A quick intro: I’m serving as one of the judges for @teamgirlpowa’s Women’s History Month Contest, which runs to the end of the month (this Saturday, 31 March 2018). There are two categories, “Women in History” (non-fiction) and “Futuristic Women” (fiction). If either of those sound like something you’d be interested in, check out the post for rules and further information—we’d love to read your entry!
The judges decided that we would post examples that entrants could look at for ideas, and this is mine. I come from an academic background (my bio says historian-in-training for a reason!), so this is a little more intense and formal than I expect anyone to get in this contest—Steemit is meant to be fun, after all! This is a paper I originally wrote for a class, edited down for Steemit, and we do not expect anyone to complete an essay like this in such a short amount of time. This is merely an example. My fellow judge @eaglespirit has a fiction example here.
Without further ado, here’s my Women’s History Month Essay!
Photo of modern Maasai women of Kenya, by Dominique Cottin on Unsplash
Getting What They Wanted: Mission-Educated Women and Girls in Colonial Kenya
Education for Kenyan women and girls was a highly contested topic during the colonial period. Parents, spouses, elders, missionaries, and colonial administrators all had a stake in the discussion. Seeking education for a daughter could net a greater brideprice for parents, or it could prevent her from ever marrying. For fathers and elders, much of the issue boiled down to the necessity for control over girls. For missionaries, educating girls was vital to the so-called civilizing mission, having the potential to foster stable Christian homes and communities. Girls and young women themselves chose education for many reasons, and their decisions regarding duration and type of schooling impacted their communities deeply. This essay examines the role of mission schools and mission education in the lives of women and girls in colonial Kenya. Counter to the desires and intentions of missionaries and other stakeholders, this essay discusses the ways in which women and girls used mission schools to achieve their own desires. Missionary intentions stand in marked contrast to the behaviors and benefits which African girls and women took from these schools. Despite attempts to exert control over them, women and girls in colonial Kenya were able to utilize mission schools for their own ends, subverting church authority to further their own survival and success.
Early in the colonial period, formal education in Kenya was the province of missions. The government did not invest heavily in mission schools, though some received grants-in-aid. Most early mission schools in Kenya focused heavily on religious education. Some taught almost exclusively on scripture, using bible study to teach reading and writing. Literature for the Friends Africa Mission stated that the organization’s primary concern was “the evangelization of the heathen,” with the ultimate aim being a “self-supporting, self-propagating native church” (S. Thomas 1999, 25). The Church Missionary Society, an Anglican organization, also sought to create independent churches patterned after the parent church, and created a curriculum focused on training a large number of individuals to fill clerical and lay positions in the church and school (Strayer 1973, 315). In Mombasa, CMS was particularly anxious to convert Muslim students, and tested students heavily on scripture and Anglican doctrine, practices to which many students objected (Strayer 1973, 325). This led to conflicts over curricula which continued to grow, contributing to the rise of the Kikuyu Independent Schools movement in the 1930s.
For girls, instruction in mission schools generally focused on teaching what missionaries deemed appropriate domestic skills for modern wives. They sought to reconfigure local gender norms to create idealized Christian helpmates; such women needed to be educated in order to support and engage their husbands, who would be drawn from a rising class of mission-educated young men. In addition to reading and writing, girls were given classes in ‘home science,’ where they learned to maintain clean homes, to create household budgets, and to efficiently care for children (Mutongi 1999, 71-72). Once educated, girls were to leave the school, marry another Christian, and establish a home away from the mission station, in order to model proper behavior for others. At the same time as these ideal wives were supposed to devote themselves to their homes, missionaries also expected these educated women to establish schools of their own, where no mission school existed, to pass on the lessons to other girls who might not otherwise have access to such an education (S. Thomas 2000, 3). Few missionaries seemed to have recognized the tension and contradiction in these expectations, perhaps because the schools themselves operated under the same tension.
