Tsoukala reviews Kang'ara, "Beyond Bed and Bread"

Over at JOTWELL, Philomila Tsoukala (Georgetown University Law Center) has posted a review that may be of interest. She covers Sylvia Wairimu Kang'ara, "Beyond Bed and Bread: Making the African State through Marriage Law Reform -- Constitutive and Transformative Influences of Anglo-American Legal Thought." The article appeared in Volume 9 of the Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal (2012) and is available online at Comparative L. Rev. Here's an excerpt from Tsoukala's review:

The Article begins by analyzing the central role that the invalidation of customary marriages in Africa played in colonial administration. During the initial legal encounter between common law and African customary laws, judges invalidated large swaths of prior legal relations. In a (professed) effort to align colonial practices with English morality, colonial administrations superimposed a classical legal scheme of thinking about the family and the market at a moment when most of the African economy depended upon a different household model.  Instead of the separate spheres ideology that characterized family law of the classical legal tradition, African customary marriages were based on an economically active household—often composed of polygamous units engaging in economically important exchanges of property through marriage, such as the bride-price. Starting from an assumption that individual free will was the building block for any civilized legal system, colonial judges invalidated customary marriages as repugnant to English colonial morality. They looked hard, but did not seem to find any African subjects capable of becoming “individual holders of exclusive and absolute rights” in the classical legal tradition.  Critically, customary marriage’s failure to cultivate subjects that were suitable rightsholders marked the first step toward property expropriation in the name of empire building.

In this way, Kang’ara shows that, far from being an act with merely moral significance, “defining marriage was an important act of conquest and a corner stone of the market oriented state” that emerged via colonialism. . . .

Read on here.