The colonial state was a patriarchy – with a sprinkle of hegemonic masculinity. Its doctrinal principles tended to limit women’s social mobility by confining them to the homestead as the hearthside custodians of Christian virtues which included absolute submission to their husbands. And, while female education was not discouraged, educational curricula were structurally gendered especially during the early years of colonial rule. In British Africa, mission schools designated normative subjects and skills such as home economics: weaving, sewing, cleaning, and childcare for women in a system euphemistically labelled adaptive education. Andrew Zimmerman’s recent study, Alabama in Africa examines Germany’s attempts to transform indigenous social institutions in German Togoland (present day Togo in west Africa) from the late 19th century to expand its cotton growing industry in the country. Through a transnational research scheme known as the Tuskegee Expedition organized by German officials and African American academics led by Booker T. Washington, the German government embarked on what Dennis Laumann aptly describes as “a complex and curious alliance” to establish an experimental cotton growing school in their west African colony. According to Laumann, instructors from the US who arrived in Togo in 1901 to commence the program were charged with promoting what German officials considered the ideal productive unit: a patriarchal, monogamous family working a small farm. The idea was to replicate the stereotyped docile, hardworking African of the American south in Togoland by transforming family structures to enhance male accumulation and female docility. Men were encouraged to migrate to cities and to proposed cotton plantations for wage labor, while women were expected to keep the “home front” and, as Teresa Barnes shows in the case of colonial Zimbabwe, prohibited from crossing over from rural communities to emerging urban centers.
Luise White’s influential study of the history of prostitution in colonial Nairobi tells a similar story of colonial anxiety over women’s social and physical mobility from the perspective of female prostitutes. Like in Barnes’ account, British officials in Nairobi put out a flurry of labor and migration policies to stop, stymie, and control women’s movement into emerging industrial areas. In colonial Zimbabwe, three separate policies were enacted between 1916 and 1936 (the Native Adultery Punishment Ordinance, the Native Affairs Act, and the Native Registration Ordinance, respectively) to entice African men into the migrant labor regime, and to effectively transform women into permanent legal minors by restricting them to rural areas. Toyin Falola corroborates this view in his candid assertion that “colonialism undermined and subverted the position and status of women in many African societies.” In essence, women’s mobility (whether social or physical) was criminalized by colonial regimes. The sight of the so-called “mobile women” in Barnes’ study appeared to threaten the very fabric of colonial social and ideological configuration.
How did women respond to this double jeopardy? They moved, anyway! Like Barnes’ mobile women in 1920s Zimbabwe, female sex workers in White’s Nairobi were equally determined to stake a claim to the urban landscapes of colonial Kenya. They moved to the cities nevertheless, confronting empire on foot against strident official labor protocols and in so doing, upset seemingly ossified local gender norms. They did not move in any organized, predetermined, or systematic form. Rather they went to towns as individuals and gradually unionized when their numbers became substantial in specialized professions. White notes that women would eventually become landlords, realtors, business owners, petty traders, and even politicians in Nairobi and its environs.
Two factors accounted for this breakthrough in women’s mobility: the fluidity of colonial policies, and the sheer grit of African women. Although it is still much debated, scholars are beginning to accept the fact that while colonialism seemed like an impenetrable monolith, its policies were often more coherent on paper. Writing in 1992, Barnes affirms that Southern Rhodesian labor policies were not so straightforward and were fraught with contradiction. The state said one thing but did another, partly because it was forced to do so. For instance, while it acknowledged men’s claims over women, it regarded itself as a woman’s higher master. Thus, once officials realised the impracticability of their gendered labor codes by the 1930s, they resorted to incrementally reverse their earlier stance on the issue without recourse to the voiced concerns of local male elders. From the 1930s, therefore, the laws were reviewed and adjusted to allow women increased access to cities in search of gainful employment if they could convince border officials that they were in the company of “proper husbands.”
This dramatic change in official attitude towards women did not occur in a vacuum. It was pre-empted by women’s ability to identify new niches in the colonial economy that required their expertise, and to effectively fill those voids. The need to provide domestic services to migrant male workers opened new, and lucrative opportunities for women, revealing the malleable underbelly of colonial rule. While men worked in mines and industries, they needed what Luise White ingeniously called the “comforts of home” – cooked food, clean clothing, emotional support and sexual services. And they could not deny the fact that in a patriarchal society governed by an equally patriarchal colonial regime, these services were primarily designated as women’s work. So, they needed women in the cities after all, as much as they were indispensable to social reproduction in the countryside. Women seized this opportunity to assert themselves in the colonial economy which now depended on their input for its sustainability, thus deflating the once regimented labor regime of British east Africa. Elsewhere in colonial southeastern Nigeria, women’s marginalization in the colonial bureaucracy and official attempt to impose direct taxation on them during the late 1920s would spark a spontaneous, women-led protest known as the 1929 Women’s War with devastating outcome for colonial administration in the area.
Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash
