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- Convenors:
-
Marie Rodet
(SOAS)
Elke Stockreiter (University of Iowa)
- Discussant:
-
Barbara M Cooper
(Rutgers University)
- Stream:
- Environment, development and human rights
- Location:
- G50
- Start time:
- 12 September, 2006 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Law was a central feature of colonial systems in Africa. The setting-up of legal systems was an essential part of the process of power consolidation after the 'conquest'. The approach of colonial regimes differed regarding the roles that existing legal systems should play in the newly established colonial judiciary. Colonial law was aimed at allowing the colonial powers to control their subjects and to shape new behaviours in accordance with European moral standards, especially in the realm of domestic and family issues. Urban centres, where colonial power and main legal facilities were concentrated, became central sites of matrimonial litigation. Africans brought their domestic disputes to the colonial courts to seek colonial, Islamic or customary remedies. This panel aims to present different case studies exploring colonial legal systems in different regions of Africa. The papers will first seek to provide insights into the social change Africans experienced in terms of family life and social status. They will then attempt to reflect on how the interaction between subjects and colonial powers, through the new legal systems, shaped the African and colonial discourse on the African family.
Long Abstract:
Law was a central feature of colonial systems in Africa. The setting-up of legal systems was an essential part of the process of power consolidation after the 'conquest'. The approach of colonial regimes differed regarding the roles that existing legal systems should play in the newly established colonial judiciary. Colonial law was aimed at allowing the colonial powers to control their subjects and to shape new behaviours in accordance with European moral standards, especially in the realm of domestic and family issues. Urban centres, where colonial power and main legal facilities were concentrated, became central sites of matrimonial litigation. Africans brought their domestic disputes to the colonial courts to seek colonial, Islamic or customary remedies. This panel aims to present different case studies exploring colonial legal systems in different regions of Africa. The papers will first seek to provide insights into the social change Africans experienced in terms of family life and social status. They will then attempt to reflect on how the interaction between subjects and colonial powers, through the new legal systems, shaped the African and colonial discourse on the African family.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Elke Stockreiter (University of Iowa)
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore the dialectic of colonial and local discourses on the family in Zanzibar during the first half of the 20th century. Indigenous Islamic courts, which continued to operate throughout the colonial period, yield remarkable insights into Zanzibaris' as well as judges' understanding of moral standards and the roles of the spouses. This paper will question the perceived dichotomy of the public and the private sphere in urban Zanzibar and account for how socio-economic changes on the island shaped the islanders' approach to the formation of the family.
Marie Rodet (SOAS)
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to examine the interplay between customary law, colonial law, and French law through the study of female desertions' court cases in French Sudan (1900-1945). In 1903, a new colonial legal system was decreed in French West Africa. The new legislation guaranteed that the colonial courts would enforce African customs for African subjects. In order to facilitate the control over colonial courts and the application of customary laws, the colonial administration was eager to formalize and unify the content of customary laws. This formalization was based on what the "traditional power," the jurisprudence of colonial courts, and the colonial administration viewed as customary law. This process ultimately led to a kind of "invention of tradition" pertaining family law, which with the help of the "traditional power" entailed the penalization of female desertions. The colonial and local considerations of control over the populations incited both power to attempt to oblige women to return to their husbands. Since prison was becoming under the colonial rule a common sanction for "misbehaviors," colonial courts started sending to jail the women, who were increasingly suing and withstanding the "traditional power."
Barbara M Cooper (Rutgers University)
Paper long abstract:
Legal systems in Africa are often multi-layered, with an outward secular veneer and a deeper sub-stratum of family and civil law governed by versions of "tradition" inherited in may ways from hybrid colonial systems of governance. Wherever Islam has had a long influence, "tradition" is a slippery referent. Much customary law in West Africa has integrated significant elements of shari'a law as it touches on family, marriage, and inheritance. "Tradition," then, serves as a screen for religious law in secular societies. On the other hand reformist Muslims assail the opportunistic use of "tradition" to forward heterodox interpretations of Islam, family life, gender relations, and property. They correctly point out that much that is defended as "traditional" and therefore "Islamic" does not conform to orthodox Islam. Under Islamic law while a daughter may inherit less than her brothers, she is nevertheless to be included within the division of property. Yet "traditional" practice in much of West Africa excludes women from the inheritance of land altogether, and then defends the inequity as religiously ordained. "Traditional" interpretations of law, within reformist critiques, become a kind of Trojan horse for occidental values (wherever women are treated as equal citizens before the law) and for paganism (wherever paternalist protections for women are neglected).
In my presentation I would like to discuss current tensions over authenticity in Islam and in "tradition" in West Africa today, with particular emphasis on the law as it is practiced in Nigeria, Niger, and Senegal. This work emerges out of a longstanding interest in gender and religion in Niger. I would like to step back and take a broader comparative perspective and focus on slightly more contemporary issues (from 1990 to the present) than I have been able to do in my historical publications on Maradi, Niger.