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3 Gendered Reproduction: Placing Schoolgirl Pregnancies in African History Lynn M. Thomas More than ¤fteen years ago, Nancy Rose Hunt (1989) noted the profound irony that while much scholarship on women and gender in African history has been framed throughthe Marxist-feminist analytics of production and reproduction, historians have left the conventional meaning of reproduction—procreation— largely unexplored. The ¤rst generation of women’s historians, largely Europeans and Americans, focused their attention on documenting the centrality of women’s labor to African economies. As second-wave feminists, they sought to challenge sexist ideologies that situated women exclusively in the domestic realm and reduced their social roles to their biological capacities. For these reasons and for fear of contributing to racist stereotypes dating back to the era of the slave trade that depicted African women as oversexed and exceptionally fertile, they avoided examining the more intimate aspects of reproduction. In identifying feminist historians’ reluctance to study procreation, Hunt argued that this scholarship had left an important part of African social and symbolic life unexamined.1 Others also noticed the gap.Inbookspublishedin1987and1997,I¤Amadiume and Oyeronke Oyewumi pointed to Western feminists’ refusal to examine the centrality of fertility and maternity in African women’s lives as an example of how exogenous rather than indigenous categories and concerns continued to inform scholarship on Africa. These books contributed to broader debates, discussed in this volume’s introduction, over who could and should interpret African women’s experiences. Amadiume and Oyewumi argued that Western feminists had fundamentally misunderstood African societies. According to Amadiume (1987, 185), precolonial Igboland was characterized not by men’s domination of women but by a “®exible gender system”in which women “could play roles usually monopolized by men, or be classi¤ed as ‘males’ in terms of power and authority over others.” Oyewumi (1997, 34–36, 156) went further to argue that gender did not exist in precolonial Yorùbá society, only the reproductive distinction between anafemales (anatomical females, obìnrin) and ana- males (anatomical males,okùnrin).Gender difference and its accompanying notion that women are of “no account,”Oyewumi explained, came with European colonialism. Amadiume and Oyewumi also argued that the most important divisions within precolonial Igbo and Yorùbá societies were constituted through age and seniority, constructs that Western feminists had generally ignored. Together , their arguments about the importance of reproduction and age hierarchies suggested that what women/anafemales have shared is not a common subordination to men but the potential to claim power through procreation. Gwendolyn Mikell (1997, 4) too has emphasized the centrality of fertility and maternity within African women’s lives in the postcolonial period by identifying pronatalism as a key tenet of “emerging African feminism.” My research has engaged such insights by exploring the history of reproductive politics in twentieth-century central Kenya.In Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003), I examine colonial and postcolonial debates and interventions surrounding abortion, female initiation and excision, premarital pregnancy, childbirth, and paternity support. These are important historical episodes because they reveal how various people—including colonial and postcolonial of¤cials,politicians,missionaries and local church leaders,parents , elders, and youth—have viewed the regulation of fertility and sexuality as fundamental to the construction of proper gender and generational relations and political and moral order. While reproduction has been a central political and moral concern in twentieth-century central Kenya, its meanings have continually been contested and consistently linked to both gender and generational relations. The questions of who is ¤t to conceive and who is ¤t to give birth have never simply been answered by anatomy, as Oyewumi argues for precolonial Yorùbá society. Rather, these questions have been part of broader debates over how to prepare female bodies and minds for procreation and how to ensure that their fertility contributes to the composition of wealth, not immiseration and misfortune. In contrast to Oyewumi’s argument that reproduction was a socially decisive but ungendered process, my research in another part of the continent suggests reproduction as a crucial site through which distinctions of maleness and femaleness as well as distinctions of age and wealth have been elaborated. Admittedly , my material does not directly address the precolonial period. Yet the range and intensity of debates over abortion, female initiation, bridewealth, childbirth , premarital pregnancy, courtship, and marriage in colonial and postcolonial Africa suggest to me that the intimate relationship between gender ideologies and procreative processes—what I would call gendered reproduction—has deep...

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