Elizabeth Thornberry is Assistant Professor of African History at The John Hopkins University. She has researched and published widely on the history of gender, sexuality, and law in South Africa. She co-edited Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (2010) and is currently writing a book on the intellectual history of customary law in South Africa. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Institute for International Education, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University, New Jersey.

• Introduction: writing the history of rape; 1. Custom and consent in Xhosaland; 2. Sex and spiritual power; 3. Liberalism and the colonial law of sexual violence; 4. Rape and racial boundaries; 5. Navigating the politics of consent; Conclusion: rape and the postcolony.

'… an interesting read … Thornberry has combed selected court records finely and commented thoughtfully, drawing out conflicting viewpoints advanced within and between the overarching discourses that were deployed to understand sexual violence in the colonial era. It is an important addition to the scholarship on gender and sexuality in South Africa.' Anne Kelk Mager, Social History