Women in African Colonial Histories (review)

Women in African Colonial Histories showcases the very best of Africanist scholarship on women and colonialism. Following in the tradition of several edited volumes on African women that appeared between the mid-1970s and late 1980s ¹, this volume argues for the centrality of African women’s labors, experiences, and stories to the making of the continent’s history. This volume demonstrates, once again, that the greatest strengths of Africanist women’s historiography lay in its nuanced analysis of local contexts and its creative combination of official, missionary, ethnographic, and oral sources. Women in African Colonial Histories moves beyond earlier volumes by casting its focus squarely on the colonial period and by expressing a heightened appreciation for the politics, possibilities, and limits of various kinds of sources. This attention to sources is manifest in each author’s handling of evidence and in the editors’ innovative decision to have each author include a primary source in her or his chapter. This volume is, quite self-consciously, a refusal to “move away from women’s history to gender history.”^{[[aid;FOOT2]]2[[/aid]]} Co-editors Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi insist that women’s history is a more powerful tool for feminist critique than gender analysis.

Rather than carving out entirely new lines of thematic inquiry, contributors approach staple topics in African women’s history — including those of life history, Christianity and schooling, marriage and law, mobility and migration, political protest and nationalism — from unexpected angles and with new analytical tools. Heidi Gengenbach’s superb essay demonstrates that an imaginative analysis of postcolonial storytelling can reveal much about the complexities of inter-racial sexual relations and women’s “‘heart’-led” struggles for survival in colonial Mozambique. Extending Gengenbach’s inclination to draw colonizers and colonized into a single frame of analysis, Wendy Urban-Mead’s chapter insightfully juxtaposes the lives of four women - one white and three black - in nineteenth-century southern Africa to suggest elite women’s varied engagements with Christianity. Jane Turrittin’s essay examines the autobiography of Aoua Kéita to explore how colonially-trained black midwives in French West Africa contributed to both the erosion of local women’s authority and the mobilization of anti-colonial sentiment. Essays by Nakanyike Musisi, Sean Hawkins, and Gertrude Mianda skillfully demonstrate that careful consideration of sources - be they medical missionary writings, court records, or an African newspaper - can elucidate how colonial discourses worked to disempower women in certain realms by representing them as bearers of ill-health and disease, the property of husbands, or subordinate housewives.

Other chapters bring women’s experiences to the fore of colonial Africa’s economic and political history. Lynette A. Jackson’s chapter powerfully reveals compulsory venereal disease examinations as an invasive, if banal, aspect of colonial control that has been ignored by previous nationalist and Marxist historians, and remembered with both indignation and ambiguity by the Zimbabwean women who endured the exams. Teresa Barnes provocatively recasts consideration of women’s labor migration in southern African by juxtaposing it to regional travel undertaken by upwardly mobile black women for educational and organizational purposes. Victoria B. Tashjian’s and Jean Allman’s essay elucidates the profound changes in gender relations inaugurated by the introduction of cocoa production in colonial Ghana, revealing how it first reduced many women to conjugal laborers but, later, provided other women with independent economic opportunities. Chapters by Holly Hanson and Misty L. Bastian insightfully explore transformations in African women’s political power in the late precolonial and early colonial periods in Uganda and Nigeria. Combining her ethnographic knowledge of southeastern Nigeria with analytical creativity, Bastian reads the poetics of testimony gathered in the wake of the famous Women’s War of 1929 to reveal how women viewed colonial rulers as profoundly ignorant of their powers and disruptive of the region’s moral economy. The volume’s final two chapters by Elizabeth Schmidt and Tanya Lyons consider women’s participation in nationalist struggles in Guinea and Zimbabwe. Lyons’s piece, in particular, does...