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Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the politics homophobia in Buganda, how homosexual practices were first made into a sin in the 1880s and then criminalized in 1890s. These sexual prohibitions were key in the political marginalization of the king of Buganda by his pro-British protestant chiefs.

Paper long abstract:

There has been much debate on homosexuality in Africa during the last decades. In Uganda, this topic had been very marginal during most of the 20th century. It is only since the late 1990s that it has become a major public issue (Anti-homosexuality Act of 2014). However, in the last decades of the 19th century, homophobia had also been a major political and religious issue. Homosexuality was made illegal (by a vote of the native assembly in 1896 and later through British law). After 1900, these issues stopped being politicized and died out. Missionary archives, colonial sources as well as ganda writings refer to these debates about sexuality albeit in a very elusive manner. The conversion to Christianity and Islam during the 2nd half of the 19th century, led to a redefinition of gender and proper sexuality in Buganda. In the 1880s, royal homosexual practices became increasingly frown upon by Christian missionaries and their converts.

In the 1890s, with the help of the British, elite Christian converts rose to power. Political competition marginalized the king and pitted against each other Catholic, Muslim and Protestant chiefs (favoured by the British). Controlling the king, Mwanga, became a key element in the fight for power, honour, converts and wealth. Dissatisfied with the status quo, the king wavered between the Catholic and Protestant factions. To neutralize him, the great protestant chiefs used his fondness of male sex partners against him. In the 1890s like today, homophobic religious feelings were fed by hidden political motives.

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In 1906, King's College Budo has been created and has become the core of Anglican elite formation in colonial Buganda (Uganda). It has been built as a factory of a new standard of man and leader. We will show the great role play by this school to impose a new standard of masculinity in Uganda.

Paper long abstract:

Buganda was the place where the British protectorate decided to establish his power, the core whose spreaded the western and ganda influences in the whole country. Missionnaries installed their Missions in the colonial Buganda to develop education and spreaded their faith as many people in as possible. In the beginning of XX century, schools was founded for sons of chief, in particular King's College Budo in 1906. This school handed by missionaries was in the core of the Anglican elite formation in Uganda. Its organization has been conceived to work out a new Uganda man, a new type of leader. This new man embedded by ideas of self-made man and gentleman's standards has become a standard masculinity. We will show how schools and sport practices play a great role in the formation of a new standard of masculinity during colonial era in Buganda and therefore in Uganda. For that purpose, we will founded our reflections on empirical work ( archives and interviews ).

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the question of labour and Christian missionary enterprise shaped debates on masculinity and morality among the Cuka of Kenya. It aims at providing connections between the small struggles of everyday life of the colonized with anti-colonial revolt in Central Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

In 1907, Edward Butler Horne, entered Chuka and summoned the community's warriors. He ordered them to arrange their shields in a row and with rapid firing tore them to pieces. He then felled an ox that was grazing nearby with a single shot and invited the shocked warriors to take their share of free meat. The century's old warrior tradition had been blown off. Thus, gunshots defined the initial contact between Cuka men and the forces of colonialism. Henceforth, Cuka masculinity and morality would be subjected to social and spiritual re-engineering. In mid - 1953, twenty two Cuka young men, some of them converts to the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM), were shot dead by the King's African Riffles (KAR), while preparing for a church wedding, catapulting the community to the Mau Mau insurgency. The moment of conquest had ushered in major disruptions in the world of Cuka men.They had to adopt to the colonial logic of labour and still grapple with the new forces of christianity. They had to pursue advantage in new social spaces availed to them by colonial conquest - such as being employed as cooks(domestic servants)and conversion to the church.With the help of archival sources and testimonies of men who served as cooks (chifoko), this paper examines how contradictions inherent in these two spaces remolded the concept of being a Cuka man and how such remodeling contributed to their participation in the Mau Mau insurgency.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the narratives of male Banyamulenge soldiers as the final protectors of their community and the Congo. This narrative has evolved from periodic participation in conflict. Yet, these periods included a deployment of violent masculinity and moralisation of violence and atrocity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the evolution of masculine narratives and moral justifications of violence in the Congolese Banyamulenge community from 1960s to present. The narrative and conceptualisation of masculinity in this community has evolved in response to perceptions of threat, even genocide. This paper focuses on four phases of evolving masculinity, from 1960s Cold War conflicts, investment in the Rwandan Patriotic Front in the early 1990s, isolationism in Second Congo War, and contemporary views on current dilemmas of survival, existential threat, employment and belonging. These phases saw the building and shaping of a narrative of masculinity that has moralised participation in violence classified as both Pan-African liberationist and at times genocidal or involving crimes against humanity. The protection of their community, since the 1960s, was considered a male endeavour, and came full circle to localised conflict from 1998 onward. The product of this narrative is that Banyamulenge men considered themselves the final protectors of their community and the Congo. This paper will use both literature on African military masculinities and original fieldwork interviews with Banyamulenge soldiers and political actors active in the 1990s.

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Using Muigwithania (the vernacular newspaper of the Kikuyu Central Association, edited by the mission-educated Johnstone "Jomo" Kenyatta), this paper traces the ways in which in the 1920s and 1930s a generation of male Gikuyu political leaders created a new notion of a "Gikuyu body politic."

