Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (review)

In this tightly focused and graceful study of gender, generation, and the state in twentieth-century Kenya, Thomas argues "the centrality of reproductive struggles to African history" by looking at attitudes about who should conceive and carry to term and who should assist in birth and child rearing in particular historical contexts (4). Using oral, ethnographic, newspaper, epistolary, legal, missionary, and colonial archival sources, Thomas juxtaposes the familiar concepts of gender, generation, and the state against the changing nature of reproductive struggles to produce a novel and insightful history.

Reproductive struggles are also struggles over gaining material resources to satisfy bodily needs and desires and over defining and achieving moral ambitions to act in ways valued by the living and the dead. These struggles structured both old (indigenous) hierarchies based on gender, generation, and kinship and shaped new (imperial) hierarchies based on racialized difference and wealth or based on binaries pitting "African" against "Western" or "Traditional" against "Modern." Thomas adapts Nicholas Thomas' notion of "entanglement" to explore how the indigenous and the imperial intersected when central Kenyans debated and negotiated reproductive change across the twentieth century.¹ This is an intimate history of the state, an institutional history of the body, a political and cultural history of "the politics of the womb." The book's analytical structure and conceptual approach may be used in different historical settings to reveal the complex contingencies and entangled logics that make the politics of the womb an arena for moral and material aspiration.

The introduction deftly reprises a complex set of theoretical inspirations for Thomas' organizing themes and sets the scene in nineteenth-century central Kenya. Chapter 1 addresses imperial interventions in central Kenyan reproduction, especially in female initiation (including excision), birthing, and child rearing. Resistance to these interventions led to altered practices that entangled indigenous issues with the imperial ones. Chapter 2 looks at how colonial desires to "uplift" African women, from the 1930s, involved inducing central Kenyans to give birth in hospital maternities and training young women to work as midwives. Colonial maternities were sites for imperial "civilizing" actions that freed younger women from the control of older women, but the younger midwives refused to drive out excised women, their seniors.

In Chapter 3, Thomas writes about the ban on female excision in Meru from 1956 to 1959. Many girls defied this ban by organizing excisions on their own in order to meet the traditional requirement of a moral adult who could produce socially viable children and enter new generational responsibilities. Loyalists and colonials enforced the ban, in part, as part of a project of ethnic distinction aimed at distinguishing "the Meru" people from "the Kikuyu" people in the wake of Mau Mau. The failure of the ban revealed the sharp limits of male control over "the processes of transforming girls into women and ensuring proper reproduction" (100).

In Chapter 4, Thomas recounts the surprising struggles over premarital pregnancies that developed in the wake of colonial efforts to lower the age of female initiation and in the wake of fathers seeking compensation from young men whom they or their daughters claimed were responsible for a premarital pregnancy. Chapter 5 looks at the Affiliation Act (1959), which allowed single mothers to sue for paternity support. The troubles that young women faced in appeals to this law and the critical debates about it, leading up to and following its repeal in 1969, opened up new divides in a politics of the womb that revolved around "the relative powers of men and women and the value of the 'modern' and 'traditional' in postcolonial Kenya" (137). These debates entered the public arena and comprised part of an African nationalist platform, an explicit misogyny when men (and a few women) argued that the Affiliation Act was an "anathema to 'African tradition' because it granted mothers custody and compelled fathers to pay child paternity support for up to sixteen years" (169). Thomas closes with concise...