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217 9 Reproducing Labor Colonial Government Regulation of AfricanWomen’s Reproductive Lives meredeth turshen Women’s reproductive capacity and women’s sexuality have always been objects of policy, whether governmental, religious, societal, or private. The breadth of policies—from macroeconomic to microeconomic, social to political—that affect population growth is striking. Government policies, the subject of this chapter, range widely: wars and military recruitment; emigration and immigration policies ; tax systems; benefits such as family allowances or, more broadly, social insurance schemes; public health and maternity services (whether free or available on payment of a fee); contraceptive and abortion laws; public housing and taxes or exemptions on private housing; laws that assign adult women the status of minors and that regulate family affairs such as minimum age at marriage; penalties for adultery; policies that cause hunger and starvation and policies of famine relief; policies that cause disease to spread and public health measures to prevent or arrest contagion; education policies, whether free or not and whether available to girls and boys alike,and language requirements that pose barriers to education;race and sex barriers to employment; and, finally, even the death penalty. Every colonial government in sub-Saharan Africa employed some or all of these policies in efforts to regulate population growth. Most of the policies fall into one of two categories: either their intention was to alter the demographic structure of the population (pronatalist or antinatalist policies) or their demographic impact was an unintended or inexplicit consequence (for example, laws 218 meredeth turshen punishing adultery).1 Note that women more often bore the burden of such policies than men and that the only direct regulations on men’s reproductive lives involved intercourse with minors and forced intercourse.2 Ultimately, widespread poverty and the lack of equal opportunity laws for social advancement had the greatest impact on women’s reproductive lives.The impoverishment was neither incidental nor accidental: when large regions were so impoverished that wage labor became part of the life cycle, the supply of laborers flowed most predictably.3 In colonized Africa, sexual control was a fundamental class and racial marker embedded in a wider set of relations of power, though the underlying relationships between gender prescriptions and racial boundaries were rarely explicit.4 Sexuality was tied to politics at several levels and in numerous ways: men shuttled between male-only hostels at the workplace and family life in the village (a way to reproduce a labor force cheaply),but such migratory patterns could also foster social disorder and political dissonance.Ostensibly,colonial powers saw stable family life as a way to depoliticize discontents.But paradoxically,colonial regimes divided families and segregated regions of reproduction from the sites of production, thus creating migrant labor systems.Yet they also tried to tie them back together. European administrators repeatedly linked family ideology and political agendas in Africa, and they argued about the costs and consequences of domesticating African reproductive practices. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler ask why sexuality was so politicized under certain colonial conditions and not others.5 Why did family organization become so central at certain moments of economic restructuring and political crisis and remain ignored at other times? Historically,all African societies,like all societies across the globe,had population regimes, managing family size through a variety of social controls and practices. These controls included infanticide;birth spacing through prolonged breast-feeding and the imposition of taboos on sexual relations before a baby was weaned;the use of herbal contraceptives, abortifacients, and manual techniques to interrupt pregnancy ; age at marriage; and social controls on sex between unmarried couples.6 Many of these controls and practices changed after colonial conquest. The foundations of colonial control of African women’s lives were, first and foremost, customary laws. Marriage and property arrangements were the basis of sexual relations and therefore of demographic trends. Changes in these arrangements followed the introduction of colonial control and the codification of custom into law. Feminist research on colonial history, together with what historians have uncovered about the impact of colonial conquest on the economy and ecology of African societies, reveals a picture of how colonial government regulations affected women’s reproductive lives. This chapter examines colonial government population policies in sub-Saharan Africa in the twentieth century, focusing on the interwar period. I try to avoid interpretations that are economically reductionist or instrumentalist without obscuring the reality of the pronatalist or antinatalist intention of colonial demographic policies.A discussion of gender relations, rather than of...

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