Beyond Women's Empowerment in Africa: Exploring Dislocation and Agency

Beyond Women’s Empower ment in Af r i ca

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Beyond Women’s Empower ment in Af r ic a Ex p lo r ing Dislo c ati o n and Ag e n cy

Elinami Veraeli Swai

BEYOND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN AFRICA

Copyright © Elinami Veraeli Swai, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin‘s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-10248-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Swai, Elinami Veraeli. Beyond women’s empowerment in Africa : exploring dislocation and agency / Elinami Veraeli Swai. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-10248-4 (hardback) 1. Women—Tanzania—Social conditions. 2. Women in development—Tanzania. 3. Women—Africa—Social conditions. 4. Women in development—Africa. I. Title. HQ1798.5.S89 2010 305.48'89678—dc22 Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: June 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved mother, Mikali Mamboro, and precious father, Veraeli Zakaria, and my late baby sister, Joyce Aisaa.

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Contents

Foreword Mary Nyangweso-Wangila Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xiii 1

1

Understanding Disempowerment: Concepts and Claims

21

2

Women’s Knowledge Systems: Toward Ambivalence and Silences

45

Speaking through Fashion: Khanga as Women’s Knowledge System

81

3 4 5 6 7

Inside Society: The Role of Women’s Knowledge Systems in Africa’s Development

101

The Genesis of Women Disempowerment: The Case of Kilimanjaro

125

Knowledge Is Power and Power Is Knowledge: The Politics of Women’s Empowerment

151

Conclusion

181

Notes

191

References

197

Index

211

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Fo rewo rd

It is a great honor and privilege to be invited by Dr. Elinami Swai to write the foreword to this great book, which examines the role of women’s knowledge systems in development in Africa using Tanzania as a case study. I would like to begin by congratulating Dr. Elinami Swai for converting her doctoral dissertation into a book because many dissertations do not make this transition. There are many eminent scholars on gender and women’s studies in Africa more qualified than I, but I am happy that I was selected to write this foreword. Since the book discusses issues about women from East Africa (where I have conducted most of my research), I believe that I am qualified enough to introduce the reader to this book. The first chapter deals with “dislocation” in a discursive form, highlighting ways in which women have been dislocated as a consequence of many forces acting against them in rural Tanzania. The second chapter addresses the idea and movement of women’s knowledge systems in Tanzania, dealing with ambivalences and silences that have attended these knowledge systems. The third chapter is perhaps the most fascinating because it uses khangas (women’s clothes) as space and site where women’s power and knowledge are articulated as text and subtext, coded and decoded. Equally fascinating is the fourth chapter, which examines the role of women’s knowledge systems in Africa’s development. Chapter 5 is titled “The Genesis of Women Disempowerment: The Case of Kilimanjaro,” which is closely linked to the final chapter, which discuses the politics of women’s empowerment. These are great themes that have not been addressed by previous studies. This book is, therefore, long overdue. The appearance of this book is most timely as almost a decade has passed since Susan Geiger’s TANU Women, which was published in 1997, on Tanzania, addressing the role of women in social movements. It is not only for this reason that the book must be welcomed by those interested in the role of women in development in Tanzania and Africa but also for its immediate value, which resides in the use of everyday examples, narratives, and new sources. Throughout the book, we are treated to interesting and exciting vignettes of women’s

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knowledge systems in Africa in ways that we have never seen or heard before. Dr. Swai uses anecdotes and fantastic life stories to lead us through complex discourses on how women have created and preserved knowledge in rural Tanzania. The stories she recounts from rural areas are a deep and exciting look into the minds of the women as well as their role in society. The book provides a significant shift toward incorporating ordinary voices in understanding the lifestyles and livelihoods of women in rural Tanzania. A notable and insightful contribution to our understanding of women’s lives, this book traces the unique narration, background, structures, and institutions within which women operate in rural Tanzania in the most remarkable manner. The book examines empowerment using completely new lenses—looking at power from the role it plays in societal relations rather than in dominating others. The main thrust of the book is on what may be termed the clash of knowledge systems— Western and African, and a subsystem that the author refers to as a women’s knowledge system—and the resulting tensions. Earlier books on women in Africa have tended to look at politics of exclusion and marginalization of women, but Dr. Swai’s study suggests an alternative way of looking at knowledge and power. The fact that some people have not heard about other forms of knowledge does not mean that these forms do not exist. This book reflects not only on new topics and themes but also on new sources. Although the book uses a variety of sources that enrich the reader’s understanding of women’s knowledge systems in Tanzania, oral sources are deployed to great effect. Secondary sources provide a starting point for some of the sections of the book; oral interviews, participant observation, government reports, and life histories of rural women are utilized by the author to a large extent. Rural women have utilized traditional coping mechanisms and have taken advantage of modern entrepreneurial techniques. Swai faults government policies of privileging Western education and its attendant structures; they have done much to produce the evisceration of women’s knowledge in Tanzania. Just as much as the role of the state has caused the marginalization of women’s knowledge, the reader will likely conclude that the state has an absolutely critical, supportive role to play (e.g., in recent calls for recognition of indigenous knowledge in areas such as medicine and environmental conservation) if women’s knowledge has to be profitable. This is not necessarily a contradictory assessment; rather, it suggests that politics and governance always are key variables in politics of knowledge. The need for recognition of women’s knowledge systems is a theme that runs throughout the book. Dr. Swai’s book is an extraordinary

Foreword

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work that deploys women’s knowledge systems such as beautiful stories, sayings, proverbs, metaphors, and slogans to great effect. She succeeds in drawing the attention of the readers to the ways in which women in rural Tanzania have created their own ways of creating power and how they have negotiated for their own position in society. Swai’s book illustrates the innovative ways in which women in rural Tanzania have responded to economic difficulties and opportunities. Dr. Swai deploys various theoretical frameworks. Among these that will be familiar to readers are the social historical theory, feminist theory, critical discourse analysis, and postmodern and postcolonial theories. Swai deploys postmodern devices in this book and refuses to close her eyes to forms of misrepresentation of women that have existed in the past. She remains perceptive and thoughtful, transporting our cognitive thoughts toward understanding and decoding women’s knowledge in ways that have never been seen before. From the first page, readers are quickly and completely immersed in this book because of its simplicity and discursive superiority. As Dr. Swai’s narrative continues throughout the book, she accurately conveys ways in which knowledge has been produced and used in rural areas in Tanzania. It requires great courage to fault and deconstruct Western education in Africa the way Swai does in this book. But rather than bashing colonial education and seeing it as a project in evisceration of women, Swai attempts to lead the readers into the states of mind of rural women and how their knowledge has remained resilient. Any reader who seeks to understand more clearly the role of women’s knowledge systems in Africa and their power, especially how they have influenced development, will be impressed with this book. There is no doubt that the book will be a useful addition to the historiography on feminism, gender, and women’s studies in Africa. The interdisciplinary approach interwoven in the book and the research from which the book was produced, including the heavy use of oral and other primary sources, as well as secondary materials, adds to the adaptability of this book to all fields in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. I would like to highly recommend the book to all students of the African continent and departments of African studies, ethnic and global studies, history, political science, education, anthropology, sociology, and gender and women’s studies, and general readers. —Professor Mary Nyangweso-Wangila, PhD, J. Woolard and Helen Peel Distinguished Professor in Religious Studies, East Carolina University

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Acknowledgments

There are many people and institutions to thank who have made this book, which came out of my dissertation, possible. During the initial part of this research, which has involved several rounds of drafts, written, rewritten, and revised, I am thankful for being so privileged to have a group of scholars on my dissertation committee. My largest and most permanent debt is to my dissertation advisor and mentor Dr. Ian E. Baptist of the Department of Learning and Performance Systems, Program of Adult Education at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, whose encouragement and unending interest for this project has seen it develop into a book. His enthusiasm and passion on cultural, historical, and social issues in learning energized me and made me more critical. His insights made me examine the world from different angles. His attention and nurturance to my personal life as well as his dedication to my success as a scholar shaped my life in ways that are beyond my description. He is simply the greatest mentor that everyone dreams of, and I am happy to have passed through his very experienced hands. He read numerous draft chapters of the dissertation from which this book has emerged and gave me comments that were invariably incisive, wise, and helped to clarify my thoughts, and he deserves credit for any virtues this work may possess. Dr. Baptiste has continued to shape my intellectual life in more ways than anyone can imagine. My profound gratitude goes to Dr. Fred M. Schied from the Program of Adult Education at Penn State University, who also served on my dissertation committee. More importantly, I would like to thank him for his faith in me, his practical inputs, as well as his devotion throughout the period of completing this study. I would also like to thank Dr. Carol Sachs, also of Pennsylvania State University, who served as the external member of my committee, for working with me at many levels. Without her hard questions, advice, and encouragement, the attainment of my academic goals could not have been possible, let alone this book. Her feminist and sociological eyes and perspectives kept pushing me to look and think like a critical feminist

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scholar and not simply mimic ideas of other scholars. I was fascinated and thrilled by her enthusiasm for African feminisms, her knowledge of women’s experiences in rural Africa, and her personal intellectual prowess, which really motivated me. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, who was willing to serve on my committee and always provided thoughtful feedback, guidance, and suggestions. Dr. Zeleza encouraged me to look harder and further into African feminist literature. His encouragement played a significant role in my getting hired for a tenure-track position at the University of Toledo. I need also to thank Lourdes Diaz Soto, my first advisor, for her encouragement. I am most indebted to all those women who graciously gave their time and knowledge during interview sessions in Tanzania. They are the true heroines of this book. They provided me with great information, some of which they had kept for many years. Without their contributions, this book would not have been realized. There is so much I can say about them that I could fill this entire book, but I cannot find adequate words to explain how indebted I am to them. I owe them big time and don’t know where to start or end. These are strong, intelligent women who taught me many new things about life. They made me realize just how important their role is in development. I feel greatly honored that they agreed to participate in this project. I am humbled by their generosity of spirit, hospitality, and commitment. Asante sana (thank you very much). My experience and academic life at Penn State and in the United States in general would not have been complete without a real support from colleagues in the department of Adult Education. A special note of thanks goes to Heather Nash, Honoratha Mushi, Kyungmi Hyung, Naomie Nyanungo, ChangGook Youn, Kavena Shimhopileny, and my roommates, Susana Corona and Srijana Shrestha, for their support and affectionate friendship. This research would not have been possible without the financial support of the Fulbright Program, which provided me with a generous fellowship for two years. I thank the Margaret McNamara Foundation for a scholarship in 2002. Many friends in diverse corners of the globe have made the long gestation of this book an enriching experience. In particular, I wish to thank Gabriel Elepu, Eliza Johannes, and Josephine Yambi. I also thank my colleagues at the University of Toledo: Sharon Barnes, Gabriella Davis, Jamie Barlowe, Ashley E. Pryor, Mojisola Tiyamiyu, Amira Akl, and Gina Mercurio. I also recognize my colleagues at Central Washington University: Cyndie Strawder, Cathrene Connery, Bobby Cummings, Keith Champaign, Teresa Francis, Marji Morgan, Don Woodcock, Lene Pedersen, Karen Blaire, Megan McLean, Mike

Acknowledgments

xv

Ervin, James Cook, Naomi Jeffery Petersen, Nancy Schnebly, and Cindy Coe. Maurice Amutabi, you know all that you have contributed, and I can never be thankful enough. There are a few other special people I’d like to mention who have contributed to my academic career: Lambart Mahai, you started it all. You encouraged me to work hard, and I did just that. I will not forget my good friends at the Institute of Adult Education: Asinan Ramadhani, P. Safari, Bakari Ngwawasya, and colleagues at the University of Dar es Salaam: Eustella Bhalalusesa, Philemon Mushi, and P. S. D. Mushi. I would also like to acknowledge Luba Ostashevsky, my editor, and Laura Lancaster, editorial assistant, at Palgrave Macmillan for their encouragement and for their commitment to African scholarship. My friend Glory Minja and my family members, who always cheered me up, and kept me motivated and encouraged me to keep going as I struggled to make it a reality: Mchungaji Zakaria and Mama Edness; Baba and Mama Ukundi; Baba and Mama Mercy; Smart and Mama Jeremiah; Geraldine, Handrich, Weniisaria, and Halfani; Eva and Wilbert; Vincent, Almodard, and Mama Nelson; Naomi and Cosmas; and Truda and Wilbert. I would like to thank my late parents—my beloved mother, Mikali Mamboro, and precious father, Veraeli Zakaria—posthumously. Without their patience, encouragement, support, and, above all, love, the completion of this work would not have been possible. Finally, I want to give my baby sister, the late Joyce Aisaa, special mention, for her place in my heart and motivation for me and for looking up to me as role model. Although she left this life early, she was very special to me and always will be. For all others who I have not mentioned, I say thank you all. Finally, I give the ultimate thanks to God Almighty, in whom I live, move, and have my entire being.

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Introduction

4

T

his book is about women’s knowledge systems as contained in the stories of ordinary women in Africa. The book is also about new interpretation of women’s knowledge systems in Africa as legitimate centers of power. It is about knowledge systems that have sustained the continent for many years despite being sidestepped and undermined by colonial and postcolonial projects. Throughout this study, my contention is that these stories by women are not only intimate and painful but also rational and philosophical. The stories are important because they show how women make meaning of who they are and what is expected of them in modern society. The stories are situated in rural communities of Tanzania, and they illuminate women’s everyday life situations that the majority of scholars have not cared to explore. The stories also reveal the separate worlds that women inhabit but are unacknowledged and unsupported. The stories debunk and deconstruct the way modern society is structured, where knowledge systems from women’s everyday lives have been illegitimated, invalidated, and constructed as “indigenous,” “local” or “informal,” “domestic,” and “private.” My contention is that these stories are not only important sources of knowledge but are useful signposts in understanding the lives of women in rural areas and important in contributing to education and development projects. To be sure, the stories move us beyond the conventional notions of marginalization and powerlessness to alternative conceptions of agency and actions of women. A commonly held view is that ordinary African women lack power and agency due to a lack of “appropriate” knowledge and economic or political positions. The justification for this (which this study does not support) is often explained by factors such as lack of education or poverty and inequity in distribution of resources. In such situations, lack of acknowledgement and support of women’s knowledge systems

2

Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

and their contribution to the development are presented as natural and inevitable in a busy and dynamic world. In her book Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems, Catherine Odora-Hoppers has argued for recognition of the legitimacy of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in Africa. In this study, Catherine Odora-Hoppers calls for determined “effort at revalorisation, re-appropriation and partial re-invention of local paradigms. (2002, 112). This is what I seek to do in this book. My project seeks to situate women’s knowledge at the center of any discourse on development in Africa. The study aims at creating an inventory of women’s knowledge systems in Africa, using rural Tanzania as a case study. I agree with Odoro-Hoppers and others when they fault the hegemonic effects of Western domination on other forms of knowledge, a domination that has been “achieved at the cost of tremendous silencing, parochial legitimation procedures and, most of all, the deterioration in social status for most of humanity, including women and non-Western cultures” (ibid., 27). Although “empowerment” is a rightfully recurring theme in this book, I fault Odora-Hoppers’s suggestion that some forms of knowledge are “mainstream” because this suggests or supposes that other forms of knowledge are not. I see Odora-Hoppers’s study as well as others before her as lacking appreciation for the creativity and genius of ordinary women in Africa. Seeking to go beyond merely stating that IKS are useful, I believe that IKS should not only be recognized as a valid rational scientific structures but should also be explained and given credit for sustaining livelihoods in many rural areas on the African continent and whose contribution should be recognized like other forms of knowledge.1 This is the reason I concur with Odora-Hoppers when she points out that there is need for mutual respect and reciprocity by all forms of knowledge systems across the globe. I also agree with her when she recognizes the need to recover, retrieve, and repossess indigenous knowledge that may have been suppressed in the past. She sees this role for indigenous knowledge as political and pedagogically emancipating and liberating, and I agree with Odora-Hoppers, although I seek to go beyond emancipation, liberation, and empowerment. My contention is that we cannot talk about using these forms of knowledge without creating a comprehensive inventory—what these systems are, what they have done, and what they continue to do. That is why I use women’s stories to reconstruct women’s knowledge systems in Africa. The stories in this book provide insider accounts of rupture and linkages, the dynamics that shape women’s everyday lives in modern Tanzania. They provide nuggets about women’s knowledge systems.

