Jomo Kenyatta, Marie Bonaparte and Bronislaw Malinowski on Clitoridectomy and Female Sexuality

Introduction

Fig. 1.

Portrait of Bronislaw Malinowski, c.1915-c.1918

Control of female sexuality and reproduction became highly topical in Great Britain around 1930 because of the so-called female ‘circumcision’ controversy. Clitoridectomy first erupted as a conflict zone in Kenya in the mid 1920s and accounts of the practice and controversy hit the press in London in 1929, shortly after the reconfirmation in Parliament by the Labour government of ‘native paramountcy’ in Kenya.¹ The fracas over the ownership of women’s bodies took place in mission settlements, particularly in rural areas close to Nairobi, where Western education, religion and social ideals engaged and sometimes clashed with African cosmology

Fig. 2.

Marie Bonaparte with her son Peter, Paris, 1909.

and social organization. The controversy involved debate between international, national and local groupings, and between different versions of tradition and modernity. An emerging African nationalist modernity that incorporated elements of social organization and traditional customs, such as female ‘circumcision’, was, for a while, in line with the thinking and political approach of the colonial regime. A different ‘scientific’ and egalitarian modernity, pushed by reformist forces in the British political system and Protestant missions in Kenya, challenged the right of communities to uphold what was seen as a barbaric custom. To the leading African nationalists the perpetuation of the rites connected with female ‘circumcision’ and the cutting itself came to be at the heart of the anticolonial struggle.²

Clitoridectomy was common among several ethnic groups in Kenya, including the Kikuyu, leaders of nationalist opposition. It involved the partial or total surgical removal of the clitoris and in many cases the labia minora and part of labia majora as an element in irua, an elaborate initiation into adulthood.³ Colonial authorities were well informed of the custom and on the whole tolerated the cutting. From the mid 1920s the powerful Protestant missions put pressure on the Kenya Government to outlaw female ‘circumcision’ and the whole of the irua ritual it was embedded in, because of its harmful effects on women’s health and for reasons of the dignity and equality of women. The Church of Scotland Mission banned church members who refused to sign a declaration, the kirore, promising to refrain from ‘circumcision’ of their daughters. The leading African political organization, the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), defended the ritual and the cutting on social and cultural grounds. In their view, ‘the rite delineated right from wrong, purity from impurity, insiders from outsiders’ – it constituted the deep structure of Kikuyu society.⁴ The result was an upsurge of African organizations that encouraged their members to secede from missions and mission controlled education. The political crisis heightened the influence of the KCA, but also gave rise to African organizations that were in favour of a ban. The Kenya government hesitantly supported the initiatives of the Protestant missions; the metropolitan government did so more wholeheartedly, urged on by prominent feminist politicians who were appalled at what they knew of the custom and its consequences. The dissension over clitoridectomy consolidated African cultural nationalist resistance and elaborated founding ideas for the fullfledged Mau Mau liberation movement of the 1950s. It also demonstrated that visions of women’s equality and liberation, as they were debated in Europe, were not at the time seen as relevant by leading African nationalists.

For a while, around 1930, African women’s bodies were the battleground on which colonial officials, metropolitan politicians, Protestant missionaries and differently positioned African men and women fought.⁵ Who owned women’s bodies – the missionary-medical establishment, the imperial government, African men, or perhaps African women themselves? In the general clamour the voices of African women, the experts on clitoridectomy, were rarely heard. What were their experiences of the operation itself and its consequences for sexual relations and reproduction? Both in Kenya and in Britain a largely medical discourse of female reproduction and motherhood was available to the conflicting parties,⁶ whereas talking in public about women...