Female Extramarital Relationships and their Regulation in Early Colonial Thembuland, South Africa, 1875-95

Abstract

This article eavesdrops on testimonies of court cases seeking damages for adultery in the late 1800s in colonial Thembuland, South Africa. It explores issues of gender, power, agency, and sexuality in this period and region. These testimonies suggest a picture that sounds a corrective to that of available studies. The article finds that domestic conflicts, especially their dramatic manifestation in extramarital relationships, were already features of life before the social disruptions brought on by late-nineteenth-century industrialization and the migrant labor regime and twentieth-century urbanization in South Africa. Family tensions, and extramarital relationships especially, were rooted in contradictions inherent in the changing gender relations of power within African families themselves. These testimonies also reveal that the precolonial ideal that constructed women as chattel and without legal standing, contrasted sharply with the very different picture of women’s freedom that the prevalence and conduct of extramarital relationships suggest.