Papers by Nafisa Essop Sheik
Routledge eBooks, Jul 20, 2023
Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2021
Interventions, 2021
This essay challenges the historiography of indenture in South Africa for its focus on land and s... more This essay challenges the historiography of indenture in South Africa for its focus on land and schemas of belonging, which do not attend sufficiently to the opacity and fluidity that crossing the Kala Pani entailed. Crossing of the “opaque” ocean invited the re-invention for lower and middle-class indentees, literally inserting them into different life-worlds. The Kala Pani had the effect of a magician’s black box, a space for transfiguration, of aspiration and mobility outside of the terrestrial strictures of castes ordained by birth and maintained by village communities. If one were to centre analyses that focus on this oceanic crossing and its transformations of self and other, rather than its elision, this would necessitate a literary focus on individual stories of indenture, where the idiosyncratic transformations exist alongside the more familiar narratives of community. In this vein, the last part of the essay suggests a reading of Aziz Hassim’s book Revenge of Kali (2009) as a potentially revelatory form, to which pluviality and its cultural histories are central.
Law and History Review, 2020
In the British colony of Natal, laws governing sex for settlers were concerned with reproduction ... more In the British colony of Natal, laws governing sex for settlers were concerned with reproduction and sexual respectability, which were the grounds for imagining difference amongst imperial populations only recently assembled under colonial jurisdiction. Age of consent laws arose out of these contingencies rather than out of any concern with a liberal politics of social reform. Consequently, colonial age of consent laws governing white settlers bore only superficial resemblance to metropolitan legislative reforms such as age of consent laws. Instead, the Natal state's practices of law-making recognized three discrete and divergent moral economies of sex in the colonial laws governing white settler citizens, Native law which governed the lives of Africans and the consolidated body of laws governing Indian immigrants. In this young colony, not only did ‘age of consent’ laws have to be newly made, but they were conceived separately and contained by ‘colonial law’, ‘Native custom’ an...
Gender & History, 2017
Edward Ryley and his wife Mary Ellen arrived in the colony of Natal, on the southeast African coa... more Edward Ryley and his wife Mary Ellen arrived in the colony of Natal, on the southeast African coast from England with their ten children in late August 1879. 1 Mary Ellen was expecting another child and like many similar migrants the Ryleys were hoping to make a prosperous new beginning in one of Britain's newest colonial possessions. But their hopes were shattered barely two months later when, soon after giving birth to their eleventh child, Mary Ellen died. New to the colony, sick with grief and burdened by the needs of his large family, Edward was desperate for help. With no family nearby to call upon, Edward wrote to his wife's sister in England, Margaret Jemima Atcherley, expressing his sorrow over the loss of his dear wife and his inability since her death to properly care for his young children. His work kept him from attending to household matters, he explained, and all this responsibility now devolved upon his twelve-year-old daughter. He acknowledged the deep affection that Margaret had had for her sister and for her nieces and nephews. Would she come to Natal and marry him, and in doing so provide much needed care and comfort for this large family? Margaret, greatly grieved over her sister's death, was not immediately convinced, but Edward persisted over the next few years. In 1885, six years after her sister's untimely death, Edward wrote that his oldest daughter who bore almost all of the responsibilities of the household, had died aged only seventeen. His oldest remaining daughter, aged thirteen, would now have to bear this burden. Margaret finally agreed to take her sister's place. The marriage would have to be contracted with haste once she arrived if she was to live with her brother-in-law in propriety. Colonial outposts were notorious in England for the impropriety they supposedly spawned, and neither Edward nor his sister-in-law wanted their respectability to be doubted by their new friends, neighbours and social acquaintances. With Margaret en route to Natal, Edward discovered the local parish would not allow the publication of banns of marriage as the official position of the Anglican Church in Natal was that sororate marriage, or marriage by a man to his deceased wife's sister, was immoral, falling within the prohibited degrees of affinity as proscribed by the Church. 2 To the surprise and disappointment of Edward Ryley, in order to proceed with such a marriage, they would have to get a special dispensation from the colonial government. The situation in which Edward Ryley found himself was not a unique one.
