civil servants of the colonial state. The governor’s annual report summarized the committee’s mandate to “reorganize the native family” through facilitating marriage for young people by decreasing bridewealth amounts, limiting adultery and the prostitution of wives by husbands, making divorce more difficult, and prohibiting the marriage of prepubescent girls.135 The commission was charged with producing a set of laws that would serve as a blueprint for local administrators and African auxiliaries in enforcing social order. Documents do not detail the opinions of the African members of the committee. However, a report by member Monsignor Matrou encapsulated the common goal of state and church members of the commission, which was to establish immutable written laws to ensure that all African men could find a wife and to make marriages last. Stable marriages, in turn, would increase birth rates.136
The various drafts of customary marriage law that emerged from 1922 to 1925 reveal the conflict between church and state regarding which institutions had the authority to determine what types of marriages would be allowable. Catholic officials viewed marriage as a spiritual contract, of monogamous men and women, consecrated by priests who were intermediaries between humans and God. Colonial bureaucrats viewed marriage as a civil contract, to be consecrated and recorded before those appointed by the colonial state. Church officials argued that polygamy should be discouraged and eventually made illegal. The church sought to add “liberty of consciousness” as grounds for divorce—women could leave a polygamous marriage in order to enter a monogamous one.137 Colonial administrators viewed polygamy as ingrained in African practice and feared that efforts to abolish polygamy could result in revolt against the colonial state. Church officials also argued that bridewealth was equivalent to the sale of women and argued for strict limits on bridewealth.138 Yet some colonial administrators viewed the monetization of bridewealth payments as a transformation that benefited the colonial economy, given that the need for bridewealth cash provided incentive for African men to participate in wage labor. Bridewealth amounts should, the governor argued, fluctuate according to wages. Colonial officials did worry that elder men with female dependents would ask for high cash payments in order to tap into the cash earnings of young men.139 However, the governor concluded that the need to alleviate the acute labor shortage for French enterprises was a greater imperative.
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