On Friday March 3rd, Emily Burrill gave a Baraza presentation titled “There Are Always Laws That Are Not Practiced: The Limits and Possibilities of Marriage Laws in West Africa.” Dr. Burrill is the Director of the African Studies Center and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. The talk focused on legal history and the history of marriage laws in West Africa, and particularly Mali.
Dr. Burrill began the talk discussing the concept of indirect rule in French-controlled Mali, where native courts were a cornerstone of indirect rule. Historians often draw on court cases as rich reconstructions of events involving otherwise voiceless and invisible actors, including women, slaves, the poor, etc. The actors Dr. Burrill focuses on are women and women in colonial Mali often went to court to defend their property, defend their rights to entrepreneurship, and to address issues involving marriage. Marriage and property disputes, she finds, often went together.
A common theme across colonized African nations, the French colonial court system in Mali represented a new alternative for individuals to seek redress for conflicts in their lives. Gender, power, and authority are often the issues at stake in these legal battles. Dr. Burrill points out the ways in which the French were using their ‘marriage legibility project’ (her term) via the court system to achieve ‘gender justice’ for women in supposedly ‘slave-like’ marriage conditions. Building off the work of Pateman, Dr. Burrill argues that while the French emphasis on consent as the defining feature of marriage practices and legal determinations, consent was also a mechanism through which women were used to legitimate the French colonial project. As such, many colonial subjects rejected the unmaking of their cultural worlds through this marriage legibility project and often refused to participate given the greater implications of working with / relying upon the French colonial state.