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239 11w฀Constructing Law, Contesting Violence The Senegalese Family Code and Narratives of Domestic Abuse scott london african family law has emerged in the postcolonial era as a reflection of competing claims about tradition and modernity, cultural authenticity and religious fidelity. Gender relations reside at the heart of these claims, and efforts to regulate them through law generate controversies with which the postcolonial state and society must contend. Issues such as domestic violence are deeply entangled with these controversies, and battered women hoping to make use of the law to end or escape violence must negotiate not only the legal system, but the competing claims that surround it. In Senegal, the Family Code1 represents an attempt in the years following independence in 1960 to blend aspects of French, Muslim, and African laws and norms. The result is a legal text in which all constituencies—Westernized urban elites, women’s rights activists, leaders of the Muslim brotherhoods—can find something to embrace, as well as something to loathe. While the Family Code establishes many protections for women, its reach and effectiveness are limited in three ways. First, knowledge of the law and access to the courts are limited outside urban areas. Second, the marabouts who lead the major Muslim brotherhoods encourage “passive noncompliance”2 among followers. Third, my research indicates that the Family Code is not applied consistently within the legal process, as disputants in family cases wend their way through open court and the closed, mandatory mediation sessions that often impose a conventional gender ideology that thwarts full application of the law. Cases involving domestic violence are particularly complex because the issue only enters formally into the Family Code as a justification for divorce, whereas violence is an important—though often marginalized—element of 240 w฀ Scott London a wide range of cases. The last part of the chapter examines two case studies that demonstrate how the power dynamics in mandatory family mediation sessions tend to privilege a gender ideology that references Islam and African identity, while marginalizing implicit or explicit claims of abuse. The first case highlights the way in which violence explicitly noted in the dispute narrative is sidelined in exchanges between disputants and the judge. The second case demonstrates how implied violence remains hidden and suppressed as the mediation process unfolds. These two cases unfolded in the Departmental and Regional Family Tribunals of Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 1997. They were among about three hundred family cases reviewed during the period 1994–1997 (consisting mostly of divorce, maintenance, and custody disputes). By comparing dispute narratives from a variety of sources—correspondence with judges, judges’ notes, police reports, clerk’s case summaries, and my own observational notes and recordings—I have been able to identify patterns in the transformation of women’s narrative accounts. Complaints about unjust conditions and mistreatment are turned into morality tales by husbands and judges in which women’s own behavior is at fault. Women’s behavior is particularly vulnerable to criticism in reference to being a “good” Muslim wife and mother, determined by the degree of “submission and obedience” to her husband. senegalese family law Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the French set up a network of tribunals overseen by local leaders selected and controlled by French colonial administrators. The appeals courts were headed by a French military commander, assisted by two European and two indigenous assessors (judicial advisors).3 In areas where Islam had already taken firm hold of cultural and political life, the French successfully co-opted and restructured local qadis’ (imams’) courts, although they were unable to uphold the standard that qadis be literate in the French language.4 By the time of independence in 1960, an elaborate network of French-mandated Islamic courts existed in the expanding areas dominated by Islam. These courts heard mostly civil and minor criminal cases. Serious cases and those heard on appeal still went before the colonial administrative courts. The latter were to be transformed after independence into the French-style state civil and criminal courts, divided geographically by department and region, that are familiar today. The former Muslim tribunals were kept “on the books” in the early postcolonial years as an adjunct to the secular state civil courts, but were slowly phased out. The Family Code of Senegal was the inspiration of Léopold Sénghor, the Catholic, French-educated poet and father of independent Senegal. The Family Code was at the heart of Senghor’s vision of a unified, stable, and postcolonial...

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