AAS "First Fridays" Speaker Series

Abstract: The twentieth century was the age of institutions for children and youth, when standardizing legal, medical, scientific, and social definitions of childhood and youth became a global phenomenon. In colonial East Africa (now Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda), this began with the institutionalization of chronological age in the first half of the twentieth century as officials, teachers, religious leaders, and doctors worked to bring children within the state’s reach. The standardization of chronological age in East Africa facilitated the registering and management of young people, and it imposed “modern” standard concepts of time, both historical and individual, on colonial subjects. British colonial practices of measuring and monitoring African children privileged Western temporal cultures based on the Gregorian calendar, but East Africans interpreted these ideas through their own epistemologies of development, both individual and societal.