Introduction

3

These stories are rich in addressing processes and practices of social and cultural division along the categories of gender, class, age, ethnicity, and race. In any case, little is known about women’s knowledge systems in Africa despite that they have been acknowledged as valuable in many sociological, educational, historical, and other spheres and have been long established by feminists in Africa and participatory and action research. This study suggests that women’s everyday lives and their stories are obviously worthy of biographical treatment because their fundamental contributions in developing theories of learning and human development are increasingly acknowledged, within Africa and by the international community. Despite this recognition, women’s stories and knowledge systems have not been decoded into meaningful knowledge structures. This book brings to view women’s stories and knowledge systems and situates them as part of fundamental issues in women’s and feminist studies, education, and development projects. The experience and stories that women tell emanate from their pasts, and are often historically structured to restrain their participation in everyday life. This study is located around the activities of remarkable women, such as Mama Mona, Ma Kilee, Ashiku Kanyeji, and others. Mama Mona is a healer and a traditional birth attendant in Yuuri, Tanzania. She has healed many people and assisted in many births in her community but her knowledge of health is trivialized as traditional and local. For example, Mama Mona works day and night offering profound health care to children and adults in her village. For many years, she has healed wounds and treated stomachaches and other conditions and diseases such as malaria. Her legacy is only respected by the lasting memory of the number of children who she has assisted in their delivery and her diligence in ensuring that they survive. Ashiku’s story brings to view something of the differentiated meaning of complex life that young women in Tanzania negotiate with on a daily basis. Unraveling her story as she makes hard choices between marriage and school inevitably undermines any simple-minded feminist assumption of identity or womanhood in which the dynamics of the process of subjectivity are of no account. Equally, all the stories in this book illuminate the workings of colonial domination and its aftermath where its legacy continues to shape all social, economic, and everyday life of people in Africa. The marginalization of women’s experiences and stories that they carry along is not confined to the contemporary period but goes back to colonial days in Africa. It is not unusual for women to be identified as wayward, wicked, and “bad” (Hodgson and McCurdy 2001)

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

or even killed for refusing to fit into roles typified as “normal” or “cultured” in society. Sometimes they succeed, but at other times the pressure becomes too intense and it breaks their agency. A good example is that of Ma Kilee, who, together with her mother, worked as traditional healers during the colonial period in Tanzania. Their practice was dismissed as antiquated by colonial officials and regarded by European missionaries as heathen. They were stopped from practicing as healers. It was after independence that Ma Kilee was allowed to continue with her practice. Ma Kilee’s life story illustrates ways in which women’s actions have been undermined and never reported. It adds to an understanding of the process of their dislocation. Therefore, the book is a critical treatment of the history of dislocation of women in Africa using Tanzania as a case study. This book brings to view African women’s experiences in the periphery of global context. It is situated into postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist African perspectives, paying particular attention to contexts and avoiding essentialization. It is cognizant of multidisciplinary inter-linked effects of larger social and cultural processes and practices in the production of knowledge. The stories in this book are not presented as gendered because I believe gender is not the master label for everything. This book foregrounds the history that has made it possible for the production of gendered subjectivity and how women negotiate it. Thus, women in this book transcend their gender, and they do not see themselves primarily as gendered subjects. This book contextualizes dislocated subjectivity by identifying neoliberalism and globalization as transformations that profoundly mediate national policies that, in turn, shape women’s life course trajectories. In a way, this book pays particular attention to diversity of women and the diverse ways they negotiate their lives, forging connections among themselves to subvert the processes of political and economic restructuring that have marginalized their knowledge and agency. Unlike Western feminist scholarship that views the third world or women in Africa in a certain way, as relatively undifferentiated, united in poverty, and with a single goal in life, I acknowledge women in their diverse interests and imaginations, bringing to view many issues and ways that women negotiated them. In this setting of concurrent harmony and conflict, I entered into a dialogue with women to formulate workable strategies to construct knowledge that is presented in this book. This is in cognizance with the framework of this book, which acknowledges the importance of history and diverse views in construction of knowledge.

Introduction

5

In this book, the concept of dislocation is construed as the process of evisceration of women’s knowledge systems. Dislocation may then be defined as procesural as women’s knowledge systems are sidelined. I am interested in the many ways in which women negotiate against marginalization of their knowledge, sometimes making accommodation, and sometimes looking for options. In this study, dislocation and agency are seen as processes that are inseparable. Juxtaposing them reminds us, however, that a woman is always an active subject, making meaning of who she is and what is expected of her, while accommodating societal demands and repudiating others in order to achieve her goals in life. To explore dislocation and agency is to foreground the cultural-historical contexts and women’s predispositions and subjectivities. These are the contexts that are used as lenses in this book. In cultural-historical and subjectivity processes framework, those moments of representations are called social acts, but not all social actions objectify women. This assertion implies a crucial distinction between what has been considered as a woman’s identity and womanhood. Notions of identity and womanhood fail to capture the complex manner in which women come to be subjected and how they use their knowledge systems to conceptualize and negotiate social norms and values that may be in contradiction to their needs and interests. Identity is a simplistic account of what women are and what they can be, driven by binary and androcentric models of patriarchal structure that contrast man and woman. Tabitha Kanogo (2005), explaining the contradiction of a woman’s identity within the lens of womanhood in colonial Kenya, observes, “Self-identity and womanhood in its various forms, including acceptance in one’s natal family, peer group, becoming a wife, daughter-in-law, grandparent, or member of a woman’s councils were all at stake, whichever choice a woman made” (84). This book, instead of looking at women’s sense of being as transparent and fundamentally reflecting their low social status, conceptualizes women as active subjects, whose bodies and minds are situated in various intersecting or interwoven multimodal processes, both of which are mediated by relations of power and processes of political struggle. Women are not objects but subjects whose thinking and behaviors are mediated by intrapsychological as well as interpsychological phenomena. These are two contexts in which a woman’s experience develops, negotiated and transformed. Inscribed within the concept of ‘women’s knowledge systems’ is the notion of learning, construction of knowledge and identity, all as processes mediated by women’s experiences. In many ways, women’s knowledge systems are legitimated as they are integrated into what is

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

considered to be of value in social life. On their own, women’s knowledge systems are regarded as private, while at the same time, they are readily accepted. We should grant women’s knowledge systems are of value in their own terms, and there is therefore need to allow ourselves an opportunity to evaluate them. There is no denying that the impact of the expansion of Europe and the establishment of western and alien cultural hegemony throughout the world, rooted in class, gender, race, and other social divisions, has a hand in eviscerating women’s knowledge systems in Africa. For example, the agenda of education for women during the colonial period was predicated on supply of cheap labor, which explains why education for girls was concentrated on women’s reproduction, childcare, and childrearing. Education for women in Africa was based on a preplanned agenda and not a matter of what women thought or believed they lacked. In Tanzania, for example, curriculum was geared toward the importance of caring for children to prevent “cruelty to children,” which was believed to be part of traditional childrearing practices among “native” women. Even where the knowledge and skills were gained, they tended to focus more on the transformation of girls’ attitudes toward being good wives, mothers, and helpers. This indicates that there was a purposeful agenda to education of girls and women, and this has not changed despite the rhetoric for the reverse of colonial policies of discrimination against women after Tanzania gained political independence. More often than not, education for women and women’s empowerment and social development are used as though they were identical in meaning. Much of the ideas that associate lack of modern education with ignorance or education with freedom and empowerment seldom consider the knowledge systems that African women have developed for many centuries and that have sustained their lives and communities for generations. Successive governments in Tanzania have not changed their attitude from colonial mentality about everyday life and knowledge emanating from it. In the insistence of science as the only mode of knowing and lack of acknowledging and supporting women’s knowledge systems and activities, we see the overarching cultural-historical process of eviscerating women’s agency, dislocating them from accessing rightful resources as citizens. This is the reason this book seeks to pay special attention to women’s stories, which give us a window into the very rupture and unspeakable process of socialization that all women must undergo and that scholars and social elites are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge. The stories of women illustrate the process of

Introduction

7

dislocating them and underplaying the value of their agency while undermining their potential as human beings. The study employs institution of education as a case study for three reasons. First, education has been portrayed as an empowering tool that has capacity and potential to lift all women, regardless of class, ethnic, or racial location, out of their subordinate position. Second, modern education is one of the most contagious social institutions in the history of modern society in its context of marginalizing and subordinating other knowledges. Third, modern education places unsubstantiated universality on human experience, and through it African women have been represented as “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, and family oriented.”2 Therefore, modern education has a particular coherent logic of controversy, on one hand, and emancipation, on the other, thus provides the best cross-sectional dissection of its impact on women’s lives and allows this study to interrogate its differentiating mechanism in many areas— social, economic, cultural, and political. Education for women has also been used by national male elites in Tanzania to legitimize their authority. And finally, the types of education that are considered to empower women are often used as a sieve, as a gatekeeping device to control and manipulate women’s social and economic mobility, and those who do not conform or resist are often fired or identified as “impossible” and ungrateful. Clearly, the institution of education has been among the cultural tools used in dislocating women and suppressing their creativity and agency in Africa. I argue that the notions of women empowerment are in fact mechanisms for women dislocation and have always been used to suppress women’s agency for political purposes. The notions of empowerment over power barely conceal specific content and intention, which is normally used for shaping women to fit into patriarchal and capitalist agenda. In fact, the book attests to the fact that besides marginalizing women’s knowledge systems, which will be elaborated later, the provision of education to women has been used overtly by governments in Tanzania to foster its international objectives. I should explain that criticizing provision of modern education to ordinary women in Africa is not an entirely new argument, but previous studies that have ventured to offer such criticism have not used case studies of women from rural areas. Much of the criticism has been confined to theoretical arguments. Marjorie J. Mbilinyi has been among the most vocal critics of this wrong use of education for educated women. The claim to originality of my study is set on three specific grounds. Its perspective is essentially different, since most

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

scholars start from the premise that education is in practice, a specific kind of socialization, which all human beings can be said to depend on, without looking into its structuring and differentiating tendencies. The problem, seen from the works of scholars like Mbilinyi and others, is that women have not acquired enough education, the argument being that if only women got enough education, it would empower them to think and assume specific roles and activities that they would otherwise not be able to perform or engage in; hence, education empowers women. The premise of this book is completely the opposite: I believe that education shapes women’s predisposition toward certain predetermined goals without considering their realities, and I see this as problematic because it is inherently normative, often unknowingly so; it is a way of avoiding or hiding a foundational element of the hegemony of patriarchy and capitalism. The study demonstrates that the institution of education for women is by no means innocent and impartial. Education seeks to control, manipulate, and shape the worldviews of participants and helps in dismantling other knowledges and ways of knowing, denying them autonomy and capacity to contribute to policies and formal practices and should therefore be assessed more critically than has been the case in the past. The study shows how education for empowerment is loaded with patronizing, distancing, and “Othering” agenda, replete with chauvinistic binaries of “us” versus “them,” “backward” versus “developed,” and more. These types of binaries shape women’s thinking and behavior, regarding good and bad, normal and abnormal, and mainstream and periphery. Contrary to previous studies, which have presented education for African women as the only way of empowering them in modern society, African women’s paths are in fact multiple and their strategies are many. The insistence on modern education has the effect of enhancing propensity for familiar or normative actions, limiting women’s agency of exploring avenues and other options that are inconsistent with those prescribed as normal. In the long run, some aspects of education erode any potential women might have in self-development. In this way, therefore, the institution of education for women needs to be critically assessed. The research discussed here tries to interrogate ways through which women’s knowledge systems in Africa have been marginalized, a process that has created in women a sense of dislocation. The data were collected using a range of critical ethnographic research methods. Having said that, I would like to state that this book is not a conventional ethnographic study of women’s exclusion or inclusion

Introduction

9

in society and how this has shaped their behavior. In other words, it will not tell you how the ordinary “woman” in Africa is confined into subservient roles and positions due to lack of necessary education or faulty knowledge, nor does it offer detailed analysis of how this was effected, although, as we shall see, these issues are touched upon in some of the discussions that follow. My research, instead, focuses on how it has been possible to use empowerment as a cultural factor to deny women power. This theoretical framework, I feel, helps to explain the implacable processes by which dominant groups of society control and even mold women’s knowledge systems and agency. A detailed analysis of how this was possible is offered. Thus, “disempowerment” as a process in which women have to negotiate is used here as a concept through which we can understand what it means to be an ordinary woman in rural Africa. While the scope of this research reaches back to the middle of the nineteenth century, the book is primarily concerned with the processes and practices of social formation and disempowerment of women in Tanzania through the institution of modern education starting from the 1880s to the present. The first period is from the 1880s to 1960— the beginning of European colonization and subsequent colonialism. The second era covers the period from 1960 to 1970, which is the immediate decade of the postcolonial era. These were periods of substantial transformation in the lives of women (and men) that would be followed by significant evisceration. The third epoch covers the 1970s to the present. Thus, the book depicts the cultural transformation of the state of women in Tanzania, especially in the construction of “woman” as ignorant, illiterate, and unemployable—thereby revealing the struggle between the woman’s personhood and the universal “African woman” in the face of colonialism. In colonial Tanzania, women were often targeted in control and eradication of venereal diseases and were often suspected as engaging in prostitution in urban areas; hence, their movement was controlled. The foundation on which a Tanzanian woman was constructed has gradually shifted after political independence in 1961 when the woman was seen as a missing link and regarded as an important partner in the ujamaa (familyhood socialist project) under President Julius Nyerere. The position of “woman” has shifted dramatically in neoliberal economic transformation of the late 1990s. In this period, we see a woman who must be empowered to meet the demands of global capitalist society. What has followed has been a progressive reproduction and reinterpretation of dislocated women despite uneasiness from cultural critics on the constant redrawing of negative connotations about African women

