Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie
| Author | Mirco Göpfert |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616659819 |
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
2016, Vol. 20(4) 446 –461
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1362480616659819
tcr.sagepub.com
Repairing the law: The
search for justice in the
Nigerien gendarmerie
Mirco Göpfert
University of Konstanz, Germany
Abstract
Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then
police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning
instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa
‘gyara’, meaning ‘repair’. Taking seriously the gendarmes’ perspective, their search for
justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not
the gendarmes’ application of the law that is deficient, but the law itself is. In their search
for justice, the gendarmes in Niger repaired a law that they deemed inappropriate for
policing the life worlds of the people they were confronted with.
Keywords
Dispute settlement, law enforcement, Niger, police and policing, repair
Introduction
It has become common ground for scholars of policing, that, as Waddington (1999: 5,
emphasis in original) put it, ‘the characteristic feature of policing is under enforcement
of the law—not its enforcement’. Under-enforcement is mostly understood as the
occasional (or frequent) non-enforcement of the law, depending on the police officer’s
discretionary decision to turn a blind eye to particular situations. The gendarmes in
Niger, during my research with them, also often chose not to enforce the law. Just as
often, however, they chose to truly under-enforce it—that is, enforce it, but not fully. In
most cases, this meant turning a délit into a simple contravention (a criminal into a
Corresponding author:
Mirco Göpfert, Department of History and Sociology, Division of Social and CulturalAnthropology,
University of Konstanz, Box 38, 78457, Konstanz, Germany.
Email: mirco.goepfert@uni-konstanz.de
659819TCR0010.1177/1362480616659819Theoretical CriminologyGöpfert
research-article2016
Article
Göpfert 447
non-criminal offence), or a contravention into a mere warning. This happened mainly in
the course of what they called ‘amicable arrangements’—the out-of-court settlement of
cases.
The Hausa term for such arrangements is ‘gyara’. Literally it means ‘to repair’. ‘Don
Allah, a gyara’, ‘I beg you to repair’, was probably the single, most common phrase
spoken during my ethnographic research in the Nigerien gendarmerie, a rural police
force in the West African Sahel. With this phrase, civilians begged the gendarmes not to
send them to court and possibly into prison but rather to allow them to make amends
instead. The victims knew that going to court meant that they had to spend months (and
a lot of money) travelling back and forth between their homes and the courthouse, which
was often dozens if not hundreds of kilometres away. In Niger, as in other West African
countries, courts work often painstakingly slowly and cases are routinely adjourned (for
Niger see Oumarou, 2011: 240–248; Tidjani-Alou, 2006; for Benin see Bierschenk,
2008: 117). The victims did not know when and if they would eventually be compen-
sated. For them it was a terribly insecure investment. So usually both parties wanted the
gendarmes to allow for an extra-legal settlement of the cases. And indeed, most cases
were eventually settled by the gendarmes and outside the courts, even when a criminal
law had been broken.
The Nigerien gendarmes usually tried not to stick too closely by the book, producing
bureaucratic cases, files and sending everything to court.1 One of their primary aims was
gyara, to restore peace, whether they were confronted with purely civil affairs (for which
they had no legal mandate to resolve) or criminal cases. The gendarme, Hamza,2
explained this to me:
You see, making noise is not good. Even if it’s a serious problem, you should always try to
avoid noise. Because the people are condemned to live together. So if you separate them, this
is not good. You must try and reunite them.3
Another gendarme, the brigade commander Adjudant-Chef Souley, added a phrase that I
later came to understand as one of the main principles of the gendarmes’ daily work: ‘you
should never leave black spots in the community’. Except when confronted with severe
crimes, Souley and his staff sought to repair the harm caused to both the individual vic-
tim and the local community.
Instead of applying the law indifferently, the gendarmes rather tried to find alternative
solutions to disputes and conflicts. When no law had been broken, the aim was to forge
a consensus between the parties. The gendarmes would merely serve as guarantors of
this agreement, which generally took the form of financial compensation. When a crimi-
nal law had been broken or rather when the gendarmes came to that conclusion, they as
the ‘soldiers of the law’, as they called themselves, also felt offended. A law has been
broken, and what is broken needs to be restored.
To achieve what the gendarmes understood as justice, that is, to repair the harm
and restore the law, all parties had to lower their expectations, including the law. The
Nigerien penal code (Code Pénal) and code of criminal procedure (Code de Procédure
Pénale) both originate and still contain elements from the colonial era. Penal codes
in Niger and other French-speaking African countries have rarely been modernized,
To continue reading
Request your trial