The Development of Statutory Marriage Law in Twentieth Century British Colonial Africa

1979 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. F. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
East Africa ◽  
The Gambia ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Marriage Law ◽  
Legislative Policy ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
English Law ◽  
The One

Professor Zabel has traced the genesis of the Gold Coast/Lagos Marriage Ordinance of 1884. This article will show the manner in which this Ordinance was to proliferate (subject to modifications in content and application) to all British territories between the Sahara and the Zambesi, with the one exception of the Gambia. The story is a complex one, to which full justice cannot be done in the scope of a single article, and it is also one which throws interesting light on the evolution of colonial legislative policy. It will, for example, be noted that the legislation was not imposed upon the territories as part of any formulated policy for the introduction of English-based marriage law to replace the indigenous customary law, nor was it brought in at the request of the missionaries in their desire to eradicate polygamy; indeed in some territories missionaries were highly critical of its introduction, fearing that it would deter Africans from Christian marriage. In fact, the initial impetus for its introduction came from the administrators in West and East Africa who merely wanted legislation which would get over shortcomings in the received English law, which in particular did not appear to cover marriages between non-Africans who were not British subjects.

The Award of Compensation in Criminal Cases in East Africa

1966 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Brown
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Single System ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Native Justice

In East Africa the traditional division of “native justice” on the one side and “English law” on the other is gradually disappearing. Within the foreseeable future it is possible to visualize a single system of law administered by one judiciary. The fusion of customary law and modified English law has been, or is being, achieved with a remarkable lack of friction. Generally speaking, however, customary law has had to make greater sacrifices in achieving the fusion than its more powerful brother, the common and statutory law of the three states. The latter has made a few minor concessions; for example, when customary criminal law disappeared in Uganda in 1964, the Penal Code was amended to admit adultery as a statutory offence. Adultery had been an offence among all the different tribes in Uganda. But it is usually customary law which has had to change to achieve a single system of law.

EQUITY IN COLONIAL WEST AFRICA: A PARADIGM OF JURIDICAL DISLOCATION

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
KWAME AKUFFO
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law

In English law, equity is assigned relatively benign and comfortable roles, functioning as a canon of interpretation of the common law; as its versatile and flexible help-mate and mitigator of its formal strictness. More than this, equity claims a moral justice or conscience function that is deeply embedded in legal culture. As a consequence, equity has been extremely successful in lubricating the machinery of English law, providing it with a ready means of change to meet the needs of the dominant actors within society. This justice function is, however, contradicted by equity's history and its practical functioning, particularly, within the British colonial experience. This article examines the effect of the imposition of English equity on the prevailing customary law systems in colonial West Africa. The analysis challenges the fundamental claim of equity to a moral justice function within the colonial regime and argues that equity served the imperial objective as an instrument for fragmenting and dislocating indigenous property systems in order to facilitate the installation of capitalist property forms.

scholarly journals GENDER DIVISION OF LABOUR AND POLYGAMY

ALQALAM ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 229
Author(s):  
Siti Aisyah
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Marriage Law ◽  
Head Of Household ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Clear Statement ◽  
Gender Division Of Labour ◽  
Do So

The Indonesian patriarchal culture and gender inequality is reflected in state policies, regulations and laws. As a pluralistic country comprising of different ethnic groups with specific cultures and traditions, Indonesia has four formal religions: Islam, Christianity, Hindu and Buddhism. Because of this, Indonesian law reflects cultural and religious diversity, including customary law or Adat law, the Marriage Law of 1974 as well as civil and criminal law. Two serious concerns of Marriage Law of 1974 are in relation to gender division of labour and polygamy which undermine Indonesian Muslim women. This paper discusses such an issue to allow women to get equaliry before the law and highlights its contribution to domestic violence.There are two contradictory stipulations with respect to the Marriage Law of 1974: equality in marriage and gender division of labour within marriage. On the one  hand, Article 31 (1) and Article 3 3 clearly state that there is no difference between husband and wife with respect to their basic rights such as love; respect, or fidelity. On the other hand, both of these Articles are contradicted with other articles which  differentiate between a husband's and wife's responsibilities. For example, Article 31 (3) and Article 34 stipulate a clear division between the roles of husbands and wives within marriage. This has become a reference point for Indonesian views in determining gender relations in marriage.Marriage Law of 1974 still which supports gender division of labour between wife and husband should be revised by providing a clear statement that these roles are conditional. This means that husbands can be domestic carers including taking care of children if they have no jobs, while wives can be finacial providers or the head of household if they are capable to do so. In this context, gender roles can be exchanged and are not strictly for a certain gender.  

