Africanist scholars have long emphasized the richness of court archives. While adjudicators sought to isolate disputes, assign responsibility, and deliver judgment, litigants routinely expanded the frame. In persuading judges and audiences, litigants narrated ethnic pasts, kinship histories, labor trajectories, sexual experiences, medical conditions, religious and political claims. What began as a narrow legal question became a documentary moment in which expansive social histories were rendered legible. This panel shifts attention from what courts decided to what litigation required. The procedural demand for proof compelled participants to assemble biographies, moral claims, and collective histories as evidence. Treating case files as sites where social existence was strategically narrated, the panel seeks to study how legal encounters did not merely record African life but reorganized belonging and identity by transforming private memory into institutional knowledge and lived experience into archival authority. By centering litigants’ testimony rather than legal doctrine alone, the panel moves beyond mining court materials for information; it instead asks how the very process of adjudication generated dense formations of historical knowledge and how ordinary people, in meeting the demands of proof, shaped the institutional record that claimed authority over them.
Some helpful questions: How did disputes illuminate forms of social knowledge that administrative archives suppress? In what ways did adjudication transform private biography into public, institutional record? How can retrospective testimony in early court records become an evidentiary record of precolonial pasts?
Subthemes include, but are not limited to, the following:
Proof, Procedure, and Social Legibility
Embodied Evidence, Intimacy, and Legal Claims
War, Memory, and Retrospective Testimony
Slavery, Freedom, and Legal Claims
Marriage, Custody, and the Adjudication of Kinship
If you would like to join this panel, please send a 250-word abstract and a short bio to Oluwasola Daniels: oidaniels@ucdavis.edu by March 15th, 2026.