10

Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

in such spaces as the media, advertising, cinema, and other avenues of popular culture. Thus, this book will demonstrate that the present condition of ordinary women in Africa is much more cultural and historical than previous studies have cared to reveal. The study demonstrates that the disempowerment of women in Africa is a cultural-historical construct, structured within the institution of education and maintained as their everyday activities continue to be marginalized. However, I suggest that explicit accounts of the origins of the process of disempowerment, the mechanisms and reproduction processes and practice through which women are implicated, are missing in feminist theories. This absence is particularly evident when we generate dialogue, such as “woman as oppositional gaze” (hooks 1998); as “Western invention” (Oyewumi 1997), and as duped by their own people, like in writing of TANU Women (Geiger 1997). Lack of a well-developed account of evisceration of women’s knowledge systems prevents us from addressing questions such as Why do women in Africa continue to engage in activities that seem to be contrary to the current social economic and global contexts? The need within feminist theory is to develop an analytical framework that can answer a long list of unanswered questions: What exactly does it mean for a woman to be “woman,” as Simone de Beauvoir (1949) asks, or what does it mean to be a good or bad woman in Tanzania? Is there a woman in Tanzania who is untainted by trappings of modernism and its corrupting ways? What characteristics does society assign to good and bad women? Are these characteristics universally acceptable in Tanzania, or Africa? This book is based on a balanced perspective that reconciles local and universal understanding of being a “woman” in Africa. I use cultural-historical lenses and multiple pathways to study the development of “woman.” I argue that the current condition of African women is sociocultural, historical, and maintained within education. In other words, the construction of African women as good and empowered or bad and illiterate and in need of transformation, and therefore to be targeted for special emancipatory education or even more belligerent forms of enforced “liberation” reinstates a worldview based on colonial lines of demarcation. It fails to see the great gray areas in between the pretentious claim that Western women have already succeeded and the equally false statement that success of women in Africa is nonexistent. As far as I am concerned, those in-between degrees of complexity are the only ones that matter, and they should be put at the center of the agenda. This position fails to take into account, for

Introduction

11

example, the precious, patient, and pragmatic work accomplished by women like those in this study. Therefore, in this study, I hope to contribute to efforts in the understanding of ways in which disempowerment of African women in the pretext of empowerment occurred, how it is maintained, and ways women strive to transcend it. I do this through historical methods and narrative evidence, as well as close observation and recording of chains of events. Thus, in this way, my project contributes to cultural historical writings, focusing more on unique constructs that have been silenced or marginalized in feminist and education literature. The strength of this endeavor is to help us understand that “African woman” is a cultural-historical construction, which scholars have taken as truthful and real. Thus, this study affords us the opportunity to look afresh. It grants us a fresh mandate of interrogating feminists’ and African thinkers’ historical perceptions and past biases, about African women as unchanging, and whether these women are wittingly or unwittingly, intentionally or unintentionally marginalized or excluded from society. This book suggests that education as a process of socialization is premised on the objectified knowledge that has its roots in Euro/ American cultural hegemony. The goal of education is the same across the world: to shape and fashion people into certain accepted norms. However, what one does with the attained knowledge and skills differs. Cultural reproduction has been used to understand this dynamic. In Africa and other places, for example, programs for women have been an important part of national development ideology; they are one of the nationalists’ ways of capturing women. “Empowering” women enables the dominant class to shape women’s conduct, regulate their capacities, standardize their needs, aspirations, and desires, and, above all, categorize and differentiate them from men and deny them access to power. Part of the criteria for this disempowerment process is identifying women as needy, uneducated, and ignorant. Today, several years into the third millennium, these identifications and their meanings constitute an important part of identity of women in Africa, which differentiate African women from other women in the other parts of the world, particularly the West. This cultural process is based on assumptions made in advance by psychology “experts” and development planners that school-based education, even if it does not mean anything to a woman, is the most important tool that all women should depend on for empowerment and development. However, Cultural Historical Activity Theorists (CHAT) have challenged these assumptions in recent years. The theorists take the perspective that

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

modern education as a social practice is situated in time and place. CHAT tradition provides a tenable starting point for understanding the cultural reproduction and differentiation mechanisms in the lives of ordinary women in Tanzania in this study. The book also raises serious questions about specific long-term conflicts and sustained women’s disempowerment in Africa. To understand this dynamic, the book identifies the significance of modern education and its role in creating dislocation between women and their needs and interests and the cultural standards of empowered individuals. Willis (1977) and Bourdieu (1977, 1990) have elaborated on the mismatch between the history in institutional structures and history at the personal level. Both agree that though social institutions such as school and employment are not related to human beings, their histories come together in terms of culturally mediated forms. Therefore, the current lives and stories of ordinary women in Africa are largely culturally mediated. Being able to conceptualize the history of modern education in relation to African women allows for a frame of reference in the exploration of structuring processes that have made it possible to disempower African women and dislocate them from their knowledge and isolate them from their labor. This book shows that studies that have embellished, valorized, and sanitized education as in opposition to the everyday messy lives of people are not only misleading but also grossly inaccurate. In fact, such views have contributed to seeing human life as divided: one informal and another formal. The book brings us to dilemmas familiar in the field of education and feminist scholarship that have lasted for several decades: how can we conceptualize the current situation of ordinary women in Africa in ways that do not in the end underwrite the sociocultural and historical conditions under which they operate? How can we avoid ideas represented about African women to understand their everyday lives and perceptions in it? The book shows that both the current situation of women and their representations are unfinished and are still taking place. Rather than beginning from conceptions of already existing states of disempowerment in stereotypes such as what womanhood, femininity, woman, and female are and their respective synonyms of “weaker” or “fairer” sex (qualities that have been developed to describe women’s condition), the approach taken in this book is one in which we are required to step back and reassess the past. The book calls for a more reflective approach of understanding the process and how those stereotypes have been developed and allocated to women and for what reasons. My argument is that these stereotypes have led

Introduction

13

to the disempowerment of women. Thus, women’s disempowerment in the context of empowerment is studied within women’s participation in social and cultural activities in particular times and places. Set within the everyday activities of women in rural Tanzania, the book answers the key question: how can we conceptualize the interplay between the current conditions of ordinary women in Africa in practice and the role of institution of modern education and governments in dislocating them? Thus, this book demonstrates that the institution of modern education in Africa has created disempowerment and resistance to the masses of women, opening a door for the dominant group to be on an offensive position. This forces women to seemingly “admit” their “ignorance” and be made to think that their knowledge, needs, and interests, as well as their everyday activities are subjective and personal, a condition that has made them humble, uncertain, and always on the defense. As the provision of education to women focuses on the lack of certain forms of knowledge or skills, as well as the capacity to get it right, African women who were supposed to be the makers of history and motors of development have become the subject matter of education discourse. For over three decades, feminists have tried to understand how it was possible to remove women from many segments of power across time and space. There have been many reasons offered to explain this discrepancy. One set of explanations focuses on structural difference in distribution of resources, including lack of recognition of African women’s power (Ogola 1995; Oyewumi 1997). The other set focuses on marginalization of African women’s knowledge and political as well as economic differences in opportunities within society and reflected in capitalist structures and institutions (Barnes 1997; Geiger 1997). A third explanation posits theories of African womanhood as the source of African women’s disempowerment. This deficit perspective has a long history within postcolonial feminisms. The deficit perspective begins with notions of societal ambivalence toward women and attack on African women’s domestic labor, and moves to trivialize child bearing, home making, and women’s roles as wives and mothers. Domestic labor, it is argued, is used to discriminate women from the world of employment. This explanation is veiled in arguments about how African women’s traditional roles impede them from engaging in activities that would lead them to accesses power, without pointing out that lack of acknowledging women on their own rights is in fact what denies women power. A third explanation for lack of power among African women draws on research on

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

race, gender, ethnicity, and disability, which has consistently argued that African women’s social and cultural positions have disempowered them because they often find themselves under men and capitalist societies where men and a larger society have access to and benefit from women’s labor, both reproduction and production (Gordon 1996). A fourth explanation, but related to the third, puts forth a somewhat different point of view, what I refer to as evisceration of women’s agency and power, or dislocation of women’s subjectivity, sometimes termed as displacement. This explanation, around which this book is situated, contends that women have power and agency, and these can be seen in their everyday lives and activities and are of equal importance to them but are not acknowledged or supported by others. To empower women and to restore their power and agency, society needs to acknowledge women’s activities and knowledge and look for ways through which they can be applied in school and development policies. There are three general themes that stand out in this book. The first theme is highlighting the history of Tanzania; the second is examining the role of woman’s knowledge systems; the third examines the processes and ways through which women have been disempowered. While examining these themes, it is clear that despite many ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and opinions about African knowledge systems, the various social, cultural, and political changes in colonial and later postcolonial processes and practices have been, to a large extent, shaped by women’s knowledge systems. These particular themes have been chosen both for the reason that they are timely topics of debate among scholars of colonialism and African development and for the fact that they allow for a historical narrative that fully explores the role of women in the processes of economic and social transformation in Africa. A critical assessment of women’s everyday lives also suggests that although the exclusion of women from social, economic, and cultural resources is mostly beyond individual woman’s control, women have often resisted against their exclusion as individuals and as groups, using various strategies throughout the colonial period and contemporary society. They continuously engage in various forms of dialogue through which they have appropriated spaces in the wake of structural and institutional changes and new demands. The book illustrates that African women are not voiceless as is often claimed. On the contrary, their voices are articulated in a variety of spaces, some in women-centered and others in gender-neutral avenues. These voices have been missed because some are coded and need to be decoded and encoded in order to be understood. While

Introduction

15

these voices are often veiled, or misunderstood, they have played a significant role in Africa’s development and can be evaluated. There is no denying that many African women’s voices still compare poorly to their male counterparts in several spheres of life and the process through which the evisceration of women’s voices has been (and continues to be) marginalized, even by feminists who claim to study them. There continues to be a lot of debate about whether African women are victims and have no agency or are agents and voice to be heard. These debates have generated massive amounts of literature, though most of this literature does not extend much beyond aesthetic judgment and mere theoretical exploration. African women’s voices are both soft and loud, and these have been clearly heard in different historical periods in African’s history, projecting African women’s agency and identity. As this study illustrates, women’s voices and agency illustrate women’s capabilities of not only telling their own stories but also of claiming their rightful place and identity in the broader global life. Although this book addresses the process of evisceration of women’s knowledge systems and ways women negotiate and transform their situation, it would be a mistake to assume that these processes and ways of negotiations were uniform throughout Africa. There is a great diversity in the politics and activities that women perform and the strategies they use in performing them. But the work of educators and development personnel continuously draws on formal education and formal employment, showing how lack of education has positioned women in precarious and disadvantageous positions. Through the detailed investigation of networks of connections used to identify and distinguish “woman” from “man,” in the context of knowledge production, the book explores a range of activities and strategies that women employ to learn, know, and construct knowledge, which I suggest must be acknowledged and incorporated in formal education.

Wh y I s This Bo o k on Beyon d E mp ower ment I mportant N ow? The last decade has seen a growth of interest in empowering women, and African indigenous knowledge systems have been acknowledged as important in the development of society. As the majority of ordinary women’s knowledge and everyday activities in Africa continue to be sidelined and marginalized, one of the most important questions of empowerment becomes primary. Furthermore, in the present postmodern condition, a growth of interest in other avenues of learning, knowing, and knowledge systems as valid and vital sources, women’s

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

knowledge has become more of a necessity for effective participation in a fast-paced change. Societies have become more global, and people must learn to interact with an increasing diversity of groups. Societies and many modern institutions are having difficulty in effectively identifying, acknowledging, and supporting other knowledges and activities that seem to be inconsistent with the current social condition: how can scholars, development planners, and national leaders tap the knowledge and skills that people develop as they learn and make sense of their everyday lives in the same globalizing world? This book considers everyday life as a rich venue for learning and knowledge that could be used to achieve larger societal goals. The book uses dialectical and synthesizing methods as viable models for developing a framework for theory and practice. Learning and knowing are both objective and subjective processes, originating not only in schools and colleges but also at home and in unregulated places where everyday life occurs as people live their lives. One theory that is used in this book is cultural-historical activity regarding learning, knowing, and construction of identity, the impact social and cultural dislocation have on an individual’s development over one’s lifespan, the role of lack of acknowledgement of one’s knowledge and experience gained from every life in one’s dislocation, and how the process of dislocation (socialization and enculturation) works to deprive one of things essential to a truly human life. Therefore, in this study, I hope to contribute to efforts in the understanding of ways in which the disempowerment of the majority of African women occurs and how it is maintained and transformed. I do this through historical methods and narrative evidence, as well as close observation and recording of chains of events. Thus, in this way, my project contributes to cultural historical writings, focusing more on unique constructs that have been marginalized in feminist and education literature. The strength of this endeavor is to help us understand that “African woman” is cultural-historical construction that scholars have taken as truths. Even as I embark on the discussion of the various chapters in this book, I would like to briefly discourage premature judgment about the theoretical framework adopted in this book. This book should not be seen simply as another contribution to that longed-for someday archive (i.e., stereotypes and revisionist reiteration) for it is not written with that intention. Rather, it is addressed more specifically to women’s knowledge systems that have been marginalized for long and enjoy less “legitimate” recognition in the world of knowledge and power production in a modern capitalist society. A growing number

Introduction

17

of researchers claim that there are multiple knowledges. At some point in the analyses in subsequent chapters, I analyze narratives from my informants or interviewees, which may seem inappropriate in the minds of the politically correct, conservatives or liberals, right or left. I do not really care about the political and social squabbles, of left and right, straight and gay, patriarchal and matriarchal, all binaries as well as yellow, black, white, red, and blue interests. Therefore, I do not care that some would think perhaps some of my informants went too far when they decided to have too many children or stick with their marriages despite abusive husbands, or, for example, the case of one woman who decided to remain in a polygamous marriage. I discourage quick judgment about the decisions these women had to make as they negotiated for agency and space in society and ordered their lives within historical, cultural, and social contradictory conditions. However, because such judgments would block effective and adequate analyzing of the data and can easily lead to oversimplification of women’s actions, it would be inconvenient but misleading to use moral judgments in understanding why these women thought and did what they did. Processes of negotiating their lives as women at different timescales and contexts played an important role in their thinking and behavior that I will be describing, and it would be poor analysis to attribute all these solely on women’s capacity to think and act. While myself and some of the interviewees, such as Mankya, had adequate education and I was reasonably stable financially, there are reasonable grounds to object to some of our actions, but I urge the reader not to let hasty verdicts foreclose more nuanced analyses of the various factors at play in all the scenarios and scenes until they are all played out. How much can we learn from the current condition of women in rural communities of Tanzania? What are sociocultural and historical processes and practices involved in these dislocations? How do women make sense of and resist their dislocation? This study seeks to answer those questions.

