The Age of Sex

Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa

Corrie Decker

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English

University of Wisconsin Press
08 July 2025

African history; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Gender studies, gender groups; Age groups: children

Series: Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture

As in much of the world, societies in precolonial East Africa—what is today Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—used rites of passage to chart an individual’s social and developmental progress toward adulthood. Under European colonialism, from the 1890s to the 1960s, colonial judicial systems and the emerging genre of ethnography converged to subject African people to standardized definitions of childhood and adulthood. The coexistence of rites of passage and chronological age regulations generated confusion well into the postcolonial era, and the question of when childhood ends sparked extensive debate about gender, race, and development. Corrie Decker argues that ultimately these debates came down to “the age of sex.”

The “age of sex,” a term Decker conceptualizes in this carefully researched monograph, refers to the hypothetical moment when a “girl” becomes a “woman” capable of engaging in heterosexual activity, and a “boy” becomes a “man” imbued with the right and responsibility to have heterosexual intercourse. Colonial ethnographic studies reduced complex precolonial rites of passage to “puberty rites” fixated on these sexual transformations. The resulting stereotypes influenced, in turn, how colonial and postcolonial court officials decided age-of-consent and other sex crime cases. Court rituals thus legally transformed girls into women by ruling on their sexual maturity, and boys into men by sentencing them to corporal punishment marking their acceptance of sexual responsibilities.

By: Corrie Decker
Imprint: University of Wisconsin Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780299352004
ISBN 10: 0299352005
Series: Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 08 July 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: The Age of Sex in Ethnography 1 Rites of Passage 2 Puberty Rites 3 Sexual Rites Part II: The Age of Sex in the Courts 4 The Age of Institutions 5 Sexual Ability 6 Rights and Responsibilities Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Corrie Decker is a professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa and coauthor of The Idea of Development in Africa: A History.

Reviews for The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa

""Decker's decolonial-historical analysis of the intersecting concepts of sexuality and age is a refreshing eye-opener, revealing the embeddedness of these concepts in complex cultural, economic, and political constructions coupled with racist imperial (mis)representations. It is an invitation to rethink conventional sex laws.""--Sylvia Tamale, author of Decolonization and Afro-Feminism