Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, Elizabeth Thornberry

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780821443453
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. The term domestic violence encompasses kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space. As a lived experience and as a social and historical unit of analysis, domestic violence in colonial and postcolonial Africa is complex.

Using evidence drawn from Sub-saharan Africa, the chapters explore the range of domestic violence in Africa's colonial past and its present, including taxation and the insertion of the household into the broader structure of colonial domination.

African histories of domestic violence demand that scholars and activists refine the terms and analyses and pay attention to the historical legacies of contemporary problems. This collection brings into conversation historical, anthropological, legal, and activist perspectives on domestic violence in Africa and fosters a deeper understanding of the problem of domestic violence, the limits of international human rights conventions, and local and regional efforts to address the issue.

PART I

Domestic Violence,
Relationships of Servitude,
and the Family

The first part of this book highlights early encounters between colonial law and shifting forms of power and authority in the twentieth century. In the early years of colonial state formation and the implementation of new legal systems, hierarchical relationships based on age and gender were particularly pronounced locations of household and kin-based violence. The chapters in this part demonstrate the ways in which legal structures sought to harden local practice into categories of acceptability and unacceptability, but they also emphasize the importance of extralegal moral economies and social mores in regulating domestic violence in the early years of colonial rule. As Martina Salvante’s work in colonial Eritrea demonstrates, colonial governments were unable to exert full control even over European colonists. Attempts to remake African “customs” and to regulate African domesticity were even more difficult for the colonial state. Similarly, Marie Rodet argues that the criminalization of the actions of women who left their husbands was a genuinely “invented tradition,” which ultimately did little to deter women from leaving their husbands during times of marital strife and abuse.

African societies tolerated certain kinds of domestic violence and condemned others. The limits placed on domestic violence varied over time and space, although they tended to reinforce existing power relations. Asymmetries of violence existed between husbands and wives, parents and children. The vulnerabilities of the pawned girls described in Cati Coe’s chapter are typical: young, female, and with few economic resources, they were subject to high levels of violence. At the same time, the limits placed on domestic violence gave vulnerable groups a degree of protection against outright abuse, thereby giving them a stake in the maintenance of the moral economy itself. As Emily Burrill and Richard Roberts demonstrate for colonial Mali, such normative limitations on domestic violence placed both social and economic pressure on husbands to limit the severity of violence directed toward their wives.

Thus, this first part of the volume situates the shifting meaning and composition of African households and conjugal relationships within the larger sociopolitical transformations of the colonial period. These changes are thrown into relief through the incidents of domestic violence that emerge in the historical record.

1	Domestic Violence, Colonial Courts, and the End of Slavery in French Soudan, 1905–12
	EMILY BURRILL AND RICHARD ROBERTS

Between 1905 and 1912, upward of one million slaves throughout French West Africa left their masters. Some headed back to their homelands; others moved to the expanding commercial centers scattered throughout the region along the lines of rail being built, along the major rivers, or simply away from their former masters.¹ Not all slaves left their masters; many slaves remained near their masters, if no longer with them. But in all cases, the end of slavery set in motion sets of social, cultural, and economic changes that transformed the worlds in which Africans lived. The degree and meanings of these changes remain hotly debated.²

In this chapter, we examine how immediate post-emancipation social transformations in French Soudan affected households and how these adaptations contributed to domestic violence in the regions of Banamba, Gumbu, Kita, and Sikasso.³ These four regions are distinct: Banamba and Gumbu were centers of slave production; Sikasso was an area ravaged by wars of conquest and slave-raiding in the near past; and Kita was a growing population center based on French colonial enterprise and protection of freed and runaway slaves. As a result of these variations, the linked transformations of colonial conquest, the end of slavery, and the operation of the new courts in early twentieth-century French Soudan affected these regions differently. These linked transformations were certainly momentous, but they were also contested and uneven. Not only was there localized resistance to French rule, but slavery persisted and justice in the new courts was inconsistent. These transformations nonetheless challenged relationships of authority at many levels and threatened the obligations and expectations that bound people together in hierarchical relationships. At the same time, some people—slaves and free alike—chose to take risks in an effort to form their own family units and new social networks, thereby breaking away from relationships bounded by slavery.⁴

Although both of us have explored these interconnected historical changes elsewhere,⁵ we have yet to consider the ways in which they affected or reflected incidents of domestic violence in African households. Most certainly, the decline of slavery and the early colonial period throughout Africa were periods of significant violence and social change, as Africans struggled over labor, dependents, and access to economic and political resources. Households and families were not immune to these societal ruptures and conflicts; in many instances, the contested nature of the relationships of slavery and bondage manifested itself within the courts as household conflicts and violence. Our argument is that slavery influenced relationships within African households—including those between free members of the household—and that the end of slavery contributed to efforts to redefine those relationships. Sometimes these efforts were smooth and frictionless; at other times, the end of slavery increased tensions within households, resulting in acts of domestic violence.

