Kanogo, Tabitha. – African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1950

Abstract

1 Tabitha Kanogo's African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya traces history of womanhood in Kenya amidst social, cultural, and economic changes in period of colonial rule from 1900 to 1950. Not limited to a single region or ethno-linguistic group, book surveys multiple communities, regions (urban and rural), and religious groups across Kenya. Male and female kith and kin, Local Native Council members and political leaders, missionaries, and state officials attempted to control women's status through legislation and social control. However, girls and women negotiated their social, economic, sexual mobility through their own individual concepts of personhood. Kanogo concludes that no single identity of Kenyan woman existed. Rather, analysis of women and girls' negotiations of the colonial reveals heterogeneous stories of contradictions, conflicts, and negotiations in determining women's' agency, social standing, and identities. The emergence of individualism amongst women and girls, Kanogo argues, involved normative and geographical migration (p. 9) as women traversed boundaries between pre-colonial and colonial, traditional and modern sensibilities in exercising agency over their bodies and minds. A constant thread throughout book is that examination of individual life cases reveals complex and multifaceted nature of women's mobility and self-assertion. 2 Kanogo divides book into seven chapters that explore key sociocultural institutions and practices around which women's lives were organized and contested: legal and cultural status; sexuality, culture, and law; clitoridectomy; dowry, marriage, and law; medicalization of maternity; and formal education. As in indigenous and colonial societies sought to control these aspects of girls and women' lives, Kanogo contends, 'Womanhood' thus became a battleground where issues of modernization, tradition, change and personal identity were fought (p. 2). Chapter one on women's legal and cultural status covers the formative, deeply fractured and fluid period of 1910 to 1930 in which colonial administration attempted to codify women's status under customary law. In continuation with work of other scholars of colonial and customary law, Kanogo argues colonial state's interventions in inventing customary law and creating an embryonic colonial legal system opened up spaces in which women seeking to leave undesirable marriages could successfully petition for dissolution. This chapter sets up argument throughout book that tentative and nature of colonial state unintentionally opened up new avenues for women's self-assertion. Chapter two examines young women's sexuality and community and state efforts to control their sexuality from eve of colonial rule through 1920s. Though customary law circumscribed parameters in which women could exercise sexual mobility, individual women employed multiple strategies in engaging in sexual exchanges. The nature of customary law in precolonial period allowed, for example, individual widows to oppose levirate while leaving little legal recourse for women who had been subjected to sexual violence. This chapter emphasizes a second thread in book that determining African womanhood was a contested process on eve of colonial rule and that colonial moment introduced further elements in already complex process of formulating womanhood. 3 The first two chapters set up foundational argument of book: that there is no monolithic portrayal of African women's status and identity in colonial Kenya, but that individual strategies and engagements with figures of authority resulted in varied ideological and