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Gerti Hesseling (1946-2009): A short memoir

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. 

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