Complicity, Compromise, and Colonial Campaign: Positioning the Tirailleurs Sénégalais Serving in North Africa

The tirailleurs sénégalais were West African infantrymen serving in the French colonial army, or La Coloniale. They participated in the French Army's campaigns in Morocco beginning in 1908, and in western Algeria in 1910. These soldiers' experiences in North Africa were shaped not only by their membership in La Coloniale, but also the legacy of the trans-Saharan trade. For over a millennium prior to colonization, trans-Saharan networks of trade facilitated the exchange of goods, ideas, and labor between communities on either side of the Sahara. Particularly relevant to this presentation, was the forced migration of a great number of sub-Saharan Africans north. They were integrated into new communities as laborers, and became stigmatized due to their inferior social positions as slaves, their lack of kin, and inability to accumulate wealth. In North Africa, dark skin gradually became a marker for slaves, and their descendants. The French Army challenged, respected, simulated, and obfuscated North African social hierarchies and historical institutions with the deployment of the tirailleurs sénégalais in the Maghreb. By analyzing colonial records and soldiers' memoirs, this presentation will unpack how deploying tirailleurs sénégalais in North Africa challenged, respected, and simulated North African social hierarchies and historical Moroccan institutions that emerged from the trans-Saharan slave trade. The everyday experiences of tirailleurs sénégalais on campaign will reveal the potency and weaknesses of several converging calculuses of dominance—the French military, as well as the more fluid and heterogeneous institutions and traditions of North African society and colonialism. West African soldiers negotiated, manipulated, and compromised these overlapping regimes of authority, which indelibly altered the meaning and direction of French colonialism and trans-Saharan relations in the twentieth century.