In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

268 14 Fathers, Daughters, and Institutions coming of age in mombasa’s colonial schools corrie decker We had a problem in our community . . . Islamic girls were not sent to school.1 Mothers don’t have time to check on education. They have time for weddings, but not for helping their children with school.2 The two women quoted here, both of whom attended primary school in Mombasa, Kenya, during the British colonial period (1895–1963), criticize mothers for not promoting the education of their daughters. They see marriage as an interruption of the complete education they believe all girls should receive. When they attended school in the 1940s and 1950s, their own mothers and grandmothers argued that schooling got in the way of initiation and marriage, traditional markers of entry into womanhood in Mombasa. Indigenous education was gender-specific; girls learned from older women about womanhood, marriage, and motherhood, while boys learned the work of their fathers. Colonial education was also genderspeci fic; girls received domestic as well as academic instruction, while boys were taught trades and vocations appropriate for “colonial development.” As families were inducted into the Western education system, however, a peculiar gender crossover occurred. In the early colonial period, government and mission schools offered instruction almost exclusively to boys. A generation later (starting in the 1920s), these boys grew into men who demanded schools for their daughters. Fathers and daughters found themselves politically allied in their demands for girls’ schools, a movement that ultimately redefined gendered and generational relationships in Mombasa. Amid a culture that expected girls to follow in the domestic footsteps of mothers and grandmothers and against a colonial power reluctant to see the value of educating girls, the combined efforts of fathers and daughters brought about profound changes not only in the culture and structure of childhood, but also in common understandings of the contribution of girls’ education to development. As is evident in Nancy Stockdale’s contribution to this volume, disconnections between the intentions of educators and the goals of parents expose the unsteady ground schoolgirls must navigate. Schoolgirls, as devoted daughters and participants in a foreign cultural system unevenly received by the community, created a space for themselves out of which emerged a new adolescence culture that redefined the transition between girlhood and womanhood. This new culture, related to the “modern girl” trend in 1930s and 1940s East Africa, reflects, in part, changes that Western education brought to the structure of female childhood, mainly an increase in the period between puberty and marriage.3 The new girl culture was thus based as much on the experience of schooling and career ambitions as it was on sexuality and marriage, and impacted future generations of girls and women. Increased funding for women’s teacher-training and nursing after World War II underscores the mounting importance of girls’ education to Kenyan colonial policies. The stories of schoolgirls told here reflect these significant moments in the history of girls’ education that led to the widespread influence of Western education in the postcolonial period. Colonial Mombasa was a city in transition. The population of coastal Kenya reflected the area’s long history of Arab settlement and rule, gradual widespread adoption of Islam, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century arrival of South Asian merchants and laborers and European Christian missionaries and settlers. During the colonial period, an increasing number of Africans from the inland areas flocked to Mombasa in search of wage labor necessary for survival in the new cash economy. In the meantime, wealthy families, most of whom claimed Arab or Indian ancestry, struggled to hold onto their dominance over others of lower economic standing in and around Old Town, Mombasa’s ancient trading center. Those looking to move up the social ladder saw colonial schools as an opportunity to get ahead in the post-emancipation colonial economy. Old merchants looked to the schools to reinforce their families’ elite position in a time of drastic social, economic, and political change. Although Mombasans of various backgrounds saw Western schools for boys as the means for economic advancement, many worried that sending their daughters to school would unravel the social fabric of their community.4 On the contrary, however, sending girls to school ultimately reinforced familial relationships, but under new gender configurations. Colonial schoolgirls went to school at a time when their attendance was still a novelty in Mombasa. Their and their fathers’ efforts to enter and keep them in school...

Share