Abstract
Men’s voices continued to dominate the discourse on girls’ education in Zanzibar throughout the interwar period. Whereas Arab men envisioned the girls’ schools as a way to inculcate Arab elite notions of heshima (respectability) in girls and their mothers, European officiais looked to girls’ education as a “source to tap” for the colonial economy.1 As early as 1916, Director of Education S. Rivers-Smith urged, “half the value of the instruction which the husband receives in hygiene will be lost if he is tied to a slut as wife who knows only the conditions in which she herself was brought up.” He argued that girls’ education was important to the “needs of the state” because it would directly combat low birthrates and high infant mortality and compensate for what he called Zanzibari women’s lack of a “sense of motherhood.”2 Similar to Arab men, colonial officials cast elder women as the root of the problem, and the education of girls as the solution for future generations, but their end goal was profit as well as moral reform. In 1931, by which time the popularity of the Arab Girls’ School had become apparent and new metropolitan funding for colonial development became available, British educationalists honed in on girls’ education as the means to raise the standard of living in rural areas and make the colonial economy more robust.
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Notes
The expansion of public education systems in other areas of the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the means whereby the state could insert itself into family life, reform the behavior of women, and collect data about the child. See Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Pearson Longman, 2005), 168;
Paula S. Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (New York: Routledge, 2013);
Tracy L. Steffes, School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012);
James Vernon, “The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain,” American Historical Review 10, no. 3 (2005): 693–725;
Omnia El Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1998), 126–70.
Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1984).
Boys’ schools focused their efforts on teaching agriculture and other technical skills also geared toward bolstering the profit of the clove industry. The boys’ schools remained very unpopular in the rural areas until after World War II. See F. B. Wilson, Report of the Commission Appointed to Investigate Rural Education in the Zanzibar Protectorate (Zanzibar: Government Printer, 1939);
Roman Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2009).
Loimeier, Between Social Skills; Jonathon Classman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 80–94. According to Roman Loimeier, dissent over the rural schools emerged from the tension between “social skills” and “marketable” skills represented in the competition between the chuo (Quranic school) and shule (government school), which led to the government’s incorporation of chuo instructors into the shule in 1940. This was most certainly a factor, but the 1940 changes did not resolve the problem of attendance in the schools, as is evident not only in the low attendance rates for the early 1940s but also in the 1954 investigation into African education as discussed in Chapter Five. Jonathon Classman points a finger at the ethnocentric attitudes of the Arab intelligentsia who made up a majority of the teaching staff of rural (non-Arab) schools, an issue addressed in the 1954 study. However, this argument does not apply to girls’ schools outside of Zanzibar Town, many of which included local and non-Arab teachers, particularly in the Pemban schools that I discuss below.
As James Scott argues, the visions of the interventionist state do not take into account the cultural milieu of its citizens, which is especially true in the colonial context. See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 67–68. See also
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Randall Packard and Frederick Cooper, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006);
Monica M. van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002).
Michael A. Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Great Britain Ministry of Overseas Development, Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, 1929–70: A Brief Review (London: HM Stationary Office, 1971). See also
David J. Morgan, The Official History of Colonial Development, Volume 1: The Origins of British Aid Policy, 1924–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1980).
Zanzibar was also experiencing the effects of the depression at the time, especially in the rural areas. See Ed Ferguson, “The Formation of the Colonial Economy, 1915–1945,” in Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule, eds. Abdul Sheriff and Ed Ferguson (London: James Currey, 1991), 70.
Cynthia Brantley, Feeding Families: African Realities and British Ideas of Nutrition and Development in Early Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002);
Diana Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2001), 91–124;
James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Michael Worboys, “The Discovery of Malnutrition Between the Wars,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 208–25. Worboys states that “the ‘discovery’ of colonial malnutrition was a result of the direct transfer of the ‘dietary survey’ from the centre to the periphery” (222).
Cynthia Brantley, “Kikuyu-Maasai Nutrition and Colonial Science: The Orr and Gilks Study in Late 1920s Kenya Revisited,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, no. 1 (1997): 49–86, 51, 74–75.
Randall M. Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach.
Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997), 69–124.
W. H. Ingrams, Zanzibar: Its History and Its People (London: Stacey International, 2007 [1931]), 230. Ingrams states that children work in various ways for their parents once they complete Quranic school or during their spare time.
