Sexual Trusteeship: Constructing Race and Sexuality in Colonial Kenya, 1885-1963

Abstract

“Sexual Trusteeship: Constructing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1963” offers an historical account of the construction of race, gender, and sexuality during Kenya’s colonial period. Scholars of race and sexuality have typically identified colonial narratives which contrasted white sexual normativity with the pathological sexual habits of the colonized. However, this dissertation demonstrates that in colonial Kenya both white and Indian settlers stressed the need to protect the “natural” and normative sexual mores of indigenous Africans from contamination by Western or Eastern cultures. This discourse of “sexual trusteeship” built upon the the imperial philosophy that the British state and its agents held land and resources “in trust” for a colonized population that was not yet sufficiently modern for self-government, but added the contention that sexual morality and/or practices must also be protected by imperial guardians. Deeply informed by anthropological and psychoanalytic research, the language of sexual trusteeship embraced the dictum that sexual deviance and dysfunction only occurred in “civilized cultures.” Both settlers and administrators used this rhetoric to argue that Africans must be protected from forces like urbanization, Western-style education, and especially political activity in order to preserve their sexual purity from corruption by more “civilized,” and hence more deviant and dysfunctional groups. Thus, authorities were able to exploit the notion of African sexual normativity and “civilized” sexual deviance to augment and maintain white supremacy in the colony.