Paper long abstract:

A widely acknowledged aspect of life in the Gikuyu highlands of colonial Kenya in the 1920s was the sudden ascendency of a young generation of mission-educated Gikuyu men who sought to mobilise the category of the "tribe" for political ends. In this paper I explore the gendered and generational moral debates that took place among these men and between them and their elders. I focus on a significant yet largely overlooked aspect of their discourse: their frequent, vivid, use of bodily images and metaphors in their references to their land and the political community they sought to rally. The paper combines attention to the Gikuyu "moral economy" (John Lonsdale, 1992) with an approach that is sensitive to what Jean-Pierre Warnier has termed the "governmentality of [bodily] substances".

Using Muigwithania (the vernacular newspaper of the Kikuyu Central Association, edited by the Scottish-mission-educated Johnstone "Jomo" Kenyatta), together with evidence presented to the 1932 Land Commission, the paper traces the ways in which this generation of male Gikuyu political leaders a notion of a "Gikuyu body politic". Reading the source material against the backdrop of missionary attempts to prohibit the custom of female "circumcision", I point to the historical conditions that informed these ideas of an ethnic, tribal body. I argue that although their patriarchal vision of the "Gikuyu body politic" was shaped by local notions of masculinity, uprightness, and health that were centuries old, it was also a product of the distinctive relationship between the body and power that emerged under colonialism.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on an ethnographic study on male circumcision ritual in Muranga of Kenya. The culture of pain and violence were used in asserting masculinities on the initiates. However,traumatised masculinities and demasculinisation of masculinities were eminent in this study

Paper long abstract:

The paper is based on a study that explored the male circumcision ritual and practices in Muranga, Kenya and their implications on public health. Promotion of male circumcision in settings with low circumcision rates is based on research evidence that male circumcision provides heterosexual men with 50 to 60 per cent protective benefit against HIV infection. For the Kikuyu people in Kenya, male circumcision is a cultural ritual and a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Provision of male circumcision for HIV prevention may open opportunities for counselling and provision of sexual and reproductive health education to young men. However, male circumcision for HIV prevention only targets the non circumcising communities, excluding circumcising communities such as the Kikuyu people.

A Focused ethnographic study underpinned by an Interpretivist paradigm was employed. Participants were recruited through purposive sampling. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 13 circumcision mentors, participant observations in three churches and written narratives with 43 male students from six schools. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

The findings suggest a changing male circumcision where pain and violence were used in making men from boys as a way of asserting masculinities. Male circumcision and initiation rites were used as a tool of violence by circumcision mentors against initiates through the practices of road license and wiping of the soot. These practices were enacted violence and sexual harassments.

In shaping the masculinities of the initiates, traumatised masculinities, feminisation of men and demasculinisation of masculinities were eminent in study.

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Paper short abstract:

Male circumcision is key to understanding the quarrelsome aspects of moral ethnicity and masculinity among the Kikuyu. Two case studies are developed to argue that while material provision is increasingly feminized, cultural and moral provision is increasingly defended as a male enclave.

Paper long abstract:

The November 2018 circumcision season in Muranga, Kenya, brought to the surface long-standing quarrels about male circumcision as a cultural practice. In its varieties, male circumcision is one of the most factious elements of Kikuyu moral ethnicity, intimately woven into real power struggles over the temporalities and values of Kikuyu masculinities. This paper examines how argument over male circumcision feeds into and departs from other discussions focused on a 'crisis of masculinity', provision and single motherhood, and bodily integrity (including the body politic). Two case studies are presented to demonstrate how anthropological understandings of provision can inform how Kikuyu categories of 'bad culture' and 'good culture' come to limit the internal boundaries of a community of argument. The first case relates to the murder of 15 year old Juliano Kanyonyo in the care of his circumcision guardians, which provoked the incursion of a woman politician, Sabina Chege, into discussions about the state regulation of male circumcision. It raised the unspoken matter of mothers' rights over their boys and women's provision of food and other necessities during circumcision periods. The second case reports back on a historical conflict between the church and traditionalists over the form and meaning of male circumcision among the Kikuyu. With specific reference to the 'botched' circumcisions of 11 boys at a church in Kahuro, new conflicts over an old standoff about who controls culture and morality burst to light. This polarisation of Kikuyu elders, Christian and traditionalist, recontextualises men above-and-beyond as cultural and moral providers.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the moral lives and self-evaluations of a group of low-status and economically marginal young men living in the southern peri-urban areas of Kenya's Kiambu County (itself located on the outskirts of northern Nairobi), drawing on 19 months fieldwork 2017-18.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars of Africa are no strangers to the plight of unemployed and underemployed young men. A growing body of scholarship attends to their lives, temporally "stuck" in modes of "waithood" and boredom, unable to accumulate the wealth to marry (and thus the concomitant social capital required become adult men). (John Lonsdale called this normative teleology of masculine becoming the achievement of "civic virtue".) Whilst this literature has had much to say about the experiences of "abjection" that defines the lives of such youth, this paper explicitly explores the moral premises that inform the evaluation of them by others, and their self-evaluations.

To do so, this paper discusses the lives of a group of young men living in Kenya's peri-urban Kiambu County (itself located on the outskirts of northern Nairobi), drawing on 19 months fieldwork. The group of young men with which this essay is concerned are generally seen as "lazy", "idlers" by other residents of the peri-urban interstice, particularly those aspiring to a middle-class standard of living. Yet rather than resisting such moral judgement of their life choices through constructing alternative understandings of their predicament, young men must contend with their normative influence. Instead of countering narratives of themselves as socially valueless "idlers", youth I befriended often sought to claim that they were "serious" in contradistinction to others within their social circles who, it was argued, truly embodied social failure.