De-Sexualizing the Black Girl: Child Marriage in Colonial East Africa

The history of “child marriage” in colonial East Africa provides insight into the ways in which the British colonial state used sexuality to delineate between African “girls” and “women.” European missionaries who came to East Africa in the late nineteenth century were the first to raise concerns that male elders sanctioned the early marriage of girls because they benefitted financially from such exchanges. British colonial officials based in East Africa initially ignored these protestations in order to maintain good relations with African chiefs. During the 1930s, Save the Children and other international activists pressured colonial states to institute child protection laws. By the 1940s, British governments in East Africa passed formal legislation outlawing child marriage and legalizing state custody of endangered girls. The question of what constituted “the child” remained. Children had the right to protection precisely because they were considered asexual and innocent. The official age of consent for marriage and sexual intercourse varied across the region, and one’s age was often difficult to determine in African societies. Starting in the mid-1930s, African girls and women launched formal complaints against fathers, brothers, and husbands. I argue that as African girls themselves became more aware of their “rights” before the law, the colonial state more intricately scrutinized their biophysical characteristics and sexual behavior as indications of whether these were innocent “girls” in need of protection or sexualized “women” who had disobeyed male authorities.