{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026048565121412803, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.157608695652174, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
THE CHALLENGES FOR POSTCOLONIAL LEADERS IN EAST AFRICA

times. Plaintiffs, defendants and court elders, however, were not the only actors in these domestic dramas. Administrators and, more distantly, officials and critics in London also played a part, in the construction of ‘crisis ’ if not in the resolution of disputes. Shadle provides the larger context. Whether or not he is right in seeing a conservative turn to administrative thinking in the inter-war period, colonial and patriarchal/generational authority were assumed to be mutually supportive. However, the Colonial Office found itself caught between activists at home who demanded an end to the ‘sale’ of women and local officials concerned that ‘girl cases’, and the disobedience that they apparently demonstrated, were undermining a basic cornerstone of ‘tribal life’. Local officials were also aware both that they lacked the power to intervene effectively and that legal remedies – criminalizing adultery, for example – were themselves problematic. Amongst the wider issues, beyond marriage itself and its discontents, that Girl Cases raises, two in particular speak to the comparative dimension and complement recent studies elsewhere. The first concerns the working of local courts and, especially, the gap between ‘custom’ in theory and its determination and application in practice. Courts did not ‘make’ or enforce a fixed custom so much as provide a focus for argument, even though inequalities of power and authority still shaped the debate. The other concerns female agency. Shadle shows how ordinary women (and men) struggled for some control over their own lives without rejecting established norms. Indirectly, their struggles again demonstrate how inadequate an unproblematized ‘resistance’ paradigm is in understanding gender issues and the complexities of individual lives. Court records well handled, as a number of pioneering studies have shown, provide us with one of the few remaining paths to an understanding not only of what people argued intimately about but of how they did so and why it was important to them. Shadle has given us much to think about here and, indeed, the general Gusii background might have been abbreviated to give even more space to ‘girl cases’ in court.