Republican ideology framed African customary law as the authentic will of the people

Evidence

This aspect of thereform reflected Panty’s belief in the right of each ethnic group to evolve freely within its own traditions, which the I909 circular had already articulated. Such a belief derived from the Third Republic’s particular commitment to respecting the voice of “the people.” As Panty put it in the introduction to his reform, in language borrowed from Rousseau: “custom, [the] natural and immediate product of social relations, is the tacit and unanimous expression of the authentic will of the population.” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 413

Categorization

• XREF: This is Rousseau’s theory of the general will applied directly to colonial governance of custom — connects to how republicanism recast empire as liberation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The colonizer borrows Rousseau to legitimate African custom as the ‘authentic will of the population’ while simultaneously reserving the right to override it in the name of civilization — a profound tension in republican colonialism.