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Excising Female Irua: The School Edition of Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya Excising Female Irua: The School Edition of Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya
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Elspeth Huxley and the 1929–1931 Controversy Elspeth Huxley and the 1929–1931 Controversy
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Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and Death by Excision Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and Death by Excision
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Eight Silence, Exile, and the Spectacle of the Fashioned Body Aman, Barry, Dirie: Aman, Barry, Dirie
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Two Kenyan Reactance: Kenyatta, Huxley, wa Thiong'o
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Published:August 2007
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Abstract
Culture is not an inborn destiny but a human artifact that can be reshaped. When culture is threatened to the core by outside forces, a phenomenon called “reactance” may arise. The cult of culture and the demarcation of a gender role in the flesh through excision can be interpreted as an African reactance against the forces of colonialism. This explains why the origins of writing on excision can be traced to colonial cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology is the first context in which female autobiography emerged in Kenya. This chapter examines these anthropological preludes to female self-writing by focusing on Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya ([1938] 1961), Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between (1965), and Elspeth Huxley's Red Strangers ([1939] 1999). It also considers the questioning of excision as a rite and a factor of social cohesiveness by analyzing Rebeka Njau's one-act play The Scar (1965), Charity Waciuma's Daughter of Mumbi (1969), Muthoni Likimani's They Shall Be Chastised (1974), and Miriam Were's Your Heart Is My Altar (1980).
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