My Africa Today

In August 1923, David Ndahani, an Anglican pastor-in-training, came before the Kongwa church court in central Tanganyika to accuse his wife, Nenelwa, of adultery. They had been married in a Christian ceremony some years earlier, but Ndahani had never fully paid the bridewealth he owed to Nenelwa's relatives. Nenelwa, disgusted with her husband, had in early 1923 left her conjugal home to live with her parents. Before the church court that August day, David Ndahani said nothing about the unpaid bridewealth. He complained that Ezekiel, a church teacher, had cuckolded him. His accusation led the church court to dismiss Ezekiel from his duties; the errant wife, Nenelwa, was ordered to submit to Ndahani. But on Christmas Day 1923, David Ndahani himself confessed to an adulterous relationship with the communicant Elizabeti. Elizabeti had spent several nights outside Ndahani's door, loudly accusing him of sinning with her. Kongwa missionaries brokered a détente between Ndahani, Elizabeti, and her husband, Ishmael, committed their agreement to writing, and posted the notice on the church door. They hoped thereby to chasten the adulterous communicants. By 1929, however, Ndahani was in prison for thievery, and the missionaries were lamenting that "adultery was the norm rather than the exception."1 1
In Tanganyika, churchmen gained control of converts' conduct by keeping records. Their bureaucracy was meant to formalize spousal relationships, making sexual behavior subject to outside authority. But lovers also represented themselves. Self-interested litigants such as David Ndahani sifted through their spouses' marital and social relationships, looking for evidence that could capture the church courts' attention. They actively recast conjugal arguments over bridewealth, residence, and other issues, using the language of the courts to make their marital debates look like simplified morality plays. In Vicente Rafael's nomenclature, litigants such as Ndahani and Elizabeti "contracted" administrative power, adopting some of its nomenclature while also shaping its hold over them.2 They followed churchmen's script while also molding the courts' efforts to regulate their lives. 2
It is the theatrical work of agency that the scholarship on African legal history ignores. Legal history in Africa has too often been conceived as a clash between the textualized, bureaucratic practice of modern governance and the oral, flexible mentalité.3 Sean Hawkins's Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana, for example, studies the "encounter between the LoDagaa and 'the world on paper.'"4 Before colonial conquest, says Hawkins, LoDagaa social order was flexible and negotiable: conjugal relationships and ethnic identity were crafted out of the back and forth of human interaction. Colonial rule worked to "subjugate and regulate [this] oral culture and force it within the conceptual framework of a literate society."5 In legal writs, in ethnographic writing, and through mapmaking, colonial officials used foreign categories to gain control over the changeable LoDagaa world. This "world on paper," Hawkins argues, was divorced from the real world; its simplified categories belonged to the British and their successors in government. Peter Pels follows a similar analytical line in his study of Catholic marital regulations in eastern Tanganyika. Where Luguru personhood was in reality built up through human relationships and ritual processes, Catholic missionaries sought to create individuals to convert and discipline. They fixed Luguru people's names on church registers, charted their life cycles, and plotted their biographies around a standard set of legal events. This individualized morality, writes Pels, was "untrue" and "in direct opposition to the context of reality."6 Like Hawkins, Pels argues that legal bureaucracy was a vehicle by which foreign modes of subjectivity were imposed on Africans. 3
The distinctions that scholars make between the real, oral world and the artificial, textualized practice of governance have shaped the discipline of African history more generally, not only in its analytical agenda but also in its methodology. The record books that church and government officials kept are catalogues of decisions made, sins disavowed, and judgments rendered. They make complicated human situations look deceptively simple. Scholars of legal history have therefore wondered about the extent to which court records can convey real insights into people's lived experiences. Legal historians of England lament that plaintiffs and witnesses couched their statements to correspond with the protocols that governed the court.7 Africa's scholars likewise worry that court transcripts are "but a shadow of a much more complex understanding of wrongs and the complex set of interactions that actually went on in court."8 The discipline of African history was, at its founding in the 1960s, conceived methodologically as a foray into oral research. Jan Vansina's 1965 book Oral Tradition argued that historians could, by excavating the original text from the accretions of later generations, engage directly with the precolonial African past through the spoken word.9 Vansina's book set out an agenda for Africa's scholars to pursue. Of the twenty-one articles printed in the first two volumes of the journal History in Africa (1974 and 1975), ten considered the methodology of oral history.10 By the 1980s, a new generation of Africanist scholars were problematizing the notion of oral tradition.11 But the emphasis on African "voices" remained. In the 1980s and 1990s, a flurry of "life history" publications heralded the methodology of oral history as closer to real African experience than any text produced by European bureaucrats could be.12 4
