Abstract
By the 1950s, the wind had changed, thanks to “radical families,” and most Zanzibaris were on board with the idea of educating women. Women’s education and work had also become part of the broader “wind of change” that ushered in nationalism across the continent.2 Whereas women strove for social acceptance and economic opportunity, Zanzibari men advocated women’s advancement as a platform of nationalist rhetoric. The fathers and brothers of the first schoolgirls and female teachers became prominent nationalists in the “time of politics” or “zarna za siasa” (1957–1963) leading up to the 1964 Revolution.3 The sultan and Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) controlled the government when Zanzibar gained independence on December 10, 1963. The Zanzibar Revolution began on January 12, 1964 when Ugandan John Okello and some members of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) staged a coup that overthrew the sultanate. Thousands of Arabs and others were killed over the next few months. Many of those who survived lost their jobs and homes, were imprisoned, or were removed from positions of power, and by April, Zanzibar joined Tanganyika on the mainland to form the Republic of Tanzania.
People have to bend with the wind, you know? If you stand up quickly you will fall. Aesop’s fables says that the bamboos and the grasses all bent with the wind and when the wind was over the big baobab trees and the big mango trees have all fallen down, but the supple grasses went with the wind this way then stood up again. So radical families sent their daughters to school.1
—Bi Muna, January 27, 2005
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Notes
The phrase “wind of change” comes from a famous speech made by Harold Macmillan in 1960, first in Ghana and then to the South African parliament, to herald the shift toward African independence. See L. J. Butler and Sarah Stockwell, eds., The Wind of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
In Swahili the phrases “zama za siasa” and “wakati wa siasa,” both of which translate as “time of politics,” refer to the period beginning around the 1957 election and culminating in the revolution in January 1964. The ethnic conflict has its origins in the nineteenth century, but after World War II it became more pronounced. See Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 58–59. See also
B. D. Bowles, “The Struggle for Independence, 1946–1963,” in Zanzibar under Colonial Rule, eds. Abdul Sheriff and Ed Ferguson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991).
Glassman, War of Words, 106; Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 64–92.
On the different approaches of Arab and African nationalists, see Michael F. Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
Dorothy Hodgson, “Introduction: Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights,” in Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, ed. Dorothy Hodgson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 12.
Marilyn Booth, “Woman in Islam: Men and the ‘Women’s Press’ in Turn-of-the-20th-Century Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 2 (2001), 171.
Women were not to be seen or heard because they were thought to embody the secrecy and privacy of domestic affairs. See Susan Hirsch, Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 33, 55, 64; Elke Stockreiter, “Tying and Untying the Knot: Kadhi’s Courts and the Negotiation of Social Status in Zanzibar Town, 1900–1963” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2008), 32–33. Both Stockreiter and Hirsch point out that in the courts women found ways to circumvent strict gender norms.
UKNA CO 822/1472, Report of the Committee on the Extension of the Franchise to Women, 1959; G. Thomas Burgess, Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar: The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 56–58;
Amina Ameir Issa, “‘From Stinkibar to Zanzibar’: Disease, Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Urban Zanzibar, 1870–1963” (PhD diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009), 270. On the mainland, women were also very active in the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) rallies during the 1950s and early 1960s. See
Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997).
See for example, Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and
Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California, 1998).
Glassman, War of Words, 141–43, 160, 230, 256. On the racialized gender narrative about the origins of the Swahili, see Kelly M. Askew, “Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast,” Africa Today 46, no. 3/4 (1999): 67–102.
See for example Judith Van Allen, “Aba Riots’ or Igbo ‘Women’s War’? Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women,” in Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, eds. Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 59–86; Geiger, TANU Women;
Tanya Lyons, Guns and Guerilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean liberation Struggle (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004); and
Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005);
Barbara Hutmacher MacLean, Strike a Woman, Strike a Rock: Fighting for Freedom in South Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003);
Pamela E. Brooks, Boycotts, Buses, and Passes: Black Women’s Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).
For a short history of Bi Samira Seif, see Roman Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2009), 364–71.
Sir John Gray, “Nairuz or Siku ya Mwaka,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 38 (1955), 1–22.
W. H. Ingrams, Zanzibar: Its History and Its People (London: Stacey International, 2007 [1931]), 281.
Gray, “Nairuz,” 7. Magnus Echtler, “The Recent Changes of the New Year’s Festival in Makunduchi, Zanzibar: A Reinterpretation,” in The Global Worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, Identity and Space in 19th and 20th-century East Africa, eds. Roman Loimeier and Rüdiger Seesemann (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 131–60. One of the women who oversaw the festival was elected by the others to serve as their political liaison with the sheha (chief) of Makunduchi.
