Current Research
The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in East Africa
I am currently completing my third book, The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in East Africa (under contract with the University of Wisconsin Press), which charts evolving cultural assumptions about race, sex, puberty, and chronological age in twentieth-century Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Before the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child declared a child to be someone under the age of eighteen, there existed no global consensus on the age of majority. States’ efforts to institutionalize chronological age metrics had to contend with rites of passage like first communions, bar mitzvahs, and other ceremonies that originally correlated with social benchmarks rather than specific ages. During the British colonial era in East Africa (1890s-1960s), officials reconciled the incongruence between local rites of passage and chronological age by attempting to pinpoint what I call “the age of sex.” I analyze racial stereotypes in East African ethnographies to trace how the age of sex became understood as the customary moment when a girl became capable of sexual intercourse (presumably marked by the onset of menstruation) and when a boy earned the right to have sex with women (presumably marked by circumcision, the ritual endurance of pain to prove his manhood).
The Age of Sex argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, rituals of maturation in East Africa moved from the initiation camp to the courtroom, reconfiguring maturity into female sexual ability and male sexual rights. When judges in sex cases forced girls to undergo medical examinations to prove their sexual maturity, they confirmed biomedical beliefs about female puberty rites. And when they subjected boys who had sex with other boys or underage girls to corporal punishment, they invoked the pain rituals of male puberty rites. These court rituals transformed young girls into sexually available women and adventurous boys into men who understood their heterosexual rights and responsibilities. Evolving cultural assumptions about the age of sex in East Africa generated conflicts between coming-of-age customs and chronological age stipulations in law, which came to a head in the 1990s when Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda adopted the UN-sanctioned age of eighteen as the legal age of majority. In demonstrating the impact of ethnography in the courts, The Age of Sex reveals the historical interdependence between custom and law despite their contemporary divergence.