Throughout the period when slavery was a legally sanctioned institution in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds (c. 1500–c. 1888), Africans and their descendants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas approached courts and other institutions to claim their entire or partial freedom. Known as “freedom suits,” these lawsuits allow access to their conceptions of freedom and justice. Mobilizing a common normative framework, enslaved individuals advanced their own interpretations regarding norms that governed slavery and freedom. This common framework, however, acquired specific meanings in different regions, depending on the configuration of the relationship between slave and owner as well as on the agency of the enslaved themselves. Enslaved women and men advanced numerous arguments in courts, but their chances of success varied widely. In the long term, these lawsuits were fundamental in determining the directions that the institution of slavery took in the Ibero-Atlantic world.
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Freedom Suits in the Ibero-Atlantic World
Cristina Nogueira da Silva and Mariana Dias Paes
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Indigenous Peoples in Africa
Renee Sylvain
Moringe ole Parkipuny addressed the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (UNWGIP) in 1989 and, for the first time, opened up discussion of the idea that certain groups of hunter-gathers and pastoralists in Africa merited the status of indigenous peoples. Local activists and international organizations took up the cause in the following decades. Several international conferences resulted in new forms of activism, the reformulation of local identities, and a growing body of scholarship addressing African indigeneity. As NGOs built solidarity among relatively scattered groups of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, often skeptical state governments initially resisted what they saw as demands for recognition of status and claims to “special rights.” Disagreements between state interests and newly organized indigenous groups were expressed at the United Nations during the process of adopting the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP); but as the idea of indigeneity evolved through such discussions, African governments gradually came on board. International activism and work done by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights play significant roles in convincing African states to accept the concept of “indigenous peoples.” The issue of developing a definition of “indigenous peoples” appropriate for Africa remains unsettled and continues to present challenges. Mobilization among marginalized groups on the African continent itself, however, has presented NGOs, activists, states, and courts with the opportunity, through well-publicized struggles and several landmark legal cases, to refine the category to better fit with African contexts.
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The Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission
Ronald C. Slye
The Kenyan Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (KTJRC) operated from August 2009 to August 2013. It consisted of nine commissioners (six Kenyan and three international) and examined gross violations of human rights committed between December 12, 1963 (the date Kenya achieved independence), and February 28, 2008, though the Commission also had the power to look at relevant events before and after those dates. During its four years of operation the Commission collected over forty thousand statements from individual Kenyans, the largest number of statements collected by any truth commission; incorporated violations of economic, social, and cultural rights in its fact-finding and analysis (one of the first such truth commissions to do so); and increased the participation of women in the process by, among other things, conducting women-only hearings at each of the more than one hundred locations where public hearings were held. In addition to these successes, the KTJRC faced two significant challenges. First, its chair was linked to three violations of human rights within the Commission’s mandate, leading the Commission to recommend that he be investigated and, if the evidence warranted, prosecuted. Second, the Office of the President interfered in the Commission’s Final Report to remove certain references to the president’s family, leading the three international commissioners to issue a public dissent. The Commission made a number of recommendations for the government to implement, including the creation of a comprehensive reparations program. Only one of the recommendations in the Commission’s Final Report has been implemented: the president publicly apologized on behalf of the Kenyan government for the history of gross violations of human rights committed since independence. The Kenyan government has not moved to implement any of the other recommendations. Finally, the KTJRC was the first major truth commission to operate simultaneously with investigations and indictments by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC often overshadowed the work of the TJRC in media coverage, and efforts to coordinate the activity of the two parallel investigative initiatives were minimal and unsuccessful
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The Land Question in South Africa: 1913 and Beyond
Cherryl Walker
Since 1913, the “land question” in South Africa has revolved around the major inequalities in access to and rights over land between the black majority and the white minority of the population, and how these disparities should best be understood and overcome. The roots of this inequality are commonly traced back to the promulgation of the Natives Land Act in June 1913, which provided the legal framework for the subsequent division of the country into a relatively prosperous white heartland and a cluster of increasingly impoverished black reserves on the periphery. Historians have cautioned against according this legislation undue weight within the much longer history of colonization, capitalist penetration, and agrarian change that has shaped modern South Africa. The spatial divide of white core and black periphery has, however, been central to the political economy of 20th-century South Africa. Beginning in the 1950s, the apartheid government attempted to maintain white hegemony, drive an urban–industrial economy, and deflect political resistance by turning these reserves into the ethnic “homelands” of African people. This involved increasingly repressive policies of urban influx control, population relocation, and the tribalization of local administration in the reserves.
Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the post-apartheid state has struggled to develop an effective land reform program that can address the crosscutting demands for land redistribution, local development, and representative government that this history has bequeathed. For many analysts, these ongoing challenges mean that “the land question” remains unresolved; for others it means that the question is itself in need of reformulation. In order to review these developments, a three-part periodization is used to organize the discussion: (1) the segregation era (1910–1948), (2) the apartheid era (1948–1990), and (3) the transition to democracy and the post-apartheid era that began in 1990.
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Legal History and Historiography in Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa
Richard Waller
Increasingly, the study of law in colonial Africa has moved out of the domain of legal scholarship per se, where it had its origins in the 1940s, and into that of social and cultural history; it has also shifted from a rules-based approach, primarily concerned with legal codes and judicial institutions, to one that focuses on process and explores the complex relationship between law and culture. As the field has expanded, it has divided into sub-branches. Some remain within the scope of legal history, defined as the study of how legal codes and judicial procedures have developed and changed and of the issues of principle that arose; others are more concerned with the social impact of law, how the establishment of colonial legal regimes, including customary law and the courts where cases could be heard, presented new dilemmas and opportunities and altered the distribution of power in African communities. Beyond this, historians have also used legal records, especially court records, as social documents without being directly concerned with their particular legal and judicial contexts. Once their limitations and the difficulties of interpretation that they present have been understood, such records offer potentially rich insights into family and household affairs as well as into more obviously civil or criminal matters.
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Medico-Legal History of Infanticide in South Africa, Late 19th to the Early 20th Century
Prinisha Badassy
By early 20th-century South Africa, discourses around the definition and designation of infanticide as a criminal act developed with three main foci: medical, moral, and legal. State and official concerns about this crime were part of a larger preoccupation with moral reform specifically related to sexual morality, legitimacy, good parenting, and racial purity. Within the medical and legal fraternities, debates at the time were fixated on nebulous understandings of illicit sex and illegitimacy. The narratives of these criminal cases pry open the social dynamics of private and intimate spaces where love, lust, incest, ignorance, poverty, seduction, and rape sometimes resulted in undesirable and “illegitimate” pregnancies. In the early years of the Union, state interventions (medical and legal) in this realm were crucial to the constitution of whiteness and the consolidation of racial boundaries. The codes of shame, honor, and good conduct that operated during this time reveal that assumptions about dangerous or bad parenting, bastardy, and miscegenation served as indices from which the state regulated and created malleable categories of respectability, further mythologized the concept of motherhood, and increasingly cast women as social causalities and inescapable victims of their biological make up. However, cases of infanticide as a deliberate act also reveal that for some women and men, this implied a life saved from economic ruin or material and moral poverty. Throughout the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, men and women who wished to terminate and conceal unpropitious pregnancies were not only responding to socioeconomic and religious pressures but more so to the lack of effective alternatives: reliable and accessible contraception or recourse to foster care and adoption. The layers of pathos, desperation, prejudices, and pity reflected in incidences of infanticide are not only illustrative of the socioeconomic and political context in which they are located, but this also reveals the deep emotional entanglements of love, affect, and emotional currencies that were constantly under state surveillance.
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Mental Illness, Psychiatry, and the South African State, 1800s to 2018
Julie Parle
Definitions of and explanations for mental illness differ between societies and have changed over time. Current use of the term arises from secular and materialist epistemologies of the body and mind, influential from the 18th century, which rejected the spiritual or supernatural as causes of illness. Since the 19th century, a specialist body of study, of law, practices, professionals, and institutions developed to investigate, define, diagnose, and treat disorders and illnesses of the mind. This was the emergence of psychiatry and of a professional psychiatric sector. With origins in the West, at a time of capitalism and imperialism, psychiatry was brought to South Africa through colonialism, and its development has been strongly influenced by the country’s economic, political, ideological, and medico-scientific histories. There have been significant continuities: the sector has always been small, underfunded, and prioritized white men. Black patients were largely neglected. Discrimination and segregation were constant features, but it is helpful to identify three broad phases of the history of the psychiatric sector in South Africa. First, its most formative period was during colonial rule, notably from the mid-1800s to c. 1918, with an institutional base in asylums. The second broad phase lasted from the 1920s to the 1990s. A national network of mental hospitals was created and changes in the ways in which mental illnesses were classified occurred at the beginning of this period. Some new treatments were introduced in the 1930s and 1950s. Law and the profession’s theoretical orientations also changed somewhat in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s. Institutional practice remained largely unchanged, however. A third phase began in the 1980s when there were gradual shifts toward democratic governance and the progressive Mental Health Act of 2002, yet continued human rights violations in the case of the state duty of care toward the mentally ill and vulnerable.
