Science Quote by Louis Leakey

Leakey’s phrasing performs a neat double move: it reports an intimate social practice while quietly relocating authority over it. “Most Kikuyu marriages” sounds like neutral ethnographic scope, but the sentence’s real engine is “what is described by anthropologists as.” With that clause, Kikuyu custom gets reframed through an external credentialing system, as if the practice becomes legible only once stamped by a discipline and its vocabulary. The words aren’t openly judgmental; the subtext is bureaucratic. A living institution is translated into a category.

“Bride price” is doing a lot of cultural work. It carries the faint commercial tang that English readers can’t easily unhear: transaction, exchange, value. Anthropologists have long argued about whether that term clarifies or distorts, because it risks implying the sale of a person rather than a transfer of obligations, kinship ties, and reciprocal responsibilities. Leakey’s “arranged on the basis of” tightens the transactional impression, nudging readers toward an economic rationale even when marriage negotiations can be as much about alliance-building and social continuity as anything “priced.”

Context matters: Leakey wrote from the colonial-era pipeline where East African societies were documented, classified, and often instrumentalized for administration and missionary debate. His sentence is observational, but it’s also a cultural positioning: Kikuyu marriage becomes a specimen in the Western explanatory cabinet. The intent is to sound scientific. The effect is to make “anthropologists” the implied narrator of Kikuyu reality, and the Kikuyu themselves the narrated.