Centr a l P ur po se of the Book In conclusion, I would like to explain the contexts and assumptions of some of the different claims that I make in this book. The most basic claim I make in the chapters that follow is that African women are knowledgeable and their stories are told in their active engagement in a much wider array of activities than has been previously documented. To the degree that these stories embedded in their everyday

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

lives have been recognized, I claim that they have been poorly understood. Another claim put forward in this book is that the knowledge and activities, and thus the stories of African women in fact, cannot be properly appreciated if viewed under the rubric of race, gender, class, or ability. These activities and the stories they tell are integrated with everyday life as women make sense of their dislocated lives. I demonstrate how African women encounter a variety of barriers and challenges that shape their knowledge and activities and produce unique forms of thinking and behavior. I argue that these forms of behavior both express and contribute to the production of the contradictory character of everyday life of women in modern and global society. I show how women’s dislocated subjectivity is inherent in the women’s stories, their reasons for thinking and behaving the way they do, and their general orientation toward the knowledge of who they are and what is expected of them as women. I assert that these stories cannot be understood in isolation from women’s material condition, as well as the type of individual woman’s disposition and perception. Finally, I argue that the stories that women tell in this book are a contradiction that women encounter as they negotiate against their dislocated selves in the separate worlds in modern society. The chapters that follow elaborate and develop on each of these themes.

Struc ture o f t he Book This book is organized in seven chapters. The general introduction outlines the various issues raised and studied in this book. The first chapter interrogates social and cultural dislocation within poststructural, postcolonial, and cultural-historical activity lenses. It examines the histories of women’s sense of disempowerment through oral histories, archives, and colonial writings. The chapter sets the foundation in understanding the root cause of women’s sense of disempowerment. The second chapter lays the foundation of a theory of women’s knowledge systems in Africa. It decodes the ambivalence toward women’s knowledge systems and presents various strategies that women in rural Tanzania resist. The third chapter looks at khanga as an important artifact through which women make meaning and construct knowledge. This chapter presents several evidences in support of the idea that women have different and specific ways that they learn, construct knowledge, and shape society. The fourth chapter looks at what I consider to be “endangered” African knowledge systems with reference to everyday activities of women in rural Tanzania. It scrutinizes the present efforts in recovering knowledge systems in

Introduction

19

Africa. The fifth chapter examines the everyday lives of women in rural Kilimanjaro, from the farm to the house. It uses the life stories of Doris Ngabanu to illustrate the daily struggles of women in this part of the world, especially how they negotiate and do dialogue with everyday obstacles. In this chapter, I show how the stereotyped images of a woman affect women’s self-image, belief systems, and values. The sixth chapter looks at the power dynamics in the context of women’s participation in development projects in rural Africa. The book uses women’s groups in Tanzania as a case study. The main argument in this chapter is that women’s participation in development projects planned by the government within the context of empowerment is, in fact, a way to disempower women. The last chapter is mainly a synopsis and prognosis of the main arguments of the book.

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Chapter 1

4

Un derstanding Disempower ment Co ncepts and C l a i ms

I ntro duc ti on

W

omen’s knowledge systems are central in the way of life of many African societies.1 Women’s contribution in the development of agriculture is pivotal everywhere in Africa, and Tanzania in particular. Women have incredible knowledge of farming, seeds, herbs, and plants of medicinal and cosmetic value commonly used by people of Africa, and this is considered precious both in the family and community. Women’s knowledge of the roots of particular plants is used in brewing rice beer, the most sacred and popular drink of the people. There are not many studies that have focused on women’s knowledge systems in Africa. There are few studies that have only alluded to this knowledge system by ethnographers, anthropologists, and other disciplines. The problem has been that many of these studies have failed to recognize the gender dimension of knowledge systems, especially in Africa. This is not surprising because many of these scholars were European and had very little means of understanding and deciphering gender dimensions in learning and construction of knowledge. Only recently have misrepresentations associated with the notions that only the Europeans and men can construct knowledge have been deconstructed and unmasked as wrong and lacking academic gravitas. It is through the efforts of feminist scholarship in Africa that there has been attention focusing on women’s knowledge systems in Africa. It has been noted that the knowledge system of women in Africa has not been privileged in the debate on development although

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

this knowledge has been pivotal to the development of the continent. There is a realization and recognition that women in many parts of Africa have intimate knowledge of the environment that enables them to maintain livelihoods, cultural continuity, and community cohesion. Based on women’s role in the development of the continent; their special knowledge of farming techniques, the ecosystem, and conservation; and their place in the cultural life in families and communities, women enjoyed considerable space in society, making decisions about resource use and development in general. The construction of women in Africa as lacking the capacity to create knowledge was a strategic device used by the colonizers in Africa to institute their racist and sexist agenda.2 It was used to create and demonize African women’s knowledge systems and women’s ways of knowing and constructing knowledge in order to justify the colonial project. It was through such apprehensive representations of women as ignorant that colonial education would be thrashed upon them. Lack of Western knowledge among African women was considered to be ignorance and was connected to disease and poverty. Only through modern education would women become “enlightened” and “normalized” to fit into the needs and demands of the colonial society. The knowledge of reproduction for example, which led to low birthrate and stagnant population growth, was seen as antithetical to the objectives of the colonial project of exploitation of labor force. The activities of the colonial officials in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa were geared toward eradicating any aspects they perceived would negate their project exploitation, especially in the early years of 1900s (Colonial Office 1922). I argue that the historical moments that colonial officers set their feet in Tanzania in the 1880s were periods of disempowering and dislocating women from their knowledge systems and special place in the development of society. The narrow focus on: ‘colonial way,’ negatively affected women’s knowledge systems. The drive to capitalism and modernity enabled the colonial officers to produce some evidence that women were ignorant, and this ignorance was linked with their ways of knowing, ways of doing things, their activities, norms, and values. This chapter examines the histories of the evisceration of women’s knowledge systems in Tanzania by relying on sources such as oral histories, archives, and colonial writings. The sources also reveal the perception of missionaries as well as colonial officials on African women and their justification for extending education to them in order to eradicate ignorance. Thus, the chapter investigates the historical and cultural construction of women in Africa as ignorant in the social and

Understanding Disempowerment

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cultural transformations of Tanzania during the colonial era. It also draws attention to the process through which women’s knowledge systems came to be local, informal, and inconsequential.

D ef y ing Stere otypi ng : C erta inly N ot D irt y or Ignora nt In 1927, Secretary for Native Affairs of Tanganyika Territory Charles Dundas wrote a letter to the acting Director of Education in which he argued that education for Tanganyika women would solve most of the pressing problems in the territory, especially hygiene (cleanliness and sanitation). As a colonial official, Dundas wrote a popular ethnographic study on Chagga social life titled Kilimanjaro and Its Peoples (Dundas 1924). Based on his findings, Dundas insisted that the root cause of all the problems that were facing Tanganyika emanated from the ignorance of women. In that letter, Dundas pointed out that “it is the ignorance of the woman which keeps the African back . . . due to their [women] unenlightened ways that the birthrate is greatly below what it could be and that infant mortality deprives the country of a good portion of the population it so sorely needs.”3 There is no doubt that Dundas saw women as the beasts of burden and colonial education as a panacea to many of the development problems afflicting colonial Tanzania. He believed that Western education would eradicate all sorts of social and economic problems facing the country. Given the prevalent misconception about development and people in Africa, it is not easy to see why native women were regarded as ignorant, dirty, and unproductive blocks in the eyes of colonial officials. Colonial officials derived their conclusions based on little and sometimes spurious information about women’s traditional knowledge systems and cultures. Missionaries were particularly at odds with competing beliefs and different understandings of the cosmos and God as presented by various African cultures. Lack of Western style in hygiene management was regarded as responsible for many diseases in the colonies as well as high levels of infant mortality among Africans. Of course, anything that affected the supply of labor force to colonial plantations was linked with women’s ignorance and lack of knowledge. At the time, many women from various ethnic groups were clean and had intimate knowledge of their environment. The Chagga women of Kilimanjaro, for instance, knew various crops and plants and their ecological requirements. They knew when to procreate and when to engage in production activities and they had refined and tested this knowledge over the years

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

and handed it down from one generation to the next. Oral tradition has it that women were responsible for food production, and they used various techniques in negotiating their lives. Those of procreation age such as breastfeeding mothers had special arrangement with their spouses which included sexual abstinence. In farming, women employed crop rotation, mixed farming or intercropping, irrigation, terracing, and application of manure techniques (see also Lema 1999). In many parts of Africa, for example, many women understood the characteristics of local ecosystems (e.g., soils, plants, hydrology, and weather; Swai 2009). To survive on the mountains, they actively transformed their physical environment by appropriating the available water sources, land, and selection of appropriate crops and animals. Among the farmers, women’s everyday schedules included a range of soil and water management activities. Women also managed their reproduction. Reproductive activities were part of their responsibilities, and child spacing was important for women to plan their activities, both production and reproduction. Women could not manage all these responsibilities and sustain their families and communities if they did not know how to negotiate their lives, and this was only possible through their knowledge systems. Like all European operatives in Africa, Dundas did not regard women’s knowledge systems as important, and his emphasis on ignorance4 had certain resonance in colonial circles. In his study, Dundas focused on women’s social and economic lives, drawing from his experience of women elsewhere. The lives of these women were very different from those he was observing. By the 1930s, based on Dundas’s rather racist and sexist views, a campaign for expanding education to girls and women was a high priority in colonial schemes and transformation agenda. Following Dundas’s findings, Mary G. Blacklock, a medical doctor who worked in the colonial medical services in India and Africa, conducted research in 1934 focusing on the negative aspects of traditional domestic arrangements. Based on the findings of her study, like Dundas, Blacklock suggested that “we must pay increasing attention to the mothers of future generations if our efforts to improve conditions and increase the population are to meet with success.”5 This implied that the traditional social and economic arrangements were harmful to women’s reproduction capacity. Blacklock’s report was widely circulated, and it was often cited in administrators’ letters and reports when recommending expansion of schooling for girls in Africa to counter traditional domestic relations considered detrimental to public health and to the population rate.

Understanding Disempowerment

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A relative flurry of studies on population and health were done by Peiper (1910)6 in Kilwa, and by Schörnich7 in the Usambara Mountains. These studies were prompted by what was considered by colonial officials in Berlin and Dar es Salaam as a population crisis in need of immediate solution (see Colwell 2001, 12). Both of the studies amplified alarm over the relationship between traditional knowledge systems and the extremely low number of children per woman. These studies prompted the colonial officials in Germany to find the best solution as the following question implies: “Through what practical measures can we achieve an increase in births and a reduction in child deaths among the native colored population—that valuable economic asset—in our colonies?”8 Although low birth rate was common in the German colony (Colwell, 2001), girls in Tanzania were sent to school, not to learn about reproduction, but to be dislocated form their knowledge systems to conform to the colonial project of exploitation (Koponen 1994). Most colonial officials and missionaries and, to a certain extent, later anthropologists were all aware that girls’ education in Africa played a different role than that of women in the metropolis (Denzer 1992; Musisi 1992). While education for them in the West helped them to assume the roles that were meant specifically for women in their own context, African women who attended colonial and mission schools were introduced to new and alien patterns of life, including notions of docility, domesticity and dependency (Hunt 1990; Moss 1997), which were contrary to the African context and way of living. The transformation of women into domestic workers became a solution for attaining the “valuable economic asset,” without any consideration of their personal needs or welfare. Colonial officials engaged in politics of exploitation, targeting women’s reproductive and productive labor. The colonial project was predicated on gaining profit by all means possible, including fabricating lies to exploit the labor of native women. Socializing women into domestic roles and dependency was a sure way of acculturating women in Africa into European lifestyle and part of the large scheme of disempowering and dislocating African women. The missionary and colonial schools played the same role of pacifying women. Those who did not comply with the objectives of colonial education were demonized as ignorant and illiterate. Dundas and other colonial officials were aware that women’s traditional knowledge in birth control and production was contrary to the colonial project of exploitation of women and their labor.

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Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa

Clearly, the colonial construction of women as ignorant and dirty, as well as transforming them into machines for forced and free labor in colonial and patriarchy society, was not because women were ignorant or did not have important roles to play in society, but because they did not properly fit into the colonial designs of exploitation. As a fact, women knew traditional methods of child spacing, but this, in the eyes of colonial officials, was a mismatch to the colonial project, and thus, there was a need to “educate” them in order to make them to think like “women.” Their “ignorance” of their role as the “channels through which labor must be extracted” had to be removed at any cost. Furthermore, the colonial structures and institutions needed unremunerated labor, and this could only be achieved through constructing women as ignorant, with only one capacity, to reproduce and to take care of the home and children. Those who accessed education were expected to marry appropriately, reproduce healthy children, and take good care of their husbands. There was nothing “objective” about the ignorance of women or emancipation of women through education. If anything, education for women was for shaping them to fit into the colonial project of exploitation. In short, Dundas, Blacklock, Peiper, and Schörnich omitted the important fact that women had very effective knowledge about their bodies and the ecosystem and their capacity to reproduce and produce. Despite this gross error and omission, their proposals became significant in the development of education for girls and women in Tanganyika (see Vavrus 2002). Based on colonial findings, a “special type of education” was developed “due to ignorance on the part of the mothers.”9 As Dundas suggested, from the 1930s, education for women in Tanzania focused on domestic matters with a goal to inculcate in women and girls the importance of cleanliness and childcare. Since that time, the goals of colonial and postcolonial education and women’s development in general have often focused on orienting women toward reproductive roles while, at the same time marginalizing their role as important in the development of society. In this way, colonial and postcolonial projects of removing ignorance in women became the mechanism for denying women a legitimate voice in capitalist society and a direct guarantee for exploitation of their labor. In some ways, some scholars have pointed that colonial education promoted some women. This is not necessarily a contradictory assessment; rather, it suggests that the majority of women were marginalized and pushed further down the social ladder during the colonial period. Although colonial education brought about some changes in the lives of some women, it was filled with certain biases. This was also

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the case for medical education. The annual Medical Report for Tanganyika, for example, made reference to women. For example, Chagga girls and women were privileged and directly targeted for birth control and increase of reproduction more than women from other ethnic groups because of their proximity to the European coffee plantations. Nakanyike Musisi discusses similar trends in colonial Uganda in the construction of Buganda women and the interest of Europeans in their childbearing capacities. Musisi sees this as racist, with exploitation implications (see Musisi 2002). There were also similarities in the European perception of women, especially in the way they questioned their intellectual ability. Also in Botswana Mgadla observes the same in the London Missionary Society for Botswana. The following observation is particularly interesting: “I have found them [women in Bechuanaland] in consequence of the hard conditions of their lives and as result of their exceedingly low intellectual levels utterly without regard to any department of work new to them. I tried to encourage them to have their dresses made for them, but they don’t care how to make them. The same applied to learning how to read. I am going to resign” (cited in Mgadla 1997, 75). There are few cases where one can notice genuine empowerment of women through modern education, and this is particularly where one could see few women who had advanced academically to higher education and employment. There were few women who had joined various colleges such as nursing, teaching, agriculture, and business. Some have become leaders in politics and taken leadership roles in the women’s liberation movement in Africa. But their empowerment is seen only within the prism of a male dominated world, where educated women find themselves making a decision whether to continue with their roles as mothers and wives or become spinsters and follow a career. In such a context, education for women becomes more of an impediment than empowerment because it does not help them negotiate their lives. This does not imply that education for women has been negative through and through. It has often empowered some women. Indeed, many admit that without education, they would be in the darkness. From the case of women in Tanzania in the early paragraphs of this chapter, the intention of colonial education for women was to isolate them from their knowledge, and construct them as ignorant for the purpose of a colonial project of exploitation. There are many tales that I could narrate to explain my own dislocation in postcolonial Tanzania. The education which I was exposed to since kindergarten nurtured in me a desire to continue studying, without knowing where it would lead me. Consequently, I found myself

