Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928

Nineteenth century Tanganyika was a place of uncertain environments and uneven opportunities. Anglican missionaries used record books and marriage certificates to define marriage as a contract authorized by God, thus allowing them to punish extramarital sex as adultery, but litigants learned to use these bureaucratic modes of religious and social control to their own advantage by articulating their own interests and complaints in a recognizable moral discourse that could draw judges' attention and sympathy.