UCLA

Femicide, as a subject, has been largely situated within contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship, with many studies relying on statistical and news media data sources only available from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This thesis historicizes femicide within colonial Kenya’s common law courts through an analysis of forty-nine murder cases, tried between 1920 to 1965, collected from the Kenya National Archives. By utilizing this “femicide archive,” this study argues that the administration of justice for women’s murders was conditional upon how motives of the accused were interpreted by the court. Courts administered murder convictions or mitigation based on how these motives for violence were translated into legally intelligible language and whether they aligned with the colonial state’s interests. Through the analytical lens of the “logics of gendered justice,” this study examines how gendered assumptions surrounding masculinity, women’s morality, and social order shaped the adjudication of femicide within colonial courts. This study also argues that legal hybridity, or the interactions of Indigenous, Islamic, and British common law, created a legal environment in which motive became the main category through which violence against women was interpreted. The six main cases analyzed in this study are categorized into the three motives of witchcraft accusations, bridewealth disputes, and women’s marital abandonment. They reveal that colonial courts interpreted women’s death through competing sociocultural and legal understandings of gender, power, and acceptable violence. Through the analysis of various legal and social institutions, this study demonstrates how colonial courts defined what forms of femicide were legally condemnable through upholding murder convictions or excusable through commutating convictions and reducing sentences. This study contributes to African women’s and legal histories by elucidating how colonial courts produced gendered legal logics that shaped the legal treatment of femicide, and how women’s voices persisted despite the patriarchal constraints of such legal documentation.