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NationalBodies, UnspeakableActs: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-making* Susan Pedersen Harvard University Government may claim and sometimes exercise its monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, but much of the time political rule can seem an elaboratecharade, in which leadersonly ratify policies decided elsewhere and fictions of compliance mask more complex networksof domination,inaction, or protest. In no area was authorityso erraticas in British-controlledKenya, where a "dignified" rhetoric of "native paramountcy" masked an "effi- cient" interestin laborcontrol and economic growthon the partof settlersand (usually) the government. Indirect rule could thus devolve in practice into eitherarbitrary rule or no rule at all, as a patchworkof mediatingsocial groups enforced, altered, or ignored the laws proceeding from an impervious GovernmentHouse. The fictions of rule were exposed in 1926, when missionary pressureand some level of official concern about the prevalentpractice of clitoridectomy led the governorsof the East African dependenciesto meet togetherto devise a strategy to combat the practice. Noting that one Kikuyu "native council" had passed a law requiring the licensing of all operatorsand restrictingthe extent of cutting to "simple clitoridectomy" (as opposed to the usual practice of removing the entire external genitalia), the governorsendorsed this shift to the "less brutal" form. The new guidelines were adopted without protest by a range of councils and with a gratifying circulation of regulations and papers.' Imagine the surpriseof the "native commissioners," then, when the * Although the concerns and interpretationof this essay differ markedlyfrom those of her own work, I wish to acknowledge my debt to Jocelyn Murray,whose excellent (and still unpublished) dissertation remains the most thorough study of the events discussed here. For helpful comments on versions of this essay, I wish to thank Thomas Ertman, Mervat Hatem, Anne Higonnet, MargaretHigonnet, Jane Jenson, Robin Kilson, Tom Laqueur, Peter Mandler, Billie Melman, Alex Owen, and Ann Stoler. I am also gratefulto DeborahCohen for trackingdown relevant materialfrom medical textbooks and to David Paulson for retrieving some documents from Rhodes House, Oxford. 1 The 1926 governors' meeting is mentioned in Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), Colonial Office (hereafterCO) 533/392/1, Grigg to Passfield, Kenya no. 130, October 12, 1929; the same file includes both the CircularLetter no. 28 (August 23, [Journal of Modern History 63 (December 1991): 647-680] C 1991 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/91/6304-0002$01.00 All rights reserved. This content downloaded from 160.39.196.142 on Mon, 6 Jan 2014 11:25:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 648 Pedersen decision by some missions in 1929 to give teeth to the rulings by refusing communion to all Christians unwilling to forswear the practice led to the largest outbreak of popular protest among the Kikuyu that the British governmenthad yet faced. The 1926 law, it seems, had been a dead letter all along. Only the missions, controlling as they did access to worship and education, could provide real sanctions against clitoridectomy; only their interventionexposed the elaborate dance of theoretical government concern and equally theoretical compliance. The consequences of the "female circumcisioncontroversy," as it has been called, for both the stabilityof British rule and the rise of Kenyan nationalism have received some attention from historians.2 Yet none have seriously addressedthe question of why clitoridectomy in particularbecame the focus of contention, or, more specifically, of why the ritualunmaking and reworking of women's bodies became so central to the constructionof nationalidentity. This question will concern us here, but not primarily for Kenya, for if the controversy uncovered the usefulness of sexual politics to the formation of African nationalism, it also exposed the racial, sexual, and nationalist presumptionsthat dominated the British imagination and underlay colonial policy. Revelations of the conflict in Kenya coincided with the entry into Parliament both of Labour politicians determined to further the political aspirations of African peoples and of humanitariansand feminists equally determinedto use British rule to "protect colored women." It thus quickly gave rise to a complex and acrimonious debate, in which the rival ideals of cultural self-expression, women's rights, and imperial hegemony came into open conflict. On its most overt level, the debate in Britain shows how the tensions between feminist, imperialist, and nationalistinterests could immo- bilize individuals and fragmentcampaigns. If we are attentive to its silences as well as its explicit concerns, it can also help us to understandthese early 1926) sent from G. V. Maxwell, the chief native commissioner, to all senior commissioners, encouragingthem to work to "mitigate the brutalitywhich attendsthe rite of female circumcision," and the resolution passed by the Embu local native council, which made it an offense for an operatorto remove more than the clitoris. 