Abstract
In her 2003 publication, Bi Inaya employed the concept of enunciation to introduce the three languages spoken in colonial Zanzibar. During the colonial era, few Zanzibari women were literate, and girls were not taught to write because elders feared they would write love letters to boys. Elders’ anxiety over female literacy was both literal and metaphorical: the desire for the boy and the desire to write were one and the same, and both led girls astray. Yet many schoolgirls embraced literacy as the most valuable skill they acquired in school.2 In contrast to girls who learned only to read and recite the Quran in Arabic, those who completed the full primary course at the government school could, with varying degrees of success, read, speak, and write in Swahili, Arabic, and English. Most schoolgirls and female teachers played down the seriousness of elders’ concerns, but they also worked hard to defend themselves against this ideology by, for instance, emphasizing pronunciation over writing. While Islamic studies mimicked Quranic schools and domestic science seemed another way to get them to do chores, academic subjects were novel to girls who knew that this knowledge was denied to their mothers and grandmothers. Literacy (expressed in both oral and written forms) became the means through which girls and women broadened the discourse on heshima to include space for women’s economic mobility; in this way, they wrote self-reliance into respectability.
With regard to the three languages of ours, from the time of our childhood we were able to enunciate well, and elders taught us to listen to the various sounds made in these three languages:
1. Swahili — the mother tongue; that which truly is heard wherever we go in the world
2. Arabic — Qur-ani; we are taught it because of our religion
3. English — the language of the Administrator; for development.1
—Bi Inaya H. Yahya, 2003
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Notes
Christopher L. Miller, Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001);
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Lynn Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa,” in The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, eds. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow (The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 96–119;
Lynn Thomas, “Schoolgirl Pregnancies, Letter-Writing, and ‘Modern Persons in Late Colonial East Africa,” in African Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 180–208; Stephan F. Miescher, “‘My Own Life’: A. K. Boakye Yiadom’s “Autobiography—The Writing and Subjectivity of a Ghanaian Teacher-Catechist,” in Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories. On film, see
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Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, trans. H. M. Wright (London: Routledge, 1965).
Karin Baber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 68.
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), 87.
Thomas, “The Modern Girl”; Nancy Y. Reynolds, “Salesclerks, Sexual Danger, and National Identity in Egypt, 1920s—1950s,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 3 (2011): 63–88;
Bianca Murillo, “Ideal Homes and the Gender Politics of Consumerism in Ghana, 1960–70,” Gender & History 21, no. 3 (2009): 560–75;
Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002);
Erika D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Elisabeth McMahon, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9;
Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001).
For a discussion of this phenomenon in postcolonial Dar es Salaam, see Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 87.
Ibid., 72, 87–88. See also Roman Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2009), 13, 149–213.
John Middleton, The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1992), 47.
Great Britain Colonial Office, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Mass Education in African Society (London: HM Stationary Office, 1943), 10.
Sybille Küster, African Education in Colonial Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi: Government Control, Settler Antagonism and African Agency, 1890–1964 (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1999);
Terence Ranger, “African Attempts to Control Education in East and Central Africa 1900–1939,” Past & Present 32 (1965): 57–85;
Andreas Eckert, “Regulating the Social: Social Security, Social Welfare, and the State in Late Colonial Tanzania,” The Journal of African History 45, no. 3 (2004): 479. Whereas Africans in other colonies demanded more literary education for the purpose of economic advancement, members of the Arab Association in Zanzibar argued that the non-literary vocational instruction of adapted education policies were “unsuitable to the Arab Community in Zanzibar.” Speaking mainly of boys’ education, they demanded an education that would “enable our boys to leave the school with a much better knowledge of Arabic, English, Arithmetic, and the outside world in general.” See UKNA CO 618, Memorandum from the Arab Association, 1934, 7, and Appendix on Education attached to the Memorandum, 4.
Alamin M. Mazrui, Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 18, 92.
Laura Fair, “‘It’s Just No Fun Anymore’: Women’s Experiences of Taarab before and after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 1 (2002): 61–81.
ZEDAR 1935, Appendix VIII, “The Koran Schools,” a report prepared by a mudir. By the 1930s, a few Zanzibari women with advanced Islamic education had established themselves as highly respected teachers and scholars. Amina Ameir Issa, “The Legacy of Qadiri Scholars in Zanzibar,” 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), 353.
Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Zanzibar was not ignorant of the developments in Egypt. For example, the famous Egyptian female author Heneina Khouri visited Zanzibar’s girls’ schools in 1931. ZEDAR 1931, 18.
Alice Werner, The Advice of Mwana Kupona upon the Wifely Duty from the Swahili Texts (Medstead, Hampshire, UK: The Azania Press, 1934). Alice Werner claimed that Swahili girls in Lamu learned to read and write in Quranic schools, it is more likely that they learned to copy Arabic passages from the Quran.
