The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa

As in much of the world, societies in precolonial East Africa--what is now Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda--used rites of passage to chart an individual’s social and developmental progress toward adulthood. Under European colonialism, from the 1890s to the 1960s, colonial judicial systems and the emerging genre of ethnography converged to subject African people to standardized definitions of childhood and adulthood. The coexistence of rites of passage and chronological age regulations generated confusion well into the postcolonial era, and the question of when childhood ends sparked extensive debates about gender, race, and development. Corrie Decker argues that ultimately these debates came down to ＂the age of sex.＂

In The Age of Sex, Decker demonstrates how maturation became defined as the hypothetical moment when a girl becomes a woman capable of engaging in heterosexual activity and a boy becomes a man imbued with the right and responsibility to have heterosexual intercourse. Colonial ethnographic studies reduced complex precolonial rites of passage to ＂puberty rites＂ fixated on these sexual transformations. The resulting stereotypes influenced, in turn, how colonial and postcolonial court officials decided age-of-consent and other sex crime cases. Court rituals thus legally transformed girls into women by ruling on their sexual maturity and boys into men by sentencing them to corporal punishment, marking their acceptance of heterosexual responsibilities.

Corrie Decker is a professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa and the coauthor of The Idea of Development in Africa: A History.