Echtler, “The Recent Changes,” 147. See also Magnus Echtler, “‘The Clitoris is Indeed Your Sweet’: Negotiating Gender Roles in the Ritual Setting of the Swahili New Year’s Festival,” in Negotiating Rites, eds. Ute Hüsken and Frank Neubert (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 59–80. Echtler argues that today the Mwaka Kogwa festival allows for the airing of sexual tension and grievances between men and women.
Christabel Majaliwa may have been a descendant of Cecil Majaliwa, a freed slave of Yao origins who converted to Christianity, became a priest, and came to Zanzibar to teach for the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa around the turn of the twentieth century. See John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 229–30. Christabel Majaliwa had also been a member of the Juvenile Court Panel. See ZNA AX 10/3, Juvenile Court panels section A for Zanzibar 1949–1967.
The high incidence of “child marriage” in Makunduchi correlated with the poor economic conditions of the time. Marrying off a girl at a young age made it easier for the parents or elders to take the child’s dower for themselves. This also relieved them of the burden of caring for the child. 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), 147–148; and ZNAAD 1/171, Child Marriage.
The one exception was Kenya, where Arab women were denied the right to vote when other women were given the franchise. It took public protests—and the influence of Zanzibar’s female franchise—to change the law for all women on the Kenyan Coast. See Margaret Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890–1975 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 191–92.
One of the first public rallies women attended was a demonstration protesting Britain’s occupation of the Suez Canal on October 3, 1956 (Loimeier, Between Social Skills, 38). Ali Mushin claimed that women amounted to more than half the participants at many ZNP events. Ali Muhsin Al-Barwani, Conflicts and Harmony in Zanzibar: Memoirs (Dubai, UAE: n.p., 1997), 146, 150, 186. See also
Muhammad Ali Bakari, The Democratisation Process in Zanzibar: A Retarded Transition (Hamburg: Institut fur Afrika-Kunde, 2001), 177.
Glassman, War of Words, 63–64. Great Britain, Report of a Commission of Inquiry into Disturbances in Zanzibar during June 1961 (London: HM Stationary Office, 1961).
Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 28–55.
ZNA AJ 15/120, British Resident to Secretary of State, London, March 19, 1960. See also Melinda Adams, “Regional Women’s Activism: African Women’s Networks and the African Union,” in Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, eds. Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 188n4. The other potential delegates from Zanzibar were also products of government girls’ schools.
As early as 1933, Muslim families in Kenya and Tanganyika were encouraged to send their daughters to the ZGGS (ZNA AB 1/4, British Resident Rankine to Chief Secretary, June 29, 1933). Rankine reports that at a recent regional meeting of Directors of Education, the Directors decided to encourage Zanzibari boys to continue their education on the mainland and mainland girls to study at the ZGGS and stay at the hostel. One father in Lamu, Kenya, had planned to send his two daughters to the ZGGS in the 1940s. He had to abandon the plan when he failed to organize accommodation for them during school holidays. Interview 050512, Bi Fatma Mahmoud Albakry, Mombasa, Kenya, May 26, 2005. See also Corrie Decker, “Fathers, Daughters, and Institutions: Coming of Age in Mombasa’s Colonial Schools,” in Girlhood: A Global History, eds. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vasconcellos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 276;
Sarah Mirza and Margaret Strobel, eds. and trans., Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 141n8.
Thomas Burgess, “Cinema, Bell Bottoms, and Miniskirts: Struggles over Youth and Citizenship in Revolutionary Zanzibar,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 2/3 (2002): 287–313; Maoulidi, “Between Law and Culture.” Maoulidi argues that these developments in women’s rights were countered by laws put in place in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the criminalization of having a child out of wedlock or the imposition of strict dress codes that gave the state more direct control over young women’s actions. Similar backlash to cultural changes took place in Dar es Salaam as well. See
Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Elisabeth McMahon argues that the shift in the meaning of heshima from “honor” to “respectability” coincided with the Arab elite’s loss of ability to control slaves and settle disputes through violence. Elisabeth McMahon, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 24.
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© 2014 Corrie Decker
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Decker, C. (2014). Mobilizing Women During the Time of Politics. In: Mobilizing Zanzibari Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472632_6
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