African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50 (review)

This study is an engaging addition to Kenya’s social history. Focusing upon the law, missions, schools, marriage and the household, Kanogo explores the myriad of responses by women to colonialism. Entwining archival material and oral testimony, Kanogo emphasizes women’s ‘opportunities for physical and cultural migration from old ways of life to new ones’ (p. 12). Their new-found transience complicated attempts, described in the first chapter, by officials and elders to define the legal status of women. In trying to determine the age at which women reached majority (if they did so at all) and thus legally existed independently of fathers and husbands, administrators set out on a path fraught with contradictions. As Kanogo demonstrates in discussing runaways and converts to Islam, women asserted agency in the space between customary and statutory law. The sexuality of mobile women unnerved administrators and elders, who reacted by attempting to codify the abduction of women, divorce, rape and polygamy within the law, as described in the second chapter.

It is unsurprising that the following chapter is given over to bitterly resisted attempts to restrict or prohibit clitoridectomy. European and African proponents of regulation fuelled the politicization of the practice, which in turn consolidated its position as a marker of Kikuyu ethnicity. In contrast to this well-known episode, the subsequent chapter on dowry is more original. Here Kanogo explores changes to the practice in response to European conceptualizations of the custom, monetarization, individualization, and the determination of missions for their members to marry within their own congregations. The codification of dowry was part of a broader attempt, described in the fifth chapter, to make marriage more recognizable to European eyes. Legislation tried to prevent child marriage, encourage demonstrations of women’s consent, introduce formal registration and assign guardianship of children to widows in case of a husband’s death. As exemplars of colonial modernity, Christian women were experiencing significant change in every aspect of their lives, including childbirth. As we see in the penultimate chapter, the frailties of scientific knowledge, accentuated by colonial parsimony, were exposed in rural hospitals with inadequate maternity facilities. These shortcomings added to suspicion caused by the employment of male dressers as midwives, the marginalization of traditional midwifery and the accommodation of expectant mothers in wards alongside the sick. Modern womanhood demanded a high price. Of all the processes of rapid social change, the final chapter demonstrates education had the greatest transformative effect for young women, but was a common site of contestation between male heads of households and their junior female relatives. By opening up the possibility of movement outside of local areas, and even as far as Britain, education demanded the loosening of the bonds tying young women to home. Their return could be as traumatic as their departure, as they brought back to the homestead the manners and customs of the mission school.

While very readable and informative throughout, Kanogo’s work is not without sources of contention. With a focus on the few highly educated, Christian women, there is a tendency throughout to stress the historical specificity of the colonial period. Women’s responses to colonialism are represented as new and dislocated from the past. The formation of hybrid identities built upon pre-colonial foundations is rarely considered. Borrowing Cooper’s terminology, Kanogo gives great attention to the conflict between colonialism and African subjects and between male elders and women, but rather less to the possibilities for accommodation between those actors. If colonial rule was such a dominant factor, this raises the question that Kanogo, unlike Lynn Thomas, leaves unanswered: what happens to concepts of womanhood in the post-colonial era? These reservations aside, there is much to admire in this book. The treatment of education is particularly fine and the preference for a country-wide perspective instead of a local study is welcome. Indeed...