Life Seen:1

1. Title of a sex-focused ‘pornographic’ magazine in Kenya.

Touch and Vision in the Making of Sex in Western Kenya

Abstract

This article is part of a project about transformations of relatedness among the Luo of western Kenya, which we examine by observing, in the everyday life of one village, concrete practices that constitute and negotiate material contact. In short, villagers understand physical touch and associated forms of material contact as practices that momentarily merge persons or their bodies by sharing substance. Such moments of merging release creative or transformative force, with its attendant ambiguity. To understand this link between merging and emergence, the Dholuo term riwo, is helpful. It can designate moments of ‘coming together, mixing, merging’ across all spheres of everyday life. Riwo is central to concerns with how things should be done, in everyday and in ritual situations, in order to sustain the order of life, commonly referred to as chike, which directs the ‘growth’ (dongruok) of the living. Since there is, in these times of death and confusion, little agreement among the villagers about how the continuity of life can be maintained, and which order should be created or restored, moments of physical contact (or its absence) are nodes around which the present predicament is debated, and alternative visions of past and future are produced. The present paper looks at one aspect of these debates: bodily intercourse between woman and man. We discuss how this practice, which among Luo tends to be associated with darkness and the absence of words, is increasingly drawn into the light of discourses – such as Christian, Traditionalist, medical and pornographic – which have emerged in western Kenya at different times during the past century, and which in different ways constitute ‘sex’ as a distinctive imagination of intercourse.

Everyday life in the western Kenyan village of Uhero is marked by a pervasive, yet highly implicit, concern with touch.2 JoUhero, the ‘people of Uhero’, touch other people's bodies with great care, paying respect to generational and generative relationships. Even getting in touch with the traces – intentional and unintentional – of other people – living and dead, human or non-human – and indeed with the traces of other's touches, such as for example parental sexual acts, is a matter of great consideration. This preoccupation is followed with some discretion, but very persistently, and after some time of fieldwork it becomes visible as a key theme that runs through everyday life, from cooking and eating to building and farming, from nurturing children to burying the deceased. It even cuts across the economic and religious lines that divide the village.3 Although this is rarely made explicit as a ‘cultural model’, as in ‘We Luo are very concerned with touch’, it can be understood with reference to the concept of riwo, ‘mixing’ or ‘coming together’, a Dholuo verb describing practices across various dimensions of everyday life that momentarily merge persons or their bodies by sharing substance. Such moments of merging release creative or transformative capacity, which can engender ‘growth’ (dongruok). In a sense, all creativity and all transformation rely upon these effects of touch; merging is the condition of emergence. This potential makes touch also highly ambiguous: it can make life as well as destroy it.

Figure 1.  Life Seen!, front and back cover (September 2001)

Touch in this sense is central to JoUhero's concerns with how things should be done, in everyday and in ritual situations, to sustain what some JoUhero refer to as the ‘order of life’ or ‘custom’ (chike), and the ‘growth’ that is its consequence. However, Uhero is in an area with growing economic disparities, expanding religious divisions, and with very high rates of sickness and death, presumably due to HIV/AIDS,4 and there is little agreement among the villagers about how the continuity of life can be maintained and what order should be created or restored. In these times of death and confusion, moments of touch are the nodes around which the present condition is debated and alternative visions of past and future are produced. This paper looks at one aspect of these debates: sleeping with the other, bodily intercourse between woman and man – a vital mode of touching the other body, and a particularly strained form of bodily contact in these days of death.

East Africanists have noted that bodily intercourse is the core of social ethics.5 Our experiences in Uhero are in agreement with these representations. However, studying intercourse in Eastern Africa, we should not consider ‘sex’ as a universal, a fact of nature, but instead regard it as one particular discourse about intercourse, which – in its shifting manifestations and local forms – is to be studied in itself and in relation to other possible imaginations and practices of intercourse. Moreover, we should not assume the homogeneity and stability of any particular ‘culture’ of intercourse, but instead explore the different co-present ‘moral regimes’6 of intercourse in a given society and attempt to trace how ‘sex’ is made and remade under locally specific circumstances.

This paper examines such different imaginations and discourses about bodily intercourse in Uhero, and the concepts of person and relatedness that underlie them. The aim is to retrace how ‘sex’ has become known as an object of discursive reflection and as the source of a specific, ‘modern’, subjectivity.7 After introducing the subject with the case of Odhis, a young man whose confusion about matters of love occupied JoUhero during our fieldwork, the first part of the paper explores two main orientations towards intercourse, which JoUhero refer to as respectively ‘Traditional’ and ‘Christian’, or with more specific connotations: ‘Earthly’ and ‘Saved’. While these are locally described as mutually exclusive opposites, they are increasingly interdependent, each constituted with reference to the other and together delineating a new discourse on ‘sex’ as a specific, maybe ‘modern’, conceptualisation of intercourse. Having thus sketched the field, in which intercourse is located in contemporary village life, the second part of the paper looks at two more recent discourses: AIDS-awareness and pornography. These innovations expand (in Foucault's terms) the ongoing production of a discourse about sex and make bodily intercourse an object of medical reflection and of commoditisation. Despite some obvious modifications that each of them entails, they extend the lines drawn by Christian discourse, making sex an object of individual moral responsibility. Sex in this sense contrasts with an understanding of intercourse as riwo – ‘merging-through-sharing’. However, the departure from riwo that this gradual construction of ‘sex’ in Uhero evokes does not necessarily imply an evolutionary transition from supposedly authentic, ‘African’ intercourse to late modern ‘sex’. Rather, the new knowledge, the new availability of different conceptualisations – and of new conceptualisations of difference – enables new imaginations and practices, and creates confusion, as the following case illustrates.

Odhis’ Dreams

Odhiambo (b. 1975), called Odhis, worked for a local development initiative and lived in Muthurwa ‘shopping centre’ (a conglomerate of rented accommodation and shops with 98 inhabitants in 2001, named after an estate in Nairobi in which many migrant Luo railway workers lived) near the tarmac road which demarcates the administrative area of Uhero village. In the beginning of 2001, Odhis became thin and worried, as he was struggling to find his way between two conflicting love relationships. He had had, since 1997, a relation with Christine, a girl of his age and daughter of a farmer from Uhero; in late 2000 she gave birth to a girl and the child's strikingly beautiful traits left little doubt concerning Odhis’ paternity. Then there was Beatrice, the slightly older, secondary school educated daughter of a teacher, whom he had been going out with for a while. The birth of Odhis’ daughter brought the tension between him and his girlfriends to a head. Initially, Odhis denied paternity and gave JoUhero food for debate by taking an advance payment and unpaid leave from his job and disappearing with Beatrice to town, allegedly using his savings for a hotel and other pleasures of townlife. When he returned he was broke, but proudly wearing the fashionable cap of the late Luo political leader Odinga. When we, among others whom he came to for support, asked him why he denied his ties to Christine and insisted on going out with Beatrice, he responded to our concerns with a defiant: ‘I love her’, and his friends added: ‘He wants an educated, modern girl!’ Odhis’ obstinate clinging to Beatrice bewildered JoUhero. People gossiped about the love-potions, produced from unmentionable ingredients and prepared by medicine-men in the city, that Beatrice had administered to him. When Odhis, who had already been weakened by his worries (combined with the loss of employment and regular meals), fell seriously ill and refused to speak to anybody, people attributed this to the lethal effects of these medicines.

Odhis’ behaviour and his excursions with Beatrice as well as her monetary demands on him, the talk about an educated girl to show off with, and the particular emphasis, in this context, on love-potions, which according to older JoUhero had not been common in the past,8 points to a peculiar aspect of this relationship. Both partners, as well as onlookers speculating about the events, seemed to regard the two people involved and the bond between them as something object-like, to be had or made and used, and as something that could be shaped according to individual wills and dreams; and it was clearly Odhis’ intention to affirm his autonomy in this matter. Odhis’ ties to Christine were of another temper: she had been his first girlfriend and their bond was evident only in the child, and, at least at this stage, not negotiated as object of dream or fancy, nor made a topic of much public speculation. Most JoUhero seemed to acknowledge the self-evident validity of the latter relation, and only a few supported Odhis’ extravagant choices. His mates from neighbouring rooms in the rented house at Muthurwa shared many of his dreams and aspirations and understood well the problem of conflicting girlfriends. Like Odhis, several of them had gone ‘touring’ to town with a girlfriend. However, they joked about his untenable denial of fatherhood and recommended that he accepted the mother of his child as wife and took care of his family, without necessarily abandoning his less virtuous dreams and desires. One of them even teasingly encouraged the otherwise shy Odhis to try to have both at once, as one of the Muthurwa boys, inspired by pornographic videos, had allegedly tried with his girlfriends (in vain, according to the girls). Others took, half jokingly, a ‘traditional’ stance and recommended in jest that he married and built a house for each of the girls (knowing well that he scarcely could afford to build a house for one wife). While she was concerned with his deteriorating health, Nell, Odhis’ slightly older ‘sister’, also joked: ‘he is dreaming of the ‘Bold and the Beautiful’!’, a television soap opera that had that had procured younger JoUhero with imaginations of sexual confusion since the early 1990s. Despite her misgivings, she eventually negotiated the conflict, talking to everybody concerned, including the girls’ parents.