2 The most thorough account of the controversy is Jocelyn Murray, "The Kikuyu Female CircumcisionControversy, with Special Reference to the Church Missionary Society's 'Sphere of Influence' " (Ph.D. diss., University of California,Los Angeles, 1974). Three books chart the influence of the controversy on nationalist aspirations: John Spencer, The KenyaAfrican Union (London, 1985), pp. 71-97; CarlG. Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of "Mau Mau". Nationalism in Kenya (London, 1966), pp. 105-35; Robert L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformationof Kenya: The Kamba, Kikuyuand Maasaifrom 1900 to 1939 (Princeton, N.J., 1976), pp. 235-50. Ronald Hyam gives a brief account of the controversy in his recent Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990), pp. 189-97. This content downloaded from 160.39.196.142 on Mon, 6 Jan 2014 11:25:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-making 649 twentieth-centuryBritons' conception of female sexuality and, more broadly, of the place of women in national life. I. THE QUARRELIN KENYA When Sir Edward Grigg, governor of Kenya during the disturbances of 1929-30, explained to Sidney Webb at the Colonial Office precisely why it was difficult for the colonial administrationto dissuade young girls from undergoingthe operationof clitoridectomy,he tended to blame an omnipotent "tradition" which made such customs virtually unquestionable. "The chief opponents to any reform are the victims themselves," he wrote, "and their attitudeis due to the fact that they are bound by custom."3 Yet the main white agitators against clitoridectomy, the Church of Scotland Mission, offered a very different explanationfor their failure. "Except for the championshipof the rite as a national symbol by the Kikuyu CentralAssociation," they wrote, "it probably would by now have been widely abandoned. This faction, in spite of its professed aims as to progress, education, and enlightenment,has, through its ill-advised attitude, done more than anything else to delay the emancipationof Kikuyu womanhood."4 Embeddedthough they are in the teleology of Westernenlightenment, both of these statements contained partial truths. Clitoridectomy was, as Grigg noted, certainly a custom of centralsignificance to Kikuyu life. Like the male circumcision undergone by Kikuyu boys, the public ritual of clitoridectomy marked for women not only the passage from childhood to marriageable adulthoodbut also the moment of entry into the full life of the community. Young women initiated together became members of the same age group, which was the basic unit of Kikuyu social organization. Age groups acted as associations for mutual aid; they also served to enforce the distinctions of status and behavior prescribedfor their members at different stages of life. Women thus understandablyoften identified clitoridectomy as the most important-if also the most painful-experience of their lives. Wanjiku, a Kikuyu woman born around 1910 and initiated before the controversy dis- cussed here, recalled in an interview with Jean Davison: "Anybody who has not felt the pain of Irua [the "circumcision" ceremony]cannot abuse me. FromIrua I learnedwhat it meantto be grown-up, with more brains.. Also from Irua, I learnedwhat it means to be pure Miigiktiyu-to have earnedthe stage of maturity when, being a circumcised person, one no longer moves 3PRO, CO 533/394/11, Grigg to Passfield, Kenya no. 44, March 15, 1930. 4 PRO, CO 533/418/2, Churchof Scotland, "Memorandumprepared by the Kikuyu mission council on Female Circumcision" (December 1, 1931), p. 7. This content downloaded from 160.39.196.142 on Mon, 6 Jan 2014 11:25:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 650 Pedersen about with those not yet circumcised.'5 "Irua was like being given a degree for going from childhood to adulthood," one Kikuyu midwife recalled. Whereas uncircumcisedgirls were not consideredmarriageable, "the minute you got circumcised, no one would stand in your way."6 If clitoridectomyremained central to Kikuyu identity and social structure, however, it was not because the Kikuyu were, as Grigg and his colonial civil servants liked to put it, "just emerging from a state of barbarism."7Rather, clitoridectomypersisted in spite of (or perhaps partly because of) the stress and dislocation borne by the Kikuyu during the rapid pace of colonization in Kenya.