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159 7 w฀ Fatal Families Narratives of Spousal Killing and Domestic Violence in Murder Trials in Kenya and Nyasaland, c. 1930–56 stacey hynd I admit I killed my husband. He used to beat me up and he had beaten me the day that I killed him. I wanted to revenge myself and be rid of him, I waited until he had gone to sleep and when he was fast asleep I hanged him with a rope and thus killed him. Tabule, wife of Kipruto arap Soi, a Lumbwa woman from Kenya, pleaded guilty in 1947 to killing her husband by strangling him with a rope in his sleep. They had been married for eight years, had three children, and Tabule was pregnant with her fourth child. However, as the district officer (DO) of Kericho reported, she had suffered “severe persecution from her husband. He had repeatedly beaten her, and was known to be like a wild animal when drunk.” Tabule’s experience of domestic abuse roused the colonial state’s sympathy, and her death sentence was commuted to five months’ imprisonment.1 Domestic violence was one of the most commonly attributed reasons for murder in colonial courts in both Kenya and Nyasaland from 1920 to 1956, both in cases such as Tabule’s when someone resorted to lethal violence to escape abuse and in cases where abuse escalated into murder. As Katherine Luongo shows in “Domestic Dramas and Occult Acts,” colonial legal settings had few tropes available for talking about domestic violence: witchcraft was one, but murder was another arena in which acts of domestic abuse were brought to light.2 In colonial Africa, murder trials were an arena where notions of “violence” and socially acceptable behavior clashed and were contested, where private lives became the subject of public discourses. This chapter analyzes domestic violence in Kenya and Nyasaland though the medium of High Court and Supreme Court murder trials, focusing both on the colonial judge’s 160 w฀ Stacey Hynd perceptions of the accused as perpetrators of domestic violence, and on the accused person’s representations of his or her own “criminality.” The attitudes of native assessors and local communities toward the domestic violence reported are also revealed. Trial transcripts, judgments, and commutation reports here highlight the discourses surrounding domestic violence and how crimes resulting from such violence were sentenced by colonial courts, showing how this varied over time, location, and circumstance. capital punishment in coloni al c ou rts — death, mercy, and cultural defens es In Nyasaland and Kenya, as throughout British colonial Africa, the legal system was based on English common law, which provided a mandatory death sentence for a murder conviction on a capital charge.3 This did not necessarily mean that convicted persons were executed, however: in Nyasaland, from 857 capital trials between 1908 and 1946, only 181 resulted in execution, and only 459 cases from 1,108 in Kenya between 1908 and 1956 (exclusive of Mau Mau trials) saw the extreme penalty enforced.4 Colonial judges were not “hanging judges,” and governors were themselves often opposed to capital punishment. The courts that tried cases of domestic violence and murder were not monolithic blocks but sites of contestation where values and beliefs were expressed and shaped.5 Capital punishment is different from other legal penalties in that it contains an expressly political element: the Governor’s Prerogative of Mercy. After sentencing and appeal, capital cases went to the governor-incouncil for final disposition, and it was this process of mercy that spared many condemned African murderers. While some mercy decisions were based solely on legal principles and the facts of a case, it is clear that many sentences were commuted because of “cultural defenses.” These portrayed Africans as “impulsive savages” prone to violence, who deserved mercy because they could not be expected to conform to “civilized” standards of behavior because of their “primitive mentalities” and low states of culture and society. Such narratives brought mercy at the price of reinforcing discriminatory hegemonic social relations.6 These “cultural defenses” and their mediation of colonial understandings of African societies informed the sentencing of domestic murders in Kenya and Nyasaland and indicated the emergence of what can be seen as a specifically colonial form of justice. The view granted of domestic violence through the investigation of capital trials is intermittent and exceptional, due to the very nature of the evidence, with a limited number of cases available, and those being of variable quality. These were not the...

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