Nineteenth century settlers viewed the British colony of Natal in southern Africa as an ‘empty’ territory ready for European bodies.These immigrants sought to create a settler state that would outnumber and supplant indigenous bodies already present.As a result, settlers attempted to defend their claims to a colony threatened by a numerically superior ‘foreign’ population by creating and maintaining forms of proper raced and gendered behavior over the bodies of all peoples in Natal.I argue racialized masculinity must be understood as instrumental to both the establishment and contestation of British sovereign imperial power in colonial Natal.Using settler newspapers, missionary periodicals, British and South African archival sources, and popular contemporary travel accounts, this dissertation looks at the development of the colony of Natal in the second half of the nineteenth century by examining debates over polygamy and ilobolo, legislation over alcohol and marijuana use, proper dress and domestic inhabitance while on mission stations, and the many circulations of the Zulu king Cetshwayo kaMpande. I argue that race and masculinity developed discursively as categories through the quotidian interactions between differing peoples in colonial Natal.Subsequently, the colonial state attempted to pass legislation that used these raced and gendered categories in order to buttress their own claims to authority.Yet these attempts were never secure; indigenous and Indian peoples constantly challenged the claims of a colonial state to mobilize race and masculinity.Thus, the study of colonial Natal in the nineteenth century offers insight into the limits of settlement—the failure at a settler state to enact full control over raced and gendered discourses within the colony.
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Limits of settlement: Racialized masculinity, sovereignty, and the imperial project in colonial Natal, 1850-1897
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