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accepting a scholarship to pursue further education at an American university. I was not exactly sure what I would do with my education, but I was sure I was going to know a great amount, an illusion that had been created through the concept of lifelong learning.10

Lo c ating S el f in the Study I became interested in the study of women’s knowledge systems in rural Tanzania when I enrolled for a master’s degree in 1997, under Dr. P. A. K. Mushi at the University of Dar es Salaam. I saw it as a chance to research the role of adult education in women’s lives. The study for my master’s degree was aimed at finding alternative methods of providing adult education to women. This was based on the fact that many adult education programs had failed to achieve the expected goal, to lift women out of poverty and gender oppression. In my study of women’s educational needs for an alternative approach to adult education in Tanzania,11 I came to realize something was very wrong in the ways we theorize education for women, especially for women in rural communities. When I started my research, I believed that education equipped learners with skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values to improve themselves and empower them to live better lives. I wanted to find out from women in Kiroka and Sembeti (two rural communities that I chose for my study) how adult education had improved and empowered them. Women in my study were all eager to describe how since becoming empowered, they had been able to read and write and how this empowerment was the only important thing in their entire lives. “I did not know anything,” a woman would respond to a question on the role of adult literacy in her life, “but now [after attending literacy classes] I can say, I have seen the light, I can read and write.” Such notions of “not knowing anything” came easily to them and such identifications of illiteracy led my research participants to believe that they were like empty slates before being enlightened by literacy techniques. I was disappointed to hear how women in Kiroka and Sembeti trivialized their knowledge and praised literacy skills gained from attending literacy classes. I had sympathy for these women. While they had been using immense knowledge in taking care of their children, seeing to it that their families thrived despite all odds, they had internalized the notions that they did not know anything. If they did not know how to read and write, they were illiterate and therefore ignorant. Many scholars who have conducted research on women and education specifically in rural communities have linked literacy skills with

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empowerment. Literacy skills have been theorized as prerequisite for improving the condition of women in rural communities. Such research has disseminated unexamined assumptions and biased conceptions about women’s capacities or the lack of them to such a degree that women often do not really know they have knowledge and can do anything useful. Furthermore, the culturally accepted notions of education as a tool for empowerment do not always acknowledge or support women who become real empowered and who want to assume their roles as women. For example, an educated woman in a certain social position may lose her job for becoming a mother. Modern education (regardless of level) was portrayed as a perfect tool for the empowerment of women and for the development of society in general. I knew that education was important to any human being in modern society, but it was not, as many studies indicated, a panacea to every individual problem and social malady. I knew women had developed their own knowledge and skills from participating in many social and cultural activities, and they have been living full lives. What nagged my conscience was the controversy between the insistence of literacy skills and the marginalization of women’s knowledge systems that have sustained the continent for so many years. While reading and writing skills were assumed to enable women to participate more effectively in their activities, in this rural community, it was not the case. My contention was not backed with empirical research, but instead on what I had seen and experienced, growing up in a rural community. I grew up seeing women with immense knowledge and skills and performing many activities including farming, health care, construction (of houses and other family shelters), marketing and selling farm produce, sewing, and milking, to name a few. Those with knowledge and skills in healing also performed extramedical functions. These women fit into the categorization of so-called ignorant women, just because they did not know to read and decipher the coded messages in a piece of paper. I believed that it was false categorization and misrepresentation, for these women were wise and intelligent. They were responsible raising their families. I remember being healed by my neighbor from many health issues including eye infections, burns, stomach aches, headaches, and the like. To an outsider, this kind and intelligent woman, like the depiction of the rest of ordinary women in rural communities of Tanzania is the very prototype of a traditional “ignorant” woman, in need of education for empowerment. In a nutshell, many women in my community, in their “ignorant” state, had more knowledge and skills than the mainstream has not cared to acknowledge and support.

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I conducted interviews with women and began to identify the common thread of marginalization of their knowledge, both by themselves and by the larger society including schools and workplaces. I admired women’s agency, but was sympathetic about their naïveté about the abundant knowledge and skills they had and how they had been led to think they were ignorant and in darkness. Why do scholars not appreciate women and their knowledge and the important work that they do? Why do they not have the same passion for supporting the everyday practices of women in rural communities? Why do they not see women’s abundant knowledge and the invaluable activities they engage in as important in society? Do they really understand how important women’s knowledge and contributions they make in rural Tanzania are? I thought that they did not. Why did they not see the essence of women’s knowledge for survival and quality of life? I reacted to my own reflection at times with fear and horror, especially when I saw how women continued to assume activities that were a backbone of the country, and yet these activities were not supported in anyway or even acknowledged. Upon completing my master’s degree, I started teaching at the Institute of Adult Education, Dar es Salaam, and I immersed myself in literature and scholarship that questioned some approaches in adult education. The work of Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), was inspirational and the beginning of my journey toward understanding power and imbalance in the provision of education and that education is not an empowering device per se, but empowering came with what people do with education. I also became aware of the way education was used to identify and differentiate people—literate versus illiterate, knowledgeable versus ignorant, and the like and the hidden agenda of such identification. According to Freire, if “empowerment” is to be taken seriously, people must be regarded as individuals with both needs and rights, and even the most incompetent individuals have certain knowledge and contributions to society. A reading of Freire’s work convinced me that my own teaching methods were political in nature since much of my work resonated with my own motivation to teach in an embodied and questioning manner. I asked myself, “What is the purpose of my teaching?” and “What kind of student and citizen am I producing or molding?” Was I participating in producing cold hedonists concerned only with their own success, to the detriment of other people’s? At times I found myself helping my students to “know how,” without offering insights into the “how” of knowing and for what purpose.

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From reading the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and other critical literature I started to frame my teaching around my students’ knowledge. I pointed to them the blatant shortcomings of education that does not acknowledge learners’ knowledge, experiences, and needs. Sometimes I offered my students a chance to speak in Kiswahili, the language that they knew better and in which they could express their views more easily. However, the position of many of my students seemed to contradict my own criticisms of the discipline of adult education. They raised such questions as, “If education was to exclude people and marginalize their knowledge, how would I explain their position or mine within it?” This was a good question because I did not believe one needs to be an outsider to be critical of her own field. In fact, being an insider, one is in a better position to critique with a view to make things better. Although some of my students enjoyed my classes because they could relate their experience with what was in the curriculum, some became pessimistic about my teaching and even questioned my knowledge and abilities. Few expressed dissatisfaction with discussions that constantly demanded their own views and personal experiences. On the other hand, some students took the criticisms seriously, concluding that the task of decontaminating the field of adult education was possible and saw sense in it. I do however, recall my discomfort when the director of the Institute of Adult Education summoned me to his office and asked about my teaching, a question to which I responded enthusiastically: I love my teaching and my students. However, although critical thinking was supposed to be inculcated in adult education, I did not realize that it was not supposed to be used to criticize our own field. Unbeknownst to me, criticizing adult education as an adult educator was regarded as a cardinal sin. The director told me, “Follow the standard syllabus.” I was not happy. I wanted out, maybe to study more and become more conversant with what I believe would provide me with the language to articulate my quandary. I wanted to conduct advanced research, perhaps at a doctoral level, where I could ask many questions and try to resolve some of my dilemmas and anxieties. In 2000, I followed my dream and was fortunate enough to be awarded a Fulbright scholarship that allowed me to pursue doctorate studies at Pennsylvania State University. In the adult education program, I wanted to know the politics of education and the root cause of what I had seen in Tanzania. I wanted to understand how notions of education could have a role in the life of my grandmother, my life, and in the lives of women I loved and how things could be turned around.

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To be more conversant in my research focus, I also took classes in women’s and gender studies. My major focus for my doctoral research was on construction of womanhood in Tanzania. During the initial part of my research, I traveled back to Tanzania and before embarking on my research, I had the opportunity to discuss my research topic and methods with my colleagues in the Department of Adult Education and Extension Services at the University of Dar –es Salaam. I explained to the group my research objectives, tentative questions, and how I had planned to conduct the research. I noticed that my ideas were not received very well. Most of my colleagues thought that I was more focused in the realm of women’s and gender studies and that the type of research was not pedagogical enough and did not, therefore, quite fit in a department of adult education. At a later stage, some of my colleagues were able to recognize its relevance, and therefore showed great interest in knowledge systems and women’s empowerment or disempowerment, inherent in my topic. One of my colleagues said to me, “I think your idea is interesting, but don’t you think you have gone too far into women and gender issues, and not in adult education issues?” Then she started to talk about her own research and the importance of focusing on the department’s needs so that I could use my research to teach in my classes. I tried to make her see my research as valid in the department, but I could not defend myself when in her mindset, my topic seemed too much about “women things.” I knew that my colleagues were very dedicated scholars and their comments were genuine. However, like my director in the Institute of Adult Education, they were not ready (and indeed, were uncomfortable) to accept my critical problematic. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now understand my colleagues’ dismay and misgivings. Many of them were critical thinkers, but like Freire, their criticality was unproblematic. Many of my colleagues believed that participation of women in literacy programs could lead to their individual and collective empowerment (Kabeer 1994; Rowlands 1997; Sen and Grown 1987; Young 1993). Like the scholars mentioned above, the key to empowerment was seen to lie in the ability of women to read and write. Armored by Paulo Freire’s notions of “conscientization,” literacy education was seen as an opportunity for women to develop “new consciousness” (as if they were unconscious) to allow them to think of themselves and as a collectivity and to meet social and economic challenges (Tripp 1994). Although it was informative for me to note that notions of empowerment remained difficult to see, I understood part of the problem

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was its subjective quality, and thus, it was open to the value-based judgments of the person gauging. I also understood that much of these values tend to be measured against Western, white, middle-class women and not against those of women in the rural communities that I was studying. Much of master’s and doctoral research on women and education in Tanzania was concentrated on how women learn differently from men and ways through which education can help generate income, reduce gender inequality, and help women to participate in democratic processes. The perplexing thing about this kind of scholarship is that to empower women, education is a must. There was no theory in place to explain the relationship between education and what scholars call empowerment. When the focus is on education for women, a researcher would jump into looking into how education for women brings the miracle of empowerment. In her study on women’s careers and professional development for instance, Eustella Bhalalusesa (1998), focused on the role of education in women’s empowerment and development. In that study, the link was made between education and women’s empowerment and development. Though this link was inherently normative, and perhaps unknowingly for her, it was largely ahistorical and assumed first a causal effect of education on women’s empowerment, and second, that women’s lack of power in society is due entirely to lack of appropriate knowledge. This assumption asserts that for any education provided to women, regardless of range of meanings, values, and how women are taught, an educated woman will always be more empowered than her less educated counterpart. On this matter, there is an unqualified declaration made that “career and professional development empower women.” Educated women are more empowered than uneducated ones. I was concerned about the tacit assumptions about the knowledge of “uneducated” women in rural Tanzania. Although there was no discussion on situations in which education disempowered women, the author did not seem to change a utopian view of women’s education for empowerment. For instance, regarding the specific social practices of marginalization and exclusion of women’s knowledge, there is an assumption that more educated women are always more powerful than their less educated counterparts and that their superiority renders them always more empowered than their less educated peers. In short, Bhalalusesa did not envisage situations in which “uneducated” women might have more power than their educated peers. I was not an activist, but I thought that there was a need to ask hard questions, like what happens to women’s knowledge and power when

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women acquire formal education. I thought women’s knowledge of production and reproduction were important, and could be acknowledged and appreciated on their own rights and supported to help them assume the role that society expects of them. Rather than trying to shortchange their knowledge, I thought women’s knowledge and everyday activities, however they are described, “traditional,” “local,” or “indigenous,” could be used to change and improve adult education, and not the other way around. As far as I was concerned, I had a choice on what to study and what questions to ask, whether it was risky business or not. I knew that critical theory was not enough to allow me to study any area, issue, or topic that I wanted. I had more questions than answers, and I wanted to study education from many perspectives—from history, culture, sociology, political science, and feminist theory. But I wanted to study education for women, not in a common sense perspective, but from a critical perspective focusing on the messiness of their everyday lives. No one had attempted this type of study in Africa. I noticed that many scholars in Tanzania, like their many counterparts in Africa, were uncomfortable with engaging in a transformative agenda, and for good reasons. Many so-called critical scholars had met with all kinds of opposition, especially those focusing on women’s emancipation and transformation of society.12 Liberal and neoliberal views dominated the research landscape in Tanzania, and many scholars were oriented in liberal views of education and how it empowers people. Education was theorized as an important tool to free the nation from the yoke of illiteracy, ignorance, and backwardness, and it was supposed to create opportunities for economic development.13 Many studies in the library linked the level of literacy and empowerment. For example, there was the declaration that 90 percent of the Tanzanians above ten years of age were illiterate in 1962, the time that that the government snatched freedom from colonial powers suggests that there is a direct relationship between colonialism and illiteracy, or political independence and literacy. This direct relationship between education and human empowerment prompted the government to extend education with a goal of empowering people. Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, made decisions to reverse colonial policies of gender discrimination in accessing education (Nyerere 1968) and the government became active in educational policy formulation in order to correct the inherited gender imbalance in society and educational reforms for equality and equity became a tradition in Tanzanian recent history. In education reform documents, the education policymakers proclaimed commitment to the democratization of education from

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the primary to higher levels, emphasizing equal opportunity for the hitherto disadvantaged majority of the population of which the female segment constitutes the largest proportion. In the case of rural communities, for example, in part having learned from colonial education, an entirely separate document was produced to highlight the importance and urgency of adopting gender-focused policy agenda. Since the mid-1970s, the debates and policies of gender equality have taken center stage, not only in Tanzania, but as an international concern, particularly at the United Nations and its various specialized agencies. As Assié-Lumumba (1996), observes, this concern was first recognized as an international concern meriting massive mobilization when 1975 was declared International Women’s Year, and then the United Nations declared 1976 to 1985 the Decade for Women. This led to the four major international conferences on women: Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and Beijing in 1995. These meetings produced policy documents that identified the most pressing issues to be tackled by each country. Women’s access to and benefit from education have been among the priorities. For instance, the second among the twelve “critical areas of concern” adopted in the Beijing Platform for Action and the Beijing Declaration (United Nations 1996) specifically points to “the inequalities and inadequacies in and unequal access to education and training.” The “Beijing Plus Five” Conference, scheduled for June 2000 contributed to create a general atmosphere characterized by a euphoria, faith, and confidence in education as the “great equalizer,” a means for individual development and empowerment, and an effective instrument for achieving national economic development. Despite the acknowledgement of the importance of gender equity in society, educational reforms in Tanzania were done under the guidance or influence of external powers. Thus, while gender equity has been among the sources of educational reforms and production of policy documents, women’s voices, needs, and interests were not included. As a result, very few paid attention to issues that focused on transformation of public cultures and politics toward women. Women appeared to be passive entities whose opinions were not necessary and never sought. They were regarded as the problem and therefore not part of the solution. But were these women ignorant and not capable of contributing to their own knowledge and development? Were they as powerless as they were assumed? Works conducted at universities and colleges of education in Tanzania were within the liberal view of education, the orientation that focused on social transformation and freedom, imbibed within an

