French courts in West Africa aimed to revolutionze native justice through judicial intervention

Evidence

Despite Dakar’s claim to the contrary, the 1912 reform did attempt to impose “a social revolution … indirectly, through judicial decisions,” especially in the punishment of crimes. Here, the administration felt and continued to feel an obligation to intervene. “In punishing crimes and misdemeanors,” one governor general said a few years later, “native magistrates left to their own devices would render judgments that were either unnecessarily cruel or shamefully indulgent … It is only by a wise and prudent jurisprudence of our courts that we will be able gradually to alter this mind-set.” Such intervention certainly had the potential to disrupt existing mores, if the lieutenant governors and the administrators cooperated and if Africans brought their cases to the courts. Even a carefully controlled commitment to respecting personal liberty, and elevating the dignity of the individual over that of the collectivity, was not as compatible as Dakar originally thought with its other political and economic goals in West Africa. As the few existing studies of native court records show, educated Africans in particular were quick to see in the native justice system an opportunity to challenge the authority of the French and their collaborators. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 451

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how colonial legal systems were both instruments of social transformation and sites of African resistance, echoing dynamics seen in other colonial settings.