By marking real life off from the written record, scholars have made it possible to identify an apparently authentic repository of African history. But the identification of African history with orality has made it hard to see how texts could shape Africans' relationships, form their imaginations, and lead them to act. The bookkeepers of central Tanganyika were not standing back from real life. Nor were church archives located in a textualized otherworld. Record books reached outside the archives' walls, and reformed Africans' real-life relationships. British missionaries and church elders regularly called errant parishioners before the courts, asking them to live up to the promises they had made on paper. Using their lists of decisions made and loyalties declared, church officials invited adherents to conform their lives to the book, to orient their behavior to accord with the model portrayed in the record. As distilled, clarified models of conduct, missionaries' lists and record books gave Africans characters to play in the real world. And Africans played into Europeans' archetypes. They signed their names to missionaries' wedding registers and wrote notes confessing their sins. Some of them took missionaries' characters off the page, restaging textualized ideas, sentences, and plots for their own purposes. In front of church courts, husbands and wives reinterpreted nonmarital sexual relationships as adultery. Through their representational work, litigants roped missionaries into their private arguments over marital rights and obligations. As actors within missionaries' morality plays, Africans obligated churchmen themselves to play out a part. 5
It was not only Africans who recast their characters. Historians have shown that litigants in medieval and early modern England were similarly contracting with bureaucratic procedure. In the fourteenth-century Christianity of York, litigants Agnes Huntington and Simon Munkton bent the church courts toward their own ends.13 Against Agnes's wishes, Simon was planning to sell the land she had inherited from her father. Agnes knew that the church courts would annul marriages only in cases where a technical flaw could be shown to invalidate the original marriage vow. In court, therefore, she produced evidence to show that she had married another man before she pledged herself to Simon. For his part, Simon argued that Agnes's unwillingness to cohabit with him showed her to be an adulteress. He hoped that the court would confirm his marital rights. Both litigants used the framework of canon law to recast an argument that was really over the disposition of Agnes's property. With examples such as this one in view, historian Lawrence Stone has described the law of marriage and divorce in medieval and early modern England as a "fig leaf inadequately covering the very different reality of human behavior."14 Couples desiring a clandestine marriage in the early eighteenth century could obtain official-looking certificates from clergy jailed at the Fleet Prison in London. By 1740, at least half of Londoners were being married in a clandestine fashion.15 The Marriage Act of 1753 put the Fleet marrying shops out of business by nullifying any marriage not carried out by regular clergy, and by requiring couples to sign the parish register. Those who counterfeited marriage registers were liable for the death sentence. Even this reformed bureaucracy, however, could not squelch lovers' efforts to secure a respectable married life. After the Marriage Act, prospective brides and grooms arranged clandestine marriages by seeking out accommodating parsons in anonymous urban churches. 6
Litigants such as Agnes Huntington, David Ndahani, and the lovers of early modern London were practicing theater. They were reading the moral archetypes and the legal procedures outlined in church law as scripts, as directions on how best to play the courts. Litigants were not shuttling between a textualized, artificial legal process and a real oral world. The characters defined in church and government bureaucracy could be taken off the page and acted out, in a theater where church officials and litigants alike were bound to play a part. Litigants were representing themselves as wronged husbands or sinful penitents, and thereby generating social capital, making allies, and getting leverage over spouses and parents-in-law. 7
