Gendering Commonality: African Men and the 1883 Commission on Native Law and Custom

Abstract

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Cape Colonial government attempted to formalise African law and custom within its native territories. This process, particularly apparent in the Commission on Native Law and Custom (1878–1883), involved much discussion between colonial representatives and African men in the Eastern Cape about the origins, utility and worth of customs and practices such as initiation, lobola (bridewealth) and polygamy. Particular areas of concern for both groups were the gender relations and sexual codes that existed in Xhosa-speaking society. The Commissioners, partially as a result of exposure to missionary thinking, viewed practices such as polygamy as troublesome, retrogressive and oppressive to women. Xhosa, Fingo and Thembu men were concerned, on the contrary, to assert the validity and worth of such practices. One noticeable change in African attitudes to gender relations concerned the way in which African men were beginning to view female sexual activity in less forgiving terms. This discussion has further implications. In a context in which much of the information sought and testimony received concerned sex and gender codes, discussion around sex framed a metanarrative more diffusely concerned with racial differences. The Commissioners repeat edly stressed the relative superiority of English gender ideology and its treatment of women (this was not a discussion in which women participated). Through reference to social behaviour, the Commissioners could underscore racial difference without resorting to race as an explanation of difference. Their witnesses were, however, assiduous in refuting suggestions of cultural inferiority. They countered allegations of cultural barbarism in the treatment of women through references to the suitability of such practices as validated by antiquity. This assertion, common to Xhosa, Fingo and Thembu men, formed the basis for the articulation of a more unified regional identity than had previously been the case between the three groups.