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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2022
Between the judicial reorganizations of 1924 and 1941, the colonial tribunals in Dahomey heard more than two hundred cases of rape. Teenage or younger girls engaged in street hawking were the most common victims of rape who reported their assaults to these tribunals. Many of the cases stand out because market women played the dominant role in transforming girl hawkers’ experiences of sexual assault into formal grievances. The history of sexual assault in colonial Africa has largely focused on how ‘customary’ and colonial courts have or have not punished the crime of rape. This approach privileges masculine authorities’ views of sex, consent, and gender violence. This article focuses on the investigative processes in cases of sexual assault. In doing so, two gendered histories emerge: firstly, a history of elder female caregiving to girls suffering the aftereffects of sexual assaults and, secondly, a history of the vulnerability of hawkers to quotidian sexual violence.
1 Archives Nationales du Bénin, Porto-Novo (ANB) 1M171, Laure, ‘Réquisitoire n. 66 (1937): Affaire Adama Samuel’, Tribunal colonial d'appel de Dahomey, 17 Sep. 1937.
2 In South African colonial courts, British colonial authorities similarly operated on the presumption that girls and women lied about their sexual experiences, see Thornberry, E., Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape, (Cambridge, 2019), 162 and 186Google Scholar.
3 For the role of a priori doubt in rape cases heard in French tribunals, see Vigarello, G., A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to the 20th Century, trans. Birrell, J. (Cambridge, 2001), 3, 45, 139–40Google Scholar.
4 The two foundational theoretical works on child circulation are Goody, E., Parenthood and Social Reproduction: Fostering and Occupational Roles in West Africa (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar; Lallemand, S., La circulation des enfants en société traditionnelle: prêt, don, échange (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar. For a detailed analytical engagement contrasting the two schools of thought that these two scholars represent, see Alber, E., ‘The transfer of belonging: theories on child fostering in West Africa reviewed’, in Alber, E., Martin, J., and Notermans, C. (eds.), Child Fostering in West Africa: New Perspectives on Theory and Practice (Leiden, 2013), 79–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Alber has written extensively on Baatombu fostering in northern Benin, see Alber, E., Transfers of Belonging: Child Fostering in West Africa in the 20th Century (Boston, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alber, E., ‘No school without foster families in northern Benin: a social historical approach’, in Parenting After the Century of the Child (Burlington, 2010), 57–78Google Scholar; Alber, E., ‘Denying biological parenthood: fosterage in northern Benin’, Ethnos, 68: 4 (2003), 487–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alber, E. and Sommer, J., ‘Quand l'application du droit national est déterminée par la demande locale’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 44:175 (2004), 659–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more information about the phenomenon of child entrustment in Africa more broadly, see Razy, E. and Rodet, M. (eds.), Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration (Suffolk, 2016)Google Scholar; Argenti, N., ‘Things that don't come by the road: folktales, fosterage, and memories of slavery in the Cameroon grassfields’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:02 (2010), 224–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shipton, P. M., The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa, (New Haven, 2007)Google Scholar; M. Deshusses, ‘Du confiage à l'esclavage ‘Petites bonnes’ ivoiriennes en France (The ‘misfortunes’ of fosterage in France: the case of ‘little maids’ from the Ivory Coast)’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 45:179/180 (2005), 731–50; Etienne, M., ‘Maternité sociale, rapports d'adoption et pouvoir des femmes chez les Baoulé (Côte d'Ivoire)’, L'Homme, 19:3–4 (1979), 63–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 George, A., Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens, OH, 2014)Google Scholar; Aderinto, S., When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (Urbana, 2015)Google Scholar. While not directly addressing sex crimes, Kristin Mann's scholarship on marriage in colonial Lagos also gives insight into the formation of female activist groups and their agendas, see Mann, K., Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.
6 The ANB no longer has copies of colonial era newspapers that circulate. I was informed in 2013–4 that they had crumbled to ‘dust’ over the years. I have consulted all available newspapers published in Dahomey prior to the Second World War available either through Gallica, the platform for digitized archival material in the Archives nationales de France, and those available in printed form at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, France.
7 I suspect that this had to do with the contrasting histories of female education and professional opportunities available to women in Lagos, Nigeria and Dahomey. Once educated in Dakar, Senegal or metropolitan France, West African women rarely resettled in their natal colonies. Educated women, and some men for that matter, often spent their careers stationed in far-flung colonies with frequent relocations. See Barthélémy, P., Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale, 1918-1957 (Rennes, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Aderinto does not compare Dahomey to Lagos, but he makes this point in regard to Lagos's uniqueness. Aderinto, When, 11.
