In
anticipation of the, supposedly imminent, completion of her
doctoral thesis on the constitutional history of Senegal, Gerti
Hesseling joined the African-Studies Centre in the Fall of 1979,
to do post-doctoral research on land law and land reform in South
Senegal, in a project initiated by Emile van Rouveroy van
Nieuwaal. Within days after her appointment, I met her for the
first time, inviting her to give a paper for the monthly national
Africa Seminar I had convened and chaired since the mid-1970s.[1] This started our period of
close cooperation. It turned out that her dissertation project
had dramatically stagnated, so I agreed to take on the day-to-day
Africanist supervision of her thesis, complementing the jural
supervision she was receiving from Lucas Prakke. This arrangement
enabled Gerti to depart (still substantially delayed) for the
field early 1982, only to return for the public defence of her
dissertation in May of that year.[2] On that
occasion, in recognition of the actual facts of our division of
labour, Lucas Prakke insisted that Gerti should receive her
doctoral diploma from my hands, and she did. After her definitive
return from the field, and the demise of the African Studies
Centre’s ‘Section on Law’,[3] Gerti
joined the Department of Political and Historical Studies, which
I had initiated on the occasion of the Centre’s
restructuring in 1980, and which I was to lead throughout the
1980s. Here she initially combined the writing-up of her Senegal
data[4] with a return to a theme that
had also been central in her doctoral dissertation: the study of
human rights as enshrined in the national constitutions of
African independent states – resulting in major joint papers
on French-language independence constitutions.[5] In this period also fell our
joint organisation of two conferences on the African state.[6] Soon I was able to persuade
the Board of the African Studies Centre to grant Gerti a
permanent appointment. Gradually, her interest shifted from
Senegal to the whole of West Africa, and from legal scholarship
to development and senior management. She came to combine her
annual fieldwork supervision of Leiden anthropology students in
Senegal, with a senior position within the West-African
think-tank Le Club du Sahel – an effective, and
convincing, preparation for her subsequent directorship of the
African Studies Centre (1996-2004). When her appointment as
director was in the balance because the Centre had not yet
implemented the ministerial preferences for a new, thematic
organisation form of its research, I managed to form the first
such Theme Group at the African Studies Centre, the one on
Globalisation (1996-2002), largely on the basis of
external funding, and thus helped tilt the scales in Gerti’s
favour. During most of Gerti’s directorship I worked closely
together with her within the Centre’s Management Team, until
I was allowed to return to my shelved writing projects in 2002.
Already
long before I ever met Gerti, I had engaged in the
legal-anthropological study of Africa,[7] on the
basis of the combined inspiration of André Köbben’s
teaching at Amsterdam University, and of my being co-opted into
the circles of the Manchester School (whose leader was the great
legal anthropologist Max Gluckman), in the course of my
appointment as Lecturer of Sociology at the University of Zambia,
my affiliation with the Institute of African Studies (the
successor to the illustrious Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in
Lusaka), and my appointment as Simon Professor at Manchester.
Working closely together with Gerti, whose education had been
primarily in positive law (and Romance languages), revived this
initial inspiration and turned it to the topics in which Gerti
was particularly interested: constitutional law, traditional law,
their interface in legal pluralism, and the pursuit of human
rights as the touch-stone of legal development in modern Africa.
Thus Gerti, as my first PhD student, was also to some extent my
teacher. Two years after her untimely death, I am offering my study on
constitutional law among the Nkoya people of Zambia (on whose earlier versions she has extensively
commented) in memory of a stimulating Africanist, a uniquely
gifted director, and above all a very dear friend.
Doornbos,
M.R., van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Hesseling, Gerti S.C.M.,
1984, ‘Constitutional form and ideological content: The
preambles of French language constitutions in Africa’, in:
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.., & Hesseling, Gerti S.C.M., eds, Aspecten
van staat en maatschappij in Africa: Recent Dutch and Belgian
research on the African state, Leiden: African Studies
Centre, pp. 41-100;
Doornbos,
M.R., van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Hesseling, Gerti S.C.M.,
1985, ‘Ideology and identity in constitutional language:
Some francophone African examples’, paper presented at the
Special Meeting on ‘Constitution Making as a Political
Process’, XIIIth International Political Science Association
World Congress, July 1985, Paris, 40 pp.
Hesseling,
Gerti S.C.M., 1981, Etat et langue en Afrique: Esquisse
d’une étude juridique comparative, Leiden: African
Studies Centre, Working Paper 3.
Hesseling,
Gerti S.C.M., 1982, Senegal: Staatsrechtelijke en politieke
ontwikkelingen (Ph.D. thesis, Amsterdam University),
Antwerpen/ Amsterdam: Maarten Kluwer;
Hesseling,
Gerti S.C.M., 1985, Histoire politique et constitutionnelle du
Sénégal, Paris: Karthala;
Hesseling,
Gerti S.C.M., 1992, Pratiques foncičres ŕ l’ombre du
droit: L’application du droit foncier urbain ŕ Ziguinchor,
Sénégal, Leiden: African Studies Centre Research Report no
49.
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1974, Kinship, Marriage and Urban-Rural
Relations: A Preliminary Study of Law and Social Control among
the Nkoya of Kaoma District and of Lusaka, Zambia, Leiden:
African Studies Centre, Conferences Papers Series;
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1977, ‘Law in the context of Nkoya
society’, in: S. Roberts, ed., Law and the family in
Africa, The Hague/Paris: Mouton, pp. 39-68.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984b., ‘The study of African law at the
African Studies Centre, Leiden: In reaction to John
Griffiths’ overview of the anthropology of law in the
Netherlands in the 1970’s’, Nieuwsbrief van
Nederlandstalige Rechtssociologen, Rechtsantropologen,
Rechtsantropologen, Rechtspsychologen (NRR) (Rotterdam), 5, 2:
199-207
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003d, ‘Introduction: The dynamics of
power and the rule of law in Africa and beyond: Theoretical
perspectives on chiefs, the state, agency, customary law, and
violence’, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.., in collaboration
with Pelgrim, R., ed., The dynamics of power and the rule of
law: Essays on Africa and beyond: In honour of Emile Adriaan B.
van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, Berlin/Münster: LIT for African
Studies Centre, pp. 9-47.
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Hesseling, Gerti S.C.M., 1984, eds, Aspecten
van staat en maatschappij in Afrika: Recent Dutch and Belgian
research on the African state, Leiden: African Studies
Centre;
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Hesseling, Gerti S.C.M., & Reijntjens,
Filip, 1986, eds., State and local community in Africa / Etat
et Communauté locale en Afrique, Brussels: Cahiers du
CEDAF/ASDOC geschriften, 2-3-4/1986.
[1] This paper, on language and
the state in Africa, was subsequently published as: Hesseling
1981 .
[2] Hesseling 1982. I
successfully applied for a translation subsidy from the
Netherlands Research Foundation (ZWO now NWO), so that the text
could soon appear in French as: Hesseling 1985.
[3] van Binsbergen 1984b, 2003d.
[4] Hesseling 1992.
[5] Doornbos et al. 1984,
1985.
[6] van Binsbergen &
Hesseling 1984; van Binsbergen et al. 1986.
[7] van Binsbergen 1974, 1977.