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insistence of modernization and an urge to catch up with the Western societies. Success in education programs for women was evaluated in terms of how many women could read and write, without any critical exploration of how education would bring gender equality. In Tanzania, notions of illiteracy were strongly tied to negative connotations and those identified with it were seen as ignorant and useless. This suggested that the discipline of critical thinking and transformative ideas and the varieties of literacy were effectively silent in Tanzania.14 Women’s traditional knowledge systems were at the receiving end of this silence, whether forced or quiescent. Restoring this emphasis and the very worldview entailed by it, I suggest, is the root cause for failure to appreciate and support traditional knowledge systems and women’s everyday activities. The choice of my topic at times surprised me. I knew that the politics of education and marginalization of women’s knowledge systems was not a popular discourse, but I wanted to bring to view this forgotten treasure. However, I was uncomfortable with the notions of women’s empowerment through education, though it was an easy link. I knew the institution of modern education had done more harm than good to the majority of women in rural communities, and not many scholars were ready to look into this phenomenon, which had become a social practice. In my research interests, I was spurred on by the ideas of cultural scholars, specifically in the works of postcolonial feminist scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) and Margret Ogola’s The River and the Source (2002). These books raised interesting questions that were relevant for my study, especially on colonial powers in the lives of African women. Oyewumi’s work defines feminist scholarship as leaning toward a hegemonic angle, where the experiences of Western women are used as a measure to gauge the experiences of women in Africa. Like Oyewumi, I believe that it is important to be sensitive to the realities and issues that are important to African women if we want them empowered. According to Oyewumi, the identification of African women within gendered positions appears to hide experiences that may not be identified within gender. I cast feminists and the institution of education in a similar trajectory, as structures that conceal hegemonic tendencies, which are continuing to trivialize and marginalize women’s knowledge systems, urging them to strive to be enlightened through education in order to fit in the larger society. I believe that true empowerment could only come from acknowledging and supporting women’s

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knowledge and allowing them to tell their own stories in their own way, while claiming their rightful place in society. Oyewumi’s work was exciting to me because she anticipated, like Margaret Ogola, who in her 1995 book, The River and the Source, pointed out that African women have power, and this power is not related to any modern system of education, particularly in her analysis of struggles by women within different historical moments in Nigeria. Like Oyewumi, Ogola articulates alternative ways of seeing and studying African women’s power. Both scholars suggest that telling the stories of women from women’s own perspectives is an act of reinserting them in the historical trajectory, without casting them as silent and powerless. These African scholars’ suggestions were interesting because they produced an alternative way of presenting African women, where their power was through their knowledge systems. Ogola and Oyewumi’s notion of telling women’s stories as a practice of freedom and that African women’s knowledge has a value of its own, without the agency of Western education, was insightful to me. My conversations with women were tentative, and I was saddened by their insecurity and how they were striving to share with me what they thought I wanted to hear. I noticed that many women were uneasy with the stereotype that societies have of them, especially about their lack of knowledge. A small question like “tell me about yourself” would draw answers such as “I don’t know.” Such responses suggest that women had internalized the idea that they did not know anything, even about themselves. Those who shared their stories would end up saying something like, “is this what you are looking for?” This lack of confidence bothered me. Sometimes women broke down emotionally while narrating their perceptions of themselves. It was clear that women were living in a struggle against what have been said about them and what they believed they were. Most were tense and in conflict between what they believed about themselves and what they believed they were capable of, what they wanted others to know about them. For the first time, I heard my own voice loudly, almost as an activist, wondering if there was something I could do to make women use their power to confront the government more forcefully, such as organizing them through a women’s insurrection, from looking people in the eye and telling them their piece of mind to going on strike from cooking and assuming their many social, cultural, and even conjugal activities. What they required was only an awareness of their power and contribution to the development of society. I found myself in dialogue with women on many issues, including health,

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childcare, marketing of many items produced by their hands like farm produces, handicrafts and so on. I experienced firsthand the tensions that I was studying, and this was not only from the larger society, but from within the women themselves. I found aspirations, hopes, fears, despair, and frustrations. Group discussions were frustrating due to deep-seated beliefs like “What can a woman do?” and “This is how things have been.” It was frustrating how my own field of adult education and gender studies could effectively hinder my research in these remote communities. This was not different from the Marxist dictum that humans create history and are created by it. I knew without radical idea there would be no change. I was careful to avoid falling in the activist thrust of empty theory and urged women to voice their needs and concerns. Though initially I had put it very clearly that my study was purely academic research, and therefore had no direct implications to social, political, or economic policy or other interventionist implications, I could not resist the urge to sow a seed that women had power and they were the only ones who could turn things around. In this regard, I did not raise their hopes that their problems would be solved through their participation in the study. However, in the focus group discussion, women raised their goals as attaining electricity in community to help them in various social and economic activities. On this, we assigned four women to follow up in the district office where they attained permission for this service. I made contributions toward this service, and there is now an electric power grid running in the two communities. Having instilled this confidence, it was interesting to see the expressions of hope in their eyes and the intensity of their emotion, which allowed the narrowing of the power gap between the research participants and me. Women started telling me in their intimate secrets and confided in me about their desires and aspirations, struggles, and fears. I was startled by the trust they had in me as they told me their inner secrets, which I had not expected or imagined. I had to prod myself constantly to remain calm, neutral, and focused and not to be overcome by any bias or become too emotional in my own study. I visited women in their homes and participated in various gatherings and meetings such as in the marketplace. I attended church services and women’s group meetings. Playing politics of representation (Mbilinyi 1992) gave me an advantage without being identified as wa mjini (of the city) and msomi (educated). These were concepts that were attached to educated women and women who were not permanently living in the community; these concepts would be used against

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me, to identify me as “not one of us.” During interviews, I achieved women’s trust by volunteering to talk about my own life experience. In this way, I was able to minimize the gaps and distance that might have existed between us. As I embedded myself in their midst, they started to invite me to more private functions and rituals such as wedding ceremonies,15 naming of children ceremonies, baptisms, house-warming parties, and kitchen initiation parties.16 Being invited in those private spaces was an indication that I was regarded as an insider, as a fellow woman, and one of them. This fact made it possible for me to come away with more information than would have been possible in different circumstances. Given the easiness of understanding the nuances, however, I was careful not to impose my meanings to the data but to ask what a particular action or an utterance meant. In this research, therefore, I was instrumental in data collection and analysis (Merriam 1998). However, my own desire to tell the truth is complicated by the research framework of this study. While poststructural feminism advocates for multiple truths to an issue, CHAT identifies contradictions and impediments not as negative but as positive indicators in fostering growth and transformation. Feminist adult educators have advocated for life history research methods as the best methods to generate new insights into women’s experiences not generated through other research techniques, since women’s experiences are often ignored or silenced, especially in a situation where they are at variance with those of larger society. I tried as much as possible to make my research participants comfortable to choose the language they wanted to use, which, in most cases, they found themselves code switching. In many occasions, I would ask women to tell their stories in the language that they felt more comfortable with, for luckily for me, I speak and understand the two major languages spoken in the study areas. These were either Kichagga or Kiswahili. Many insisted in narrating their stories in Kiswahili, the national language that was not used much in their everyday conversation. I kept reminding them that I was not a government official but a colleague and I understood Kichagga very well, but some insisted on speaking Kiswahili to me. Despite their insistence, I could sense a lot of struggle with words and vocabulary. Sometimes they would ask me to translate a concept from Kichagga to Kiswahili. In their attempt to speak in Kiswahili—that is, making themselves more authentic— they made many terrible and embarrassing mistakes in the academic research, but were never ready to give up. I thought that some of these women were afraid of being seen as ignorant for not using “appropriate” language. I could not understand why they insisted on talking to

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me in Kiswahili even when it was clear that they would do a better job in communicating with me in Kichagga, their local language (and my first language). It was hard not to conclude that the colonial mentality had never left, and if it did, its legacy was alive and well, ensuring that women were condemned to struggle even when no struggle was needed. Should I force them to use their first language? I did not want to prescribe to them the language to use. But I was going to use my own sense of insider identity and imagination to set the tone. At the same time, I was also lost in my dilemmas. While women admitted that they used their mother tongue in everyday interactions, they also said that those who speak the mother tongue in formal settings like in a research activity would not be considered as progressive (sio wa maendeleo). Who was I, and who were my subjects? Will I always be a researcher and my subject always the participant or informant? This dichotomy was disturbing, though at times it was not visible in my interaction with them. Sometimes I would be invited in a home and family members would ask me questions about my research and life in the United States in general. Because we spent many hours talking about general issues, I found myself constantly trying to know the research participants better and to ask relevant questions so that by the end of the day I could get coherent life histories that could make sense to research interest. Therefore, the power relation that women tried to forge with me was complex and masked. In that struggle to regain their voice and to use it to articulate their views in their own way, a sense of double consciousness did not escape my observation. But I understood the root cause of women’s sense of disempowerment and empowerment. On the one hand, society had been judged them as worthless, and on the other, I was encouraging them that they were worthy, even without speaking in Kiswahili. Another explanation may be that, because the Kiswahili spoken was more appreciated than its counterpart, women strived to speak in Kiswahili, and sometimes throw out one or two words of English in an effort to prove their worthiness. The privilege afforded to Kiswahili and English was highly prized in the Tanzanian public sphere such as in education and the workplace. Therefore, my research participants preferred the Kiswahili language to Kichagga, even when they had been given a choice, not because they were comfortable with it, but as a means of raising their status as well as a way of assuming a sense of power. One woman who insisted on using Kiswahili said, “Kichagga is old fashioned,” to my absolute dismay. With this self-disempowerment all over the place, it was no accident that my project was meaningful to so many women in rural Tanzania.

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For example, at the marketplace, I watched women traders inviting potential customers to come and buy from them. I could hear, “karibu mteja,” meaning “welcome customer.” At first it was hard for me to consider myself a customer to a relative or a close friend, while male traders unknown to me were comfortable to address me as aunt, mother, or sister. It was also interesting to see that most women were communicating in Kiswahili in a local open-air market rather than in Kimachame, their vernacular, which more than 99 percent of the people knew. Outside the marketplace, women communicated with each other in Kimachame. The older women, I observed, communicated more in Kimachame that the younger ones. Being called mteja and spoken to in Kiswahili created a business kind of relation and a distance between my relatives, friends, and myself. I felt isolated, but the people around me seemed not to take any notice of this condition. When I tried to initiate a discussion in Kimachame, we could converse for some time, but the moment I asked about something I wanted to buy, the language was switched into Kiswahili. This phenomenon led me to take note of how women and men communicated with their customers. Incidentally, it was worth noting that while women used one word, “customer,” men were free to refer to their customers with varied names, using words such as aunt (shangazi), younger mother (mama mdogo), sister (dada), and greatmother (mama mkubwa). To my amazement, although both men and women spoke in Kiswahili, their use of vocabulary was completely different. It was interesting to find that most of the older women, who were less conversant in Kiswahili and were shy to vary the names of their customers. But many seemed vulnerable and apprehensive especially when they thought that their actions could easily be misinterpreted as (or be considered by others) as flirting. Initially, I had planned to focus on women’s knowledge systems, but the range of issues extended beyond knowledge per se. I found myself looking into various issues such as language, marriage, clothing, and women’s everyday activities. The material conditions of women’s lives in rural Tanzania are harsh. Many villages lack electricity and public water supplies, clinics and schools are scarce, and roads are often impassable in the rainy season, thus restricting social and economic exchanges. To a casual observer, this condition was enough to condemn women as lazy and ignorant of their situation. But when I closely observed their interactions and listened to what was said and done, I found a lot of mismatch between what a casual observer would see and what I was observing. Women’s knowledge systems and their everyday activities, although

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not acknowledged or supported, were invaluable to the survival of their families and community. Much of what women did cannot be exchanged in monetary terms as they are discredited and concealed by the values of care and community. Many of these women were burdened at home with grumpy husbands and overpowering mothers-in-law. Some were banned from visiting their maternal homes for marrying someone the family did not approve. This meant that they were isolated from the safety of maternal family and were totally in the lives of their husbands and husband’s family members. In many homes in rural Tanzania, families live with their elderly in-laws, and there were many cases of bad relationships between mother and daughterin-law, as well as sons and fathers-in-law, and vice versa. There was also a lot of negotiation taking place in these local spaces and more intimate interactions that I had never imagined possible. For example, it was common for women to communicate through metaphoric expressions in their khanga and kitenge.17 They disclosed some of the coded communications to me later. These coded communications helped them to speak with fellow women without men interfering. It also averted face-to-face confrontation in general. On closer study, I found that women’s symbolic communication also serves as an exercise of power. Some used these clothes to negotiate their way. Occasionally, they also used these clothes to communicate with men. In dressing, for example, women used certain messages that cannot be coded in ordinary language. This way of communication challenged the traditional view that language is rules and words that guide the structuring of words to create logical structure. Women’s symbolic communication was socially embedded and style symbolized certain class. I found that affluent women wore wax kitenge, or a khanga from Mombasa, while those who could not afford them would put on ordinary kitenge from Arusha or Morogoro or a khanga from within the national textile. Some took the opportunity to give others a khanga with the message to the other as a gift. It was interesting to see while scholars insist on literacy (reading and writing), women in rural communities in Tanzania were comfortable with constructing their realities in different ways.18 I was impressed by women’s metaphoric or artistic communication, and I thought they fitted nicely into the metaphor of empowerment. The only surprising aspect is that these forms of communication are not acknowledged in the mainstream of society. Why do scholars fail to see and acknowledge these alternative forms of communication and way of making meaning and knowledge construction?

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Throughout my interviews, the research participants indicated that if their knowledge and labor were valued, their frustrations and sense of inadequacy would not occur. Although they seemed to enjoy what they were doing, they were victims of internalized notions of disempowerment and subordination. In such conditions, women lived their lives in constant tension and fear, in a condition that I describe as relational dislocation. I saw and witnessed women’s suffering and enduring in ways that I had never imagined possible—in ways that I could not have contemplated even if I had been told or read about. One needed to see such in order to believe that it was possible. I fell in love with these women and their strengths and patience. I sympathized with the ways in which they confronted their situations. I hated the violence against them from their husbands, in-laws, and friends despite the fact that women were powerful.

