An Encounter in Paris – Conversations on Clitoridectomy across Borders

Abstract

This essay describes how a controversy over clitoridectomy came to influence the conjuncture of imperial politics and nationalist resistance between Kenya and Great Britain the 1930s. Clitoridectomy was a key component of the initiation rites of leading population groups in Kenya. Missionaries and medical doctors opposed it on moral and health grounds, African men and some women defended it a precondition of mature and responsible adulthood. An unlikely meeting and collaboration between a group of people - Marie Bonaparte, Jomo Kenyatta, Bronislaw Malinowski and Prince Peter - who had a keen interest in the issue, generated new insights into the roots of tradition, how it fitted into not only structures of the human psyche but also the social structure of so-called traditional societies. The essay discusses what led to the collaboration, traces its consequences and situates the clitoridectomy controversy in the context of anti-colonial and female emancipation.