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117 5 w฀ Sex, Violence, and Family in South Africa’s Eastern Cape elizabeth thornberry in October 1893, a Xhosa-speaking woman named Nondaba described to the resident magistrate of King William’s Town the following experience: I was sleeping in our hut with my mother, Nosenti, Noponi, and Nosayiti, and I was awoke late in the night or towards the morning by someone having connection [intercourse] with me. I was lying on my side and the person was behind me. I could feel when I awoke that he had penetrated me. I jumped up and caught hold of him, and then I screamed out and my mother came and shut the door of the hut. The other women were aroused; we threw up the fire and found the person Christmas. We kept him there till the next morning when we handed him over to the police. I was examined next morning by a board of matrons. . . . I was a virgin up to that night.1 In the nineteenth-century Eastern Cape, Nondaba’s experience was not unusual . In King William’s Town district alone, thirty-eight cases with a similar pattern of facts—a woman complaining of sexual assault while sleeping, often in the presence of several witnesses—appeared before the magistrate between 1847 and 1902. In Xhosa, such assaults were labeled ukuzuma, and defined to a 1950s ethnographer as to “have sexual relations with a woman while asleep,” with the further explanation that someone who commits ukuzuma “is despised . . . his punishment is that he should be thrashed when caught.”2 The colonial court system, however, was more lenient. Christmas, the man Nondaba accused of raping her, was found not guilty at his trial. These cases do not fit contemporary definitions of “domestic violence,” including that employed in this volume. The parties involved were not family 118 w฀ Elizabeth Thornberry members, or husband and wife. In most cases, they had no prior intimate relationship—while a few of the assailants claimed to be the lovers or “sweethearts ” of the women they assaulted, most did not.3 Nor were these cases recognized as domestic violence by the men and women of the nineteenth century who dealt with them. Although the term “domestic violence” had not come into common usage yet, British colonial administrators recognized categories such as “wife-beating,” while African men and women understood certain kinds of violence within the family as operating according to different rules than extrafamilial violence. However, the adjudication of ukuzuma cases reveals that ideas about the separation between public and domestic spheres influenced a much broader range of cases than those which are normally understood as domestic violence. I argue in this chapter that an analysis of ukuzuma cases—and, particularly, of the reluctance of the British administration to convict the men who committed these offenses—illuminates the broader history of domestic violence. These cases crossed the boundaries between customary and criminal law that the colonial administration was trying to create; they brought “domestic” issues of sexuality and family relationships into the sphere of the criminal court system. An analysis of their adjudication therefore reveals the British colonial system’s commitment to maintaining a separation between these spheres, and the consequences of that commitment for their ability to comprehend and apply Xhosa custom in colonial courts. Definitions of domestic violence in both the nineteenth century and the contemporary period center on an idea of the family as part of the “private” sphere, defined in opposition to such “public” institutions as the state, the workplace, and even religious institutions. Feminist critiques of domestic violence in recent Western history argue that this division between the private family and public institutions has insulated violence within the family from state intervention.4 However, historians have described institutions of the family as operating in very different ways in many African contexts. Slavery in Africa has famously been understood as operating through the language of kinship, while other studies have emphasized the importance of ideas of relatedness to religious identity and trade networks.5 In Southern Africa, including Xhosaland, family ties were a fundamental idiom of political culture. Writing in 1934, the Xhosa intellectual J. H. Soga described the “tribe” as “an aggregation of clan units, as the latter is of family units, all descended from one progenitor.”6 In precolonial Xhosaland, precisely because of the centrality of concepts of relatedness to political and social life, the term family could cover a wide range of relationships. Relatives could be people...

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