This chapter addresses the connections between the end of slavery, domestic violence, and the moral economy of marriage in French Soudan during early colonial rule. The patterns of violence and domestic desertion that took place in Banamba, Gumbu, Kita, and Sikasso were part of larger patterns of slave migration and the resultant redistribution of labor and power within households.⁶ Such shifts in gendered labor obligations upset balances in the moral economy of marriages and frequently resulted in domestic desertion and violence within the household.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF MARRIAGE IN FRENCH SOUDAN

E. P. Thompson first introduced the idea of a moral economy in 1971, but James Scott’s later intervention would lend the expression more currency in African studies.⁷ Whereas Thompson used moral economy as a tool for explaining the motivations and actions of a working-class crowd in eighteenth-century England, Scott turned to moral economy as a conceptual framework for understanding peasant uprisings in Southeast Asia, particularly in the face of subsistence crises. There was nothing “moral” about the moral economy. It describes a system of exploitation in which individuals accepted exploitation in expectation of protection and subsistence. Moreover, the limits on exploitation were generally understood and accepted. Most scholars of African history who use moral economy apply the concept in similar ways: as an organizing principle for understanding the actions of male peasants and agrarian workers in struggles over land and labor in colonial contexts. Moral economy is potentially limited in its possibilities for analysis because it suggests a closed, unchanging, and potentially static system of rational choice. These critiques are to be taken seriously; however, despite these limitations, moral economy is useful as a way of understanding the meanings of protest, resistance, and seemingly disorderly struggle in contexts of unequal power distribution.

For these reasons, we turn to moral economy, but with an eye toward factors that have been left out of the discussion—namely, gender and the household. Rather than see moral economy as a governing network of obligations, entitlement, and provisions between workers and patrons, or proletariat and patricians, at the societal level, we extend the moral economy to the gendered and generational hierarchy of the household. This smaller and more intimate unit of analysis allows us to understand the ways in which systems of exchange and materiality are embedded in other social and cultural mores and values, especially those that govern marriage and the family. Here, then, the breaking point is not the food riot or the mass protest; it is the incident or pattern of domestic violence. As such, domestic violence signals the breach in the system of obligations and reciprocity governing a set of relations. It is not simply an act of hitting, withholding food, forcing extra work, or leaving the home that causes the breach; it is when these acts exceed the limits of acceptability and threaten the mutuality of interdependence and obligation. We are interested, then, in what potentially caused the breach, and we suggest that the end of slavery contributed to breaches in the moral economy of marriages. The evidence we use comes largely from the newly created colonial courts, which provided new resources to women and former slaves to resist changes in the moral economies that governed marriages. We believe that similar analyses could be applied to the precolonial period, but we do not have sufficient evidence for that period.

Various factors contributed to domestic violence among married men and women. The prevailing culture of patriarchy helped define the place of husbands and wives in a hierarchical but mutually dependent moral economy of marriage. Patriarchy contributed to male control over women, junior men, children, and the household’s various dependents. Although the moral economy of marriage was deeply structured by gendered asymmetries in power, it was also shaped by a widely shared sense of entitlements and limits on exploitation. Men and women had discrete gendered tasks and responsibilities that defined the household. Husbands were required to provide for their wives’ and children’s subsistence, protection, and propriety. Wives were required to perform domestic and sexual labor, work in the household’s fields for part of the day, and care for the children.

Of the varieties of intimate, kin-based violence (violence among married partners, child abuse, and elder abuse), we are concerned here only with violence among married or quasi-conjugal partners in domestic contexts.⁸ Marriage in French Soudan at the beginning of the twentieth century was a complex affair that linked individuals with wide kinship groups and embedded the new married couple in a set of interlocking institutions. In French West Africa, a woman was always a daughter, a wife, a widow, and/or a mother or co-wife. Marriage in most of the region’s Malinke, patrilineal, virilocal societies involved the transfer of rights to a woman’s labor and reproductive power from her father’s kin to that of her husband. Brides were rarely consulted on their wishes, and bridewealth solidified the transfer. Women almost always lived within domestic units headed by men.⁹

In her ethnographic study of the sahel, Camilla Toulmin describes Bambara marriage as “a particularly long term investment. While the woman’s labour and services provide some immediate returns for the heavy wedding costs, many of the benefits will accrue over the following 30 years or more.” Toulmin further notes that because the consequences of marriage are likely to be with the family for decades, care in making marriage choices is not left to the potential spouses. Spouses often come from groups already bound by existing marriage ties. “In this way, the household head hopes to ensure that marriages endure and are free of conflict.”¹⁰ Such was the practice in Banamba, Gumbu, and Kita.

In the Sikasso region, some marriages were forged among Malinke patrilineal groups in the manner described above. The Senufo who predominated in the Sikasso region practiced matrilineal forms of marriage. Normative accounts of Sikasso’s past, in the form of ethnographies and oral accounts, depict turn-of-the-century marriage in Sikasso as a regulating force in Senufo society. Senufo men could gain wives in a number of ways that reinforced various units of membership: the virilocal household, the matrilineal descent group, age-grades, secret societies, and the village. The myriad paths to marriage complemented and contributed to these units of belonging, and maintained a political balance that privileged the authority of the matrilineal patriarchs of a community as well as the chief. Among Senufo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Domestic Violence and the Law in Africa
• Part One: Domestic Violence, Relationships of Servitude, and the Family
• Part Two: Narrating Domestic Violence
• Part Three: Domestic Violence, Conjugal Relationships, and the Politics of the State in Postcolonial Africa
• Afterword: Finding Gendered Justice in the Age of Human Rights
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index