While girls were studying, they contributed to the daily running of the mission. In the case of one boarding school, girls were responsible for all the agricultural production of the school, cared for younger children, sewed their own clothes, and baked the bricks used to construct new buildings. In defiance of established custom, African girls were even involved in the handling of cattle, an area generally considered to be the sole province of men (S. Thomas 2000, 16-17). This was a matter of practicality: parent churches emphasized self-sufficiency for all mission stations and schools, and nonacademic training for students created a pool of cheap or free labor for the mission. In spite of this, some mission schools strongly resisted the addition of industrial training programs to mission curricula. Voices resistant to industrial training argued that such training would distract from the biblical study that was the mission’s focus (Strayer 1973, 319-21). Whether or not these concerns were founded, it is true that students sought mission education for many reasons, and were quick to leave if what they found did not meet their needs.
For some girls, mission schools served as shelter when seeking to avoid distasteful or unnacceptable marriages. Among the Luhya, girls and young women who objected to a match could flee to a distant relative for shelter, and wait in safety for the suitor to lose interest. Some girls adapted this cultural practice and took shelter with the mission, leaving at will if they received news that the suitor had moved on (S. Thomas 2000, 12). One mission-educated girl received and refused offers of marriage from many men, using her place at the mission as a way to delay her choice until she decided which suitor was most worthy (S. Thomas 2000, 11). In at least one instance, a young woman put off marrying indefinitely, extending her education until she was eligible to become a teacher at the school where she had been taught. As a teacher, she earned an income that her family came to rely upon, which prevented them from pressuring her into marriage. Defying her society’s expectations, she chose to remain single indefinitely (S. Thomas 2000, 13). In these and other ways, girls used the mission school to get what they wanted.
For widowed mothers, educating daughters represented an investment in their own future security. Educated women could garner a higher brideprice because they were seen as more desirable spouses among soldiers and government employees. Training in home science was a source of pride for men married to these educated women; it was generally believed that mission education made women “[docile], amiable and obedient” wives for “respectable men” (Mutongi 1999, 72-73). As a generation of educated, high earning young men rose to prominence, widows called upon relatives to help them pay the school fees for the girls, and shared out the increased bridewealth when daughters married (Mutongi 1999, 74). Girls understood that their mothers relied on them to do well in home science and then find a wealthy suitor. They knew that they were expected to use their knowledge to contribute to the family’s wellbeing.
Beyond the impact on their marriageability, many African girls and young women saw the many skills they learned at mission schools as additional tools for creating independence and security. Girls at a boarding school run by the Friends African Mission were taught to sew and weave, and they made dresses, woven mats, and bags to sell and raise funds for the mission. They were allowed to keep some of the profits, and were also given individual plots of land to cultivate, growing vegetables and selling them to the mission for cash (S. Thomas 2000, 14). Girls at other schools learned crochet, and more efficient forms of farming (Mutongi 1999, 72). Once they left school, some young women went into business, utilizing the skills they learned from the mission to accumulate wealth for themselves and their families. One woman created an entire industry, teaching other African women sewing skills so they could produce a wide variety of banana fiber-based products, giving them increased economic security (S. Thomas 2000, 15). During the interwar period, some Christian women engaging in sex work in Nairobi used skills they gained from mission schools to deflect suspicion while they waited for customers: women sat outside their doors and sewed, perhaps creating items to be sold later, supplementing the income gained from sex work (White 1990, 104-05). Some women used their education in first aid and cleanliness to take paid positions as nurses, over the objection of mission administrators (S. Thomas 2000, 15). Although education was intended to create docile housewives, the example set by women missionaries was one which undermined the expectation of gentle domesticity: women of authority, unmarried, with nice possessions and knowledge to share, these women did not live the retiring life they imagined for the girls in their care (S. Thomas 2000, 17). Mission schools must have had a deep impact on girls who studied in them, although it was not always an easy or positive impact.
