In June 1905, a woman named Aina stood in front of the court official of the newly established native court in Ake Abeokuta to narrate her experiences and the ordeals she went through as a slave and a wife. The quote in the title of this article is part of Aina’s testimony in the court against her former master and husband when she sought a divorce. This case is one of the several hundreds of cases brought before the native court which chronicle the encounter of slave wives in twentieth-century Abeokuta. The cases offer clues about how women (both freeborn and slave) contested their marriages after the establishment of the colonial native courts. For women in Yorubaland, the greatest change in marriage during the colonial period was, undoubtedly, the opportunity to contest an unsatisfactory marriage and seek a divorce, a phenomenon that was uncommon in the pre-colonial period. The slave wife identified as Aina, standing before several possibly angry chiefs (who also had slave wives), argued that there had been no exchange of bridewealth for her, indicating that there was no marriage. Furthermore, she requested for a divorce because she had never consented to the marriage. The court granted her request.
Aina’s courageous assertion captures the prevailing culture of negotiating marital status and marital choice in the context of economic, social, and political transformations occurring in the twentieth century. It highlights the changing circumstances of the twentieth century when women (slaves and freeborn) increasingly appealed to new interpretations of marriage, initiated by the European Christian missionaries, and advanced by the British colonial administrators to gain agency against well-established traditions. It also reveals how the establishment of the colonial native courts intersected with indigenous norms surrounding marriage and slavery. This paper will emphasise the intersection between marriage and indigenous inequalities and hierarchies within Yoruba society. It will probe the role played by the newly introduced British colonial courts in local matrimonial disputes and practices and investigate how they gave women like Aina a voice.