Odhis’ mother, who lived in his ‘father's’ homestead in a nearby village, was in favour of Christine, whom she hoped would move into their home and bring her grandchildren as well as company and assistance. Odhis was born before his mother had married his ‘father’, and since Odhis was her only surviving child, his mother's place in her husband's home was precarious.9 Together with her concern about her only daughter-in-law's fertility, ‘respect’ (luor) was a crucial issue for Odhis’ mother: she regarded Christine as a respectful girl, wishing for proper relations to her child's father and his people. Odhis’ ‘father’, a retired railway man, who, as his ‘son’ put it, had ‘become a born-again Traditionalist when he returned to the village’, also stressed that Christine's home was one that honoured ‘Luo Tradition’, whereas Beatrice's educated parents had left the Luo ways. His advice did not really count for much on this occasion; it was highly unusual that he got involved at all in the debate, and that he seemed to accept Odhis’ belonging to his home; maybe this was because he was seriously ill and only had one other child. Odhis’ other ‘mother’ (his mother's sister) in Uhero, Mercy Ogumba, with whom Odhis had lived as a schoolboy, would usually have regarded a good Christian background and some wealth and education as main criteria for choosing a spouse. Yet, on this occasion, even she advised him to marry Christine : ‘this child is his, why can he not stick to it?’ Concerning the teacher's daughter, Beatrice, she alluded to the rumours that she was not menstruating, that she had ‘bad morals’ and that she might even be ill. Other women similarly pointed out that Odhis’ and Christine's blood was ‘in agreement’ (rembgi owinjore) – hence the child. The other girl's blood, by contrast, was ‘different’ (rembgi opogore): ‘They may agree in their hearts [giwinjore e chunye], but their blood … ?!’ One added jokingly, and in English: ‘Odhis and Beatrice, they are in love!’ These women had no qualms about Odhis sleeping with different girlfriends, but they urged him to realise which one his blood agreed with and to acknowledge the fruit of their merged blood.

Facing this criticism and rising monetary demands from Beatrice, Odhis kept quiet and refused to engage with his critics, even after he had overcome his sickness. He continued to meet Beatrice when he could find the necessary resources, which became increasingly rare. The common-sense argument of the child was irreconcilable with Odhis’ love, and his dream of a well-groomed, smart girl. The situation seemed in a deadlock until Christine took a decisive step and moved with her little daughter into Odhis’ one-room flat, rearranged the furniture in a manner appropriate for a young family, including two AIDS education posters, and declared the matter to be settled. Odhis’ mother encouraged her to hold out, and even her parents declared – ignoring that no bridewealth had been brought – that they would regard their daughter married if he did not send her back within days. Odhis complained to his friends, threatened to escape into the army and slept out for a couple of days, but eventually he came back home. Christine set up a little shop selling food and medicines with the final payments from Odhis’ employment, and Odhis supported this enterprise by bringing the merchandise from the market town. When Christine's father died, shortly thereafter, he struggled to bring the required first wedding gifts (ayie, ‘I accept’) to Christine's home before the father was interred, so as to formalise their marriage. When his own father died a few months later, Christine participated in the ceremonies as his wife. However, when she was asked after the funeral to stay on in her mother-in-law's home, she declined and before the end of the official mourning period, she returned to her shop and room.

Odhis’ case presents us with an utterly bewildered young man, momentarily paralysed by contradictory imaginations and options, increasingly motionless amongst women's moves. The story of him and ‘his’ girls, as it was narrated by himself and the relatives and neighbours around him, illustrates the confusion created by different connotations of the bodily union: visions of romantic town love, ‘sexy’ girls and wealthy men confront imaginations of virtue of various kinds, such as embodied in the ‘rural girl’ or the ‘Christian maid’, and seem eventually to be overruled by the unequivocal force of motherhood, and a tie of the blood, as well as by the joint pressure of different interests within the village community. The case also shows that these different ideas about bodily love, in as much as they seem to exclude one another, mix and merge as they are employed by different people, thus contributing to the overall confus ion. Odhis’ very Christian, Saved aunt, whose ideology should have insisted upon premarital chastity and whose general orientation would have recommended an educated daughter-in-law, succumbed to the facts and advised that Odhis should stick to the woman who had proven her fertility, much in agreement with Odhis’ bodily mother's more kinship-centred view. In her argument, Christian moral concerns with the other girl's virtues and epidemiological worries were mixed with questions of reproductive capacity, which she shared with many others. The outcome of the case – as for the moment – also shows how a matrifocal attitude prevails – or an emphasis on the tie between mother and father, created by their child – that gets the upper hand over the father's aspirations.

Moreover, the case shows in its development that the variety of ideas about sexuality and attachment does not lead to any predictable outcome. In Odhis’ story, the joint decision of most of the women made Odhis stick to his new family, and he even took bridewealth to his father-in-laws home to seal the relation (which few of his age mates in Muthurwa had done). Yet, despite this seemingly customary outcome, he and Christine continue to reside in the roadside settlement outside the village, partly because of Odhis’ unclear position in his ‘fathers’ home, but mainly because Christine did not wish to adhere to customary practices after the burial of Odhis’ father, and maybe because she on the whole preferred a life as an independent shopkeeper assisted by a husband to that of a rural wife digging her fields under the eyes of her mother-in-law. Odhis consented to their continued residence in town, and instead of following custom and building his wife a house in his father's home, he aimed to build ‘a straight home’ according to custom, but on his own, bought land.10 In other words, new ideas about the ties between women and men and about bodily intercourse open debates and create confusion and new opportunities, but they do not produce unequivocal outcomes. With this caveat, let us now turn to these changing discourses about intercourse and explore the background of Odhis’ dreams.

Earthly Ethics and Christian Morality

(i) Riwo:Touch and Transformation

A key to JoUhero's understanding of bodily intercourse is the verb riwo. According to Dholuo dictionaries, riwo means to mix, merge, join, unite, be together and collaborate. Riwo also can mean ‘cross’ or ‘step over’, possibly suggesting an association between merging, and transitions and liminality (or deriving from different etymological roots). In everyday speech, it is the most common verb for intercourse, and it also designates a range of other forms of material contact: to share food (riwo chiemo (food) or riwo lwedo (one's hands, by eating from one plate); conversation (riwo weche (words) or riwo ji (people)); to join a dance (riwore e miel); to share beer (riwo kong'o) or liquor (riwo chang'aa); to share a common grandfather (riwo kwaru) or a kinship bond (riwo wat); to reunite, through shared food and medicine (riwo gi manyasi), people that disturbed the order of everyday life (see below); or to plant and harvest together (riwore waguru (work-group) or riwo tich (work) or riwo lowo (earth)). All these activities are substantial but always momentary, associated with a particular act. They relate the creation of substantial bonds between one and an other person to transformative processes such as conception, cooking and fermentation, intoxication and digestion, plant and animal growth, healing and rain. Riwo thus designates contingent events in the double meaning of the word, implying touch and occurring incidentally, uncontrolled by a will; it is these qualities that enable the momentary consubstantiality between one and other to transform and create. The experience of contingent events such as birth and death, but also of smaller everyday events such as growth and transformation in agriculture and food preparation, is in this way related to moments of touch between humans. Instead of answering the question why life exists and perpetuates itself with reference to an external subjectivity, the planned action of God or scientific Nature, the awe for the living is here directed towards the transcendent capacity of the contingent event between one and other. ‘Sharing’, as captured by the term riwo, designates a momentary, ambiguous moment of simultaneous union and differentiation; the moment of sharing marks two people as different, or else their sharing would not make sense, and it makes them one.

It is in terms of these meanings of riwo that Luo concepts of sociality and personhood must be understood. Riwo is sharing the substance of the other, or sharing substance with him – a moment of mutual complementation. In this logic, the difference between one and the other person implies incompleteness, as one is constituted by the other which he is not (most evidently in the case of man and woman), and this incompleteness contains a creative potential, which is released when it is momentarily transcended – when one touches the other. The gendered complementation that occurs in bodily intercourse is an important case of such creative complementation, but other forms of gendered complementation (labour, planting, cooking, commensality, building, ritual) are equally necessary to maintain creativity and sociality. The creative capacity of touch in this riwo sense is ambiguous – transformations can be towards growth and life, but also towards decay and death, and often one implies the other. Therefore, concerns about how to get in touch in the right way are vital among JoUhero, and debates and disagreements are common.

(ii) Riwruok: Nearness outside Intentionality

While the principle of riwo is omnipresent in everyday practice and conversations about it, bodily intercourse itself (riwruok, n.) is not usually spoken about in such terms between people who respect each other (especially parents and children).11 The constitution of intercourse as an object of discourse is thus restricted. So, too, are other modalities of bringing the act of intercourse into representation.12 Prohibitions regarding (looking at) nakedness are related to this silence surrounding the bodily union. The other body and intercourse should not be made objects of speech or of gaze.13 Seeing the private parts of somebody is dangerous: the worst of a mother's curses is to show her private parts to her son.

It seems strange that this power of nakedness should exist in a place where people dressed scantily (in the sense of hiding the skin) until three generations ago.14 What is at issue, however, is not nakedness itself, but a specific kind of gaze – looking at the other body, especially within particular relations. No deadly risks are involved when men and women bathe at some distance but within potential sight of each other. In sensitive situations, however, even a mental image of the other's body or, rather, of intercourse can be detrimental: when a couple moves into a new house, for example, they sneak into it at night so that nobody could know (or imagine) how they entered and performed the intercourse required on this occasion. The same effort to prevent intercourse and the naked other from becoming objects of representation and intentionality is evident in the proscription against touching the other body with one's hands: little girls caring for siblings are already taught that touching a boy's penis will make it wither, young women are warned that touching their boyfriend's or husband's may kill him. Young JoUhero share this aversion to intentional hand contact, and insist that intercourse ought to take place in darkness; girls disliked the idea of touching the boys genitals, and boys tended to agreed ‘that is out’.15

These avoidances aim at preventing intentional contact with the other's private parts. If, as Emmanuel Lévinas suggests in his post-phenomenological writings, intentionality is premised upon one's identification with the other and the appropriation of the other, then the avoidance, in JoUhero's dealings with intercourse, of speech, gaze and the hand as tools of intention acknowledges the radical otherness of the other in the moment of bodily union. Instead of assuming identity with the other, and of envisaging sex as an exchange of pleasures between equal agents, such a view acknowledges the absolute difference between one and another human, especially woman and man, as the precondition of the bodily encounter and of creation, which results from the momentary transcendence of difference. Clad in darkness, the touch of intercourse is, like a sacred moment, kept beyond representation. The nakedness that it protects is not a thing that offends or pleases the viewer, but the vulnerability of one human facing the other as irreconcilably different, in Lévinas sense of the ‘nakedness’ of the face that creates the human relation beyond or before an intentional act and before subjectivity.16 The maxims and practices derived from the ethics of riwo express respect for the generative power of complementation, of the moment of difference being brought into touch, which is conceptualised less as an act (of one agent upon the other) than as an event (between them). This is the core of the notion of what in English, somewhat misleadingly, is called ‘respect’, luor, a central concept in JoUhero's ethical debates. In this sense – and not primarily in the sense of seniority or authority – the notion of East African ‘respect cultures’ is apt.17 This respect is an awe for the possibility of the human relation, and its unpredictable capacity.

(iii) Dongruok and Chira: Growth and Blockage

The place of intercourse and of riwo in Uhero must be further situated in the context of dongruok (‘growth’) – the ultimate aim of sociality – and of chira, the illness that embodies the opposite of growth: wasting, childlessness, death. To follow chike – the customary ways of performing everyday practices from planting to cooking, building to intercourse, merging the right substances in the right order – opens the way (yawo yo) for dongruok and continuous transformations. The chike according to which particular practices (kwer, pl. kweche) must be ordered are not so much ‘rules’ that prescribe or proscribe specific actions – although they more recently have been reified in such a way (see below). Rather, they are a shared vision of the order of life that allows the participants of social life to harmonise their practices and to speculate about possible violations of these principles, if an illness or a misfortune has affected one of them.

Chike do not aim at forbidding or confining bodily intercourse, but on the contrary, because of the omnipresence of significant moments of merging in the everyday and because of the connections made between different kinds of riwo in ritual and mundane practices, the creative principle of the bodily union is woven into every social practice and evoked in every meal. The rules do not serve to limit its potential, but to proliferate it.

Growth, dongruok, can be blocked by some mix up of the right sequence of practices. Chira is the bodily manifestation of such blockage as child-death or (increasingly commonly) as wasting illness, diarrhoea and death. Chira strikes because the temporal order of things, or their directionality, is confused, preventing the steady downward flow of life. Not sleeping with someone may in this logic be as dangerous as doing so, depending upon the appropriate sequence. Chira and dongruok are the two faces of the ambivalent potentiality of riwo that demarcate the potentialities of human touch.

This riwo perspective is in Uhero commonly referred to as ‘Earthly’, emphasising both its association with the place and with its ancestral forces. According to it, intercourse is an important modality of touch, which as such is neither good nor bad, but necessary to maintain the processes of life that lead to the constitution of persons and the reproduction of life. These ‘amoral’ ethics of riwo persist in the lives of JoUhero, but they have not remained unaffected by the social transformations of the past century and the diversification of discourses related to bodily intercourse that we examine below. 18 The interplay of persistence and change within the ‘Earthly’ perspective can be seen in the ambiguity of the concepts of chodo and luor and in the recent ‘Traditionalisation’ of Luo chike, which we address in turn.

(iv) Chodo and Luor: Continuity and Change

If one looks at the everyday life of the girls sleeping in the house of Mary, a lady in her 90s who lives together with her grandchildren, the girls and young boys of her son's neighbouring home, one is struck by the continuity of the amoral ethics of riwo. Jokes about boyfriends’ visits are common and Mary does not prevent her granddaughters’ nightly visitors, claiming that some of them even present her with tobacco in appreciation of her generosity. The girls, as well as the older boys of the bachelors’ house (simba) at the opposite end of the home, take pride in their adventures. So too, it seems, does Mary: she teases the girls, and, when she speaks about the past, recalls her own exploits with relish. Several of the girls have given birth to children, some delivered by Mary herself; their fathers are not known to the family and they have joined the children of the grandmother's hut. In spite of the material and educational problems they cause for their mothers, these fatherless children are less a moral issue than a proof of womanhood and progress in life, to judge by the girls’ pride. In some respects, then, Mary's house resembles the siwindhe (the house of an old woman, unmarried girls and pre-adolescent boys in the Luo homestead of the past) described by old JoUhero as a place of grandmotherly education on ethics, social life and the secrets of riwruok, as well as of encounters between boys and girls.19 Little seems to have changed since the 1930s and 1940s when observers noted ‘considerable intermingling’ between girls and boys and described the practice of chodo, ‘incomplete penetration’ or ‘playing between the thighs’, that girls used to learn from elderly women so that they could ‘play’ with boys without getting pregnant. 20 In the absence of formal initiation, sexual experiences were and are a mark of maturity and not primarily a moral concern in the sense of binary Christian morality.

Yet, despite these continuities, Mary and other older women in Uhero point out differences between the girls of their past (themselves) and their granddaughters. They claim that these days, limitations in terms of penetration and exogamy are all but forgotten and that their granddaughters do not listen to teachings about the playful chodo of the past. Then, girls’ ‘playing’ (tugo) with boys was sharply differentiated from ‘marriage’ (kendo); it did not open gendered bodies to fertility and reproduction and therefore was not associated with any of the concerns in the sense of kweche (see above) that surrounded married people's intercourse. Today, by contrast, girls ‘play at marriage’ (gitugo kendo): ‘getting pregnant in the grass’, moving in with men, calling it marriage, returning home, starting over again.21 These laments about changed mores – particularly of girls and women – use the term chodo in its contemporary sense of ‘prostitution’.22 Between the times of Evans-Pritchard and the end of the century, pleasurable, amoral ‘play’ has mutated to immoral ‘fornication’ and commodified ‘prostitution’.23 This is not a total transformation of meanings, but it is through these additional meanings that ‘moral’ evaluations permeate speech and thinking about intercourse. The term chodo can no longer be employed in its older amoral sense; as soon as it is spoken, it is situated in the grid of virtue and vice. Practices around Mary's house and her defence of her granddaughters’ right to play with the boys suggest the continuity of an amoral appreciation of intercourse in terms of riwo, but even in Mary's discourse, what otherwise appears (and understands itself to be) an unadulterated voice from the past registers the presence of the ordering principle of sexual morality.

A second concept that JoUhero employ in their evaluation of changing mores is luor (‘respect’), which underwent a similar transformation. While the definition of chodo shifted from play to sin, luor changed from notions of mutual recognition and awe for the powerful potential of substantial relations activated in touch, which we outlined above, to meanings that are closer to the English sense of the word: hierarchy and obedience, self-discipline and respectability. Although Anglican bishops and young, authoritarian politicians sometimes instrumentalise luor in the latter sense for their political ends, present debates oscillate between these two meanings. If JoUhero lament that people (and again, especially women) have no luor, they can be referring to their short skirts, their sexual voracity and indiscriminate contact with men, or to their lack of generosity, compassion and kindness, or their lack of respect for a particular relation. The polyvalent discourses on the loss of luor, like those about the commonness of chodo, must be read not as a way of telling us whether or not people sleep around more today than they did in the past, but as a way of talking about the wider transformations that people have experienced during their lives: the constitution of a new, binary morality, associated to a new subjectivity and the production of objects this entails. This separation of subject and object, and of agent and acted-upon, is taken for granted in western sociality (particularly concerning sexuality) but it is relatively new to Uhero and a challenge to people's understandings of personhood and relatedness.

