Female workers were central to the coastal East African labor force during the 19th and early 20th centuries, yet their bodies have disappeared from the historical narratives of public and skilled labor. Colonial officials wrote copiously about African labor along the Swahili coast; how to find laborers, how to coerce them into working, the categories of labor, what skills laborers held, how much they should be paid, how to efficiently move them to where they were needed, among many other aspects. However, these same officials, when writing about female laborers, often eliminated mention of females from both the skilled workforce and from their status as an equal portion of free laborers in the post-abolition era. Women and girls in the nineteenth century were present in the public labor force throughout littoral communities, yet reading the records of colonial officials and historians would suggest otherwise. This epistemic erasure has warped the way historians have thought and written about labor across coastal eastern Africa. Colonial officials gendered almost all forms of public, and particularly skilled labor, as male – for both enslaved and freed workers – an erasure often mimicked in the work of historians, thus reifying colonial views of an idealized labor force that was dominated by skilled male laborers with a few low-skill female manual workers.The British belief in the “benevolence” of Arab slave-owners was a longstanding one, a belief that officials in the Zanzibar Islands used to justify their slow response to the metropole demand for the abolition of slavery. The “benignity concept” as Marek Pawelczak termed it was so pervasive in colonial reports that historians into the 21st century still use it as an argument for why slavery in the Zanzibar islands was “mild” and required “not more than twelve hours’ labour” in any given week. Hidden within the “benignity concept” is an image of enslavement as wholly domestic, and therefore implicitly feminized. What is more insidious about the benignity concept is that British officials used it in the late 1890s both to justify allowing slavery to continue and figuratively to erase female enslaved laborers as workers, rather making them “domestics” and as such part of the household. Beginning in 1895, descriptions of an enslaved female became either one of a luxuriously kept concubine who was in essence a “secondary wife” or simply of a wife and mother. Men were enslaved, women were wives, and children were no longer part of the conversation at all. Similarly, I argue here that referring to laborers as ungendered historical actors obliterates significant pieces of history and distorts our understanding of the past. The distortions in colonial record-keeping has perpetuated an epistemic erasure in contemporary literature on labor in eastern Africa, which is an act of epistemic violence.