A statement on the importance of unclassified legal records:

The following text was excerpted from comments by Dr. Dennis Galvin.

Unclassified colonial legal records are particularly important for studying the history and development of Africa. As oral history sources become increasingly rare, court documents have emerged as increasingly important alternative primary resources in reconstructing the social, cultural and structural changes wrought by colonial expansion and domination in Africa

Documents on legal activities reflect the relationship between colonizer and colony. As French colonial practice was geared to more direct (authoritarian) rule than the British, often ignoring or subverting African authority in local matters, the court and legal proceedings demonstrate the conflict between the & quot; principles of French civilization" and the realities of African social structure and cultural practice. From civil matters to administrative law, the records are important sources of material for social scientist and historian alike.

Although court records are notoriously fragmentary throughout the continent, in Senegal local and expatriate researchers are fortunate to have at their disposal a rather rich body of legal records, including actual case materials and testimonies dating back to the mid-19th century. Until recently, this body of evidence was thought restricted mainly to the activities of the various metropolitan courts of the Four Communes of Senegal (Goree, Saint-Louis, Dakar, and Rufisque), the communities in which French citizenship rights were partially extended to African inhabitants. Litigants in these courts tended to be Europeans or individuals who through marriage, commerce or education had had varying degrees of contact with European institutions and culture. When we examine court records from the Four Communes, we are examining a very distinctive slice of the overall encounter between Africans and colonial institutions - the originaires of the Four Communes were delicately suspended between African and European societies, values and institutional structures. They thus experienced colonialism partly as accomplices in the late 19th century dramatic expansion of conquered territory, partly as Africans particularly well-positioned to take advantage of and profit from the social transformations unleashed by colonialism. Their civil, commercial, and other legal conflicts of course reflect their distinctive position in the system of colonial rule.

Outside the Four Communes, the nature and application of colonial law was quite different, most notably in its fairly conscious effort to identify (and if need be concoct) systems of customary authority and customary legal traditions which the colonial legal superstructure could then preserve and defend in order to maintain the local authority structures needed to extend colonial rule on a shoestring budget.

Materials which document legal proceedings in the interior of Senegal are thus quite useful because they yield insight into the process of identifying and codifying "tradition" in the early colonial period, a process which regularly entailed conflict between the rulings of administrators and the realities of African social structure and cultural practice. In conflicts over marriage, inheritance, property, labor, moral codes, and in affairs which call into question the jurisdictional authority of a judicial body or the legitimacy of colonial administrative authority, we witness struggles on the part of various African social actors and colonial officials which are quite distinct from legal conflicts in the Four Communes. Given the quite different social context and use of law (both French and "customary") in the interior regions of
Senegal, these regional sources represent a more fruitful set of primary documents for examining legal conflict as an encounter between the "civilizing mission" of a colonial conqueror and newly fluid social relations and culture of African communities.

The National Archives Service of Senegal has recently identified sources of court records that document direct judicial activities outside of the small number of coastal entrepots tightly linked to the metropole. Several vaults of unclassified, partially preserved court records have turned up in local courts in the regional capitals of Kaolack, Thiès and Fatick, as well as in the former colonial capital, Saint-Louis. Based on initial sampling, these collections appear to include a wide variety of documents relating to the activities of the patchwork of judicial bodies which regulated commercial, civil and political matters as the French colonial empire expanded into the interior of West Africa.

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