Corrie Decker

The Age of Sex

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

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

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

University of Wisconsin Press (2025)

The Idea of Development in Africa

A History

The Idea of Development in Africa challenges prevailing international development discourses about the continent, by tracing the history of ideas, practices, and 'problems' of development used in Africa. In doing so, it offers an innovative approach to examining the history and culture of development through the lens of the development episteme, which has been foundational to the 'idea of Africa' in western discourses since the early 1800s. The study weaves together an historical narrative of how the idea of development emerged with an account of the policies and practices of development in colonial and postcolonial Africa. The book highlights four enduring themes in African development, including their present-day ramifications: domesticity, education, health, and industrialization. Offering a balance between historical overview and analysis of past and present case studies, Elisabeth McMahon and Corrie Decker demonstrate that Africans have always co-opted, challenged, and reformed the idea of development, even as the western-centric development episteme presumes a one-way flow of ideas and funding from the West to Africa.

Cambridge University Press (2021)

Mobilizing Zanzibari Women

The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa

"Decker provides a detailed and richly-nuanced study of Muslim women's education in Zanzibar, revealing not only what colonial officials, Islamic scholars, and island elites sought to achieve by providing secular education to women, but more importantly how Zanzibari women used schooling for their own empowerment. Her study situates the development of girls' education in Zanzibar within larger global trends in the Islamic and Western worlds for 'modernization' and demonstrates how island women's movements into paid professional employment were also part of a larger twentieth-century global trend towards women's economic self-reliance." - Laura Fair, Associate Professor, Michigan State University, USA

Palgrave Macmillan (2014)