The Use of Court Records as Sources for African History: Some Examples from Bujumbura, Burundi

Abstract

Historians of Africa have often cast a jaundiced eye in the direction of written sources; their suspicions have been particularly grave with regard to colonial documents. They have seen them as, at best, the creations of ill-informed foreign observers or, at worst, as the deliberately self-serving justifications of the ruling elite. To counter the all-too-real deficiencies of these documents, historians have laid increasing emphasis on materials produced by Africans themsleves--oral accounts. Yet these records too are problematic, and their principal weakness lies in the fact that they are often collected decades after the events and circumstances the historian wishes to understand. Each of these kinds of sources thus presents methodological difficulties. This paper advocates the use of a third type of source, African court records, which are at once contemporary and yet created by Africans themselves. These records--while not without their own particular biases--permit one to overcome some of the problems inherent in official documents and oral interviews. Courts for Africans were established by colonial regimes throughout the continent. But, although Africans participated in varying degrees in their proceedings, the records have largely remained ignored by historians. In what follows I discuss the court records in two tribunals in Bujumbura, Burundi. The paper is divided into three sections: the first is a description of the city's African community and the courts; the second is a discussion of the court proceedings and the reliability and use of the records; and the last is a brief summary of some of the data the documents have yielded.

The selection bias in court records: settlement and trial in eighteenth‐century Ottoman Kastamonu

“…See, for example, Bodde and Morris, Law in imperial China ; Cale, Law and society ; Dickerman, ‘Use of court records’; Flaherty, ‘Early American court records’; Harvey, Manorial records ; Kolsky, Colonial justice .…”