9 Markets and streets in precolonial Dahomey had been heavily policed and were reputed to be among the safest in West Africa.
10 Demaret's comments are quoted in B. Brunet-La Ruche, ‘“Crime et châtiment” aux colonies: poursuivre, juger, sanctionner au Dahomey de 1894 à 1945’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Université Toulouse II, 2013), 228–9.
11 Brévié, ‘151 A. P. Arrêté promulguant en Afrique occidentale française le décret du 3 décembre 1931, réorganisant la Justice inidgène en Afrique occidentale française’, Journal officiel de l'Afrique occidentale française, 6 Feb. 1932, 125–34.
12 In 2013–14 and 2018, I systematically photographed all legal documents containing information related to sex crimes in Dahomey. These were contained in the 1M and 2M series at the Archives Nationales du Bénin and 3M, 8G, and 5C in the Archives du Sénégal.
13 For a more detailed analysis of legal rituals, see Craig, E., ‘The Inhospitable Court’, University of Toronto Law Journal, 66 (2016), 199–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 None of the seventeenth or eighteenth century European visitors to the Kingdom of Dahomey confirmed this twentieth-century tradition regarding the punishment of rape. Herskovits, M. J., Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, Volume I (New York, 1938), 87–8Google Scholar and 290. In his mid-nineteenth-century ethnography of the precolonial kingdom of Dahomey, Forbes does not include rape in his list of capital crimes, Forbes, F. E., Dahomey and the Dahomans: being the journals of two missions of the king of Dahomey in the years 1849 and 1850, Volume I (London, 1851), 26–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Hérissé, A. Le, L'ancien royaume du Dahomey: Moeurs, religion, histoire (Paris, 1911), 76–7Google Scholar.
16 It is possible that his interrogation of his informants created a feedback loop that simply solicited confirmation of his own definition, but nothing in either the precolonial or colonial documents leads me to believe this. Vigarello, A History, 13, 93, and 201.
17 D. Lett et al., ‘Éditorial: les violences sexuelles au coeur de l'intime’, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire, 52 (2020), 1.
18 See article 5 of A. LeBrun and A. Briand, ‘Décret portant réorganisation de la justice indigène en Afrique occidentale française', Journal Officiel de La République Française, 44:227 (1912), 7586–9.
19 ANB 1M113, Commandant de cercle d'Allada, ‘n. 1092’, 9 May 1931. In the colonial setting, indecent assault often became the default crime for attempted rape or forcible sex perpetrated against female bodies that the tribunal deemed could not be raped, such as adult women or pubescent girls. In 1810, French magistrates invented the crime of ‘attentat à la pudeur’, or indecent assault, as an alternative category of sex crime distinguishable from viol/rape. For a discussion of how rape and indecent assault overlapped and defined one another in opposition in the history of French tribunals, see Vigarello, A History, 105, 115–21 and 142–5.
20 See article 19 in the 1912 decree, article 22 in the 1924, and article 46 in the 1931. A. LeBrun and A. Briand, ‘Décret’, 7586–89; Millerand, A., ‘Arrèté promulguant en Afrique occidentale française le décret du 22 mars 1924, réorganisant la Justice indigène en Afrique occidentale française’, Journal officiel de l'Afrique occidentale française, 20:1026 (1924), 398–406Google Scholar; Brévié, ‘151 A. P. Arrêté’, Journal officiel de l'Afrique occidentale française, 6 Feb. 1932, 125–34.
21 Even though the 1931 decree was issued in December of that year, it was not actively applied until April 1932.
22 It is difficult to assess if this had to do with male gatekeeping by those who recorded the complaints and assigned them a French criminal category or if this reflected Dahomean women's internalization of this particular definition of rape.
23 ANB 1M94, Tribunal Criminel d'Allada, ‘État des affaires criminelles du tribunal criminel d'Allada: Jugement n. 1 Akpime – viol’, 16 Aug. 1933.