(v) Chike Luo: Return to the Modern Order or Progression to the Past?

The challenge to Earthly understandings of sociality is reflected in the tide of Luo ‘Traditionalism’, which has accompanied the economic, political and epidemiological crisis that engulfed Kenya and especially the Luo since the 1980s. Although this process of cultural reification (which is beyond the scope of this paper24) understands itself as a ‘return’ to Luo chike, it implies important changes regarding the ethics of riwo and the role of bodily intercourse. In their Traditionalist rendering, chike are fixed, written down and printed as prescriptive ‘Luo Rules’, bearing greater resemblance to the precepts of the Christian moralism that we will turn to below, than to the earlier polyvocal and retrospective debates about the transformative effects of riwo.25

In this process, chira is transformed from a misfortune that, due to confused or ruptured social relations, affected the growth of a group through ill-health, child-death or infertility, into an illness that sanctions individual rule-infringements. Whereas before it had wider implications in relation to lineage and seniority, here chira becomes focused on the act of bodily intercourse. David Parkin showed that chira emerged as a dominant theme of Luo social life in the 1960s, and in particular among urban Luo (it appeared to have been less important in rural sociality).26 He argued that the effects of labour migration had challenged male control over their rural possessions, wives and kin, and that chira, interpreted narrowly as breaches of rules of gender and age seniority, was elaborated and deployed to regain control, as well as to translate new economic resources, gained through urban labour, into power over land and family.

The strong emphasis on chira in rural Luoland forty years later can therefore be considered an aspect of the urbanisation of village life and imagination, which characterises the 1990s return of urban Luo to the village. As part of this process, a moralist-Traditionalist discourse about female chastity, led by elderly men who often became Traditionalists after a long ‘modern’ life in the city, replaces an idiom of mutual respect, interdependence and gender complementarity. Thereby it shifts the emphasis towards individual responsibility and morality, and to sex. A related shift implied by the Traditionalist ‘return’ concerns the conceptualisation of kwer. These efficacious, and thus highly sensitive, practices that make up chike are increasingly rendered as ‘taboos’, supported by an ethnographic tendency to (mis)interpret concerns with the power of touch and substance as ‘prohibitions’, as rules to prevent merging rather than as modalities to elicit its potentials.27

Given this marked Luo Traditionalism, it would be wrong to simply oppose ‘Earthly practice’ to ‘sexual discourses’, as if the former was entirely implicit. The Earthly imagination is increasingly made to produce its own discourse, of Tradition, which makes explicit what before was implied in gestures and practices, and which speaks to the other, even more explicit, discourses that we will now turn to. Clear dichotomies exist only within these discourses, such as when Traditionalists distance themselves from Christians, or vice versa, Saved Christians from Earthly people. In contrast most JoUhero see themselves as Christians and as Earthly people, and straddle the resulting gaps pragmatically. In other words: there is no underlying, unchanged ‘Luo’ notion of intercourse in present day Uhero, against which discursive intrusions occur, but a landscape of fragments, which this analysis groups into different narratives, but which are taken up or dropped less systematically in JoUhero's everyday life. An important factor in the proliferation and fragmentation of discursive options pertaining to intercourse was undoubtedly the intrusion of Christian morality, to which we now turn.

(vi) Cleanness: Sex and Separation

Riwo describes moments of intercourse and other touch in which difference is encompassed by unity – one person and another complementing each other – and in which the continuity of sociality and life itself is produced. In contrast, the Christian, moralist discourse (in the sense of providing clear distinctions of good and evil) on ‘sex’ in Uhero relies on categorical boundaries between persons and bodies, and many a debate among JoUhero about sex is framed in terms of sin and pollution vis-à-vis chastity and cleanness (maler: ‘clean’, ‘bright’ and, in Christian language, ‘holy’). These debates place Earthly practices of riwo in opposition to a Christian life of striving for cleanness (not least from the material contaminations implied by riwo and the earth).

According to the Anglican Church Missionary Society's (CMS) ‘Instructions to Christian Africans’, to which the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) still subscribes, marriage is the core of Christian life, and although Christian marriage is only entered into by a minority of JoUhero, the morality underlying this document appears in most local debates about intercourse.28 The purpose of marriage is here limited to procreation and to prevent men from ‘fornication’: ‘The Christian person must be able to control every desire both of body or soul.’ Sex outside marriage (which includes polygyny) is sin: ‘Your body is the temple of God: keep it holy.’ Apart from its uncompromising moralism, the emphasis on intercourse is striking: sex (and the sexual body) is constituted as an isolated object of the imagination, separated from the wider productive relations of everyday life; and marriage is identified with the physical union, the control of which is central to the constitution of a Christian person, the basic unit of Christian society. Talk about the sexual act is more overt here than in the Earthly ways, albeit in a negative light. Intercourse is made to speak, as sex, in Foucault's sense of a modern, strategic discourse.

These Christian precepts are accompanied by puritan sensibilities about (particularly women's) dress, which have been markers of conversion since the beginning of Luo Christianisation.29 Women's hair should be covered and skirts long and double layered so as to prevent the thighs and their convergence to be seen; trousers are considered to be immodest. The contrast between this Christian emphasis on concealment and the concerns with nakedness, noted above, in the Earthly ways of riwo points to the difference between the darkness of bodily mixing and the hiding and separation of Christian morality. The former concern could be said to be about protecting a vital instant of unity from the separating force that gaze, representation and objectification entail; the latter concern is about excluding or containing the dangerous potential, within the individual person, of being joined with the other; it protects the separateness of the individual.

In Uhero, this moral discourse finds its clearest expression among the Saved or ‘born-again’ Anglican Christians. For Saved women, ‘Christ is enough’ (Kristo oromo); for couples, Salvation entails marital fidelity or abstinence; and unmarried Saved persons aim for premarital chastity. Being thus relegated to the marital union, sex is further restricted by an emphasis among Saved Christians on ‘family planning’ and on endogamous marriage among Saved families’ children. Saved sexual morality in Uhero views sex as fostering impurity and best avoided. The cleanness for which it strives is contingent upon the maintenance of unambiguous boundaries of the body (through self-restraint and concealment) and of one's group (by focusing on the nuclear family, endogamy and class). Loosening one's bodily boundaries risks premarital pregnancy, oversized families and sickness and reveals a lack of ‘self-discipline’, which is the centre of Saved Christian subjectivity. Only self-discipline – chastity, birth control, hard work, savings and investment – brings progress to a person or her family and group. This moral framework links boundaries (of bodies and possessions) and growth in a very different way from that of riwo: here, separations and confinement facilitate ‘development’ (dongruok), imagined as augmentation, which excludes its opposites, such as weakness and wastage; there, the permeation of boundaries by relations of difference is the origin of creation and of growth (also dongruok), imagined as transformation, which encompasses its opposite: decay and decomposition. While Saved sex is about the confirmation of identity, intercourse according to riwo explores the potential of alterity.30

This dichotomous opposition of Saved and Earthly, separation and mixing, is an analytical fiction. JoUhero move between these orientations: girls replace Jesus with boyfriends; widows decide that Christ is not enough, anyway. As Earthly people are quick to point out, Salvation does not prevent hypocrisy: ‘one sees the mouth pray, but does not know the heart’. And there are Christians with diverging views. As one might expect, Catholics are less strict with regard to family planning, but they share Anglican concerns regarding chastity.31 The new ‘born-again’ charismatic Churches also embrace and invigorate the discourse of bodily boundedness. In contrast, some members of Legio Maria, an ex-Catholic independent African Church, interpret the death of today as Divine punishment for the ‘sin of birth control’ that ‘the west’ brought to Africa.32 Thus being a Christian in Luoland need not mean adopting a puritan morality. This sexual morality is important in Uhero not because the majority of JoUhero would adhere to it, nor because it neatly replaces other existing imaginations and practices of intercourse, but because the polarity between Earthly and Christian imaginations shapes JoUhero's understandings of intercourse, and because the contrasts that the moralist discourse rests upon inevitably reconfigure what is around them, drawing other discourses into their binary frame. Saved practices in Uhero have been shaped by missionary rejection of ‘pagan rituals’ of complementation and the logic of riwo, and they rely on the very assumption that they claim not to ‘believe in’ (yie, also ‘to agree’): that physical contact engenders transformation. The new Luo Traditionalists have in turn borrowed Christian notions of sin and chastity in their reformulation of chike into fixed commandments, reconfiguring the Earthly perspective as mirror-image of the Christian discourse. These movements suggest underlying similarities between the two apparently antagonistic perspectives, at least as far as the realm of explicit discourse is concerned. These developments can be further explored in the recent debate about AIDS in Uhero.

