The Public, the Private, and the Sanitary: Domesticity and family regulation in Northern Nigeria

Abstract

The Public, the Private, and the Sanitary: Domesticity and family regulation in Northern Nigeria Steven Pierce The recent violence in northern Nigeria1 between government forces and an extremist Muslim group called Bok’o Haram (“Western education is forbidden”) has returned the country’s religious conflicts to international attention. When Bok’o Haram first came to prominence in 2009, its stance on gender segregation—extreme even by northern Nigerian standards—reminded outside observers that beginning in 2000 Nigeria’s northern states had passed new criminal codes based on Islamic law, which resulted in segregated public transportation and even the inauguration of single-sex schools in some places, as well as police and vigilante crackdowns on bars and other places where the sexes might intermingle, all of which reinstituted or deepened initiatives from preceding decades. The recent history of gender segregation is thus nothing new but rather picks up on a centuries-long tradition of debating women’s appropriate role in public life. What is somewhat more novel than gender segregation per se, though still many decades old, is a tendency to view it as an issue of female sexual morality stemming from a conflict between northern Nigerians and forces associated with southern Nigeria, Christianity, and the West. Many have long deemed Western education, literacy in Roman script (the literal meaning of “bok’o”) and fluency in English to be dangers to piety, and to be particularly dangerous for women. But while other, better-established reformists such as the Shi’ite ‘Yan Uwan Musulmi or the Wahhabist Izala have emphasized women’s education (Western as well as Qur’anic) as a way to ensure that women gain access to, for example, Western medical treatment from female practitioners, Bok’o Haram insists both on an absolutist rejection of Western education and a withdrawal of its women from contact with the external world. By itself, the extreme ideology of Bok’o Haram is not terribly influential. It nonetheless indicates the sensitivity of education, women’s public role and appropriate religious stances toward the West. While some aspects of these debates substantively predate the advent of colonial rule in 1900 or intensive contact with the West, the period of British rule occasioned vast social change and tended to align issues of education and women’s rights with concerns over Western cultural and religious imperialism, and to build this conflict into the relationship between state institutions and ordinary Nigerians. In this regard, a thirty-year period starting just before the Great Depression is of critical importance. Until the late 1920s the colonial government made very little attempt to intervene in family life or to create policies that explicitly addressed women as such. Commoner families received little attention at all; aristocratic ones were accorded a respectful non-interference supposed to accord with their Muslim sensibilities. Such women as came to official notice did so as members of other groups—criminals, freedpeople and so forth. At the end of the 1920s, however, British officials in the central administration became concerned with the status of women. After several years of increasing concern with what it began to understand as issues of social welfare in the protectorate, in 1929 the British colonial government embarked on a new set of initiatives aimed at women’s welfare as a way of creating a modern northern Nigerian family. To achieve this, the government established schools for girls and maternal health centers in hospitals within the region’s major cities. These programs and the agendas underlying them were structured by a set of paradigms from Britain about women and their place in modern family life. Coming after more than a century of intensive concern with gender and the family in Europe, the initiatives inevitably reflected notions developed elsewhere of the public and private, of domesticity and the family, and of the appropriate role for women in social reproduction. But Northern Nigeria is unusual because—especially in this period—intensive attention to women and the family served primarily to politicize issues of women’s education and healthcare as threats to morality, far more than it opened up an arena allowing women a degree of autonomy and power. From the start, British rule depended on...