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74 3 w฀฀ Continuum of Gendered Violence The Colonial Invention of Female Desertion as a Customary Criminal Offense, French Soudan, 1900–1949 marie rodet In September 1909, Filifin K. from Fodébougou came to the court of Kita to ask for divorce and request the reimbursement of bridewealth. He claimed that his wife, Kaniba B., intended to leave him following an argument during which he beat her because she insulted and disobeyed him.1 Kaniba claimed that Filifin constantly attacked her when he was drunk and that she did not wish to live with him any longer. The court pronounced the divorce but found the wife liable for repayment of the bridewealth to her husband. This court case is revealing on two levels. First, the husband considered himself to be the one suffering a loss: not only did his wife disobey and insult him (and therefore she deserved to be punished), but she wished to leave him. This was why he was in court to request a divorce and the reimbursement of the bridewealth . Second, his condemnation of his wife’s “loose behavior” was backed by the court of Kita, which found her at fault in the divorce and ordered her to reimburse the bridewealth. The colonial administrator, who retranscribed the case for the legal records, supported the husband and concluded that the court’s sentence was reasonable. “[S]he [could not] refuse to live with her husband just because of a simple quarrel which [was] a very common fact in indigenous households.” Unfortunately, the record does not tell us much about the exact circumstances of the wife’s battery. However, in a previous judgment on the same day Filifin K. asked the court to authorize him and his mother to leave the region because his older brother called him a “bastard.” We can suspect that his quarrel with his wife and her intent to ask for divorce were a direct consequence of his decision to leave the region. His wife probably refused to follow him. Although the transcripts of the court cases found in the Malian archives for the first half of the twentieth century are often very brief and elusive on Female Desertion in French Soudan, 1900–1949 w 75 the precise context of the case, they remain a precious source of information about gender conflicts, as the majority of the cases heard in civil courts at this time concerned marriage disputes. An attentive study of the court cases heard in the region of Kayes2 can furthermore help us question the degree of colonial interference into “indigenous family matters.” Following the implementation of a new colonial legal system and the establishment of colonial native courts in French West Africa (hereafter FWA) in 1903,3 the idea of respect for African custom became the pivot of the French politics of domination. The 1903 legislation guaranteed that the colonial courts would enforce African customs for African subjects. The compulsory use of customary law for defining and judging civil law offenses was reinforced by the decree of 16 August 1912, which officially recognized the “personal status” of French subjects.4 Colonial respect for local customs facilitated above all colonial control over native courts, by ensuring that the “traditional power” became the loyal ally of the administration. The colonial administration was in charge of formalizing and unifying the content of customary laws. This formalization was based on what the “traditional power,” the jurisprudence of colonial courts, and the colonial administration viewed as “customary law.” It also aimed at unifying and standardizing customs, the colonial administration being convinced that the different customs used in French Soudan were fundamentally similar.5 Moreover, the colonial obsession with the coercive control of the population and the “preservation of the traditional African family” ultimately entailed a certain “invention of tradition”6 pertaining to family law. This invention was facilitated as many local chiefs and notables used this opportunity to manipulate customary law for their own benefit. This simultaneous colonial and local manipulation of customary family law was often to the detriment of women. In this chapter I examine to what extent certain forms of colonial inventions of tradition contributed to the persistence of violence and to new forms of violence against women, from domestic and intimate violence to violence structured by the colonial state. Here, I define domestic violence as a continuum of behaviors enacted by a member of a family or household against another member of the family or household that is intended to result in...

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