The Proliferation of ‘Sex’

(i) AIDS and Chira

By 2000 most JoUhero have become familiar with AIDS or ayaki,33 but most consider it inappropriate to suggest that somebody specific has died of this disease. However, debates about AIDS and its relation to chira are abundant. Chira – wasting, diarrhoea and skin symptoms – resembles AIDS,34 and intercourse is crucial to explanations for both AIDS and chira, but material contact, touch, has different meaning in the two illnesses.35 Chira arises from inside, from a confusion in the substantial relations between people that otherwise are necessary to sustain life. AIDS, by contrast, is an illness from outside, an extreme kind of ‘germ’. It is conceptualised in the metaphors of intrusion, battle and eradication that have shaped tropical medicine, and it reduces the relationship between body and illness to an either–or: contaminated or clean, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. It renders illness and touch a matter of life and death, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, as anti-AIDS campaigns tirelessly proclaim. AIDS is diametrically opposed to an understanding in terms of riwo, chike and chira, according to which illness is ultimately a problem of disturbed flows, of blockages in the continuity between people and in the processes of life. Accordingly, conceptualisations of illness as AIDS or chira lead potentially to different responses, one of which defends the boundaries of one's body and group in the spirit of hygiene, while the other one attempts to restore relations. Putting things in such antagonistic terms overlooks, however, the fact that in practice any long-term illness with the above symptoms can be either or both, and that the two illnesses exist within the same social space. Local ideas about AIDS have been shaped by chira, and, as we have already indicated, chira itself is not simply the unchanged illness of long ago: with the re-constitution of Luo Tradition, chira has become a punishment for a bad deed, shifting the emphasis of this concept from a concern with relations, flows and transformative potentials, to one with punishment as a necessary to sanction individual moral transgressions.

(ii) AIDS and Moralism

The ‘moralisation’ of the social imagination and the conceptualisation of intercourse within the moral framework of ‘sex’ have undoubtedly been encouraged by educational discourses on AIDS, which have emerged in Uhero during the 1990s. Since the beginning of the public debate about the AIDS epidemic in western Kenya, the Churches have played a prominent role, reflecting and reinforcing the view of AIDS as a sexual and thus moral problem.36 Accordingly, the main message on HIV education materials remained for long ‘Say No!’ (emphasising in particular girls’ right to remain chaste) or ‘zero grazing’ (re-using a much earlier slogan for home-based cross-breed cattle husbandry). While emphasising the dangers of sex and adopting an either/or attitude towards it, this discourse promoted a new openness, representing sex as a ‘natural’ part of life. In Foucault's terms, it expanded the ongoing production of a discourse about sex that we suggested Christian mission had initiated.

The continuity between Christian and AIDS discourses is reflected in Christian sermons about AIDS, particularly during funeral services. Favourite themes here are the story of Sodom and the Book of Job, who in the face of loss did not lose faith. According to the Dholuo Bible, the devil states here that he is ‘just walking’ (abayabaya). Since bayo in contemporary Dholuo also means to ‘move’ or ‘sleep around’, this passage allows the preacher to enter into a discussion of HIV, linking ‘movement’, promiscuity and the devil – ‘it is the devil who makes people move around’ – and casting AIDS as this-worldly punishment. Sex is here linked to what are seen as new kinds of mobility in terms of migration and labour, and to idle strolling and dancing that give rise to promiscuity. Moral cleanness has thus become equivalent to containment and stasis. Pre-HIV Christian mission ideology largely failed to obliterate the social practices of riwo, which are anchored in everyday practices and, as far as intercourse is concerned, shielded from view and debate. Christian AIDS-work instead assaults intercourse head-on, linking it to death and suffering. It may be that it thereby lends the Christian message new transformational power.

Luo chike, which the Christian discourse had for long constituted as its antagonist, has been drawn into this new, moralised area of discourse: the adherence to ‘Luo culture’, particularly concerning intercourse, is often blamed for the transmission of HIV. From the opposite, Traditionalist angle, the neglect of ‘Luo rules’ is blamed for the widespread death and illness and stricter rule-adherence is called for. The levirate, or ‘widow inheritance’ has an important place in this debate, since Christian AIDS discourses see it as morally and epidemiologically the worst Luo practice.37 In contrast, Traditionalists attribute women's resistance to the levirate to their bodily and economic greed, and regard this moral decay as the cause of death. Both discourses focus on the sexual act as something that must or must not be performed. One insists on widows’ chastity, the other on intercourse as the execution of a law. As this example shows, the moralisation of intercourse in AIDS-related discourses on sex powerfully encourages a view of women as morally endangered and dangerous and proposes – from both a Saved and a Traditionalist perspective – constraint and control.

(iii) Bounded Bodies and Open Speech

Condoms play a crucial role in the context of AIDS. Initially, opposition to condom use was equally vehement among the Churches and among those who held Earthly views.38 They epitomised moral evil, both for Christian moralists, who saw them as the legitimisation of promiscuity, and for the more Earthly inclined, who thought that intercourse with a condom was no intercourse at all, as no mixing occurred, and saw them as a tool of outside intervention into domestic life. However, while Saved Christians initially saw condoms as an invitation to infringe the boundaries of chastity, promoting sex, today younger Christians advocate their use, and neither priests nor teenagers find it difficult to speak about condoms. Within their Christian or especially Saved morality of boundary-marking and self-discipline, this separating layer of plastic between one person and the other in the sexual act appears to be an acceptable compromise – Saved sex has prefigured ‘safe sex’. One could say that AIDS has driven home (to the body) the virtue of the individual subject that Christian ideas of the person and of sin have long promoted.39 Along the way, the message has been radicalised as a question of life and death, for the HIV virus – in contrast to Christian concepts of sin – knows no absolution. Now sins – acts that compromise the disciplined person and her bounded body – equal death and this-worldly suffering. Only impenetrable frontiers between one and the other can protect physical life. The understanding of the ‘death of today’ as AIDS realises thus an older project of creating new subjects by separating one person and body from the other, around a specific bodily practice – intercourse – and makes personal choice on that practice a matter of life and death.

Speaking about HIV means speaking about sex, speaking of the act of intercourse and of the sexual partner, of his/her genitals and substances. A potent message of recent AIDS education has been ‘Let's talk’, a marketing campaign for condoms – emphasising the need to speak about sex (Figure 2). Educational cartoons on this theme, displayed at the local dispensary, not only show people going to bed with each other (quite against local sensitivities and unheard of a decade ago) but depict a man and a woman sitting at opposite sides of a table, each with a speech-bubble attached to their heads, in which the image of a condom represents their conversation before going to bed with each other. Condom adverts have even begun to promote condoms and, by implication, sex, as a fashionable object of consumption, accompanied by the same iconography as multinational softdrinks, suggesting that sex ‘… is the thing’ (or ‘Obey your thirst!’). You could hardly get further away from the discretion of riwruok. These are significant steps in the production of the discourse on sex, drawing the amoral practice of riwo (specifically intercourse) into the sphere of moral discourse and judgement, forcing it to speak under the threat of death. Reluctantly, some younger JoUhero follow the call; while this will hopefully reduce HIV transmission, it speaks about what was silent and it will effect wider social changes.

Figure 2.  ‘Let's Talk’, roadside kiosk near Kisumu, western Kenya, 2002 (Authors’ photograph)

The outcomes of this repositioning of intercourse and of the extension of the sexual discourse are not predictable. There are a few people, who adapt to it, condemn ‘sex’, discuss its evils and praise chastity; how much this tells us about their practice must remain open. Others claim to adopt what an epidemiologist would call a ‘rational’ (and thus supposedly less moralist) approach and use condoms where they find them appropriate – that is, where they imagine a danger for their own or the other body. They strip ‘safe sex’ of its moralist discourse while, one might argue, nevertheless accepting the language of individual risk, and the imagination of either-or and boundary defence, conforming with Foucault's evolutionary history of sexuality. However, many others reject condoms in a gesture of defiance towards Christian preachers and overseas development workers, teachers and doctors alike. Thus, a number of unmarried girls in Uhero, whom we asked for their occupation, defiantly responded ‘I am just walking about’ (abayo), evoking this term's implication of promiscuity. Particularly for younger people, the separation of bodies by condoms seems to be a problem, because it prevents nearness and flows. They know all they need to know about HIV, they bury their age-mates every week, and yet they say about condoms ‘it's like not sleeping with each other’, ‘it must come out’, and many, even among the girls, take a defiant pride in not using condoms, as captured in their statement (responding to the ‘zero grazing’ slogan, mentioned above): ‘We'd rather die with sweet grass in our mouths!’40 Thus, underneath the evolving ‘sexualisation’ of intercourse and, with it, of ethics and sociality, these young people search for alternative pathways. On the one hand, they appear herein committed to older imaginations of riwo, but on the other hand, the life they are looking for is not one of the past, and certainly not of reified Luo Traditions. Where are they heading?

