FORCED MARRIAGE IN AFRICA: Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa

Engaging with the scholarship on child soldiers and the history of childhood, Hynd argues that forced marriage in conflict zones emerges both from immediate conflicts, for which it serves as a tactic for achieving military success, and from historical patterns of structural gender violence, which make forced marriage imaginable. Elizabeth Thornberry unpacks the practice of ukuthwala (abducting girls into marriage) in the Eastern Cape; E. Ann McDougall considers concubinage as a form of forced marriage in Mauritania; Bala Saho explores the challenge of traditionalism in Gambian marriage ideologies; Lawrance and Charlotte Walker-Said analyze the work of homophobia and forced marriage in African asylum claims; and Mariane Ferme investigates how arguments made in the Special Court for Sierra Leone following the civil war of 1991–2002 had the paradoxical effect of enshrining some forced practices as ‘crimes against humanity’, while categorizing others as ‘customary’, and therefore noncriminal. In each of the chapters, scholars grapple primarily with the question of marriage — what defines it; what it encompasses and masks, as well as what sorts of social practices and domestic arrangements it produces; and the ways that these issues have been structured by law-making bodies like colonial courts or international courts.