Seeing marriage litigation as a theatrical performance helps us rethink the analytical category agency. Africa's scholars have very often equated agency with resistance. Inspired by E. P. Thompson and James Scott, social historians in the 1970s and 1980s set out to document "the ongoing, if prosaic, struggle between peasants and those who sought to extract from them their labor, rent, food, and taxes."16 Where an earlier generation of scholars had celebrated Africans' heroic wars of resistance against white conquerors, social historians looked for resistance in the mundane: in the quotidian negotiations between plantation workers and their overseers, in independent church members' subtle appropriations of missionaries' symbols, and in workmen's efforts to defend their own conceptions of time against white employers' clocks.17 This focus on the mundane was made possible by the use of oral interviews, which lent a first-person immediacy to the analysis of everyday resistance. Critics have noted that the sovereign, self-aware, speaking agent celebrated in social history was largely derived from liberal political theory.18 By focusing attention on the relationship between resisters and oppressors, the resistance paradigm made it hard to see that colonized people were themselves divided by generation, class, and political theory.19 8
Social history needs to inquire into the anthropology of colonial power as vigorously as it has analyzed human agency. Colonialism in Africa was not simply an invasive force, working to subordinate African subjects. Neither was colonial power very often resisted by heroic agents who were self-consciously defending their ways of life. Colonial government most often worked through routine, by patterning Africans' marital, religious, and political identities in predictable forms. With identity cards, passbooks, and marriage registers, officials stereotyped Africans' shifting ethnic, conjugal, and social identities, so as better to discipline them as members of tribes, as wives, or as sinners. For Africans, the bureaucratic form of power was at once a structure constraining the possible range of action and an opportunity for novel forms of discourse. Africans leveraged themselves into the characters that Europeans defined, playing the characters delineated in court records and government writs. Through their theatrical work, African agents laid out courses of action for missionaries and government officials to follow. Legal bureaucracy was an instrument of colonial governmentality, but Africans could open up grooves of representation that shaped the courts' judgments. 9
English missionaries first settled in Ukaguru and Ugogo, in the protectorate of German East Africa (later the British protectorate of Tanganyika), in the late 1870s. From that time until the 1920s, when the postwar British administration inaugurated a system of African-run courts, missionaries exercised extensive legal powers over their converts' lives. The German colonial government was represented in central Tanganyika by a cadre of Swahili-speaking functionaries brought in from the Indian Ocean coast. They took little interest in Kaguru and Gogo people's marital disputes. Church courts were therefore virtually the only formal legal venue where antagonistic husbands and wives could redress their grievances. Confronted with converts' ceaseless marital arguments, church officials kept records on who had married whom, took notes on adultery cases, imposed fines, and suspended adulterers from communion. Their bureaucratic work solidified dynamic conjugal relationships, creating standards by which to judge deviant sexual conduct. But it was not only missionaries who were participating in the legal definition of adultery. African husbands and wives stereotyped their spouses' sexual and social relationships. They employed the legal categories authorized by missionary judges to reframe arguments about property, marital deference, or work. By accusing their spouses of moral indiscretions, litigants reconvened the church courts in their favor. 10


Nineteenth-century central Tanganyika was a place of uncertain environments and uneven opportunities. Its people were therefore entrepreneurial about their social relationships and ethnic identities.20 The people who came to be called the "Gogo" lived in the dry plains of the Rift Valley. Rainfall there was erratic and unevenly distributed, and the Gogo suffered at least nine killing famines during the nineteenth century. Different regions suffered more than others. During an 1888 trip through the eastern plateau, the missionary John Price found that hunger was "dreadful" at Chilomwa, but at Nayu, only five miles away, "there was said to be plenty of food."21 The disparate ecology of their homeland invited Gogo people to defend their local interests. Clan leaders, called watemi, did not acknowledge a coordinating political authority. "Each town is entirely independent of its neighbor, and they frequently amuse themselves by running off with one another's cattle," wrote Dr. Baxter in 1881.22 Ecology and economics did not encourage the inhabitants of the central plains to think of themselves as members of an overarching ethnic community. One popular account has it that Swahili-speaking caravanners named the "Wagogo" after the logs (Sw. gogo) that local people placed across caravans' path when negotiating for tribute. But the people named Gogo did not organize around frustrated outsiders' appellations. As late as 1927, British colonial officers were in despair over their political parochialism. Hugh Hignell, charged with creating a "tribal" authority in central Tanganyika, thought the Gogo chiefs were a collection of "petty despots." He doubted whether he could give "any outline of the composition of the Gogo tribe or any exposition of its original constitution."23