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Native Foreigners and the Ambiguity of Order and Identity: The Case of African Diasporas and Islamic Law in British Cameroon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Harmony S. O'Rourke
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Abstract:

In 1947, the colonial government in British Cameroon established an Islamic court in the Grassfields to try cases involving the region's Muslim population, primarily comprised of Fulani and Hausa diaspora communities that had settled the area since the late nineteenth century. Colonial debates over the creation and purview of the court reveal uncertainties that permeated Indirect Rule's legal categories of native and non-native, or tribe and race, which were to be governed by customary and civil law, respectively. Comparing legal regimes in British Cameroon with Northern Nigeria, the homeland of “native” Hausa and Fulani, shows that Islamic law sat uneasily across the divide between customary and civil law. With the importation of the court to the Grassfields, where Fulani and Hausa transformed into “native foreigners,” the delineation between customary and civil law was rendered even more obscure, illustrating that it could never neatly correspond to constructions of race and tribe.

Type
Critical Source Analysis
Information
History in Africa , Volume 39 , 2012 , pp. 97 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2012

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