Brett L. Shadle
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The law and the lash
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This chapter examines settlers’ dedication to corporal punishment and a racially-biased legal system as props to their status as a ruling race. As philosophers and historians of pain and violence have shown, the neurological sensations resulting from corporal punishment are usually of secondary importance to the performance. A beating – with fist, boot, or whip – reinforces a hierarchy. Insofar as a challenge to prestige could be seen as humiliating to a white person, corporal punishment was humiliating to the sufferer. Settlers wished the state to be impartial only when dealing with intra-white concerns. For inter-racial disputes, they believed that the state machinery must favor whites. Unfortunately for settlers, many colonial officials and judges disagreed. Settlers railed against a judicial system that allowed Africans to charge settlers with assault, for it undermined their personal control over Africans. Africans would see not the genius of English law (settlers claimed), but only that a white magistrate had sided with a black man against a white man. It was humiliating to whites and undermined white prestige.

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The souls of white folk

White Settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s

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