24 The age taboo has been discussed in this article. For a more in-depth discussion of Dahomean norms of sexual maturation, see J. Reuther, ‘Irresponsible boys, promiscuous girls: maturity, gender, and rape myths in the criminal tribunals of colonial Dahomey, 1924-1940’, La Revue d'histoire de l'enfance ‘Irrégulière’, 20 (2018). The taboo against sex — consensual or not — with a pregnant woman was made clear in the well-documented rape case against Epiphane Agbo, see Archives du Sénégal, Dakar (AS) 8G26 (17), Tribunal d'Athiémé, ‘Extrait du registre des jugements du Tribunal d'Athiémé: Jugement n. 1 Affaire Epiphàne AGBO’, 16 Feb. 1937.
25 Vigarello, A History, 134–45.
26 Lett et al., ‘Éditorial’.
27 Thornberry makes a similar point based on British colonial law courts in South Africa. Thornberry, E., ‘Virginity testing, history, and the nostalgia for custom in contemporary South Africa’, African Studies Review, 58:3 (2015), 162CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Brunet-La Ruche, ‘“Crime et châtiment”’, 509–48.
29 Roberts, R., Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895-1912 (Portsmouth, NH, 2005), 16–18Google Scholar.
30 Letters of complaint and oral statements of complaint made clear that Dahomeans did not think of colonial courts as their first avenue of recourse. For an example of a detailed discussion of multiple failed attempts to resolve a dispute over an entrusted girl out of court, see ANB 1M99, letter from Madame Yovonon to commandant le cercle de Porto-Novo, 12 May 1932. The administrator noted that he settled it out of court with no official legal process even opened.
31 Sou was a bronze coin in the French currency equal to five centimes or .05 franc.
32 ANB 1M139, H. Ravet, ‘Procès-verbal: n. 222 Viol - Affaire Kinhodé … c/ Awandjinou Sogbossi’, 25 Nov. 1932.
33 ANB 1M139, illegible, ‘Requisitions: Affaire AWANDJINOU Sogbossi’, 11 Jan. 1933.
34 ANB 1M4, ‘État des jugements rendus en matière répressive: Jugement n. 16 du 28/9/1928,’ 30 Sep. 1928.
35 Ibid.
36 D. H. Dwyer, ‘Outside the courts: extra-legal strategies for subordinating women’, in M. J. Hay and M. Wright (eds.), African Women & the Law: Historical Perspectives, Papers on Africa, Volume VII (Boston, 1982), 93. She raises these points in general, not specifically in the context of colonial era Africa or Dahomey/Bénin.
37 Judicial documents attest to all these commonplace scenarios. Also, little technological innovation has encroached on the hawking profession and today the general dynamics of these encounters and exchanges remain much the same. While living in Benin in 2013–14, I witnessed and participated in such exchanges.
38 George, with the help of Wale Makanjuola, surveyed 46 current and former septuagenarian women traders who recalled that while they were hawkers in Lagos during the 1940s and 1950s, the chief danger that they feared was of being robbed of their goods or money. George acknowledged that the fear of sexual violence may have been downplayed due to these women's reluctance to discuss issues of sexuality or sexual violence with Mr. Makanjuola. George, Making, 124–7.
39 This narrative is primarily based on the procès verbal given by Akouéle. Some of the details are drawn from the testimonies of Alougba and Ahoussi. ANB 1M162 ‘Procès-verbal d'audition de témoins - Affaire Stanislas Amoussouvi: Akouéle’, Cercle de Mono, Poste d'Athiémé, 19 Jun. 1929.
40 Ibid.
41 ANB 1M162, ‘Procès-verbal d'audition de témoins - Affaire Stanislas Amoussouvi: Ahoussi’, Cercle de Mono, Poste d'Athiémé, 19 Jun. 1929.
42 Felstiner, W. L. F., Abel, R. L., and Sarat, A., ‘The emergence and transformation of disputes: naming, blaming, claiming …’, Law & Society Review, 15 (1981), 631–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 Thornberry discusses how elder women in South Africa monitored girls’ bodies to ensure their chaste status through virginity testing. Thornberry, ‘Virginity’, 134–5.
44 This list of complaints was compiled after an exhaustive review of rape cases contained in series 1M in the ANB.
45 ANB 1M154, C. B. d'Almeida, ‘Extrait du registre des jugements du Tribunal du 2e degré de Ouidah: Jugement n. 39 Affaire Adamon - viol’, 21 Nov. 1924, 3–4.
46 Ibid.
47 For example, after being raped, sixteen-year-old Houngboné returned to the market to sell akassa, a traditional Beninese recipe made of cornmeal and typically served as the base for a stew. Shortly thereafter, Sokou, the canton chief, saw Houngboné crying and bleeding. He then took her to the French administrator to report the assault.
