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Paper short abstract:

The British law was introduced in early colonial Malawi as African order in council of 1889 to 1902 and included policies which regulated sexual violence. This paper seeks to examine the implications such policies had to the postcolonial judicial system when handling sexually related cases.

Paper long abstract:

This study seeks to understand the history of sexual violence in Malawi from 1891 to 1902 and its legacy to the judicial practices on sexual violence in the post-colonial period. It seeks to examine institutionalized sexual violence against African local peoples which occurred in 1895, 1897, 1900 and 1902. The study is qualitative and uses archival sources from the Malawi National Archives and the Historical Society of Malawi; missionary reports from missionary stations; colonial court cases and secondary literature to address these questions; What were missionary, settlers and colonial administrators’ conceptions of sexuality, sexual immorality, and sexual violence in early colonial Malawi? How was sexual violence regulated and punished and how did this shape the modern judicial practices on sexual violence? In line with Martin Chanock work on the Making of South African Legal Culture from 1902 to 1936, the study argues that policies and laws on sexual violence were refashioned in colonial Malawi in relation to the imported doctrine and legislative models with local contexts. Consequently, such policies and laws reflected histories of distant metropoles as well as the immediate opportunities and constraints of colonial conquest. African bodies were sexually exploited to achieve political and economic objectives of the colonizers. Likewise, policies on sexual violence rendered the British Law as an instrument of domination with disastrous effects on the judicial system today which directly affects the development of the country.