(iv) Pornography – the Free View

Pornography, a recent phenomenon that further extends these developments, enrages puritan sensitivities and spurs the imagination of JoUhero, may give us some clues to address, though not to answer, this question.41 In the early 1990s, even western ‘gentlemen's’ magazines were illegal in Kenya. Ten years later, one can buy locally produced sex-magazines openly even in small market towns, and pornographic videos are shown in many a small, battery-driven VCR-cinema.42 An official ban on pornography exists, but it is available at affordable prices, and youths of both sexes and many older people are now familiar with these kinds of images, which generally are referred to as showing ‘bad things’ (gik maricho), inverting the values of Christian morality and creating a new place for sex in the moral imagination.43

The magazines carry colour images of scantily clad women and are often sealed in transparent plastic, which enhances the aura of the forbidden and has to be torn by the buyer, underlining the link between gaze, intentional act and appropriation that pornography consists in (Figures 1 and 4). Buying them is making a lifestyle choice, an act of luxurious consumption linked to identity. The urban, middle-class settings of the pornographic narratives (told in English but with Luo names and locations) involve hotels, Viagra, mobile phones and offices; references to ‘other societies’ and ‘the West’ situate them in terms of global connections. Despite their relative innocence, these images and stories cast light on the darkness between bodies, replace blind nearness with visual distance. The other body and sex itself become tangible and commodified objects, implying the creation of a sexual subject, a self in pleasure. The dominant theme is accordingly the orgasm, which both man and woman should have to ‘leave satisfied’, requiring discussion and ‘exercise in sexual techniques’ and careful ‘planning of arousal and climax’ (Figure 3). Technical illustrations, ‘wild ratings’ and promises of ‘multiple’, even ‘two-in-one’ orgasms turn intercourse into an object of sexological categorisation and knowledge, which against the backdrop of riwo is indeed extraordinary.44

Figure 3.  Making sex. Source: Bendo, Sex Curiosities, 29, 34.

The close relationship of these discourses to Christian morality is underlined by recurrent emphasis, in the magazines’ texts, on the ‘badness’ of pornography, which should be ‘read only behind closed doors’.45 Most stories are about morally bad sex such as adultery with a priest, seduction by a teacher, rape by street children, divorce due to Viagra, teenage sex, forced circumcision and incest in a Luo village, and the editor comments: ‘there are lessons here for fornicators: some things are only for those with stamina, and that includes sex’.46 Pornography's attractiveness is derived from its position within the moralist grid – to engage with its ‘badness’ equals (male) toughness. A bikini-clad cover-‘Playgirl’ expresses a similar tension when she asks to be ‘dated in High class restaurants’ but presents the motto: ‘I love my body as much as I hate sex’ (Figure 4).47 The ‘letters to the editor’ in these magazines freely mix Christian morality and Traditionalist reflections, when they search for ‘God fearing’ partners for marriage, express disgust over the ‘indecent dresses of Nairobi women’, rage about the ‘unAfrican habit’ of kissing women ‘imitating alien cultures’, encourage the magazine to depict ‘healthy looking, plump women’ whom ‘typical Africans admire’ and exchange sources of pornographic videos.48 Woven into this pattern of sin and pleasure are warnings about AIDS: ‘No sex is worth dying for!’, and full-page advertisements in all the magazines present AIDS mortality figures and, seemingly in contrast to the other contents, urge readers: ‘if you can't abstain, use a condom, if married stick to one partner, and if not pleased, be tested. AIDS kills!’ (Figure 1).49 The apparent contradictions between moral precepts, fears of HIV/AIDS and yearning for satisfaction do not negate the fact that these intertwined discourses of chastity, infection and pleasure share the idea of a bounded, self-protecting and self-interested person who acts (in sex and otherwise) upon the other in a subject–object relation, and they rely on a binary morality according to which the individual subject chooses between good or bad.

Figure 4.  Playgirl cover (September 2001).

A subject of great fascination for young and old in Uhero seems to be oral sex (fellatio only), which, according to the cited magazines, epitomises western influence. This makes sense as oral sex represents the starkest contrast (sado-masochism being as yet unknown) to the non-intentionality and non-objectification of riwore. It focuses intentionality and reduces nearness to an act performed by a subject to a part, a thing (and by reverse metonymy, it turns the whole other who carries that thing into an object). Moreover, oral sex makes the sexual act itself an object of exchange, ‘something he wants’ and the girl ‘gives him’, as a young woman put it. In oral sex, eating is turned into a metaphor of consumption and appropriation. We noted above that in everyday practice the link between eating and intercourse, familiar from many African societies, relies on the merging-through-sharing that both imply. In oral sex the metaphorical substitution of eating for sex and the conceptualisation of both as consumption is different: it separates rather than merges subject and object. As yet, this is as far as one can get in Uhero on the way towards making oneself a subject and the other an object of pleasure.

That pornographic images and texts are condemned by the Anglican Church does not mean that they are antithetical to Christian discourses on sex. In contrast to their parents, young Anglicans (even Saved ones) have begun to discuss sex not as a source of sin that needs to be constrained, but as a need that must be allowed to take its course, lest it erupt in sinful ways. According to this view, Saved wives’ chastity risks driving their husbands into sin, and women are also perceived as having a right to sexual satisfaction. The latter was brought home to us in all its novelty when a young Anglican deaconess, chatting with other well-to-do Saved women over tea after the Sunday Service said: ‘How can Jesus be enough for a widow of my age? She cannot live without that sweet feeling.’ The young women agreed that both parts of a Christian couple are obliged to satisfy each other sexually. The deaconess, with whom we had earlier spoken about ‘the problem of pornography’ (which she then had considered a threat to morality) added: ‘You see, that's where those “bad things” can even be of use.’ This ‘liberation’ of sex and its constitution not as a danger, but as an obligatory exchange of satisfaction, is a significant step in the evolution of Christian notions of individual bodies and persons.

Different ages see things differently: old ladies suspect their daughters-in-law of spoiling their sons with unheard of sexual demands; some boys recognise the potential of pornography to support dominance; some adventurous girls voice new ideas that frighten shy boys, who then claim to be Traditionalists. Worries about taboos and illness mingle with Christian sensitivities, and both feed into debates about what people do wrong, and into the struggle to make sense of the current crisis. Thus, pornography does not replace other idioms of sex, but the technical reproducibility of intercourse avails to JoUhero the observational gaze as a new option, a new distance in what is potentially one of the closest moments of human touch. It turns bodies into objects, reduces the complexity of riwruok to an ‘orgasm’, and makes sex itself an object, an act and an experience to be produced and exchanged, to be done and had.

It is ironic that images of pornographic nakedness should strike at the core of African sociality and relatedness more than a hundred years after the gaze of the colonial occupiers and their photographers constituted Africa as the ‘naked continent’, and the undressed black body as the object of white pornographic imaginations (as well as of social control). A century after colonial picture postcards and expedition photographs have on the one hand fed into the subjection of Africans to western knowledge, and on the other hand into the late modern sexual revolution, images of naked white people bring the message home to Africa.50 According to some western feminists this pornographic turn may have negative consequences: male domination, sexual violence and promiscuity.51 More radically, as Kappeler suggests, one might argue that the implications of pornography reach deeper than this: rather than merely prefiguring new realities of sex (new modes of men acting upon women), pornography embodies the deployment of representation for the constitution of a particular subjectivity marked by its distinction from and superiority to the other – control, that is, unadulterated by the contingent encounter with the other.52 As such, the advent of pornography in Uhero signals not only changing gender relations, but the progressive development of a way of seeing that constitutes the opposite of touch.53

It would be premature to conclude, with Kappeler, that the pornographic fantasy or the subjectivity of sight replaces other modalities of sociality in Uhero. To be sure, the debates about sex and pornography are part of larger struggles regarding subjectification, but it is important not to make assumptions about where all of this will lead to. At present, pornography is not, it seems, consumed by individuals, but in groups, sometimes composed of men and women, with a mixture of bewilderment and excitement. It is maybe more a medium of instruction and imagination about other possible worlds and an issue of debate, a modern symbol and a source of intimate knowledge about ‘white ways’ (chike wazungu), which provides new sexual imaginaries, new objects of discourse and gaze, but not necessarily another practice (judging by the youths’ accounts, attempts to make Uhero's girls into objects are so far not very successful). One should also note that, in the context of Uhero, pornography could also have beneficial consequences: rather than a mere outlet for the sexual frustrations of AIDS-induced chastity, pornography could be read as market-driven response to AIDS, extending – in an unforeseen way – the messages of ‘Let's talk’ health education. It potentially enables people to talk about sex, making it an object of speech, and to look at sex as a thing that one can make and remake. What will be lost on the way remains in darkness.