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Ogidi Women’s Market Protest of 1914
Tara Hollies
In March and April of 1914, the women of the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria staged a massive, multiweek protest of the town’s corrupt warrant chief, an Ogidi indigene named Walter Okafo Amobi, as well as the British colonial administration that he represented. The trouble began when Amobi decided to move the sacred Afo Udo market, which was the possession of the Igbo oracle Udo, away from its hallowed location (about a mile and a half from Trunk A Road, the relatively new colonial highway) to a site much nearer that road and Amobi’s palace. Before moving the market, Amobi did not consult Udo, his priest, or the Ogidi women whose duty it was, as intermediaries of the Igbo earth goddess, to protect marketplaces. The women responded by staging protests at the entrance to Amobi’s palace as well as outside the native court and colonial district officer’s post in the nearby city of Onitsha.
The Ogidi women’s market protest of 1914 was one component of a prolonged period of strife between the people of Ogidi and Amobi, which a British colonial official documented in early 1915 as the “Ogidi Palaver.” Afo Udo was a large and popular market held on every Afo day, one of the four days of the Igbo market week, and was regularly attended by traders from within and outside Ogidi. The warrant chief argued that moving the market closer to the recently constructed main road would bring more revenue to the town. Regardless, the people of Ogidi did not trust Amobi due to his consistent maltreatment of them since he was appointed a warrant chief in 1903. By the close of the several-week standoff between Amobi and the women, the market was returned to its original, spirit-sanctioned location, but the colonial authorities failed to acknowledge the coordinated and concerted effort of the town’s women to achieve this end. The colonial record only briefly documents one of the many actions Ogidi’s women carried out, and the rest of the narrative has been reconstructed from local oral histories.
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The History of Islam in Mauritania
Erin Pettigrew
The study of the long-term history of what has been known since 1960 as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania is possible largely because of inhabitants’ early embrace of Islam in the 8th century. While research on the early pre-Islamic history of the region is limited by the availability of sources to primarily the archaeological, the arrival of Islam through trade networks crossing the Sahara from North Africa meant that Arab merchants and explorers supplied and produced knowledge about the region’s inhabitants, polities, and natural resources that was then written down in Arabic by Muslim chroniclers and historians. Early Muslims were largely Kharijite and Ibadi but the 11th-century Almoravid reformist and educational movement ensured that the region’s Muslims would predominantly follow Sunni Islam as defined by the Maliki school of law and ʿAshari theology. By the time the Almohad empire succeeded the Almoravid in the 12th century, important centers of Islamic scholarship were emerging in major trading towns in the Sahara and along the Senegal River. The expansion of Sufi thought and practice, the arrival of the Arabic-speaking Banu Hassan, and the subsequent development of political entities known as emirates occurred in ensuing centuries and played a part in the genesis of a social structure that valorized the Arabic language, the study of Islam, and claims of descent from the Prophet Muhammad. The arrival of European merchants in the 15th century and the subsequent colonization of the region by the French led to rapid changes in the economic and cultural bases of political authority and social hierarchy, with colonial policy largely valorizing Sufi leaders as political interlocutors and community representatives. Independence from France in 1960 meant the establishment of an Islamic Republic whose laws are based on a mixed legal system of Maliki Islamic and French civil law. The basis of presidential rule is not religious in nature, though presidents have increasingly used a discourse of religion to legitimize their rule in the face of internal political opposition and external threats from extremist groups such as al-Qaʿeda.
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Women's Legal Rights in Africa
Johanna Bond
In the colonial and postcolonial period, African women have advocated for legal reforms that would improve the status of women across the continent. During the colonial period, European common and civil law systems greatly influenced African indigenous legal systems and further entrenched patriarchal aspects of the law. In the years since independence, women’s rights advocates have fought, with varying degrees of success, for women’s equality within the constitution, the family, the political arena, property rights, rights to inheritance, rights to be free from gender-based violence, rights to control their reproductive lives and health, rights to education, and many other aspects of life. Legal developments at the international, national, and local levels reflect the efforts of countless African women’s rights activists to improve the status of women within the region.