Modernity, Print Media, and the Middle Class in Colonial East Africa

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Emma Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
East Africa ◽  
The Other ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

This chapter takes a look at colonial East Africa. On the one hand, the chapter shows that the colonial economy and racial hierarchies of East Africa offered little potential for the growth of an African bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it demonstrates that in the cultural rather than the economic sphere, a slightly different picture emerges. Looking at the Swahili-language government and the mission newspapers of colonial Zanzibar and Tanganyika between the 1880s and the 1930s, the chapter reveals the ways in which a small but growing literate elite in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century East Africa used the medium of print in order to allow them to create “a space in which new collectivities could be imagined and identities constructed.” The particular space offered by newspapers and periodicals thus provided a possibility for African middle classes to create a distinct public sphere and to assert their distinctiveness by rhetorically identifying with, and making a claim of belonging to, an imagined global bourgeoisie.

Native Tribunals In The Gold Coast 1844—1927

1957 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 163-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. N. Allott
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Local Courts

Throughout British Africa today the future of the native courts (otherwise called African, customary, or local courts) is in the melting-pot, and is the subject of much discussion and deep concern. Considerable legislative and administrative changes affecting these courts are already being made, especially in West Africa. What are to be the relations between the superior courts of a territory, predominantly administering English law, and the native courts whose primary law remains African customary law? How are the law, practice and procedure followed by native courts to be moulded and modified to adapt them to the conditions of today and tomorrow? In the study of these important questions a backward glance at history does not come amiss, and may indeed help to illumine the problems of the present.

British Justice and the Native Tribunals of the Southern Gold Coast Colony

1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Gocking
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
African Society ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indirect Rule

As a result of the policy of indirect rule which British administrators introduced into the Colony of the Gold Coast at the turn of the twentieth century, customary courts, or what were called Native Tribunals, became important venues of adjudication for the indigenous population. As a result, however, of the powerful impact of British justice on the Colony, the judicial responsibilities, procedure, personnel and the nature of the customary law that these courts applied underwent profound changes. It was an excellent example of how important was the cultural interchange between European and African ideas during the colonial period, which, however, both academic lawyers and historians have neglected. The former have preferred to focus on the superior courts as venues of juridical interaction while the latter have focused far more on ‘what was said about change than what was said about order’. By looking, however, at this example of cultural interaction on a fundamentally popular level, we can see that this ‘transforming moment’ in the colonial situation can be seen neither as something ‘imposed’ on African society by colonial administrators nor as simply generating new mechanisms for privileged groups to take advantage of. The Native Tribunals never fully came up to what British administrators or African lawyers considered the highest standards of British rule of law. Nevertheless, their most important function was to popularize recourse to judicial institutions which increasingly adopted more and more of the features of the British legal system.

Pablo Neruda's Transnational Modernist Networks: Colombo-Madrid-London-Buenos Aires (1927–1933)

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-225
Author(s):  
Patricia Novillo-Corvalán
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Complex Composition ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The One ◽  
Composition Process ◽  
In Transit ◽  
Standing Question

This article positions Pablo Neruda's poetry collection Residence on Earth I (written between 1925–1931 and published in 1933) as a ‘text in transit’ that allows us to trace the development of transnational modernist networks through the text's protracted physical journey from British colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Madrid, and from José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente (The Western Review) to T. S. Eliot's The Criterion. By mapping the text's diasporic movement, I seek to reinterpret its complex composition process as part of an anti-imperialist commitment that proposes a form of aesthetic solidarity with artistic modernism in Ceylon, on the one hand, and as a vehicle through which to interrogate the reception and categorisation of Latin American writers and their cultural institutions in a British periodical such as The Criterion, on the other. I conclude with an examination of Neruda's idiosyncratic Spanish translation of Joyce's Chamber Music, which was published in the Buenos Aires little magazine Poesía in 1933, positing that this translation exercise takes to further lengths his decolonising views by giving new momentum to the long-standing question of Hiberno-Latin American relations.

State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury

APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
The Other ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.

Subordinate-Deity Models of Ultimate Reality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Metaphysical Problem ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Colonial Resistance ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.

Gender and Social Exclusion in European Migration Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 658-676
Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Other ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
The One ◽  
European Migration

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.

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