Emily Burrill’s study of the history of marriage in Mali demonstrates how marital relationships were the terrain for a variety of political programmes throughout the colonial period. The research brings together a wide range of court documents to open the doors onto marital relationships as a way to understand struggles over gender justice, state-making, and the colonial court system. Burrill uses local histories of Sikassoville and the region of Sikasso as a lens but broadens out the discussion to the colonial and the international level. For Itinerario readers, this book demonstrates how European colonial expansion and intervention into intimate terrains looked from the perspective of West Africans. Burrill succeeds in teasing out the messy entanglements between the specific local practices of marriage and the internationalising forces attempting to impose European norms.
Marriage, as Burrill points out in the introduction, is a particularly useful institution to examine a variety of West African cultural, social and economic practices. As she argues, “Marriage is tied to localised interpretations of authority and access to wealth in goods and wealth in people” (2). Marriage practices are directly related to questions of gender justice and equality. Further, it plays a large role in the treatment of children and the extended family. For the historian, particularly of the colonial period, marriage is also useful because it attracts the interest of the government, who attempt to regulate and control it, what Burrill terms the “marriage legibility project”. Marriage then is a window into both intimate and formal relationships of authority and power.
She is not the only scholar to have identified marriage as a fruitful focus for the study of colonial rule. Emily Lynn Osborn’s Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule also focused on the relationship between household-organisation and state-building in French West Africa, modern-day Guinea-Conakry. Mike McGovern’s Unmasking the State, while more focused on the relationship between a modernising government and religious tradition, also strongly argues for a closer look at the significance of marriage on the settlement and integration of migrant groups in the broader Mande region. New research agendas focused on African marriage are also emergent in the UK and South Africa. The history of marriage represents a heady mix of different “levels”, the intimate and romantic, the family and household, the national legal framework and the international transmission of new norms and concerns.
This research is based primarily on court records. Burrill is careful to avoid the strangely common fallacy of presenting colonial courtrooms as nascent protectors of human rights. As she correctly asserts, that kind of thinking can result in “the erasure of violence meted out by the colonial state or on its behalf in the name of law and order” (10). One of the key strengths of the book is the way in which it tracks the changing nature of gender relations, particularly with regards labour obligations, without stereotyping or falling into trees of victimisation of women, or a teleological presentation of the introduction of women’s rights. Burrill’s work also stands out in how she links the “marriage legibility project” she has identified with a range of other issues significant in the development of the colony known as French Soudan.
The book consists of six chapters which trace the changing contours of the “marriage legibility project” from the normative expectations revealed by oral traditions in Sikasso through the demands of the colonial period for labour and military service to the developmental interventions of the colonial state in the post-war period. The third and fourth chapters, “Returned Soldiers and Runaway Wives” and “Wealth in Women, Wealth in Men”, provide an excellent grounding in the empirical and historical realities of how the “wealth-in-people” model was lived and experienced in French Sudan. They also provide an eye-opening view on labour struggles in the inter-war period. Burrell reveals, through her focus on marriage, how labour demands sat at the intersection of gender and generational tensions. Young men started to use colonial courts to assert their gender (or perhaps more accurately generational) rights against old elites who sought to control the labour, both productive and reproductive, of young women.
Rather than merely offering an overview of what has gone before, the conclusion unfolds some big questions for the academic reader. Burrill directly refers to the issue of consent as “this liberal colonial project of consent-manufacturing” (184). A strong statement, the accompanying analysis deftly highlights the tensions between colonial coercion and people’s participation in “unmaking the world”, that is renouncing traditions and family ties and embracing new ways of organising social bonds. This foray is critical and, only emerging as a concept in the second half, the book could have more thoroughly explored it. The conclusion opens a challenge to others working in this field to more clearly and precisely explore and define consent in a variety of historical settings. For the more general reader, or for students, this book is a challenging read. Some background knowledge of the workings of the French Empire is needed, and even those with some regional expertise would benefit from more explicit maps of Sikasso.
States of Marriage is not, ultimately, a book about marriage. The husbands and wives featured in this account appear only fleetingly for the most part. Because the research relies almost entirely on court documents, the insights we get into the state of people’s marriages are necessarily brief, focused on the one crisis point which brought them to court. Instead, this book is about how a variety of different agendas and issues relate to each other and how they govern through the institution of marriage. As a life-cycle stage of profound importance in West African society, marriage should not be underestimated or dismissed as of marginal interest.
