Jomo Kenyatta, Marie Bonaparte and Bronislaw Malinowski on Clitoridectomy and Female Sexuality
E-mail: bodilff{at}ruc.dk
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Abstract |
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This article tells the story of a significant meeting in 1935 between the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte and the future President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, then a student of anthropology under Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. Their discussion centred on female ‘circumcision’, a topic being hotly debated in East Africa and in Great Britain among British colonialists and reformers and Kenyan cultural nationalists. Kenyatta became a key figure in the controversy. Bonaparte's interest in the matter came from her explorations of female sexuality: were all women bisexual as the two sites of the source of erotic pleasure – clitoris and vagina – seemed to indicate? Beyond her intellectual engagement, Bonaparte had a strong personal interest in clitoridectomy as she regarded herself as frigid and saw frigidity as an epidemic among Western women because of their exaggerated ‘masculinity’.
The meeting and the discussions surrounding it had implications for understandings of women's sexuality in Europe and Africa both then and today. Accounts resulting from it formed part of the knowledge constructions of anthropology and psychoanalysis – one discipline was central to both colonial oppression and emancipation, the other to both the consolidation of patriarchy and to movements of sexual liberation. Central themes were the universality of the Oedipus complex and the role of ‘sublimation’ in relation to the development of moral and intellectual capabilities in Europe and Africa. The article describes the meeting and its background in the context of social reform movements and African nationalism, and discusses the interchange between anthropology and psychoanalysis concerning women's sexual experience that surrounded it. A concluding section examines the relevance of historical accounts for present-day understanding of the problem of female genital cutting.