Conclusion

In contemporary Uhero, everyday practices of coming together and merging, riwo, share the social space around intercourse with other discourses, outlined above as ‘Puritan’ and ‘Traditionalist’ (religious/moralist), ‘AIDS’ (medical/political) and ‘pornographic’ (representational/commodified). These intertwined and interdependent discourses make ‘sex’ as a discourse in Foucault's sense, entangling intercourse with governmentality, market and the production of knowledge. They are aspects of Foucault's ‘polymorphous technologies of power’, ‘strategies’ in Certeau's sense, which have emerged in Uhero in a historical sequence similar to that outlined by Foucault, but over a shorter time span and as ready-assembled exports from more distant sources of government.54

While one could, following Foucault, regard pornography as an intensification of the processes of subjectification, objectification and commoditisation that mission, medicine and market have brought to bear upon JoUhero (and such an interpretation is certainly partially correct), young JoUhero seem to make use of the new, diverse opportunities in their own ways, rejecting the static rules of Christian or Traditional moralism and hygiene, which they experience as barriers to their own search for a way of life. Their bodily defiance has a tradition in the same area, as witnessed by the occurrence, around 1932, of a self-assertive, anti-colonial and anti-mission youth movement, ‘The Fornicators’, who subscribed to nakedness and ‘traditional’ dress, and were described by an English traveller as ‘naughty young men who roam the country having dances and orgies [and] paint round one eye, which gives them a sinister appearance. […] a reaction against our law and order’.55 The Uhero youths’ rejection of boundaries and their insistence on continued movement and togetherness against the odds – ‘We'd rather die with grass in our mouths’ – also resembles the defiant rejection of ‘safe sex’ among Luo youth in Tanzania: ‘It is better both die than to use a condom’.56 However, apart from the obvious danger that these young people's defiance entails, it is difficult to decide whether this should be represented as a creative search for ways out of being stuck between past and future (a ‘tactical’ appropriation of space, as Certeau celebrated), or whether this liberation is already contained in the imagination of freedom that the new discourses transport (as Foucault and Pasolini argued in their critique of the European ‘sexual revolution’).

Uhero youths challenge modern discourses while simultaneously striving for the new opportunities that these offer to the ‘individual’. While informed by new sources such as video films, their search is rooted in another matrix, designated by the term riwo. In this search, photographs, narratives and video films such as those mentioned above might indeed be educative, but the optimism of some ethnographers of modern African youth, such as Richards, who interprets similar imagery as sources of ‘imaginative solutions to the challenges posed by the global epidemic of drugs and violence’, appears to us naive, neglecting the less palatable transformations of the subject and his imagination, which the new images – be they violent or pornographic – set in motion.57 These need a more thorough examination. A hundred years after colonial occupation, mission and medicalisation, riwo appears still to be the dominant theme of intercourse in Uhero, despite church and school practices, sexual moralism, AIDS education and pornography. Its persistence may be explained partly by the limited power and reach (compared to nineteenth- and twentieth-century European governmentality) of the strategic institutions in Kenya. But it is not just a matter of limited power, but also of the particular ways in which riwo is embedded and reproduced in everyday practices of touch, both fleeting and momentous, reiterated in many daily gestures, which (like intercourse) are inexplicit and often shielded from view. Furthermore, there exists a collective imagination in Uhero, which – although contested and affected by the strategic discourses of Traditionalism that draw it into the field of discursive power-play – insists on the continuance of riwo in specific practices: chike, the order of life.58

Once these everyday practices are rendered reified Tradition, made into discourse, they become the object of reflections and engaged in contests with other discourses – be they moralist Christian or libertine Pornographic – and they potentially lose ground or harden into authoritarian rules. For the time being, this has only happened to a limited extent: only the ‘ears of the hippopotamus’ have become visible, while most of it remains submerged in the muddy waters of the everyday, or, in the particular case of intercourse, in the darkness of the night. Riwo persists, apart from intercourse, in the many momentary movements of one person towards the other, producing myriads of relations in a continuous daily practice in which being or coming together remains the ultimate value. Life springs from riwo, but also death – and although one may be enthralled by young JoUhero's defiance in the face of medical rationality and Christian morals in their defence of togetherness, it might be this very source of persistence and continuity that brings about its destruction.

We are grateful to the people of ‘Uhero’ and especially to Mercy and her family, and to Mary and her large family for their hospitality and patience. Thanks to Philister Madiega and Emmah Odundo who worked with us. Our late teacher and friend Susan Benson's reading of an earlier draft was enormously helpful. The fieldwork was carried out in association to the Kenyan Danish Health Research Project, and was funded by grants from the Danish Council for Development Research. Additional support came from the Institute of Anthropology (University of Copenhagen), the Danish Bilharziasis Laboratory, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Smuts and the Rivers Funds, University of Cambridge. Names of places and persons have been changed.

Notes

1. Title of a sex-focused ‘pornographic’ magazine in Kenya.

2. In 2002, at the end of our last long-term stay (2000–02) in this village in which we have worked on and off since 1995, Uhero had 956 inhabitants distributed across 105 scattered patrilineal, virilocal homesteads. Most people engaged in subsistence agriculture, some planted locally marketed cash crops, many of the men fished and men and women engaged in short-distance fish trade. Many of the older people had lived and worked in towns before settling in their rural homes, and many of Uhero's young people were moving between village and town, working or looking for work. Like elsewhere in rural Nyanza, most households in Uhero have relied on migrants’ remittances for cash needs such as schooling, medical care and even for food (Hay ‘Luo Women and Economic Change’; Stichter, Migrant Labour in Kenya; Cohen and Odhiambo, Siaya). In the last decade these remittances have become increasingly unreliable, due to growing urban unemployment and return migration, as well as to the burden of illness and death due to AIDS (Francis, ‘Migration and Changing Divisions of Labour’).

3. See Prince, ‘Salvation and Tradition’.

4. Each year of our fieldwork, between 2000 and 2003, thirty JoUhero died (above 3 per cent, a likely underestimation due to our census procedures) and about half of these deaths affected young adults, possibly related to HIV/AIDS. Likewise, the age-distribution showed the mark of AIDS, the middle age groups being reduced by deaths among younger adults. Accordingly, JoUhero recognised ‘the death of today’, which many saw as but the outcome of a long-term loss and decline captured in the expression: ‘the land [piny, also ‘earth’ and ‘community’] is dying’.

5. See Whyte, ‘The Widow's Dream’, 101–03, or Heald, ‘Power of Sex’, 128–45 for respectively Marachi and Gisu, both neighbours of the Luo.

6. Ahlberg, ‘Is there a Distinct African Sexuality?’, 220–42.

7. Our emphasis is here on spoken and written discourse, due to the limitations of our fieldwork data, and in order to be able to provide an overview of several different discourses, between which intercourse is negotiated. Thus, the sensual, embodied aspects of knowing, undoubtedly important to our topic, are not the object of the reflections below.

8. According to women of various ages, love-potions (referred to as ‘medicine’ (yath)) used to be employed by wives to attract their husbands with the ultimate aim of conception. In contrast, according to them, there were now a growing variety of potions, often with foreign origin or connotations (one was recommended to Odhis as ‘Atlantic’, the ‘Luo Viagra’), which aimed to attract men (less frequently women) for sexual satisfaction.

9. Classificatory relations are distinguished by inverted commas to enable the reader, familiar with biological kinship reckoning, to realise the extension of kin terms and relations beyond biology.

10. Odhis referred in this debate to ethnographic work on the Luo he had read, arguing that ‘Luo rules’, especially in his father's ‘born-again Traditionalist’ rendering ‘only serve[d] to maintain the old people's authority and the stages’ of hierarchy and could not contribute to ‘development’ (see below).

11. Intercourse can be called riwo only among those who are ‘free’, such as peers or grandmothers and their grandchildren. Usually, if one talks about it, euphemisms referring to related practices of physical nearness or sharing are used – ‘to sleep’ (nindo) or ‘sit together’ (bedo kanyakla achiel), ‘to eat’ (chiemo) or ‘bite’ (kayo) – and even these are not used freely. In the ritual context, tieko (‘to finish’) chik refers to required intercourse.

12. Similar restrictions of speech, vision and touch related to intercourse apply among the Gisu (Heald, ‘Power of Sex’, 131).

13. Even in funeral ‘discos’, boys and girls dance by themselves, and bodily contact occurs in darkness.

14. Hay, Who Wears the Pants?, 5–6.

15. Some girls complained they ‘could not know’ whether a boy had put on a condom, which (even if it is an excuse for the girls’ unwillingness to use condoms, which many girls admitted to) only makes sense if it is dark and if the genitals are not touched.

16. Lévinas, Die Spur des Anderen, 198–200.

17. Heald, ‘Power of Sex’.

18. We distinguish the wider field of ‘ethical’ evaluations of human conduct from ‘morality’ as ethical systems setting up ‘law-like obligations’ in a strictly binary frame. Morality in this sense is but a ‘certain kind of answer to the question: how ought one to live?’, ‘distinguished among ethical systems’ (Laidlaw, For an Anthropology of Ethics, 14).

19. See Cohen, ‘Doing Social History from Pim's Doorway’, 191–228; Cohen and Odhiambo, Siaya.

20. Ominde, The Luo Girl, 31–32, 37. See also Evans-Pritchard, ‘Marriage Customs of the Luo of Kenya’, 228–44. In the past newly-wed girls were apparently even permitted to sleep with their earlier lovers (chodene, sg. chotne), i.e. those with whom they previously had only chodo, until the ritual of riso when the husband brought cattle to the girl's parents, built a house for her and she began to cook for him (Ocholla-Ayayo, Traditional Ideology and Ethics, 149).

21. See also Cohen and Odhiambo, Siaya, 97. These laments do probably reflect dramatically changed marriage practices or at least a delay of formal marriage compared to the previous generations. In 2000, very few of the young couples in Uhero had even commenced wedding visits and only in one case did we witness the bringing (tero) of a single cow to the bride's home, whereas the older men and women generally claimed that numerous cows had been brought for their marriage (up to 15). (A formal ‘bridewealth survey’ was not possible as the topic was too sensitive).

