29 - Introduction:

Summary

Historians have increasingly found evidence from the courtroom to be very valuable, particularly in reconstructing social history. Two kinds of problems exist. The first is with the transcript. In many cases, there is only a list of decisions, though even such evidence can be valuable, as Richard Roberts has shown. The second problem is the nature of the court. Even where there was a court with the full apparatus of European judicial procedure, as in Lagos or the Gold Coast, the operation of the court was influenced by the strategies of opposed attorneys, the accused, and the different witnesses. The slave witness was usually in an unfamiliar court situation, where his or her interests were secondary to these strategies and where he or she was being pressed in Stickrodt's terms, "to say the 'right' thing".