I
N 1956, IN a village in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), a desperate woman sought help from a local tribunal made up of tribal elders in putting her marriage back on track. The relationship was in tatters. In recent months, both she and her husband had been diagnosed with a venereal disease. The husband insisted that it was she who had infected him, but she denied any infidelity and claimed he was at fault. He had threatened to stab her on one occasion and, worse, to use witchcraft against her. Yet none of that would have brought the couple to the tribunal had something more outrageous not happened, something so intolerable that the wife ran to court that very day: At dawn, she had awoken to find her husband with her breast in his mouth. She remembered his threat of witchcraft, and became terrified.

At the hearing, one of the elders demanded of the husband: “[W]hat were you thinking of when you were sucking your wife’s breast? Are you a small child, like that one [pointing to a baby in the room]? . . . Why did you do it?”

The husband’s reply only made his situation worse: “It was love,” he said.

The elder was incredulous. “Love! You must be a strange person, practicing your love in that way while your wife was asleep.” The elder and the husband went back and forth like this for a while, the husband protesting that he had merely been expressing tender affection for his wife while the elder became increasingly suspicious that the man was practicing sorcery. Finally, the elder said, “No, no . . . I am afraid that if you went with your wife, you might try to kill her.” The woman was placed in the protective custody of the police for the night, with more court proceedings to follow.

It was not the only time in mid-twentieth-century Northern Rhodesia that such disputes required court intervention. Another man had been accused of causing his wife to become infertile by sucking her breasts, and wives often ran to the courts to stop their husbands from performing cunnilingus on them or having intercourse with them while they slept. On other occasions, wives accused their husbands of stealing their menstrual cloths and using them as charms to bring success in gambling. The tribal judges took these accusations seriously. To them, taking a sleeping woman sexually was like making love to a corpse, while sucking a woman’s breasts at any time of day blurred the roles of adult and child. Cloths soaked with a woman’s menstrual blood were, in that society, not simple rags; they contained the awesome power of reproduction, which could be used for good or ill. To use such cloths for luck in gambling dens was to waste the procreative powers of the cosmos. In this context, the tribunal’s decision to post a guard to keep a breast-sucking husband away from his wife was a sensible response to an explosive situation.

The British colonial officials who reviewed the tribal decisions, however, shared none of these beliefs. They usually threw such cases out, reasoning that marital sex was the concern only of the husband and wife, for which court intervention was inappropriate. A man who enjoyed his wife’s body while she slept was simply taking the erotic pleasure that was his due, and unless he used violent force the law had no role to play. All that talk about power and witchcraft and luck was quaint, but irrelevant. Local courts in the territory complained that the Europeans should be taking these cases seriously, but their protests went unheeded.
¹

These incidents exist at the flashpoint between conflicting views on how the law should deal with sexual issues. To the inhabitants of Northern Rhodesia, it was not a question of prudishness, liberation, or even morality as such. Rather, sex was one of the underlying forces moving heaven and earth. Improperly conducted sex summoned danger and caused everyone harm. By barring such sex, they were protecting the entire society from catastrophe.

Lest anyone snicker at the hapless couple, we should recognize that the differences between “modern” and “primitive” views on sex and law are not so clear—not clear enough, at any rate, to merit smugness. Sex and lawsuits have gone hand in hand everywhere, in every era, and few sexual transgressions have ever been too small to merit the meddling of one tribunal or another.

The wife in the Northern Rhodesia incident fell through a late-colonial justice gap. Her case did not fit the 1956 Western model of what a sex claim should look like. Yet had she and her husband lived in Europe a few centuries earlier, when courts regularly involved themselves in bedroom behavior, she would have found a more sympathetic hearing: European records are full of cases in which married couples were accused—and accused each other—of sexual sorcery. The judges who punished such transgressors often justified their decisions as necessary to save society from God’s wrath. Indeed, dozens of sex acts in Renaissance Europe, both within and outside marriage, were believed to provoke divine vengeance. Sexual behavior was everyone’s business because one person’s sexual missteps, if bad enough, could cause war, famine, and hails of fire and brimstone.

Moreover, had the aforementioned African couple been students, married or not, at any number of present-day U.S. colleges, the wife’s claim might well have been enthusiastically received. Many postsecondary institutions have adopted elaborate rules governing their students’ sexual conduct, which they enforce with the zeal of the most devoted officers of the Inquisition. Gettysburg College’s 2006 student handbook requires that all sex be “consensual,” which it defines as “willingly and verbally agreeing (for example, by stating ‘yes’) to engage in specific sexual conduct.” The handbook also prohibits the erotic touching of people’s bodies while they slumber. Thus, a man wishing to “initiate sexual contact” with a sleeping woman would need to wake her up, make sure her judgment is clear, and then ask (for example), “May I suck your breast now?” If he does not do so, he stands to be expelled from school and reported to the police.
²

Other books

Lady Be Good by Nancy Martin

I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide by Dorian Solot, Marshall Miller

Dead Village by Gerry Tate

Dark Knight of the Skye by Ray, Robin Renee

Ravyn's Flight by Patti O'Shea

Break Away (The Baltimore Banners Book 5) by Lisa B. Kamps

The Tainted Coin by Mel Starr

Realm of Light by Deborah Chester

Ghost Guard 2: Agents of Injustice by J. Joseph Wright

Ruler of Beasts by Danielle Paige