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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Custom-made: constructing courts in colonial Kom (Cameroon), 1926-1960
| Panel |
36. Between customs and state law: The dynamics of local law in sub-Saharan Africa
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| Paper ID | 576 |
| Author(s) |
Vries, Jacqueline de
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | When the United Nations Visiting Mission paid the Fon of Kom (Cameroon) a call in 1948, he and his elders summarized the confused state of public affairs in their kingdom in the question: Are we to move towards self-government? If so, how and when? Should we follow Native Law and Custom?
By this time, the concept of Native Law and Custom and undergone multiple transformations, both in the understanding of colonial administrators and in the minds of the Kom people. Ill-suited to the Kom colonial context, vaguely and variously defined in terms of content and purpose, and inviting manipulation by various parties, Native Law and Custom (later termed Customary Law) was hijacked by various actors for various ends. Traditional leaders supporting the authority of the Fon, traditional leaders undermining the same, the newly educated, usually Christian elite seeking autonomy, the nouveaux riches hoping to safeguard their cash-crop wealth from ‘traditional’ inheritance customs, women aiming to increase their freedom of choice in marriage or strengthen their rights to children and property, all made their way to the Kom Native Court, and, happily for the researcher, into the Court Record Books.
My presentation will look at the dynamics of customary law as it was implemented in the Kom Native Court (later Kom Customary Court) from roughly 1926 to 1960, focussing on struggles over marriage, brideprice, child betrothal, and the definition of ‘repugnant customs’. Research on this theme was carried out in colonial archives in Buea and Bamenda, and in court records held in Kom. The latter source, for all its limitations, provides us with fascinating insights into the meanings which the colonial construction of customary law acquired for the Kom people. The records show the Kom Customary Court to be both a forum for the local articulation of ideas and struggles, and at the same time the cause of considerable tension. A far cry from the “cornerstone of Indirect Rule”, it was nevertheless an influential institution which played an important role, in ways intended or unintended, in the political upheavals of the 1950s.
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