At the end of the 1920s in Kenya, Protestant Missionaries, government authorities and Christian Kikuyu clashed when missionaries sought to prohibit female circumcision among their adherents. The mission discourse emphasised the negative moral and physical effects of female circumcision on individual women, while that of the government stressed the function of female circumcision in maintaining the body-politic. The colonial discourse, as whole, is marked by a striking division between issues concerning women and those deemed political. Thus, women seldom appear as actors in historical narratives of the female circumcision controversy, which is generally represented as a nationalist movement initiated by, and of concern to, men. / This thesis presents alternate readings of the relevant colonial records. By examining the processes that functioned to exclude women from the political discourse it provides a different interpretation of the controversy as one in which women did indeed play a central political role, indirectly controlling the issue through men, who were regarded by the colonialists as the legitimate representatives of tribal interests. The thesis explores indirect methods of eliciting the perspectives of women which are muted or absent from the historical record.

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