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PART II w Narrating Domestic Violence testimony and narratives of violence feature prominently in the second part of this volume. The stories that emerge from these sources demonstrate that across the diversity of colonial experiences, European rule in Africa tended to increase the vulnerability of women and children to domestic violence. Even in places where the colonial administration made attempts to raise the status of women, the imperative of maintaining order quickly trumped concerns for women’s welfare. Thus, Elke Stockreiter finds that in colonial Zanzibar, a lone official’s crusade against child marriages was suppressed by an administration more concerned with political stability. In many places, colonial regimes systematically tried to procure the cooperation of male elders by reinforcing their power over women and younger men. Colonial officials also brought European models of patriarchal control to their administrative practices. In colonial Kenya and Malawi, Stacey Hynd finds that colonial officials regularly commuted sentences for men convicted of murdering their wives, and Elizabeth Thornberry’s research in South Africa reveals the reluctance of British administrators to believe women’s accusations of rape. In South Africa, dissatisfaction with colonial responses to sexual assault led Africans to maintain parallel judicial systems that avoided the colonial state entirely. Katherine Luongo shows the ways in which victims of epistemological and intimate violence, manifested in witchcraft, narrated their suffering within cases of physical violence that the Kenyan colonial state recognized as actionable. ...

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