South African Historical Journal, 2016
Abstract The arguments presented here are offered in critical appraisal of Guy's contribution... more Abstract The arguments presented here are offered in critical appraisal of Guy's contribution to the scholarship of colonial Natal and are informed by two primary concerns: the first is a politics of producing desegregated historiography, and the second is the need for local historical studies to relate to areas of wider scholarly concern, in this instance relating Shepstonian politics to liberalism and the nineteenth-century British Empire. Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal (2013) is Jeff Guy's magnum opus and a meticulously researched and richly detailed book. Guy's finely considered archival narrative builds a vision of a colony forged out of the local contingencies of Native administration centred around Shepstone's mediations of power. In this telling, it is out of the struggles between the powerful Shepstone; a small, fractious settler elite – his friends and enemies; and an intricate network of chiefly authorities that Natal is made. It is clear from this tome, as it is in his considerable body of earlier work, that Guy was not one to countenance theoretical generalisations about Shepstone's Natal. It is the contention of this essay that Guy's writing of this history of the colony is, at best, a history in part, and that connections and generalisations beyond these groups and beyond the colony are political and scholarly imperatives. In addressing this, I will draw on instances of my own research on race, sex, marriage and state-making to demonstrate the necessity of, and the possibilities for, a broader, more complex telling of the history of colonial Natal.
African Studies Review, 2014
: This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the proc... more : This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the processes of customary marriage in South Africa, as well as the ways in which colonial political intervention worked to effect social change in nineteenth-century colonial Natal. This analysis reinforces the established historiographical understanding that instigating generational shifts in authority was important to Natal Native Policy, unlike customary regulation elsewhere in colonial Africa in which colonial law worked to shore up the authority of senior men. However, it seeks to underline that while negotiations of colonial power began to shift authority from older to younger men by manipulating Native marriage, and in particular the practice of lobola, the effects of such policies produced profound shifts in the experience and articulation of gendered relationships of marriage and colonial authority. The imbrication of changes in gender and generational norms ultimately reveals the contradictions in both colonial claims of liberal gender reform and African claims that colonial policy provoked the usurpation of male traditional authority.
transformed our small family into a much larger one, making everyday life warm and entertaining i... more transformed our small family into a much larger one, making everyday life warm and entertaining in Ann Arbor, particularly over the last two and a half years. Thanks also to Gabrielle Hecht, Paul Edwards and Luka Edwards-Hecht. Aaron Seaman and Brady G'sell have been the best neighbors that anybody could want. These friendships will always be treasured.
Marriage was at the heart of the administration of colonial subjects in Natal, a British colony w... more 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 its own.
Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 2005
This article analyses administrative contestations around Indian personal law in the Colony of ... more This article analyses administrative contestations around Indian personal law in the Colony of Natal from the establishment of the Coolie Commission of Inquiry in 1872 to the promulgation of the Indian Marriages Act in 1907. To date, very little attention has focused on this area ...
The arguments presented here are offered in critical appraisal of Guy's contribution to the schol... more The arguments presented here are offered in critical appraisal of Guy's contribution to the scholarship of colonial Natal and are informed by two primary concerns: the first is a politics of producing desegregated historiography, and the second is the need for local historical studies to relate to areas of wider scholarly concern, in this instance relating Shepstonian politics to liberalism and the nineteenth-century British Empire. Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal is Jeff Guy's magnum opus and a meticulously researched and richly detailed book. Guy's finely considered archival narrative builds a vision of a colony forged out of the local contingencies of Native administration centred around Shepstone's mediations of power. In this telling, it is out of the struggles between the powerful Shepstone; a small, fractious settler elitehis friends and enemies; and an intricate network of chiefly authorities that Natal is made. It is clear from this tome, as it is in his considerable body of earlier work, that Guy was not one to countenance theoretical generalisations about Shepstone's Natal. It is the contention of this essay that Guy's writing of this history of the colony is, at best, a history in part, and that connections and generalisations beyond these groups and beyond the colony are political and scholarly imperatives. In addressing this, I will draw on instances of my own research on race, sex, marriage and state-making to demonstrate the necessity of, and the possibilities for, a broader, more complex telling of the history of colonial Natal.