ZEDAR 1925–1931; Elisabeth McMahon, “Becoming Pemban: Identity, Social Welfare and Community During the Protectorate Period” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2005), 218. McMahon reports that absences in Pemban schools were often due to children traveling with their parents during the clove-picking season. On football during the colonial period, see Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 226–64. Colonial schools often served as the center of social welfare in colonial Africa. As Joanna Lewis explains with regard to Kenya, “Only teachers could get real co-operation between the school, chief, headman, agricultural, veterinary and health assistants.”
Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War & Welfare in Kenya 1925–52 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 347. See also
Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 117–143.
Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 79. White argues that allowing prostitution, for example, relieved the government and employers of basic costs associated with maintaining a healthy and productive workforce: housing, food, and revitalizing forms of leisure.
Jeanes schools were started by an American Quaker woman, Anna T. Jeanes, in the early twentieth century. As with Phelps-Stokes adapted education programs generally, Jeanes schools coincided with Booker T. Washington’s visions for African American education. See Lance G. E. Jones, The Jeanes Teacher in the United States, 1908–1933: An Account of Twenty-Five Years’ Experience in the Supervision of Negro Rural Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011 [1937]);
Thomas Jesse Jones, Education in Africa: A Study of West, South, and Equatorial Africa by the African Education Commission (New York: Phelps-Stokes Fund, 1922).
ZEDAR 1932, 20. ZEDAR 1932, 19. See also, Sir Alan Pirn, Report of the commission appointed by the Secretary of State for the colonies to consider and report on the financial position and policy of the Zanzibar government in relation to its economic resources (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1932).
Zanzibar Protectorate, Nutritional Review of the Natives of Zanzibar (Zanzibar: Government Printer, 1937). Plans for the survey date back to 1931, the year that Zanzibar submitted the application for development funding. See also ZNA AB 2/252, Secretariat, Nutrition, 1932–1938. Similar surveys were conducted in Nyasaland, South Africa, and other territories in late 1930. See Brantley, Feeding Families; Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach, 149.
Fair, Pastimes and Politics; William Bissell, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and
Elisabeth McMahon, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xv.
Susan Hirsch, Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 64–65.
Comorians were those who traced their heritage to the nearby Comoros Islands, which were at the time under French colonial control. See Ibuni Saleh, A Short History of the Comorians in Zanzibar (Dar es Salaam: Tanganyikan Standard, 1936).
Muhammad Saleh Farsy, Islam and Hygiene (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964), 83 (emphasis in original).
Ibid., G. B. Johnson to Director of Medical Services, July 29, 1938. On fears of colonial medicine, especially the taking of blood, see Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Getting girls over the age of thirteen presumably ensured they had reached puberty. The British government estimated the age of puberty for girls to be thirteen, the age at which a girl could be legally married according to the 1934 Penal Code. See Elke Stockreiter, “Child Marriage and Domestic Violence: Islamic and Colonial Discourses on Gender Relations and Female Status in Zanzibar, 1900–1950s,” in Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, eds. Emily Burrill, Richard Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 150.
ZNA AD 21/3, Girls’ Education, 1938–1944. In Zanzibar, training of women in midwifery and nursing lagged compared to teaching. The director of education noted that Arab women were beginning to accept midwifery and nursing in 1937, but prejudice still prevailed. ZEDAR 1937, 7. See also Issa, “‘From Stinkibar to Zanzibar,’” 260–75, 281–86. The professionalization of women in medical fields in Egypt, and the return of Zanzibar women trained in medicine in Cairo, went a long way to convince elites in Zanzibar to follow suit. For more on women’s medical work in Egypt, see Hibba Abugideiri, Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2010).
Interview 010502, Bi Muna. Bi Muna also said she did not want to “sit down and grate coconut” when she explained the alternative to schooling. The use of the phrase “grating coconut” to stand in for marriage likely comes from the fact that the mbuzi, a tool for grating coconut, is one of the symbolic vyombo (kitchen utensils) that a woman brings into the marital home. See Erin E. Stiles, An Islamic Court in Context: An Ethnographic Study of Judicial Reasoning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 87.
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© 2014 Corrie Decker
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Decker, C. (2014). Training Girls for Colonial Development. In: Mobilizing Zanzibari Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472632_3
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