22. When we asked Mary and other old women directly, they confirmed the older ethnographies’ descriptions of chodo, and that they had been taught about it by their ‘grandmothers’, whereas in contrast, Mary's granddaughters and most others who speak English translate chodo as ‘to prostitute’ or ‘sleep around’ with implications of moral waywardness and danger (of illness). Even old Mary uses it at times in this sense to chastise the mores of certain contemporary girls. It is also used in this sense in the Luo Bible.

23. This transformation was probably linked, like in the case of other socially important concepts, to the particular use of these terms in the Luo Bible, translated by missionaries, and in Christian speech.

24. See Prince, ‘Salvation and Tradition’.

25. See e.g. Mboya, Luo Kitigi gi Timbegi; K'Aoko, The Re-Introduction of: Luo Circumcision-Rite; Ogutu, Ker Ramogi is Dead; Malo, Jaluo; Raringo, Chike jaduong e dalane.

26. Parkin, Cultural Definition, 149–63. Parkin's idea that 1960s rural Luo were predominantly concerned with witchcraft was born out by JoUhero's narratives of the 1960s sleeping sickness epidemic, which were full of witchcraft accusations. This is unlike the present situation, in which witchcraft has become marginal compared to chira (for a similar argument about witchcraft and taboo in western Kenya see Whyte and Whyte, ‘Cursing and Pollution’).

27. Whisson, ‘Some Aspects of Functional Disorders’, 283–304; Douglas, Purity and Danger.

28. Wilson, Luo Customary Law and Marriage Customs.

29. Hay, Western Clothing and African Identity; Hay, Who Wears the Pants?

30. In de Certeau's terms, Saved sex could be said to rely on a ‘strategic’ imagination focused upon ownership of ‘place’ – that is, the Saved, self-disciplined person and her body (and the family and the Church) (see Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34–42). In contrast, riwo designates a ‘tactical’ engagement with the other within which relations are reconfigured and remade out of movements that produce moments of touch and contingence, culminating in – but not to be reduced to – conception and birth. Such tactical engagement does not rely on the possession of power and indeed, in the case of intercourse, it seems purposely withdrawn from the reach of the calculus of power. In contrast, Christian morality (as well as Tradition) constructs sex and its control as a domain of self-making and of deployment of power. This power is often employed to control women, but, as the case of Saved, independent widows shows, it may also be a means for women to take control of their lives. Either way, it fashions new persons.

31. See Catell, ‘Praise the Lord’.

32. Schwartz, Selected Aspects of Legio Maria Symbolism; Schwartz, ‘Christianity and the Construction of Global History’, 134–74; Prince, ‘The Legio Maria Church in Western Kenya’.

33. Ayaki derives from the verb yako, ‘to plunder’, ‘to grab’, ‘to gobble up’.

34. These symptoms of chira predate the HIV epidemic (Abe, ‘The Concepts of Chira and Dhoch among the Luo of Kenya’, 127–39).

35. The relationship between chira and AIDS remains a puzzle to villagers. The two illnesses can be glossed as identical, as when an elderly neighbour remarked: ‘we used to call it chira but now we know it as AIDS’, or when people argue that: ‘in the old days, chira could be treated with manyasi’, ‘but nowadays’ this is no longer the case because ‘people move so much (geographically, socially and sexually) that one does not know whom one sleeps with’ (i.e. one does not know his/her relations and situation in life). Alternatively, the two illnesses can be regarded as distinct, as in: ‘chira comes from spoiling chike, AIDS is from sleeping with somebody who has it’. In spoken discourse (especially in interviews) people construct relatively clear relationships between the two illnesses, but in everyday life distinctions are blurred. The different connotatioins of the two illnesses are evident in the synonyms used for them: chira is the illness ‘of long ago’ (machon), ‘of home’ (mar dala), ‘of the land’ (mag piny), associated with Luo identity and expressing the present crisis of Luo life, as people have left the Luo ways and lost direction in life. Ayaki is the ‘new illness’ (tuo manien), ‘from outside’ (mar oko), ‘from town’ (mar taun), also ‘of moving’ (mar bayo), associated with an intrusion from outside, and excessive, undirected movement.

36. During the 1990s the question of teaching schoolchildren about HIV/AIDS was debated in the national media, schools and homes. Initially, an alliance of government (unwilling to engage with the issue), parents (who felt that such matters should not be talked about between adults of reproductive age and children) and churches (who refused to accept the fact of pre- and extra-marital sex) objected to such teaching. Eventually – and again to some extent driven by the major churches – this gave way to some HIV education.

37. See Prince, ‘Salvation and Tradition’; Okeyo and Allen, ‘Influence of Widow Inheritance’.

38. Sometimes the two positions drew upon each other. Thus, some youths referred to a preacher's claims that condoms could not prevent AIDS to justify their reluctance to use them. Especially during the initial condom donation programmes, when truckloads of condoms appeared in western Kenya without much explanation, rumours about the impregnation of these condoms with HIV occurred – tied in with rumours that HIV had been spread by the Americans to eradicate black people, or by the government to get rid of the Luo (similar rumours are found in many parts of Africa, e.g. in the Ashanti region of Ghana, Susan Benson, personal communication).

39. It is an awareness of this continuous process of subjectification and individuation that is implicit in JoUhero's talk about the ‘death of today’ being caused by a lack of ‘love’ (hera) between people; that is by the neglect of the practices of relatedness in the sense of riwo, which are synonymous with hera; for them, people die because they are no longer ‘together’, while from the perspective of AIDS knowledge, they cannot be together because they will die.

40. Taylor describes similar concerns among Rwandans with the ‘blocking’ effects of condoms, preventing ‘reciprocal flows of secretions between the two partners’, which he interprets in relation to Rwandan notions of ‘fractal’ personhood based on substantial continuities between persons, which much resemble the understanding of personhood captured in the Luo concept of riwo (Taylor, ‘Condoms and Cosmology’, 1023–28, 1026).

41. We refer to different media focusing on sex (mainly magazines and videos) as ‘pornography’ although this term is not commonly used in Uhero, because the magazines are the most recognisable form of this new discourse (see Figure 1), and because these expressions all share an emphasis on visual distance and objectification by gaze, which is central to the pornographic mode of relating to the world. This choice of term should not gloss over important differences between western pornography and the materials common in Uhero: for instance, many of the magazines also seem to have an educational aim.

42. Internet pornography does not play a role in the rural areas yet. Unlike professionals in Kisumu and Nairobi, no JaUhero has regular access to private internet facilities. The computers in the two internet cafes in Kisumu contained no traces of pornographic website use, probably because of the relatively public setting.

43. The proliferation of ‘bad’ pictures and texts has been accompanied by ‘bad’ music, dance and lyrics, which are hotly discussed in Uhero and have a much broader audience (e.g. at the nightly discos at village funerals). The new lyrics praise girls’ bodies and refer to sex in a way that horrifies moralists of Christian and Traditionalist colours. The 2001 ‘hit’ ‘Adhiambo's buttocks’ (Adhiambo Sianda), for example, contains lines like: ‘Her panty makes me so happy – small and clean – Your intercooler kills me, your intercooler makes me happy’, which led the local Anglican Church to denounce this tape as ‘unchristian’. Similarly, ‘Atoti’, a 2002 hip-hop song dwells on the male singer's pleasure in viewing his girl's different body parts, which she presents to him in her dance (Prince, ‘Popular Music and Luo Youth’).

44. E.g. Bendo, Sex Curiosities, 29–31.

45. Playgirl (September, 2001): 2.

46. ‘Life Seen! ’ For Those Who Love Life (September, 2001); 2.

47. Playgirl (September, 2001): 1.

48. ‘Life Seen! ’ For Those Who Love Life (September, 2001): 24–27.

49. ‘The wildest sex guide’ combines descriptions of venereal diseases and HIV with images of acrobatic sexual positions and of white couples having sex, to relate a somewhat ambiguous message (Midui, Wildest Sex Guide).

50. See e.g. Hay, Who Wears the Pants?; Corbey, ‘Alterity: The Colonial Nude’, 75–92.

51. See Dworkin, Pornography. Similarly, local Christian discourses and debates in the Kenyan newspapers (e.g. Daily Nation, Saturday Magazine, ‘Rid us of this Filth’, p.5, 5 Jan. 2002) regarded pornography as a threat to morality.

52. Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation, 59.

53. In other words, rather than constituting a threat to morality, pornography is the apotheosis of the particular form of separating morality, which produces the modern, moral subject.

54. Foucault, History of Sexuality. Vol.1; Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

55. Perham, East African Journey, 150–51.

56. Dilger, ‘Sexuality, AIDS, and the Lures of Modernity’, 23–52.

57. Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest, 114.

58. This differs from Certeau's inner-city ‘tactics’, which he suggests refer to ‘older’ forms but remain inchoate and inarticulate and, maybe more importantly, unaware of their links to past and memory, place and landscape.