Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876-1928
Author(s)
Peterson, Derek
Abstract
This essay article contributes to the growing literature on colonial agency in an African context. It focuses on the history of conjugal litigation in late-nineteenth-century Tanganyika, offering a corrective to conventional views of Africa’s legal history as defined in terms of a perpetual contest between modern governance and inflexible tradition. Anglican missionaries used record books and marriage certificates to define marriage as a contract authorized by God, thus allowing them to punish extramarital sex as adultery. Litigants, however, were hardly passive in the face of such efforts; they learned to use these bureaucratic modes of religious and social control to their own advantage. Husbands and wives entered into the legal process by articulating their own interests and complaints in a recognizable moral discourse that could draw judges’ attention and sympathy. In this way, they were able to pursue claims concerning such pertinent issues as wives’ deference, payment of bridewealth, or marital residence. By naming their spouses as adulterers, litigants could co-opt judges, who were bound to punish wrongdoers, to rule in matters of fundamental importance to them.
