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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'These laws should be made by us': customary marriage law, codification and political authority in twentieth-century Gabon
Author:Jean-Baptiste, RachelISNI
Year:2008
Periodical:The Journal of African History
Volume:49
Issue:2
Pages:217-240
Language:English
Geographic term:Gabon
Subjects:customary law
marriage law
codification
indirect rule
authority
1900-1949
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/40206640
Abstract:This article analyses the multiple and failed efforts to codify customary marriage law over the course of the twentieth century in colonial Gabon. It argues that these efforts illuminate the discursive arenas in which the colonial State, the church and African political leaders struggled to demarcate power and control over wealth-in-women. In a time of sociopolitical crisis and change State, chiefs and other elite African men all become involved in attempts to conceptualize, codify and administer customary marriage law. The contested process of codification reveals disjunctures in the articulation of male political authority in colonial Gabon. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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