Regulating reproduction: State interventions into fertility and sexuality in rural Kenya, c. 1920-1970.

This dissertation reveals how state interventions into fertility and sexuality contributed to the reconfiguration of gender and political relations in colonial and early post-colonial rural Kenya. Drawing on extensive oral and documentary research in Kenya and England, it explores how African men and women, local leaders, and government officials have contested and constructed relations of authority through medical and legal interventions surrounding clitoridectomy, abortion, childbirth, population counts, and extra-marital pregnancy. It traces these political struggles from family compounds, administrative meetings, court hearings, and hospitals in the case study area of Meru District, located on the northeastern slopes of Mt. Kenya, to central government offices in Nairobi to the Colonial Office and House of Commons in London. This dissertation contributes to literature on gender and the state, and provides historical background for current concerns about fertility and sexuality in Africa. Chapter One examines how campaigns to regulate clitoridectomy and eradicate abortion enabled male colonial officers and local leaders to position themselves as guardians of the Meru tribe and to wrest partial control of women's bodily practices away from women's councils. Chapter Two explores the colonial state's uneven efforts to introduce biomedical maternity services in rural areas, arguing that both Europeans and Africans viewed such services as a challenge to relations of gender and generational authority and moral order. Revealing how post-World War II welfare and development initiatives entailed extending official knowledge beyond male taxpayers and challenging African beliefs that counting children endangered their lives, Chapter Three examines the history of the 1948 East African census and the demographic discourses which surrounded it. Chapter Four reconstructs the history of the 1956 ban on clitoridectomy in Meru to demonstrate how relations of gender and generation constrained the elaboration of a more interventionist colonial state in the post-War period. By examining the formulation of laws pertaining to pregnancy outside of wedlock and court cases which ensued from such laws, Chapter Five analyzes the discourses through which politicians, administrators, parents, and young people debated changing patterns of courtship and marriage negotiation in late colonial and early post-colonial Kenya.PhDAfrican historyCultural anthropologyHealth and Environmental SciencesPublic administrationPublic healthSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130851/2/9811206.pd