Wallace Teska

University of Cambridge, Trinity college, Junior Research Fellow

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Wallace Teska is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in African History from Stanford University in 2024. Teska’s research centers on histories of law, religion, and environmental change in francophone West Africa. His work has been supported by, among others, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fulbright-Hays DDRA, Fulbright IIE, the American Society for Legal History, the West African Research Association, and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. His articles, chapters, and book reviews have been published and are forthcoming in journals including Slavery & Abolition, African Studies Review, The Journal of African History, and French Historical Studies.
Supervisors: Richard Roberts; Joel Cabrita
Address: Trinity College, Cambridge
CB2 1TQ U.K.

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Papers by Wallace Teska

Making Marriages at the ‘End of Slavery’: Religion, Identity, and Law in the Early Colonial French Soudan

Slavery & abolition, Feb 20, 2024

This article examines how formerly enslaved people in the early colonial French Soudan (today Mal... more This article examines how formerly enslaved people in the early colonial French Soudan (today Mali) negotiated and contested the meanings of marriage at the ‘end of slavery’. Because the abolition of slavery in this region was unexpected, no one knew what the legal rules for marriages between emancipated slaves should look like after it occurred. But formerly enslaved people made their opinions known. This piece examines how former slaves’ ideas about marriage clashed and converged, drawing primarily on one exceptionally detailed marriage annulment dispute from a nascent Catholic community called Patyana. Doing so, it illustrates how emancipated slaves went through inchoate processes of forging new identities in slavery’s wake by migrating, changing their names, and converting to new religions, including Christianity and Islam. Bringing these complex identities before legal adjudicators, former slaves determined the meanings of marriage in a time and place marked by great legal ambiguity.

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Konstanze N’Guessan. Histories of Independence in Côte d’Ivoire: An Ethnography of the Past. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xii + 277 pp. Acknowledgements. Bibliography. Index. $85.00. Paper. ISBN: 978-9004227583

African Studies Review, 2022

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Dead-End Scandal in M'Pésoba: Local Politics and Colonial Justice in French West Africa, 1913–18

The Journal of African History

This article scrutinizes recent histories of colonial and international law that use metropolitan... more This article scrutinizes recent histories of colonial and international law that use metropolitan reactions to the ‘scandals of empire’ to project a reform-oriented version of European colonialism. In French West Africa, most scandals never reached the level of metropolitan debate; they hit dead ends in colonial bureaucracies. Analyzing one dead-end scandal, the M'Pésoba Affair, this article argues that colonial justice on the ground often adhered to a politics of expediency, not a reformist rule of law. To maintain their precarious grip on power, colonial administrators had to simultaneously appease their superiors, economic interests, and powerful African actors. Resolving the M'Pésoba Affair, for one, entailed navigating the complex entanglements of cotton production, chiefly disputes, Islamic policy, and interracial sexual relationships in a backwater of empire marked by anticolonial revolt and world war. Especially in moments of crisis, political constraints shaped the ...

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Making Marriages at the ‘End of Slavery’: Religion, Identity, and Law in the Early Colonial French Soudan

Slavery & abolition, Feb 20, 2024

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African Studies Review, 2022

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Dead-End Scandal in M'Pésoba: Local Politics and Colonial Justice in French West Africa, 1913–18

The Journal of African History

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Wallace Teska

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