This study is centrally concerned with examining the historical construction of difference throug... more This study is centrally concerned with examining the historical construction of difference through the contestations surrounding the state regulation of marriage custom in colonial Natal. It attends to the historical making of gender ideology and practice, in particular how the legal machinations of colonial state-making in 19th and early 20th century Natal relate to the imagining of a colonial order differentiated by race and gender. As an account of the role of multiple, different and changing forms of patriarchal state-making, espoused in the actions of various prominent officials and legislative bodies tasked with governing colonial subjects in this region, this work seeks to demonstrate the possibilities offered by gendered histories of law and ‗the state‘, in all of its
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contestation and complexity, to address the racialized compartmentalization which characterizes the historiography of colonial Natal.
The relations among colonial officials inside of the colonial state bureaucracy, employers of labor, white settlers and Indian and African subjects in this period implied particular forms of gendered negotiation and contestation which worked to shape social hierarchies at contingent moments of colonial rule. Women were both discursively and materially drawn into these struggles over the relative masculinity and femininity of colonialism‘s citizens and its subjects. Thus, both women and men who were the citizens and subjects of British colonialism might be viewed as actors in a wide field of gendered contestation. In the context of the colonial history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Natal, such a gendered analysis of the relations of colonial rule has further implications: it permits viewing ‗African‘, ‗Indian‘ and ‗White‘ subjects within the same analytical frame, by considering colonial processes of regulation which were common to all of these legally-identified groups. The intentions of a gendered analysis are twofold: by placing gender at the center of this account I illuminate the gendered constructions and effects of colonial rule, as well as drawing out the similarities, complexities and contingencies of ostensibly separate policies for supposedly distinct racial groups in the same colonial space.
This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the proces... more This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the processes of customary marriage in South Africa, as well as the ways in which colonial political intervention worked to effect social change in nineteenth-century colonial Natal. This analysis reinforces the established historiographical understanding that instigating generational shifts in authority was important to Natal Native Policy, unlike customary regulation elsewhere in colonial Africa in which colonial law worked to shore up the authority of senior men. However, it seeks to underline that while negotiations of colonial power began to shift authority from older to younger men by manipulating Native marriage, and in particular the practice of lobola, the effects of such policies produced profound shifts in the experience and articulation of gendered relationships of marriage and colonial authority. The imbrication of changes in gender and generational norms ultimately reveals the contradictions in both colonial claims of liberal gender reform and African claims that colonial policy provoked the usurpation of male traditional authority.
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Papers by Nafisa Essop Sheik
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contestation and complexity, to address the racialized compartmentalization which characterizes the historiography of colonial Natal.
The relations among colonial officials inside of the colonial state bureaucracy, employers of labor, white settlers and Indian and African subjects in this period implied particular forms of gendered negotiation and contestation which worked to shape social hierarchies at contingent moments of colonial rule. Women were both discursively and materially drawn into these struggles over the relative masculinity and femininity of colonialism‘s citizens and its subjects. Thus, both women and men who were the citizens and subjects of British colonialism might be viewed as actors in a wide field of gendered contestation. In the context of the colonial history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Natal, such a gendered analysis of the relations of colonial rule has further implications: it permits viewing ‗African‘, ‗Indian‘ and ‗White‘ subjects within the same analytical frame, by considering colonial processes of regulation which were common to all of these legally-identified groups. The intentions of a gendered analysis are twofold: by placing gender at the center of this account I illuminate the gendered constructions and effects of colonial rule, as well as drawing out the similarities, complexities and contingencies of ostensibly separate policies for supposedly distinct racial groups in the same colonial space.
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contestation and complexity, to address the racialized compartmentalization which characterizes the historiography of colonial Natal.
The relations among colonial officials inside of the colonial state bureaucracy, employers of labor, white settlers and Indian and African subjects in this period implied particular forms of gendered negotiation and contestation which worked to shape social hierarchies at contingent moments of colonial rule. Women were both discursively and materially drawn into these struggles over the relative masculinity and femininity of colonialism‘s citizens and its subjects. Thus, both women and men who were the citizens and subjects of British colonialism might be viewed as actors in a wide field of gendered contestation. In the context of the colonial history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Natal, such a gendered analysis of the relations of colonial rule has further implications: it permits viewing ‗African‘, ‗Indian‘ and ‗White‘ subjects within the same analytical frame, by considering colonial processes of regulation which were common to all of these legally-identified groups. The intentions of a gendered analysis are twofold: by placing gender at the center of this account I illuminate the gendered constructions and effects of colonial rule, as well as drawing out the similarities, complexities and contingencies of ostensibly separate policies for supposedly distinct racial groups in the same colonial space.