Educated Girls, Clothes and Christianity: Subverting Mabel Shaw’s Sartorial Agenda on the Colonial Zambian Copperbelt, 1925–1964

Abstract

Mabel Shaw, a missionary educator who founded a boarding school for African girls at Mbereshi in modern Zambia’s Luapula province at the inception of the 20th century, perceived her former schoolgirls who jettisoned mission-inspired clothes and took to wearing modern apparel in the mine compounds of the Copperbelt as relapsed Christians who had reverted to worldliness. The missionary held that this situation was a consequence of the girls’ urbanisation on the Copperbelt, an area she dismissed as a profane space that induced individualism, materialism and secularism in Africans. This article, based chiefly on Mabel Shaw’s own writings, oral interviews and short life histories of ex-Mbereshi pupils, questions her perceptions. Informed by academic scholarship that explores the myriad ways in which colonial subjects subverted imperial and missionary cultural projects and highlights connections between religion and material consumption, I suggest that Shaw’s former schoolgirls in the Copperbelt embraced stylish apparel to express Christian modernity and to lay claim to social respectability and church leadership.