Paper short abstract:

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.