ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 is the second in a series of chapters all considering gender, moral subjectivities, and changing customary law. Cases of adultery reflect changes in the way that gendered and generational relations have been treated and experienced in different historic periods, despite moral lectures by village chiefs on parental responsibility and the need for family consultations. In tension with that, indeed subverting it, was the unsettling evidence of a new modus vivendi: the relative independence of the younger generation, and the inability of parents to fully control young people’s decisions, however much nostalgically they desired to do so. Equally important has been the change in gendered relations in marriage: customary law no longer condones men’s philandering or polygamy. Young women can take their husbands’ girlfriends to court, and many do so, asserting their right to do so even in the face of gossip that they are being too wilful. Taking a legal realist, living-law approach, this chapter shows that customary court decisions are embedded in considerations of equity that also inform wider ideological, critical movements and processes of judicial innovation and legal reform. Attempts to shape customary law from above, the chapter shows, tend to fail in the long run.
