In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern Cape, no single understanding of sexual consent achieved hegemony. Collisions between different frameworks made it difficult for women to assert sexual autonomy or to win redress when their autonomy was violated. In colonial courts, forensic science promised to provide reliable marker of women’s truthfulness, but there were also multiple ways of understanding medical evidence, as European doctors and African women both served as medical witnesses. Women did not often control the framing of their grievances, which were shaped by family members as well as by the various African intermediaries who translated them into the legal categories of the colonial world. While chiefs and headmen often sought to bolster their own authority by privileging customary frameworks, police and court interpreters tended to use criminal categories, reflecting the link between sexual consent politics. Meanwhile, migrant labor and other economic transformations prompted some men to interpret transactions such as bridewealth in newly commoditized ways and to claim rights over women as men, rather than as fathers or husbands. Women’s difficulty asserting their sexual autonomy paralleled, and helped create, the parallel difficulty that Africans of all genders faced in asserting their political rights.