Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial

Preface

vii Preface Domestic violence is fraught and complex, as a lived experience and a social and historical unit of analysis. From conference to published volume, this project has been deeply influenced by spirited and engaging discussions with colleagues regarding our use of the term domestic violence—that is, why we use the term domestic violence and not sexual violence, gender-based violence, or household violence. In their chapters, Codou Bop and Pamela Scully both make impassioned arguments for using gender-based violence as the appropriate analytical category. Here, we use the term domestic violence to indicate overwhelmingly controlling and punitive behavior—whether physical, psychological, or emotional— directed by one member of a household toward another as a means of establishing dominance. Such punitive actions very often take the form of gender-based violence, but not always. “Domestic,” in this sense, indicates a realm of shared living space oriented around relationships within households. Given the range of complex African residential patterns, living spaces were often gendered, often contained several generations, and consisted of kin as well as dependents of various kinds. We recognize domestic space and household relationships as processual and linked to larger social relationships and movements rather than part of a binary relationship that pits the private against the public. Using the term domestic allows us to talk about kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space. Domestic violence, as a legal and criminal category and a cause for social activism, is often associated with European and North American contexts that center on the nuclear family. Our use of the term is also tied to a tradition and recent history of legal and political liberalism; however, the chapters that follow reveal the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. Therefore, we use the term domestic violence recognizing the potential limitations of the term as a unit of analysis but with the expectation that it will provoke further discussion and research. viii w฀ Preface As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, African histories of domestic violence demand that scholars and activists refine our terms and analyses and that we pay attention to the historical legacies of contemporary problems. This volume began as the Symposium on Law, Colonialism, and Domestic Violence in Africa and in Comparative Perspective held at the Stanford Humanities Center in April 2007. Each of the three editors had been conducting research on issues relating to marriage, domestic violence, and sexual violence using colonial court records. We felt that the topic was rich enough to bring together a group of scholars working on the general topic of domestic violence to share their findings and to spark further research and debate. The papers presented at the conference exceeded our expectations and congealed around a set of issues relating both to the domestic space as a site of violence in Africa and the mutually reinforcing interests of researchers working on historical and contemporary aspects of domestic violence. For their participation in the original symposium we thank especially Wayne Dooling, history, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Prinisha Badassy, history, University of KwaZulu-Natal; Robert Gordon, anthropology, University of Vermont ; Helen Moffett, University of Cape Town; and Leslye Obiora and Zelda Harris, School of Law, University of Arizona. We regret that given the constraints of publication, we were unable to include all of the excellent papers presented at the symposium. We are grateful to Raising Voices, a Kampalabased NGO, for permission to use the image that appears on the cover. Since 1999, Raising Voices has been tirelessly working to prevent domestic violence and to educate both women and men about the harmful effects of domestic violence not only on households but on the wider communities as well. This image was originally used in one of Raising Voices’ teaching aids. We also express our thanks to the Center for African Studies, the Department of History, the Stanford Humanities Center Law and History Workshop, and the Division of International and Comparative Areas Studies, all at Stanford University, for their support of this project. Richard Roberts is especially grateful to the Mericos Foundation, which funded his yearlong fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center as the Donald Andrews Whittier Fellow. Emily Burrill University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Richard Roberts Stanford University Elizabeth Thornberry Stanford University [18.222...