Dr Rhian Keyse’s research examines the evolution of (post)colonial and international medico-legal responses to rape and sexual violence in Anglophone Africa, c. 1920-1985. Sexual violence in African countries is an important area of international, national, and local concern, with issues such as wartime rape, child marriages, and female genital cutting capturing public, policy, and academic attention. However, this attention has not been well-historicised. Current popular debates around sexual violence in Africa often fall back on ahistorical notions of ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’, which erases local specificities and ignores the historical trajectory of such concerns. This project places these questions within the broader imperial and international frame and examines them across Anglophone Africa as a whole, with focused case studies on Kenya and Ghana. Kenya, as a settler colony, allows the examination of important broader questions such as racial dynamics, whilst in Ghana, legal pluralism saw the involvement of African lawyers and juries far earlier than in other colonies, allowing more access to African perspectives than elsewhere.
Combining sociocultural, legal, and medical historical approaches to sexual violence in Africa, the project has three core aims: to understand how international, colonial and postcolonial legal, medical, and psychiatric structures have impacted on African victims and survivors of sexual violence; to recover the experiences of these complainants as they navigated medico-legal structures, as well as the role of medical personnel in identifying and prosecuting sexual violence; and to examine how shifts in colonial governance, ideas of anti-colonialism, development, and universal rights, as well as changing medical discourses relating to physical and psychological harms, influenced debates around, and responses to, sexual violence in British African colonies and the independent states that emerged after decolonization. The project’s multi-level and comparative approach will provide a unique perspective on debates around, and responses to, sexual violence in (post)colonial Africa.