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Part I: Domestic Violence, Relationships of Servitude, and the Family
- Ohio University Press
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PART I w Domestic Violence, Relationships of Servitude, and the Family the first part of this book highlights early encounters between colonial law and shifting forms of power and authority in the twentieth century. In the early years of colonial state formation and the implementation of new legal systems, hierarchical relationships based on age and gender were particularly pronounced locations of household and kin-based violence. The chapters in this part demonstrate the ways in which legal structures sought to harden local practice into categories of acceptability and unacceptability, but they also emphasize the importance of extralegal moral economies and social mores in regulating domestic violence in the early years of colonial rule. As Martina Salvante’s work in colonial Eritrea demonstrates, colonial governments were unable to exert full control even over European colonists. Attempts to remake African “customs” and to regulate African domesticity were even more difficult for the colonial state. Similarly, Marie Rodet argues that the criminalization of the actions of women who left their husbands was a genuinely “invented tradition ,” which ultimately did little to deter women from leaving their husbands during times of marital strife and abuse. African societies tolerated certain kinds of domestic violence and condemned others. The limits placed on domestic violence varied over time and space, although they tended to reinforce existing power relations. Asymmetries of violence existed between husbands and wives, parents and children. The vulnerabilities of the pawned girls described in Cati Coe’s chapter are typical: young, female, and with few economic resources, they were subject to high levels of violence. At the same time, the limits placed on domestic violence gave vulnerable groups a degree of protection against outright abuse, thereby giving them a stake in the maintenance of the moral economy itself. As Emily Burrill and Richard Roberts demonstrate for colonial Mali, such normative limitations on domestic violence placed both social and economic pressure on husbands to limit the severity of violence directed toward their wives. Thus, this first part of the volume situates the shifting meaning and composition of African households and conjugal relationships within the larger sociopolitical transformations of the colonial period. These changes are thrown into relief through the incidents of domestic violence that emerge in the historical record. ...