Abstract
On the afternoon of 20 February 1949 police were called to an Indian household in Kijabe, Nairobi, following reports that four African robbers had attacked the house and shot dead an elderly Sikh man, Mankaran Singh. Upon arrival how ever, it quickly became apparent that the story of African robbers was ‘a cock and bull tale’.3 Instead it appeared that the daughter-in-law of the household, a 23-year old woman called Harjit Kaur, had attempted to teach their African servants this story to cover up the fact that she herself had shot Mankaran Singh.4 The dead man’s daughter, Jessa Singh, told the police of how Harjit had quarrelled with her father-in-law, and asserted that Harjit had shot him. Harjit was arrested and charged with murder. The subsequent trial from 7–25 June 1949 in Nairobi’s Supreme Court revealed the tensions within the family regarding whose deviant behaviour was to blame for the shooting. For the historian, the archival record left by this trial highlights the contested nature of ‘deviance’ within colonial societies, and how narratives of deviance were constructed around ideas of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ within the legal arena.
‘Then my father said… “You will be sent back to your parents because such things cause damage to our reputation and we cannot tolerate such things”.1
‘He said “I will sleep with you by force because you have no child”’.2
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Notes
M. J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6.
É. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Hall (Basingstoke: Macmillan (1984 [1903]).
A. L. Stoler, ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’, Representations, 37 (1992), 151–89.
D. Downes and P. Rock, Understanding Deviance, 6th edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
See C. Ginzburg, ‘Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian’, Critical Enquiry, 18, 1 (1991), 79–92;
N. Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Polity, 1987).
See A. L. Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist, 16 (1989), 634.
See C. Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology (London: Routledge, 1976).
See D. Crummey (ed.), Banditry, Rebellion and Social Order in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1986);
D. M. Anderson, ‘Black Mischief: Crime, Protest and Resistance in Colonial Kenya’, The Historical Journal, 36, 4 (1993), 851–77.
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See E. Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011);
M. Brown, ‘Race, Science and Construction of Native Criminality in Colonial India’, Theoretical Criminology, 5, 3 (2001), 345–68;
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See M. Vaughan, ‘Idioms of Madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the Colonial Period’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 9, 2 (1983), 218–38.
On punishment, see D. Branch, ‘Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya, c.1930–52: Escaping the Carceral Archipelago’, International Journal of African Historical Studies (2005), 239–65.
S. Hynd, ‘Murder and Mercy: Capital Punishment in Colonial Kenya ca 1909–56’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 45, 1 (2012), 92.
C. Campbell, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in Colonial Kenya, 1900–39’, The Historical Journal, 45, 1 (2002), 129–51;
P. Ocobock, ‘“Joy Rides for Juveniles”: Vagrant Youth and Colonial Control in Kenya, c.1901–52’, Social History, 31, 1 (2006), 39–59.
See P. Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender and Empire’ in P. Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 134;
Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
T. Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–50 (Oxford: James Currey, 2005).
These gender norms were themselves influenced by Victorian imperialism. D. Jakobsch, Relocating Gender in Sikh History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
On disciplining the body, see M. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
See A. L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
P. Scully, ‘Rape, Race and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa’, American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 335–59.
E. Kolsky, ‘“The Body Evidencing the Crime”: Rape on Trial in Colonial India, 1860–1947’, Gender & History, 22, 1 (2010), 111.
D. Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1987). It is noticeable that Kenya’s ‘black peril’ scares focused on inter-racial sexual violation of the ‘helpless and innocent’; children and elderly women.
See D. M. Anderson, ‘Sexual Threat and Settler Society: “Black Perils” in Kenya, 1907–30’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38 (2010), 47–74.
See Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology; F. Heidenson, Women and Crime (New York: New York University Press, 1985).
C. Campbell, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
South Africa did hang a number of women for murder, usually premeditated offences by poor women, including poor whites. See R. Turrell, White Mercy: A Study of the Death Penalty in South Africa (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 109–11.
See W. Jackson, Madness and Marginality: The Lives of Kenya’s White Insane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Wiener, An Empire on Trial, 219.
S. Hynd, ‘Deadlier than the Male: Women and the Death Penalty in Colonial Kenya and Nyasaland, c.1920–57’, Stichproben, 12 (2007), 13–33.
Dr H. L. Gordon-Confidential Despatch of 16 October 1936, Death Sentences and Executions, CO 533/462/9, TNA. See Sloan Mahone, ‘Psychiatry and the Practical Problems of Empire in East Africa’, in M. Vaughan and S. Mahone (eds), Psychiatry and Empire (London: Palgrave, 2008), 41–66.
See S. Hynd, ‘Fatal Families: Narratives of Spousal Killing and Domestic Violence in Murder Trials in Kenya and Nyasaland, c.1920–57’ in R. L. Roberts, E. Thornberry and E. S. Burrill (eds), Domestic Violence in Africa: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010), 159–78.
Hynd, ‘Deadlier than the Male’, 17–20; T. B. Zimudzi, ‘African Women, Violent Crime and the Criminal Law in Colonial Zimbabwe 1900–52’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30 (2004), 499–517.
See Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy, Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender (Oxford: James Currey, 2001).
J. Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–52 (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), 181; EAWL Executive Committee Memorandum, 12 March 1951, AG/52/423, KNA.
See Jackson, Madness and Marginality, 57–60; Brett L. Shadle, The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900–1920s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
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Hynd, S. (2015). R. v. Mrs Utam Singh: Race, Gender and Deviance in a Kenyan Murder Case, 1949–51. In: Jackson, W., Manktelow, E.J. (eds) Subverting Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_12
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