C o nc lus i on In this chapter, I have explored the process in which women’s knowledge systems in Tanzania have been marginalized and sidelined and by doing this, I tried to move between the binary opposition between women’s empowerment and disempowerment. The purpose was to extend the investigation of the modern education system in relation to women’s traditional knowledge systems beyond the division of literacy and illiteracy, educated and uneducated, and empowerment and disempowerment. I pointed out that in most discussions on education and empowerment, the question of how education brings empowerment is often forgotten. When the debate centers on women and power, the discussion is isolated from larger social, economic, and political processes. Even if these larger processes and practices are taken into account, the operation of power in marginalizing women’s traditional knowledge systems is not discussed adequately. In this chapter I have tried to bring these aspects into the debate on women’s empowerment by arguing that the discourse of literacy, empowerment, and education creates a form of subjecting women into powerless position, constantly in need of education for empowerment. To them, the gendered position in the creation of knowledge is adaptation and subjectivation in modern and globalized economy, but which does not provide them social recognition as knowledgeable individuals. This chapter concludes that women’s sense of disempowerment is far from simply being a result of lack of modern education, but is part of ongoing social and cultural insistence on going modern without

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acknowledging or appreciating women’s traditional knowledge systems. I have shown the various methods that women have used to fight back and pointed out that unless one understands the coded messages in the women’s stories, one cannot understand their plight and forms of disempowerment that they experience. Inclusion of the writer’s self into the text is informed by the feminist thesis that “our politics start with our feelings” (Grosz 1993). In terms of knowledge construction, this refers also to the understanding of learning and knowledge construction as construction of identity. Following the assumptions that human beings live by stories and that our lives are storied, it entails that personal narrative that reveals the situatenedness and subjectivity of the author is connected to the larger cultural-historical narratives. The feminist thesis of the “personal” being political relates also to the acknowledgement of the role of gender in knowledge production. The inclusion of self in this text also means that I want to be sensitive about my own authority as the author, which leads me to follow the narrative turn and write the result of my research in the way enabled by the new ethnography. Thus, by employing the narrative mode of writing, I want to let go of the form of writing that produces the binary opposition and the position of otherness of my research participants. This chapter confirms, if nothing else, the political significance to be found in the mundane, hidden, and taken-for-granted world of women’s everyday lives in rural Tanzania. The appropriation of various concepts from sociology and cultural studies were an important means of sensitizing and opening up fresh ground to understand the cultural-historical development of women’s disempowerment in Africa. Beyond all of this, however, is the finding that taking into account issues of modern and powerful women confirms the importance of acknowledging women’s traditional knowledge systems in order to avoid evisceration of their power and agency. The next chapter takes us to the narratives of women whose knowledge systems and voices have been silenced and marginalized.

Chapter 2

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Women’s Knowledge Syst ems Toward Am bivalence a nd Si len ces

I ntro ducti on

T

his chapter focuses on the study of narratives of publicly silenced, “othered,” overlooked, disregarded, marginalized, and dislocated women in rural Tanzania. In particular, it examines stories of rural women in Tanzania who have undergone both local (district), societal (ethnic), and national (Tanzania) marginalization. The stories told by these women might appear simple, but they are quite knowledgeable, intelligent, and complicated. Their stories are also exciting because they provide their own flavor, backgrounds, frameworks, and more. They do not have to cite anybody in order to be understood. The only sources they cite are their mothers, aunts, and neighbors. As they do this, they are not only artistic, philosophical, and complex but also more nuanced than many might imagine, for there are many subtle meanings and codes in their conversations, which only an insider can decode and understand. The aim of this chapter is to bring to view the development of women’s knowledge systems with a goal to inform curriculum designers, teachers and development planners the impoertance of everyday life as a source of knowledge in order to resist dominant discourses of education, development and empowerment. The chapter examines defiance and resistance through storytelling by women in rural Tanzania in ways that are different from conventional ways of conducting research. It is now commonplace to say that knowledge emanates from a knowing subject (the person who achieves knowledge), “the master”

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(Plumwood 1993, 454), who would most likely be a man. This insight, which is the product of application of Aristotle, Descartes, and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, informs the contemporary analysis of a wide variety of knowledge systems. This approach to an understanding of knowledge is important because it draws attention to commonsense logic, which sees knowledge as generic rather than gendered. Knowledge as generic has been theorized within what characterize knowledge and how individual represent knowledge. It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to survey the different philosophical positions and psychological theories and models of knowledge. Our perspective is informed by cultural-historical psychology on knowledge creation. I do not adhere to simple behaviorist view that knowledge occurs as a result of association of stimuli and responses or merely a quantitative increase in bits of information (for example in Cae, 1998; Keil, 1998).1 Rather our perspective reflects the idea that knowedge is organized and structured by the knower in line with the idea that knowledge is domain specific and contextualized. Our understanding of women’s s reflect this domain specificity and the role that one’s social and cultural position play in the development of and construction of knowledge. The wide acceptance by most contemporary feminists who have studied knowledge and position of women in it, I believe, created a situation in which Plato’s ideas and, most particularly, Enlightenment notions of knowledge are considered so secondary that they can be easily dismissed. Reason and rationality (read knowledge or knowing) have been defined in exclusively masculine terms; the “‘Man of Reason’ is engendered” (Hekman 1990, 34).2 Most have agreed that in the context of reason and rationality as the only sources of knowledge, other ways of knowing are publicly silenced, “othered,” overlooked, disregarded, and marginalized. In this chapter, I seek to lay the foundation of a theory of women’s knowledge systems in Africa by questioning previous ambivalence and silences that have attended the theorizing on the agency of women, especially the lack of acknowledging and supporting women’s traditional knowledge systems. Meaningful analysis of women’s knowledge systems and meaningful educational programs for them needs that curriculum designers, teachers and development have detailed knowledge of the context through which women’s knowledge system develops. Luice Moll calls this understanding the “cultural fund of knowledge” and Carol Lee calls it “cultural modeling.” Women’s knowledge system however, differs from cultural funds of knowledge and cultural modeling frameworks in several ways. The funds of

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knowledge framework, on the one hand, focuses largely on practices of people in a community, examining the cognitive development in such practices. The goal is to understand how an individual in a peripheral position aquires knowledge as she participate in social and cultural activities and how this fund of knowledge can be used in school-based knowledge creation. Cultural modeling framework on the other hand, concentrates on the practices in which people directly engage, not so much in which they are in the peripheral. My conceptualization of women’s knowledge systems has been greatly influenced by these two frameworks – funds of knowledge and cultural modeling. However, women’s knowledge systems framework brings a related but different set of foci. First, women’s knowledge systems concentrate on women’s everyday lives. A second intent of women’s knowledge systems is to address the specific and very different way of conceptualizing knowledge. This perception is based on the idea that what a woman learns and the knowledge she creates cannot arbitrarily be attributed to her gender, race, ethnicity, or any other kind of cultural category. There is no doubt that the existing analytical frameworks and canons that relate women’s social position and relation with their knowledge are old and need serious revision and updating. In the second part of the chapter, I scrutinize the present efforts that are engaged in recovering knowledge systems in Africa. The objective is to understand and decode the ambivalence toward them and their effects on women. I contend that in order to understand the contributions of women’s knowledge systems more fully and to resolve some of the ambivalence toward them, a comprehensive view of their contribution to the development of the continent needs to be developed and articulated. I argue that the agenda of current initiatives in incorporating women’s knowledge systems into the mainstream of economy and society did not have women’s needs and interests as the focus but those of African governments and international organizations.

Wo men’s K now ledge: Wh at Are We Tal ki ng Ab ou t? Many scholars will agree that the expression “women’s knowledge” appears vague, obtrusive, or even meaningless to mainstream authorities, except when it is rightly defined and contextualized. The question regarding what women’s knowledge is about exactly women’s way of knowing is a spurious one according to contemporary notions of knowledge systems. The perspective taken here is that knowing

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is a process of constructing identity. According to such perspectives, women’s knowledge as knowing, meaning making, and negotiation of identity cannot be seen apart from everyday life as what women do. Thus, women’s knowledge has to do with what women learn and how they solve their problems and is closely bound up with how they understand their identity. Closely related to these aspects are akin to what has been developed in feminist literature. Critical scholars such as Schoenfeld (1998) and others have asserted that knowledge should not be conceptualized as discrete and isolated sets of mechanical skills. As Schoenfeld assets, “those who are really good at a task are not simply mechanically good . . . but have access to a range of methods they can use”3 suggests that the goal of knowledge system is to make meaning and weigh options to solve a perceived problem. The best I can do here is to trace women’s knowledge from feminist literature since it is foundational. Epistemologically developed in feminist literature, women’s knowledge has been studied through detailed, nuanced studies. Feminists have used interviews, focus group discussions, and various other methods to understand the dynamics of power of women in knowledge production. The overarching conclusion here is that there is little empirical evidence pointing specifically to women’s knowledge and ways of knowing, which would inform us beforehand how we can identify and understand it when we see it. In her effort to go this route, Carol Gilligan (1982) very specifically suggests a model based on an ethic of care that she finds more fitting to an understanding of women’s knowledge systems. Gilligan argues that the ethic of care grows from a focus on women’s sense of connectedness, saying, women’s sense of connectedness “Illuminate life as a web rather than a succession of relationships.” According to this view, women portray attachment rather than autonomy. In this way, women’s knowledge emanate from their attachment and connectedness rather than from autonomy and individualistic. Women’s knowledge systems, according to Gilligan, replace “a hierarchy of rights with a web of relationships” (ibid., 57). According to this view, the social dynamics within which an individual lives, directly impacts the way she learns and the knowledge she gains. Women’s knowledge systems are part of their everyday lives. These have gender implications because the world that women embody is different from that of men. The usefulness of looking at women’s knowledge as gendered, according to Gilligan, is an understanding of knowledge as inherently social and cultural, and its value is determined by the producer’s social relation rather than by certain predetermined and justified “truths.”

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Although Gilligan emphasizes on connected knowing, and on women’ thinking and knowledge are mediated through interaction with others, her view has been critiqued as essentialist, as it has been seen as proposing the characteristic of care as part of a female source of knowledge. According to her critics, this essence forecloses any women’s social, cultural, and political preferences. Some see her work as supporting biological determinism: a view in which women are “fundamentally all alike, a homogeneous group with common life opportunities and experiences already ‘known’ to us before we actually see them or hear from them” (Harding 1996, 436). The charge of essentialism is a misrepresentation of the way Gilligan conceptualizes women and knowledge. Gilligan’s aimed at overcoming a historical neglect of women’s knowledge system. Different notions of women’s knowledge systems exist in feminist scholarship. Belenky et al. (1986) developed their theory of women’s ways of knowing (6–9). According to Gilligan’s (1996), women’s knowledge systems are theorized as connected knowing. Clinchy (1996) describes women’s knowledge as “a rigorous, deliberate, and demanding procedure, a new way of knowing that requires work” (Clinchy 1996, 209). This idea became less common once the outcomes of both psychology and education got their way in scholarly debates among feminist scholars. Before this observation got shelved, several feminists had made a case, articulating the nature of women’s knowledge systems, that included making sense of their world, making connections as they interact with others and their environment as they carry out activities. These were theorized as ways for women to know and to construct knowledge. This case got impetus as a result of feminists of color that proposed the so-called black womanhood, which focused explicitly on the experiences of black women in modern society. Proponents of this movement explicitly framed women’s knowledge systems as a way of knowing in its own right. Drawing on experiences of everyday life of black women in the United States, for example, Patricia Hill Collins (2000) developed a framework to understand black women’s knowledge. In her Black Feminist Thought, Collins identifies several characteristic themes that structure black women’s knowledge including discriminatory patterns rooted in a distinctive history of slavery and segregation, stereotypical, “controlling images” of black women, and motherhood. Collins apportions a lot of value to women’s concrete experiences as a source of knowledge for women. Others, however, returned to the nature of women’s knowledge systems as emanating from socialization. Dyson (1997) collected and

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analyzed stories written over a two-year period by children in a single classroom in the San Francisco Bay area in the United States. She found out that 49 percent of writings by girls centered on relationships with family and friends, and three quarters of their narratives included specific, named emotions. Only 14 percent of boys addressed such themes. Most of their stories were about superheroes from the media, a theme hardly occurring among girls. It is against this background that I locate my study of women’s knowledge systems in Tanzania. In this regard therefore, my submission is that the foundations of knowledge of African women are diverse, and their learning and ways they make meaning of situations are not neutral but class bound, cultural bound, gendered and race specific and cannot be clearly described by theories that are several decades old. There are many issues that mediate women as they make meaning of their situation. These include individual predispositions, cognitive abilities, emotions, social and cultural positions, as well as individual personal goals and resources exposed to her. I would like to suggest that scholars need to take a closer look into what a particular issue means to a particular individual so as to recognize that not everybody makes sense of or perceives the world in the same way. In the current tide of globalization, where knowledge systems of African women are seen as unscientific and archaic, writers on feminist, gender, and women issues in Africa need to draw down a bright line of distinction between women’s knowledge systems and other knowledge systems, as the two are very different systems. In my theoretical articulation in this chapter, I fault previous writers on African women who still insist on homogenizing and normalizing women through modern education. This tendency, as Conaghan (2000) suggests, silences and exclude women from the group of knowers. This is true, even of contemporary progressive approaches to study women in Africa which have sought to solve the problems of African women in an activist sense, with scorecard in hand, to compare where women have come from and anticipate where they are going. Much of this scholarship suggests that women have no knowledge prior to attending formal education. Unlike the previous studies on women’s knowledge systems and experiences, which can be termed as the “big picture,” in feminist work, this chapter illustrates the the quality of women’s knowledge systems and gender relations that women experience in everyday life. In other words, the analyses presented in this chapter focus on the micro-dynamics of women’s lives as they negotiate their structural constraints. From these micro-dynamics and struggles, we can read

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expressions of women’s knowledge systems and agency in their own definition. It is also at this very micro position of gender struggle that the implications of the broader structural conditions and constraints can most tellingly be read. More specifically, this chapter argues that the examination of the micro-relations of gender as expressed through women’s knowledge systems and agency reveals the all-important place of women’s knowledge systems in shaping the lives of women. In short, the study of women’s knowledge system in practice provides an excellent vantage point from which to understand the lives of rural women in Tanzania. Thus proponents of the previous theories on African women have sought to emphasize a technical discourse—a discourse of experts, professional competence, and boundary maintenance that has isolated women from their true selves and imposed on them Western models that undermine their knowledge systems, for their knowledge is scored or graded on Western report cards. Therefore, in what follows, I seek to problematize the way in which women’s knowledge systems in Africa have been represented in the literature, televisions channels, and in a wide range of mass media across the world. When discussing women’s subjectivity, we need to address new issues using new forms of methodology and new kinds of questions and interpretations. We need to examine the issues surrounding women’s experiences against the open possibilities of knowledge production and ethical affiliation that are foregrounded in postcolonial theory, postmodern modes of representation in which studies on African women easily turn in autobiographical outbursts about the researchers who are quick to insert themselves in studies in which their own stories are obviously irrelevant. I believe that addressing critical issues affecting women in Africa, new questions, new understanding, and new interpretations are pivotal in a time in which there are deepening patterns of cultural balkanization and disciplinary insulation in feminist and women studies—a product of the uncertainty precipitated by the proliferation of difference as a consequence of modernization and globalization. Such scholarship is predicated on the sense that the survival of African women depends on the interpretation of their knowledge systems through the Western lens and their solutions must come from the West. The story presented in this chapter is just a snapshot of the many micro-histories and stories that I will be using in this study. Such micro stories, I suggest, will compel us to seek new ways of studying African women’s knowledge systems that are not necessarily related to one’s race or gender.

