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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]