Miroslava Prazak

Talking about Sex: Contemporary Construction of Sexuality in Rural Kenya

Discussion of sexuality in Kuria District in rural Kenya is constrained by relationships of respect between parents and children. Grandparents and peers were, and continue to be, the main sources of knowledge and information on the subject. As the arbiters of norms and values, grandparents convey reproduction as the goal of sexual activity, carried out within the context of marital responsibilities. Peers provide a more practice-oriented perspective, as well as form the community of peers which ultimately enforces the norms, based on cultural notions of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. The growing importance of education, mandated by shifting economic, political, and social contexts is helping redefine roles and expectations, but has not yet become fully integrated into the discourse or processes needed to define guidelines for regulating adolescent sexuality to reflect more closely the contemporary situation within which adolescents learn about and practice appropriate sexual behaviors.

’We're on the run’: ideas of progress among adolescents in rural Kenya

Abstract Based on compositions written by Standard VIII students in rural southwestern Kenya, this essay analyses the constructs of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ as conceived by youths who are about to complete their primary education. Asked to describe how their lives compare with the lives of their grandparents, the essays show that Kuria adolescents see progress and development as central to their lives. By and large, they do not wish to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, and tend to speak of the ways of the past as inferior, outmoded and insufficient for success in todays world. They see todays world as fundamentally different from that of their grandparents, and fundamentally better. Yet adolescent Kurians do not accept all the component elements of progress and development as desirable. And in this way they invoke their own power of agency to shape their individual lives and the transformational direction of their generation.