Wives or Workers?: Negotiating the Social Contract between Female Teachers and the Colonial State in Zanzibar

This article explores the negotiated relationship between the Department of Education in colonial Zanzibar and its Muslim female teachers. In the 1930s and 1940s, elite Muslim women in Zanzibari society remained in the home to maintain their respectability (heshima). Aware of this, the colonial government drew up plans for recruiting, training, and employing women teachers modeled on the social contract of a respectable Islamic marriage that both protected the women's heshima and provided the financial maintenance expected of a husband. By the 1950s, however, the Department of Education began to abandon the social contract it had attempted to establish with its female staff. Not only was this approach expensive, but it was also seemingly unnecessary to retain teachers, as fewer elite women were participating in the program. Female teachers did not work for the government because of the state's elaborate efforts to maintain their respectability, although certainly the respectable reputation of the position was a bonus. Instead, they joined and remained loyal to the Department of Education as a means of earning a salary that either supplemented those of their husbands or provided insurance against divorce, a common occurrence in colonial Zanzibar.