The name is absent

cases that tested and reshaped gender boundaries (for example, marriage,
divorce, adultery, dowry, childbirth, and inheritance were all new social spaces).
The issue of gender during colonialism will be explored in more detail in the next
chapter, but it represented a social space that was fought in the colonial courts.
Women found new degrees of freedom and individuality and the courts became
spaces for protection. At the same time, it was the battleground of men who
wanted to negotiate the gender roles and freedoms of women. The issue of
gender was one of many social transformations that were periodically contested
in the court. Gender is an example of how, as Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts
suggests, “Africans and Europeans in colonial Africa used law to compete for
resources, labor, power and authority...”²⁶ The laws established by the 1950s in
Kenya were the products of long negotiations, but the fluid notions of justice
remained a problem.

The Justice Problem

Justice in colonial Africa was difficult because it was highly interpretive,
dynamic, and responsive to the changing social, cultural, political, and economic
developments. All legal systems have their own embedded ideologies, motives,
and culture, and in Kenya these systems often clashed. Tudor Jackson describes
justice as “what the ordinary man in the street believes to be fair.”²⁷ However,
ultimately the law under colonialism was a law of domination and authority. Also,

²⁶ Mann and Roberts, Law in Colonial Africa, 33.

²⁷ Tudor Jackson, The Law of Kenya (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1992), 2.

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