Emily Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1989), 143–58. Patricia Romero notes that she “may have been the only woman of her generation on that island who could both read and write, and is certainly the only one to have left a personal memoir” (Patricia W. Romero, “Introduction,” in Ruete, Memoirs, v–vi).
Ann Biersteker, “Language, Poetry, and Power: A Reconsideration of ‘Utendi wa Mwana Kupona,’” in Faces of Islam in African Literature, ed. Kenneth W. Harrow (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 59–77. Scholars disagree as to whether Mwana Kupona was really a woman. Ann Biersteker argues not only that Mwana Kupona was a woman, but that her obsequious tone advising her daughter to please her husband mocked patriarchal expectations.
Laura Fair, “Identity, Difference, and Dance: Female Initiation in Zanzibar, 1890 to 1930,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 17, no. 3 (1996): 146–72. Singing was also an important component of girls’ initiation ceremonies. On women’s dance groups in Mombasa, see
Margaret Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890–1975 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 156–81. Siti binti Saad, the most famous female singer in colonial Zanzibar, performed in front of both men and women (Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 183).
Interview 010502, Bi Muna. In addition to W. D. Hussey, Discovery, Expansion, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954),
Bi Muna mentioned L. W. Hollingsworth, A Short History of the East Coast of Africa (London: Macmillan, 1949). Hollingsworth was an education official and headmaster of the Central Government Boys’ School in Zanzibar Town, and author of other works used in Zanzibar’s government schools.
UKNA CO 850/42/2, Exhibit “H”, letter from the schoolgirl to her lover, Dr. Prichard, April 3, 1934, and other documents in Immorality Case, 1934. See also Lawrence E. Y. Mbogoni, Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2013), 129–162.
The definitions are from Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic-English, ed. J. Milton Cowan (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1980), 180. See also
Richard T. Antoun, “On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: A Study in the Accommodation of Traditions,” American Anthropologist, 70, no. 4(1968), 679.
ZNA AD 2/10, Women’s Teacher Training Contracts, 1945–1956. See also Elisabeth McMahon and Corrie Decker, “Wives or Workers?: Negotiating the Social Contract between Female Teachers and the Colonial State in Zanzibar,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 2 (2009): 39–61.
Interview, 071209, Bi Nasra. Bi Nasra took a journalism course at Dar es Salaam and, after the revolution worked as a translator for Radio Zanzibar. Today she is a well-known filmmaker and author. See, for example, Nasra Mohamed Hilal, Mfinyanzi Aingia Kasri: Siti Binti Saad, Malkia wa Taarab (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2007) and Old Childhood Stories from Zanzibar Stone Town, narrated by Bi Nasra Mohamed Hilal, produced by the German Embassy (Zanzibar: The Oral Childhood Stories Program in Zanzibar Stone Town, date unknown), DVD.
Part of the problem of distinguishing between students and teachers may also have been due to the fact that girls and women were required to live in the girls’ hostel while undergoing teacher training. See also Corrie Decker, “Schoolgirls and Women Teachers: Colonial Education and the Shifting Boundaries between ‘Girls’ and ‘Women’ in Zanzibar,” in Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast, eds. Erin Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, forthcoming 2015).
Interviews: 120401, Mama Asha; 010501, Bi Khadija; 010502, Bi Muna; 010503, Bi Salama; 010504, Bi Jamila; 020501, Bi Inaya; 050511, Bi Saada (pseudonym), Mombasa, May 25, 2005; 120801, Bi Fatma; 071202, Bi Zuwena; 071203, Bi Amina; 071204, Bi Fatima; 071205, Bi Arafat; 051311, Bi Khadija Abdulla, Unguja, May 6, 2013; 051314, Bi Mtumwa, Zanzibar Town, May 6, 2013; 051316, Anonymous Female, Western Unguja, May 6, 2013; Interviews with Hajj Muhammad Hajj for Elisabeth McMahon: Bi Farashuu Sleiman, Tundauwa, Pemba, December 21, 2004; Bi Halima Rashid, Pandani, Pemba, December 11, 2004; Bi Asha Hamad, Wete, Pemba, December 21, 2004. I am grateful to Elisabeth McMahon for providing me a copy of these interview notes. See also J. G. C. Blacker, “Population Growth and Differential Fertility in Zanzibar Protectorate,” Population Studies 15, no. 3 (1962): 258–66.
Susan Hirsch, Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 64.
Stockreiter, “Tying and Untying the Knot,” 11. See also Suad Joseph, ed., Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures: Family, Body, Sexuality, and Health (Volume 3) (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 125.
This usually covered the first forty days of the child’s life at the end of which the most important ceremony occurred. See W. H. Ingrams, Zanzibar: Its History and Its People (London: Stacey International, 2007 [1931]), 227–228; Ruete, Memoirs, 60.
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© 2014 Corrie Decker
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Decker, C. (2014). Writing Self-Reliance into Respectability. In: Mobilizing Zanzibari Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472632_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472632_4
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