Mobilizing Zanzibari Women ─ The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa

Despite the vast literature that exists on the history of colonial Africa, the experiences of women in the era before independence remain a woefully understudied facet of that history. This innovative and carefully argued study thus adds tremendously to our understanding of colonial history by focusing on women's education, professionalization, and political mobilization in the East African islands of Zanzibar under Arab and British rule. It begins by examining the girls' schools that were established in the late 1920s in accordance with an Arab regime of respectability that dictated Muslim women's seclusion from the public gaze in order to protect their respectability. By the 1930s, the British colonial administration co-opted these institutions for a bio-political development scheme that promoted hygiene and domestic science as a solution to the problem of labor productivity—a campaign that met with much resistance in rural areas. These dominant, male discourses sought to produce good wives and mothers, but had the unintended effect of cultivating women's professional ambitions and sense of self-respect. By the 1940s and 1950s, female teachers were being trained as development agents, work that was disrupted by the racial politics of nationalism, though the women's movement continued into the post-colonial period. As author Corrie Decker reveals, Zanzibari women were not fighting against one thing or one group; their 'struggle' consisted in their day-to-day negotiations between prevailing gender expectations and their own ambitions, desires, and investments in work and family.

Corrie Decker is an Assistant Professor of History at University of California, Davis, USA.