‘Beach-Boy Elders’ and ‘Young Big-Men’: Subverting the Temporalities of Ageing in Kenya's Ethno-Erotic Economies

Abstract

In the 1980s, Samburu men from northern Kenya began migrating to coastal tourist resorts to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for European tourists. Many of them engaged in transactional sex or marriages with European women attracted to the image of the exotic African young male warrior. Through relationships with European women, some Samburu men managed to rapidly accumulate wealth, becoming so-called 'young big-men'. As a way to transform their wealth into more durable forms of respectability, these men used their money to marry local women and speed up their ritual initiation into elderhood. Meanwhile, there also emerged the figure of 'beach-boy elders', men who aged before accumulating sufficient wealth. They returned to coastal tourist resorts, dressed as young warriors, and waited to find European partners. In the article, I argue that beach-boy elders and young big-men produce queer moments in the temporalities of ageing, in that they subvert normative expectations of ageing at the very same time that they seek to produce them.keywords Age, temporality, sexuality, Samburu, Kenyan tourism B amburi is one of the most popular tourist beaches on the north coast of Mombasa. Luxurious tourist hotels and expensive Italian restaurants, swimming pools, and disco bars line the beach front, facing onto the Indian Ocean. Tourists -mainly from Western Europe -sunbathe on the white sands. Kenyan men from all over the country sell souvenirs or offer tourists picturesque boat trips and scuba diving sessions, camel rides, or guided tours ethnos, vol. 80:4, 2015 (pp. 472-496), http://dx.

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