If books fail, try beauty: Educated womanhood in the new East Africa By Brooke Schwartz Bocast. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 205 pp.

This ethnography of university life and early adulthood offers an accessible account of young people's competing priorities in changeable times. Centered around a cohort of female undergraduates at the renowned Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, Bocast's book highlights the contradictory expectations they face and the creative pathways they use to meet these on their own terms. Her analysis contributes to bodies of literature on neoliberalism and its impacts, particularly concerning the privatization of education; cross-national experiences of “the middle class”; gendered dimensions of the life course; and sexual health and behavior. I have found the book exceptionally useful in introductory courses. In addition to students in African studies, gender and women's studies, anthropological demography, and the anthropology of education, the book should also be of great interest to public health educators and professionals, whose theories about “transactional sex” Bocast squarely aims to criticize. The phrase “If books fail, try beauty” disparages female university students, particularly Makerere matriculants. The implication, of course, is that women are not capable students but woo their way to a degree by sleeping with professors or having boyfriends do their work. Presuming these claims to be so much hyperbole and prejudice, Bocast investigates and finds herself surprised by “a much more complicated reality” in which “‘transactional’ sex is integral to university life” (p. xxiv). Bocast spent two years conducting ethnographic research with a cohort of female students, remaining in Uganda for a further two years. During her active research phase, Bocast roomed with students; traveled to meet their families, both locally and across international borders; attended classes; and, perhaps most importantly, partied in the elite clubs and posh leisure centers of Kampala. Contextualizing participation in the sexual economy of the university within the region's contemporary political economy and traditional Kiganda feminine ideals, the book presents the emic perspectives of this international cohort of privileged young women as they engage in “transactional” sexual relationships as part of a larger social strategy to achieve personal independence. They certainly use sex, but not only sex, to get what they want. They want a Makerere degree and much more: a comfortable (even luxurious) lifestyle, career opportunities, independence, and, ultimately, self-determination. This last is the “educated womanhood” of the book's subtitle: being adult, mature, and “educated” does not come from a formal degree but is a disposition of self-mastery and socially orchestrated independence. The book has three sections, neatly adopting the arc of the undergraduate career. Two “Orientations” chapters succinctly present a history of social and economic change in Uganda since independence and explain the context of Makerere University as “the” elite institution of nation and region. Important here are retellings of Uganda's educational policy changes in the late 20th century, which rapidly increased the percentage of female students in all educational settings in ways the broader populace found frankly threatening. Bocast also reviews traditional Kiganda ideals for the (gendered) life course to argue that there have always been versions of independent female adulthood that did not require marriage and child-rearing. These options, however, also carried negative reputational consequences. Since Bocast's main interlocutors hail from different countries and ethnicities, I wondered how important this Kiganda legacy was to individual students. It's very helpful, in any case, that the author pays close attention to the cultural foundations of broader public opinion. Three chapters in “Embodiments” then detail how young women see their relationships with men as resources cultivated to yield different products: from older, professionally established men, they receive spending money and political protections, and they can achieve a kind of notoriety in the national tabloids, which then becomes its own social resource; with same-aged peers, they subcontract their schoolwork and receive love and romance. Perhaps paradoxically, the young women consider themselves independent through their multiple dependencies: they feel freer and more self-directed as they use many men to meet their various needs rather than relying on one man, be it a father, uncle, or husband. Bocast further asserts that the young women rely heavily on one another to realize and manage these relationships with men. She argues that these young women's intergenerational and transactional relationships with “sugar daddies” cannot be adequately understood unless contextualized within the dynamics of their relationships with one another, and all these within the larger historical and cultural matrixes of patron-clientelism and the traditional ideals of “success through social connection.” Two chapters and the epilogue form the final section, “Departures.” Chapter 6 offers a type of “departure” from the main argument about transactional relationships through the case of female students sponsored in their educations by international NGOs. Bocast uses these examples to make the point that possibilities for self-direction and adulthood remain deeply gendered even in the absence of “sugar daddy” strategies; students she presents in this chapter do not engage in the transactional sexual economy of university life but are still constrained by sponsors in other, deeply gendered dimensions, demonstrating how “in Uganda … there is no alternative to patron-clientage … only variations in form” (p. 143). The concluding chapter then returns to the main cohort of young women presented in the book, following them after their graduation. The epilogue offers brief thoughts on Uganda's broader demographic and political trajectory. In analyzing transactional relationships, Bocast considers how the relationships of ethnographic research also fit in; her thoughts here, as well as the liberal incorporation of “raw” data in the text, make this book well suited to the introductory classroom. Another productive point for methodological conversations is her use of composite “characters” and her navigation of study subjects’ disparate desires: while most were thankful for the anonymity offered by pseudonyms and composites, others wished to be “part of the historical record” under their real names, entirely in keeping with the cohort's strategic manipulation of relationships and reputation.