Race, Class, Gender, and African Women as Perpetrators of Murder in Natal, 1900–1929

Abstract

Murder cases provide a constructive lens for identifying relationships that generated a significant degree of social conflict during a given period. This article examines 144 murder cases in Natal from 1900 to 1929 and demonstrates that murder by African women tended to concentrate around a few distinct relationships, including women and their husbands or lovers, polygamous co-wives, and female acquaintances not related by marriage. Such clusters suggest that these relationships were imbued with a particularly high degree of conflict for African women. Through representative case studies, this article argues that there were three main sources of this conflict, including dynamics internal to African society, legal and economic interventions of white authorities, and the ability of African communities to obviate laws that might serve to protect African women. These factors worked, to varying degrees, to impose constraints on African women along the lines of race, class, and gender, thereby creating strained social conditions that sometimes escalated into lethal violence.