James Baldwin Essay Prize

Teska, a historian of francophone West Africa, is currently completing his PhD in History and, in October 2024, will begin a four-year appointment as a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.  Before coming to Stanford, Teska earned a B.A. in Modern European and African History from Columbia University, then served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Benin.  His dissertation, “Paths to Justice: Environment, Religion, and Social Change in French West Africa, 1850–1960,” analyzes the development of state and non-state law in a transnational region spanning present-day Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali.  In his prize-winning essay, Teska examines the criminalization in colonial Côte d’Ivoire of trials by ordeal, in which a person accused of a crime was made to drink a powerful poison on the theory that they would die only if guilty, and if innocent, would harmlessly regurgitate the toxin.  The French colonial administration criminalized this practice, trying, imprisoning, and even executing its practitioners.  Teska uses this intersection of Ivorian and French medico-legal ideas and practices to reveal the violence inherent in both colonial and indigenous justice.  He also traces the endurance of trials by ordeal well into the postcolonial period and their eventual demise, not through imposed criminalization, but rather through a complex social and cultural process that challenges common assumptions of African legal scholarship, such as the assumption that French colonial law easily dominated, absorbed, and replaced African forms of dispute resolution.