Colonizing Consent
Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape

Using a wealth of court records, Colonizing Consent shows how rape cases were caught up in, and helped shape, the major political debates in colonial South Africa.

Elizabeth Thornberry (Author)

9781108472807, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 December 2018

378 pages, 4 b/w illus. 2 maps
23.4 x 15.7 x 2.2 cm, 0.65 kg

'… an interesting read … Thornberry has combed selected court records finely and commented thoughtfully, drawing out conflicting viewpoints advanced within and between the overarching discourses that were deployed to understand sexual violence in the colonial era. It is an important addition to the scholarship on gender and sexuality in South Africa.' Anne Kelk Mager, Social History

Elizabeth Thornberry uses historical evidence to shed light on South Africa's contemporary epidemic of sexual violence. Drawing on over a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry reconstructs the history of rape in South Africa's Eastern Cape, from the precolonial era to the triumph of legal and sexual segregation, and digs deep into questions of conceptions of sexual consent. Through this process, Thornberry also demonstrates the political stakes of disputes over sexual consent, and the ways in which debates over the regulation of sexuality shaped both white and black politics in this period. From customary authority to missionary Christianity and humanitarian liberalism to segregationism, political claims implied theories of sexual consent, and enabled distinctive claims to control female sexuality. The political history of rape illuminates not only South Africa's contemporary crisis of sexual violence, but the entangled histories of law, sexuality, and politics across the globe.

Introduction: writing the history of rape
1. Custom and consent in Xhosaland
2. Sex and spiritual power
3. Liberalism and the colonial law of sexual violence
4. Rape and racial boundaries
5. Navigating the politics of consent
Conclusion: rape and the postcolony.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH]