Women’s Experiences in the Colonial Justice System of Southern Nigeria, 1920 -1960
Date
2023-12-08
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Abstract
The law and criminal justice institutions are embodiments of a state’s authority to govern and punish erring subjects. This study highlights how southern Nigerian women navigated traditional versus colonial approaches to acts deemed criminal during a period of regime change. This micro-history of southern Nigerian women seeks to individualize their experiences within the framework of the criminal justice system by weaving a narrative of how these institutions deliberately and in other cases, unintentionally provoked the display of female agency in matters involving defiance, crime, and punishment. The stories of these women, culled from newspapers, archival documents, and court records reveal how they imagined, understood, and negotiated, their crimes when brought before institutions of the criminal justice system. Firstly, I examine how colonial institutions punished women for engaging in the non-violent crime of profiteering during World War II. At first glance, the actions of these accused women might be viewed merely as resistance to the intrusion of imperial law. However, a deeper analysis of this crime reveals how colonial institutions created conditions resulting in a collision between normative and legal orders in southern Nigeria. This study also reveals how the blanket term ‘profiteering’ camouflaged the involvement of women in other forms of crimes during this period. Secondly, in seeking to demystify the rather exclusive images of male-dominated violent crimes in Nigeria, this study also examines female-perpetrated homicide. Unlike profiteering, homicide had normative implications in both colonial and traditional cultures. Thus, I examine the changes and continuities in the punishment of women involved in this crime. I also focus on officials of the justice system and argue that because of their pertinent role in examining the cadaver of the victim and understanding the state of a woman’s mental and physical health, male medical witnesses began to play a significant role in determining the truthfulness of a woman’s words. However, a woman’s biological peculiarity, societal perceptions and a judge’s discretion based on his cultural understanding of a case mattered and were sometimes brought to the fore in the prosecution of female-perpetrated homicide. Overall, this study reveals a paradox of female experiences in the colonial justice institution, which sanctioned and punished women for their ‘crimes’ but sometimes created avenues for negotiation, compromise, and accommodation.
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Keywords
Women, Crime, Criminal Justice
Citation
Osondu, Y. C. (2023). Women’s experiences in the colonial justice system of southern Nigeria, 1920 -1960 (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.