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Martin A. Klein, Emily S. Burrill. States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1718–1719, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1718a
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Emily S. Burrill’s States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali is a history of marriage in the colonial French Soudan (now Mali). It focuses on the district of Sikasso in southern Mali and deals with both changes in French policy and the effects of economic and social change on the ways local people married. It is based on the discussion of marriage policy in colonial archives, court cases, and interviews with both men and women. French colonial administrators were often impatient with marriage issues, but in Sikasso marriage and divorce were the most important source of court cases.
Sikasso was largely inhabited by matrilineal people known as Senufo, who lived in decentralized communities until the seventeenth century, when Muslim traders known as Juula began infiltrating. Then in the late nineteenth century, a powerful slave-raiding state called Kénédougou imposed itself on these communities. There were thus three intersecting patterns of marriage: one based on political elites rooted in the Kénédougou state, one based on Muslim law, and, at base, a society that was both matrilineal and patriarchal. One theme that remains constant throughout the period studied is a tension between the household and the matrilineage.
