In Primitive Normativity Elizabeth W. Williams traces the genealogy of a distinct narrative about African sexuality that British colonial authorities in Kenya used to justify their control over indigenous populations. She identifies a discourse of “primitive normativity” that suggested that Africans were too close to nature to develop sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution which supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less polluted than that of the more deviant populations of their colonizers. Williams shows that colonial officials and settlers used this narrative to further the goals of white supremacy by arguing that Africans’ sexuality was proof that Kenyan Africans must be protected from the forces of urbanization, Western-style education, and political participation, lest they be exposed to forms of civilized sexual deviance. Challenging the more familiar notion that Europeans universally viewed Africans as hypersexualized, Williams demonstrates how narratives of African sexual normativity rather than deviance reinforced ideas about the evolutionary backwardness of African peoples and their inability to govern themselves.

Elizabeth W. Williams is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky and coeditor of The History of Sexuality: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies.

Abbreviations  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: Primitive Normativity  1
1. The Intellectual Roots of Primitive Normativity  24
2. Sleeping Dictionaries and Mobile Metropoles: Female (A)Sexuality in the Silberrad Scandal of 1908  42
3. “Stoop Low to Conquer”: Primitive Normativity and Trusteeship in the Kenyan “Indian Crisis” of 1923  69
4. White Peril: Rape, Race, and Contamination  92
5. Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange’s Kenyan Novels  117
6. Eating the Other: Erotic Consumption in Anti-Mau Mau Discourse  139
Conclusion  163
Notes  169
Bibliography  211
Index  223