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In the British colony of Natal, laws governing sex for settlers were concerned with reproduction and sexual respectability, which were the grounds for imagining difference amongst imperial populations only recently assembled under colonial jurisdiction. Age of consent laws arose out of these contingencies rather than out of any concern with a liberal politics of social reform. Consequently, colonial age of consent laws governing white settlers bore only superficial resemblance to metropolitan legislative reforms such as age of consent laws. Instead, the Natal state's practices of law-making recognized three discrete and divergent moral economies of sex in the colonial laws governing white settler citizens, Native law which governed the lives of Africans and the consolidated body of laws governing Indian immigrants. In this young colony, not only did 'age of consent' laws have to be newly made, but they were conceived separately and contained by 'colonial law', 'Native custom' and 'Indian custom'. The sexuality of young white woman was coded in colonial rape laws and used to draw lines of civilizational difference between settler citizens and their Others. For these others, relating sex to exceptional marriage customs excluded from legal codes of civilized common practice was how the state worked to assert difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage was at the heart of the administration of colonial subjects in Natal, a British colony which would become part of the Union of South Africa in 1910. In contrast to colonial spaces in which authorities attempted to bring English-style ‘civility’ to native practices of marriage, the codification of Native customary marriage in Natal sought the preservation of ‘non-Christian’ forms of cultural practice as firstly an explicit denial of liberal reform in the mid-nineteenth century, and then from the middle of the twentieth century, as a demonstration of the commitment of a segregationist state to the supposed cultural and ethnic integrity of ‘non-white’ inhabitants of apartheid South Africa. This article attends to gender in order to deconstruct and demystify the making of the colonial common law. The marriage practices of European settler citizens that were being incorporated into the common law challenged the very idea of Christian propriety that was the rationalisation for excluding the marriage practices of native subjects. The lines of difference between ‘civilised’ and ‘Christian’ common law and ‘barbaric’ and unassimilable Native law were in fact created out of common and simultaneous assertions of domestic patriarchy, something that has been made invisible by the understanding of the colonial state and the civil codes through which it governed as being without a cultural specificity of their own. Between [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arguments presented here are offered in critical appraisal of Guy's contribution to the scholarship of colonial Natal and are informed by two primary concerns: the first is a politics of producing desegregated historiography, and the second is the need for local historical studies to relate to areas of wider scholarly concern, in this instance relating Shepstonian politics to liberalism and the nineteenth-century British Empire.Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal(2013) is Jeff Guy's magnum opus and a meticulously researched and richly detailed book. Guy's finely considered archival narrative builds a vision of a colony forged out of the local contingencies of Native administration centred around Shepstone's mediations of power. In this telling, it is out of the struggles between the powerful Shepstone; a small, fractious settler elite – his friends and enemies; and an intricate network of chiefly authorities that Natal is made. It is clear from this tome, as it is in his considerable body of earlier work, that Guy was not one to countenance theoretical generalisations about Shepstone's Natal. It is the contention of this essay that Guy's writing of this history of the colony is, at best, a history in part, and that connections and generalisations beyond these groups and beyond the colony are political and scholarly imperatives. In addressing this, I will draw on instances of my own research on race, sex, marriage and state-making to demonstrate the necessity of, and the possibilities for, a broader, more complex telling of the history of colonial Natal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]