Local and Foreign Models of Reproduction in Nyanza Province, Kenya

This article uses colonial archival records, surveys conducted in the 1960s, and surveys and focus group discussions in the 1990s to describe three distinct but temporally overlapping cultural models of reproduction in a rural community in Kenya between the 1930s and the present. The first model, “large families are rich,” was slowly undermined by developments brought about by the integration of Kenya into the British empire. This provoked the collective formulation of a second local model, “small families are progressive,” which retained the same goal of wealth but viewed a smaller family as a better strategy for achieving it. The third model, introduced by the global networks of the international population movement in the 1960s, augmented the second model with the deliberate control of fertility using clinic provided methods of family planning. By the 1990s this global model had begun to be domesticated as local clinics routinely promoted family planning and as men and women in Nyanza began to use family planning and to tell others of their motivations and experiences.