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Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895-1912. By Richard Roberts. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005. Pp. xii, 309; maps. $99.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.
In their introduction to Law in Colonial Africa (1991), Richard Roberts and Kristen Mann challenged scholars to develop new methodological approaches to studying the rich source material generated by colonial legal systems in Africa. Roberts answers that challenge in his latest book. He explores why Africans brought their most intimate domestic disputes to the newly created native courts in the French Soudan in the early twentieth century, and how these disputes inform historians about everyday life and social change. His book not only models a methodological approach that will be useful to other scholars, but also offers new insights into the history of gender and household relations in this region in the formative period of French colonial rule.
Roberts's interest in court records stems from his belief that the field of African history is confronting "a period of epistemological and methodological transformation regarding oral history," as a generation of Africans who could provide detailed oral testimonies about the early colonial period is passing away (p. 20). Roberts sees court records as rich yet under utilized sources that yield insights into African agency and provide vital information about social life from a time no longer accessible through oral histories. Nonetheless, he is acutely aware of the limitations of these documents and devotes a significant...