Marriage, Perversion, and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894-1930

This is the first scholarly study of African marriage relationships in Southern Rhodesia during the early twentieth century. It is a highly original and cogently argued history of sexuality and gender relations in colonial Africa. Diana Jeater examines the impact of colonial occupation at its deepest level - the way in which men and women conceptualize themselves and their gender. She explores the extraordinary experience of people who, for the first time in their history, were living in towns, and traces the struggles which led to new ideas about appropriate behaviour between men and women. Dr Jeater examines the marriage relationship and the regulation of sexuality, showing how the urban environment produced social relations which were not based on kinship networks and how wage labour and the cash economy offered unprecedented opportunities for the young to break free from lineage control. The book demonstrates how European concepts of gender relations were selectively absorbed by various interest groups within the African communities in order to maximize the benefits and reduce the costs of interaction with the white occupation.