19. Precarious Liaisons: Gender, Moral Authority and Marriage in Colonial Kenya

The concept of moral authority facilitates a deeper understanding of the fluid interconnections that exist between what are seemingly separate spheres of women’s lives. Moral authority highlights the way in which agency, power, culture and meaning impact on the daily experience of life. This article examines the gendered notions of moral authority that protect women’s political spaces and identity within the context of marriage in Colonial Kenya. For women under colonial rule in Kenya, the use of moral authority provided not only a sense of personal power but a method of confronting powerful menfolk and undermining the colonial regime. In exploiting the implied power of moral authority that came from being a wife, or a mother, or via links with the spirit world, women confronted those who encroached on their rights and livelihoods. The colonial experience tested women’s survival instincts and the capacity to challenge the injustice that would serve to undermine their socio-economic status in a colonised nation, and most importantly, reshape personal and social relations within their ethnic community.