'Civilised domesticity', race and European attempts to regulate African marriage practices in colonial Natal, 1868–1875 (original) (raw)
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WHITE POWER, WHITE DESIRE: MISCEGENATION IN SOUTHERN RHODESIA (ZIMBABWE
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African Marriage Regulation and the Remaking of Gendered Authority in Colonial Natal, 1843–1875
This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the processes of customary marriage in South Africa, as well as the ways in which colonial political intervention worked to effect social change in nineteenth-century colonial Natal. This analysis reinforces the established historiographical understanding that instigating generational shifts in authority was important to Natal Native Policy, unlike customary regulation elsewhere in colonial Africa in which colonial law worked to shore up the authority of senior men. However, it seeks to underline that while negotiations of colonial power began to shift authority from older to younger men by manipulating Native marriage, and in particular the practice of lobola, the effects of such policies produced profound shifts in the experience and articulation of gendered relationships of marriage and colonial authority. The imbrication of changes in gender and generational norms ultimately reveals the contradictions in both colonial claims of liberal gender reform and African claims that colonial policy provoked the usurpation of male traditional authority.
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Zambezia: The Journal of Humanities of the University of Zimbabwe., 2000
This article analyses the role of ethnic chauvinism in determining the patterns and trends of white immigration into Rhodesia from the country's occupation in 1890 to the Second World War. It argues that, while scholars have rightly emphasised white settler racism and discrimination against the African majority, and have tended to treat settler white society as a homogenous entity which shared a common identity, a closer examination of the racial dynamics within white colonial society reveals that strong currents of ethnic chauvinism maintained sharp divisions within the white settler society, even though settlers presented a united front when protecting their collective interests in the face of the perceived African threat. This article focuses specifically on racial and cultural chauvinism emanating from settlers of British stock which, among other things, determined the pace, volume and nature of white immigration into the country and contributed, together with other factors, to the fact that fewer white immigrants entered the country than had originally been envisaged by Cecil John Rhodes. Thus, while Rhodes had dreamt of creating Rhodesia as a white man's country, this dream remained unfulfilled because of the dominant British settler community's reluctance to admit whites of non-British stock. It is argued, therefore, that, throughout the period under study, British colonial settlers continued to regard themselves as "more white than others" with respect to other non-British races.