48 Shadle, Thornberry, and Getz have all separately commented on how rarely African women's and girls’ experiences were heard in colonial courtrooms or in the larger legal and intellectual discourses. See: Shadle, B. L., ‘Rape in the courts of Gusiiland, Kenya, 1940s-1960s’, African Studies Review, 51:2 (2008), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thornberry, Colonizing, 201; T. R. Getz and L. Clarke, Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (2nd edn, New York, 2016).
49 M. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History (Boston, 1995). For an example of applying Trouillot's theories about silencing to African women's voices in colonial legal records, see T. R. Getz and L. Clarke, Abina, 139–40.
50 In two different contemporary contexts, Bailey shows how observations become medical facts, see Bailey, M., ‘Misogynoir in medical media: on Caster Semenya and R. Kelly’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience , 2 (2016), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similar processes regarding the manipulation of evidence presented to a tribunal were taking place in the colonial setting as well. Tribunal members in Dahomey were working with a different set of biases about black femininity and black girls’ sexuality that are distinct from but related to the misogynoir analyzed by Bailey. More broadly on medical discourses vis-à-vis Black bodies, see Delphine Peiretti-Courtis, Corps Noirs et Médecins Blancs: La Fabrique Du Préjugéracial XIXe-XXe Siècles (Paris, 2021).
51 Thornberry makes this same point about the lack of forensic training of district surgeons, but she does not comment on their gynecological expertise: Thornberry, Colonizing, 253.
52 For more on the origins of these stereotypes, see J. L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004), 12–49.
53 Bailey, ‘Mysogynoir’. For more on the specific French iterations of these stereotypes, see Sharpley-Whiting, T. D., Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC, 1999)Google Scholar; Mitchell, R., Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Athens, OH, 2020)Google Scholar.
54 Thornberry, Colonizing, 8.
55 By the 1930s, European condemned ambulant and itinerant professions to be morally dangerous and sought ways to eradicate them. There exists comparatively less information on French views concerning children's street trading in West Africa, in part because, unlike in British Lagos, no indigenous activist movement existed. George, Making, 113–41. George does not use legal records to determine the veracity of this anxiety. See Aderinto, When, 78–81.
56 The posited blameworthiness of rape victims that plagues prosecutions of the crime of rape in a variety of contexts is one of the reasons rape victims are in a unique position. See Chennells, R., ‘Sentencing: the “real rape” myth’, Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, 82 (2009), 32Google Scholar.
57 This was not the only case where the girl reported the assault only after repeated rapes or attempts by the same man. Formally filing a complaint with colonial authorities was often the last option for girls.
58 ANB 1M106, ‘Requistions n. 24 (1932): Affaire Gaudens – viol’, Chambre d'accusation, 6 Jul. 1932.
59 Ibid.
60 The only time that the 1931 decree explicitly mentions age relates to the question of discernment, or when a juvenile should be held accountable for their actions.
61 ANB 1M106, ‘Requistions n. 24’, 6 Jul. 1932.
62 ANB 1M005, Tribunal Colonial d'Appel du Dahomey, ‘Réquisitoire n. 175 (1936): Affaire Ogoulede Bancole et consorts, viol’, Cotonou, 26 Oct. 1936.
63 For a detailed explanation of female initiation and the associated genital practices see, Herskovits, Dahomey, I: 282–3. Herskovits was able to get this detailed information through informants’ discussions with his wife who conducted some of the research and data collection.
64 Peiretti-Courtis, Corps. Gilman, S. L., Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 85–9Google Scholar.
65 ANB 1M005, ‘Réquisitoire n. 175’.
66 Schildkrout, E., ‘Age and gender in Hausa society socio-economic roles of children in urban Kano’, Childhood, 9:3 (2002), 342–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 Throughout the colonial period 1894-1960, the Northern districts were chronically understaffed and overstretched administrators recorded much less documentation concerning the functioning of the courts in these districts. This article analyzes cases from the southern districts of Abomey, Allada, Cotonou, Grand Popo/ Mono/ Athiémé, Ouidah, Porto Novo, Savalou, and Zagnanado.
68 Thornberry similarly documented the decline in the value and credibility in elder women's testimony regarding virginity testing in sex crimes cases in the Eastern Cape. Thornberry, ‘Virginity’, 134–8.