Of course, colonial administrators and missionaries generally took the paternalistic view that they knew what was best for Africans, and this led to many cultural clashes. One of the most significant battles surrounding Kenyan girls’s education during the colonial period was over the initiation rites that marked the maturation of a young woman from girlhood to married life. Missionaries, in particular, rejected these rites and pushed incessantly for legal intervention into these “needless and revolting” practices (Hetherington 1998, 103). When teachers at Church of Scotland Mission schools were given the option to take an oath condemning these rites, or lose their jobs, four-fifths of the pupils withdrew from the school (Hetherington 1998, 108), and local communities began to call for government schools or to create their own independent schools (Natsoulas 1998, 291). Mission schools were already being closed due to lack of staff and pupils, and African girls became a symbol for colonial control (or lack thereof).
Although colonial officials were unable to recognize it, initiation rites were the province of women, and girls proved willing to defy legal restrictions to continue their practices. Some missions expelled all initiated girls (L. Thomas 1996, 342), forcing them to choose between their educations and their cultural traditions. In some instances, girls ran from Christian parents to seek initiation on their own, if their parents refused (Hetherington 1998, 101). When a ban on initiation was instituted in Meru, girls snuck away to the woods to be initiated (L. Thomas 1996, 347-48). The Meru ban was passed during the state of emergency, and girls who participated in the rites were subjected to beatings, destruction of their homes, hard labor, and even execution for sedition, yet girls defied the law (L. Thomas 1996, 352). Girls and their communities saw initiation rites as an important aspect of relations between community members, both those between women and men, and those between women of different ages. Women governed these rites, and carried them out away from the view of men; they involved a series of ritual actions taken in succession, all of them carried out by the women of a girl’s family and community (L. Thomas 1996, 340-41). Despite mission and government opposition to it, girls fought to maintain the initiation system, asserting their culture and their right to it, even when it meant losing access to the educational opportunities offered by mission schools.
Mission education played a prominent role in the lives of women and girls in colonial Kenya. Mission schools provided girls with escape, and with skills they could use for homemaking or entrepreneurship. Widowed mothers gave their daughters opportunities for education which also increased their own security. Girls and young women were able to increase control over their futures, choosing whether, when, and who to marry. They knew what they wanted, and used mission schools to get it. They were willing to leave if they needed to, and they defied church leadership to defend themselves and their cultural practices. While mission schools were sites of education and self-betterment, they operated through power imbalances and a lack of cultural understanding that left church leaders prone to paternalism. Despite the goals and intentions of the missionaries, however, Kenyan women and girls possessed their own agency, making the choices they wanted and needed to in order to survive and succeed. Counter to popular conceptions of colonial imposition, these women and girls did not exist strictly as the losing side in a binary system of oppression; rather, they were able to create opportunities for themselves and others.
References
- Hetherington, Penelope. 1998. “The Politics of Female Circumcision in the Central Province of Colonial Kenya, 1920-30.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (1): 93-126.
- Mutongi, Kenda. 1999. “‘Worries of the Heart’: Widowed Mothers, Daughters and Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940-60. Journal of African History 40 (1): 67-86.
- Natsoulas, Theodore. 1998. “The Kenyan Government and the Kikuyu Independent Schools: From Attempted Control to Suppression, 1929-52.” Historian 60 (2): 289-305.
- Strayer, Robert W. 1973. “The Making of Mission Schools in Kenya: A Microcosmic Perspective.” Comparative Education Review 17 (3): 313-30.
- Thomas, Lynn M. 1996. “‘Ngaitana (I Will Circumcise Myself)’: The Gender and Generational Politics of the 1956 Ban on Clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya.” Gender and History 8 (3): 338-63.
- Thomas, Samuel S. 1999. “Gender and Religion on the Mission Station: Roxie Reeve and the Friends African Mission.” Quaker History 88 (2): 24-46.
- Thomas, Samuel S. 2000. “Transforming the Gospel of Domesticity: Luhya Girls and the Friends Africa Mission, 1917-1926.” African Studies Review 43 (2): 1-27.
- White, Luise. 1990. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Word count (excluding reference list): 2,038
Dividers created by @javehimself, and used with thanks.
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