Beginning in the late 1930s, a crisis in colonial Gusiiland developed over traditional marriage customs. Couples eloped, wives deserted husbands, fathers forced daughters into marriage, and desperate men abducted women as wives. Existing historiography focuses on women who either fled their rural homes to escape a new dual patriarchy-African men backed by colonial officials-or surrendered themselves to this new power. Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya 1890-1970 takes a new approach to the study of Gusii marriage customs and shows that Gusii women stayed in...
Beginning in the late 1930s, a crisis in colonial Gusiiland developed over traditional marriage customs. Couples eloped, wives deserted husbands, f...
Kenya's white settlers have long captivated observers. They are alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers, hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. However, if we wish to better understand Kenya's tortured history, we must examine settlers not as caricatures, but as people inhabiting a unique historical moment.
The souls of white folk offers a striking new interpretation of white settlement in early colonial Kenya by interrogating settlers' lives. It takes seriously - though not uncritically - what settlers said, how they viewed themselves and their...
Kenya's white settlers have long captivated observers. They are alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers, hedonistic bed-...
