Women in African colonial histories

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Bibliographic Information

Women in African colonial histories

Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, editors

Indiana University Press, c2002

  • : pbk
  • : hard

Available at  / 4 libraries

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

How did African women negotiate the complex political, economic, and social forces of colonialism in their daily lives? How did they make meaningful lives for themselves in a world that challenged fundamental notions of work, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and family? By considering the lives of ordinary African women - farmers, queen-mothers, midwives, urban-dwellers, migrants, and political leaders - in the context of particular colonial conditions at specific places and times, Women in African Colonial Histories challenges the notion of a homogeneous "African women's experience." While recognising the inherent violence and brutality of the colonial encounter, the thirteen essays in this lively anthology show that African women were not simply the hapless victims of European political rule. Innovative use of primary sources, including life histories, oral narratives, court cases, newspapers, colonial archives, and physical evidence, attests to the diversity of African women's lives and reveals them as active agents whose experiences defy static representation. Readers at all levels will find this an important contribution to ongoing debates in African women's history and African colonial history.

Table of Contents

  • Contributors include Jean Allman, Teresa Barnes, Misty Bastian, Susan Geiger, Heidi Gengenbach, Holly Hanson, Sean Hawkins, Lynette Jackson, Tanya Lyons, Gertrude Mianda, Nakanyike Musisi, Elizabeth Schmidt, Victoria Tashjian, Jane Turrittin, and Wendy Urban-Mead
  • Preliminary Table of Contents: Acknowledgements
  • Introduction - Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi
  • Part 1. Encounters and Engagements
  • 1. "What My Heart Wanted": Gendered Stories of Early Colonial Encounters in Southern Mozambique - Heidi Gengenbach
  • 2. Dynastic Daughters: Three Royal Kwena Women and E. L. Price of the London Missionary Society, 1853-1881 - Wendy Urban-Mead
  • 3. Colonial Midwives and Modernizing Childbirth in French West Africa - Jane Turrittin
  • Part 2. - Perceptions and Representations
  • 4. The Politics of Perception of Perception as Politics?: Colonial and Missionary Representations of Baganda Women, 1900-1945 - Nakanyike Musisi
  • 5. "The Woman in Question": - Marriage and Identity in the Colonial Courts of Northern Ghana, 1907-1954 - Sean Hawkins
  • 6. Colonialism, Education, and Gender Relations in the Belgian Congo: - The Fvoluz Case - Gertrude Mianda
  • 7. Virgin Territory?: - Travel and Migration by African Women in Twentieth Century Southern Africa - Teresa Barnes
  • 8. "When in the White Man's Town": Zimbabwean Women Remember Chibeura - Lynette Jackson
  • Part 3. - Power Reconfigured/Power Contested
  • 9. Queen Mothers and Good Government in Buganda: The Loss of Women's Political Power in Nineteenth Century East Africa - Holly Hanson
  • 10. Marrying and Marriage on a Shifting Terrain: Reconfigurations of Power and Authority in Early Colonial Asante - Victoria Tashjian and Jean Allman
  • 11. "Vultures of the Marketplace": - Southeastern Nigerian Women and Discourses of the Ogu Umunwaayi (Women's War) of 1929 - Misty Bastian
  • 12. "Emancipate Your Husbands!": Women and Nationalism in Guinea, 1953-1958 - Elizabeth Schmidt
  • 13. Guerrilla Girls and Women in the Zimbabwean National Liberation Struggle - Tanya Lyons
  • Afterword - Susan Geiger
  • Contributors
  • Index

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