The Centre for Law and History Research invites you to the seminar titled 'The Widow's Wrath: Inheritance Struggles in the Postcolonial Courts of Ghana, West Africa'. The seminar will be given by Dr Kate Skinner, Professor of African History at the Department of History, University of Bristol. During the seminar, Professor Skinner will draw on her recent research on the histories of gender activism and politics of family law reform in postcolonial Ghana.

In the aftermath of independence from British colonial rule in 1957, the higher courts in Ghana (West Africa) ruled on a series of cases involving widows. Whilst a small minority of Ghanaians contracted their marriages under the Marriage Ordinance that had been introduced under colonial rule, the great majority of marriages fell within the realm of customary law. Following the introduction of the first republican constitution and the Courts Act, custom was no longer deemed a matter of ‘fact’ which plaintiffs and defendants could seek to prove via witnesses; rather, custom was a matter of law, which it was the duty of the court to know or to ascertain via the specified procedures. Cases involving widows in the early postcolonial period therefore led to some crucial rulings which distinguished wives from non-wives (aka ‘concubines’), defined them as dependents of their deceased husbands' families, and set out the obligations that those families were supposed to honour. The powers of the courts, however, were primarily definitional: there were few means of enforcing obligations to widows. Women therefore campaigned vociferously for new laws which would better recognise their contributions to the acquisition of property in marriage, and enable them to access more reliable material support for their children.