Building customary law through legal periodicals. Magistrates of the Belgian Congo in the Interwar Period

Landmeters, Romain [USL-B]

Over the last fifteen years, researchers have given a new impulse to Congo’s Colonial history. Historians managed to describe the structural dimensions of the Belgian colony. Recently, justice and the judicial organisation have been focussed upon. Through biographical and prosopographical approaches, the Belgafrican Magistrates Social Networks project (2014-2018) shed light on the colonial magistrate’s position. To apprehend this judicial body and their making of law, I use the specific methods of periodical studies. This research field within the humanities has bloomed over the last years. Considering periodicals in their entirety gives us access to a whole cultural context. In the 1920’s, the booming mining production put Katanga at the centre of world affairs’ map. In the 1920’s, the booming mining production put Katanga at the centre of world affairs’ map. Within this changing societal context, Belgian colonial authorities were convinced in law’s power and its application to maintain their position of domination. In 1924, Antoine Sohier (1885-1963), a catalyst of the legal science of the colony, gathered a group of magistrates in the Katanga Legal Studies Society in Elisabethville (today Lubumbashi). In the same time he created the Revue de droit et de la jurisprudence du Katanga. As consequence of the 15 April 1926 decree, wich created a hundred of indigenous jurisdictions in Congo, Antoine Sohier published the Bulletin des Juridictions Indigènes et du Droit Coutumier Congolais (BJIDCC) in 1933. The purpose was to reinforce the study of customary law in the Belgian Congo: codification of customary law appeared to be a way for the authorities to cope with troubles threatening of the colonial society. How was customary law codified? How did these magistrates use of their periodicals as a vector to develop a « Congolese » legal culture? More generally, what do we learn in these periodicals about the Belgian colonial magistrates and their intellectual and social circles? What ideology of colonization they spread?