States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali by Emily S. Burrill (review)

“Signaling consent was potentially a way of unmaking the world” (184): This comment, at the conclusion of States of Marriage, illustrates the importance of changing marriage laws in colonial Mali. In 1939 the Mandel Decree, which required consent of the man and woman for a marriage to take place and established minimum ages for marriage, was adopted across French colonial Africa with the intention of bringing “civilization” to the colonized peoples of the French Sudan. Emily Burrill’s insightful analysis of marriage, gender justice, and rights in colonial Mali deftly analyzes the ways in which colonial laws on marriage, of which the Mandel Decree was only one, both contributed in essential ways to the colonial state-building project and undermined existing social dynamics, thereby “unmaking the world.”

States of Marriage offers important insights into the complexity of women’s rights and the role of the state in colonial and present-day Mali. By means of archival research in Sikasso and Senegal, including previously classified court cases, as well as interviews in the region, Burrill explores the colonial interpretation of African marriages as akin to slavery and French attempts to use legal reforms to control marriage and thereby control colonial subjects. Interestingly, the evidence shows that at least in the earlier years, women were more likely than men to bring cases to the courts and to win rulings in their favor, and thus they were able to use the recently codified marriage laws to their advantage. This situation shifted over time, however, as the colonial state reinforced patriarchy.

Burrill includes female voices extracted from the colonial court records to build a persuasive argument about gender, patriarchy, and the generational dynamics that were at play in the construction of the colonial state. She illustrates, for example, how women as well as men participated in the maintenance of marriage norms while helping to build the patriarchal state. In one case a female neighbor and a co-wife testified that a husband, whose blows had killed his spouse, was only disciplining a troublesome wife. The consequences of challenging the man might have led to ostracization from the community or a jailed husband who could no longer provide for the family. Domestic violence, Burrill says, was “ultimately political in nature and linked to larger sociocultural values,” and she prompts us “to look more closely at the links between brutality directed towards women in their conjugal relationships and families, social and economic strife, challenges to local political authorities, and disputes over state power” (139–40).

Burrill’s analysis of the generational tension that developed in the context of colonial state-building also illustrates the depth of social upheaval triggered by marriage law reforms. For example, the Jacquinot Decree of 1951, another attempt by missionaries and colonial administrators to create a more “civilized” environment for women perceived as subservient, placed restrictions on bridewealth, authorized the official registration of civil marriage, and required men to register at the time of marriage whether a union was monogamous or polygamous. But like the Mandel Decree, this resulted in “competition between young men, lineage and village elders, canton chief, missionaries, and colonial administrators over African marriages and especially the place of African women in those marriages” (136). Burrill examines how, as young men were conscripted into the military and various state projects, including road and railway construction and irrigation projects, “wealth in men” as laborers shifted to “wealth in women” as elders used marriages to benefit the household and (in the case of the Senufo) matrilineage.

Burrill’s book is a welcome addition to our understanding of gender, justice, human rights, and the colonial state. It is persuasive and well written and is essential reading for scholars interested not only in colonialism and gender but also in law and society. It is perhaps unfortunate only that Burrill does not explore all the nuances of...