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Narratives as “ Taking Back Power”: Women “Res is ting” Other ing and D i sempower me nt In this section, I bring to view Ashiku Kanyeji’s story within marriage institution to illustrate the power of women gained from their knowledge systems. Using this story of a woman like Ashiku Kanyeji, I demonstrate that within the interview context, these rural women were bold enough to come out and dispute their misrepresentation, denying that they were silenced and non-agentive actors. Through these stories, we clearly see the intersections of women’s knowledge systems that are employed by these rural women to construct discursive identity. Consequentially a closer, insider approach to narratives of these experiences opens up the space for a more pluralistic understanding of the sources of women’s knowledge systems in rural Tanzania. Although the study of narratives of personal experience more easily places the experience of the teller at the center of the analysis, there are scholars who believe that the analyses that emerge are often still those of the researcher. I handle researcher subjectivity with much more care in all of my case studies in this text. There is a wide-ranging display of the different linguistic strategies used by women in rural areas, both within and across ethnic lines, as they negotiate their marginalization or exclusion. Ashiku Kanyeji was getting married in two weeks. She apparently had enough money to do many things in preparation for this very important day. When I met her, she was twenty-one and she had just completed her undergraduate studies from the University of Dar es Salaam. Ashiku had gone home to her parents to wait for the examination results and possibly for her first career posting. Initially, Ashiku did not want to get married that year, and she was unsure whether she would ever marry, let alone love the man to whom she was about to say “I do,” the two very important words that people anxiously wait to hear in wedding ceremonies. I came to realize that Ashiku had been pestered by her mother and aunt to “grow up” and “be a woman.” Whenever she had a vacation, Ashiku went home to her parents who lived in a rural community. Such behavior was not uncommon, but few girls had gotten a chance to study like Ashiku had, and it was common to bring their boyfriends and to announce marriage plans, even if these plans took ten years or forever. I had heard of Ashiku’s wedding from the women’s group that I was interviewing for this study, and I thought it would be interesting to hear her views on that very important event that was about to turn her life toward a different direction. When I first met her, she was directing her bridesmaids

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that she had chosen for her wedding, instructing them on where they would sit and what they would do: who would be in front and who were going to hold the wedding gown when necessary. Ashiku was a tall, dark-brown, moderate, and charming young woman. When we finally settled down, Ashiku said that her mother had for a long time pestered her to bring home a potential son-in-law. She said, I think the day that all these sank home was when she asked me pointblank whether I had found a mate, someone to marry me. When I told her I had friends and was not ready or interested in getting married (at least not now), she laughed and started listing the names of girls who had refused to get married or who had been too “choosy.” She says a woman’s life does not go on forever and that I was old enough to know and to make a wise decision. My aunt said the same thing. When I visited her, she said, “You have become a beautiful ‘woman,’ it is high time to bring our in-law home.” I laughed about this conversation, but when I came to think of what my aunt and mother were saying and, of course, going by what I see around me—girls who are in marriageable age, but are not married—their advice made sense. I know I am rushing, but I just hope things will work out.

Why would women continue to be identified with marriage and motherhood in the current global economy where women are now identified as assertive, dynamic, independent, and unbound from the constraints of passive femininity? How did their long history contribute to this phenomenon? To understand the underlying reason, this chapter explores marriage and motherhood as cultural forms that shape women’s sense of being and knowledge. By allowing the stories of women, such as Ashiku Kanyeji, in their own voices to be heard more directly, we are able to shut ways through which wrong interpretations and straightjacketing have been used to suppress rural women. In doing so, we are able to allow these rural women to explain, correct, and contain the previous biases against them. To be sure, using these voices allows us to resist gender profiling that has often created boundaries and differences through interpretation. It allows us to avoid such judgmental overtones such as what is “proper” and actions that are moral or amoral and avoid being configured or pigeonholed. The story of Ashiku Kanyeji function as texts to be read and, indeed, to be understood in a context. The story is in protected terrain and is therefore in a form of citadels, which society wants to break in but cannot. To get access to such inner story is to contain, exploit, and

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control the women by making their narratives a part of general societal knowledge. By giving the story presented in this chapter autonomous existence, the knowledge emanating from it becomes the nuggets to be desired, which makes these women stand out as the ultimate, elusive treasure. The story encourages our interpretive desires by teasingly denying us full access into the foundations of women’s knowledge systems. Yet due to the multilayered manner of this sory, we are able to see the power of African woman in the coded messages that confront not only our own interpretive assumptions but also our very impulse to interpret women’s knowledge systems in rural Tanzania. At this time, it is useful to pay closer attention to production relations in rural Tanzania, on the farms and other spaces in the rural surroundings.

S h if ting B o undar ies: The C ha ngi ng Fa mi ly a nd Vil l age Struc tures i n Tan z an ia The key to understanding the foundations of knowledge systems of women in rural Tanzania lies in the historical struggle to maintain their identity as women. We shall argue that the changing of family structure, due to economic and political transformations that accompanied the rise of capitalism in Tanzania have profoundly shaped women’s knowledge systems and ways of being. We also will argue that, since the late-19th century, the combination of the historical forces from socialism to capitalism and their accompanying policies have contributed nationally to the rise of women as dependent of men. Whether ‘objectively’ measured, or ‘subjectively’ defined dependence has led both to the formation of certain kind of thinking about women, which has led to specific kind of knowledge system and actions. Today, a majority of Tanzania’s population is still largely rural. About 90 percent of the population still live in rural areas, and about 99 percent of these families live on farming or pastoralism. They survive on land-related and subsistence activities. Many of these households subsist on ancestral land (land passed from father to son). Managing the Tanzanian rural community is changing, but rural women are still excluded from decision-making processes. Patriarchy remains the distinguishing characteristic of a rural family, and men still make major decisions affecting farming practices. Men control “male” crops such as coffee (mainly cash crops), and women have marginal control of “female” crops, which are mainly for subsistence (such as vegetables and cereals).

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To understand the foundations of knowledge systems of women in rural Tanzania requires that we not see it as simply a particular form of abstract knowledge, the product of their socialization, even where this is demonstrably the case, but as a practice of power, as an exercise of human judgment and intentional action. however vulgar, irrational or rationalized - within social and material relations in rural Tanzania where a woman’s value is in society that she lives. Sally Falk Moore has provided some of the earliest ethnographic studies in rural Tanzania among the Chagga (Moore and Puritt 1977). The organization of rural households in Tanzania has shifted over the years, and this has complicated the role of women. Some of the shifts have been positive, while others have led to dislocation of women from their role. Since independence in 1960, there have been many changes in the set of connections affecting rural women. However, having said that, many observers think that the prototype for the Tanzania rural family has changed very little after the failure of ujamaa4 programs of the 1970s and 1980s. Under ujamaa, ten households, or jamii (families), were placed under a village (mtaa or kijiji), which was supposed to have the basic units to which the state was supposed to supply infrastructure. Essentially, a typical rural family was a patriarchal arrangement called jamii, under a patriarch, with a man with his wife (or wives) and children. Under the village, the ten households were controlled by a central authority that linked to the kata (location), tarafa (division), wilaya (district), mkoa (province), and finally, the taifa (nation). Rural communities composed of such villages were governed by wazee (elders), mainly older males, with few women. The rural family was actually arranged around a patriarchal structure that was dominated by men. The social, economic, and political decisions within a family and village were decided in these patriarchal structures. Many families had ten to twenty individuals. Because families included paternal grandparents, paternal aunts, unmarried close relatives, and sometimes distant cousins who had been orphaned, some families were usually quite large. There was a lot of reciprocity, where older members of the family who could no longer actively work on the farms were allowed to look after children in exchange for being cared for. They were given food as well as other provisions. There were also arrangements under which relatives were also brought in to assist in raising children or working on farms. On rare occasions, there were live-in or stay-in workers who lived on farm houses with peasants and farm owners. Inheritance of the family business and property was based on an established system of inheritance, usually through sons. The basic rural community in Tanzania, a village called kijiji,

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was conceived and accepted by the Tanzanian traditional household, jamii, and coalition of closely related or allied families. In many parts of rural Tanzania, for a long time, women were primarily viewed as voluntary and unpaid laborers whose main tasks were to work on communal farms, take care of homes, have children, and take care of the elderly communally, sharing their time, food and other resources. They are also caregivers for children and the older members of the family. At the end of ujamaa and the beginning of liberalization, jamii remained a part of the Tanzanian rural family system but no longer communally. In the past, there was reciprocal sharing and exchange of foodstuffs. If one has surplus, it was inevitable to share with neighbors. Some foodstuffs such as potatoes and cassava were given out for free, in a reciprocal manner. Since the 1980s, there has been increased commercialization and commoditization of farm produce. The family structure has suffered some disconnection since then, and women have been at the center of these dislocations. Since the 1980s, rural communities in Tanzania have gradually accepted changes such as land subdivision and an increase in the number of nonfarm households in the community. These have presented special challenges to women. Subdivision of land has meant that there is less and less land available to households, and women are often the first to feel the pressure. Although the collective support system has been retained, many rural families have attempted to adapt to the changing economic and social conditions, which have demanded more time and commitment by women working on land in order to augment family income. Women have had to deal with these dynamics in many innovative ways, especially the task of raising children. Although the traditional manner of raising children collectively still remains, there is an emerging trend of individualization that is complicating the whole project of raising children communally. The rise in popularity of kindergarten means that children are going to school much earlier, some as young as three years old. Since preschool education is not sponsored by the government in Tanzania, the burden of paying fees for children in kindergarten falls on the parents. Many parents are poor and cannot pay. In the past, grandparents took care of their grandchildren until they reached school-going age, usually the age of seven. This has changed with the new economic and social demands. Traditional practices such as reciprocal sharing of food and other farm produce have decreased due to economic demands and pressure to self reliance and development. All farm produce—from foodstuffs to grass for domestic animals—is now sold, making life harder in the villages. This has put a lot of strain and pressure on

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women. Many planners and development stakeholders often imagine that when better roads are opened, the standard of living will go up. Whereas this is ideally the case, many areas of Tanzania that were opened up by infrastructure improvement tend to be exploited by urbanites who arrive with trucks and buy food from villages leaving them poor and vulnerable. Although the image of women carrying heavy loads from one point to another, which has been carried all over the world as symbolizing the suffering of the African woman, is a bit exaggerated, there is some sense in which this is true. Even though today there are more roads and many areas are accessible, this has not translated into better lifestyles for inhabitants in these villages. The cost of transport remains prohibitive. Many of the people in rural areas are often forced to sell their surplus produce to middlemen who arrive in villages with large trucks ready to transport anything to urban markets. In all these activities, women are the most disadvantaged because of the raising of food prices in ural communities. Family and village granaries have disappeared, making rural areas vulnerable. Since the majority of inhabitants in these rural areas are women, women have become victims. There are also more schools and improved access to health services compared to the 1970s and 1980s. Despite these changes in rural Tanzania, the level of gender equality in terms of role sharing in the rural community is still not enough. Women are still excluded from major decision-making processes of the family and community. They are denied access to strategic resources, higher education, employment and are continually kept in agriculture and subsistence production. An example of a typical rural family in Tanzania can be found before and after ujamaa, from the 1970s to the 1990s before economic liberalization and neoliberal structures permeated rural areas. Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs)and their attendant austerity measures disrupted life in the villages in rural Tanzania more than anything else before them. They increased vulnerabilities of women. Before then, rural families had quietly engaged in subsistence agriculture and cattle keeping, but SAPs undermined rural stability. The post-SAPs era has brought some changes in the family in rural Tanzania. The family structure in Tanzania has changed to nuclear family—to exclude close cousins and uncles—largely as a result of austerity measures and new economic realities and demands. However, there are still noneconomic relations (mainly social) between members of extended families. There has been increased subdivision of land. There has also been a significant reduction in commitment to cash crops compared to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. As families with

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farms increase their income with other businesses, family members are more and more engaged in different jobs and not just dependent on the farm. From the 1990s, there has been greater movement to urban areas, to seek alternative livelihoods. The party leaders—grassroots leaders of Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM)—were very powerful and took charge of the mitaa (villages) where they ruled like dictators. They exploited the labor of villagers, mainly women. The party leaders imposed additional levies besides those of the government and women were often at the receiving end of these illegal tariffs. These leaders, most of whom came to power without the consent of the people. There were no elections, and where there was, women were not involved. Although women were and remain the majority in the rural areas, they cannot hope to vote in their own, for there was simply no opportunity to do so. A study by Ferrara (2002) illustrates ways in which lack of income among the majority of women in rural Tanzania due to unequal distribution of resources led to lack of women’s participation in political activities such as voting. Thus, the cultural structures that control life in rural Tanzania and that tend to privilege men are the major inhibitions for women’s recruitment to leadership positions. Rural communities in Tanzania are organized around closely related families and clans. Therefore, the main feature of the Tanzanian rural communities is their homogeneity; spaces are settled according to clans and ethnic groups. This makes it hard to get rid of patriarchy and its attendant male-dominated structures. This network of geographical and close relations has often interfered with the management of individual households and decision making. Women are seen solely, on the one hand, as family assert or resource when they bring dowry in the family upon marriage or when they offer their labor free of charge. On the other, they are seen as a liability when they cannot be exploited as unpaid laborers. In many rural areas, there is an emerging sense of specialization, in which lazy men are being rapidly exposed. The days of joyriding are coming to an end. As many young people move away from the villages, there is scarcity of labor. Even those who have remained in rural areas to engage in agricultural work are subject to greater division of labor, and gender differences are increasingly getting lost. There are new economic activities and an emergence of middle persons or middle figures—those who buy produce from the villages and sell to the urban areas. There are also transporters who are hired to take produce to the market. Some transporters are also engaged in moving people from the village to market centers, towns, and cities.

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Lifestyle changes have affected relations. They have also affected life outside of work as well: families that engage in farming as the main source of income are forced to divide their income to provide for items such as sugar, tea, soap, salt, clothes, and so on, which are acquired from outside. There are also now village shops that function as emergency stops for basic household goods, besides those previously mentioned. The houses are also fewer because they have not matched rapid population growth. In the past, sons were supposed to have their own houses and homes. Nowadays, families have started to share houses. Thus, the living quarters have been divided into smaller family units. Use of living rooms is often divided, with the married couple owning the majority of the place but sharing with a younger sibling. Many women are not getting married, remain in their paternal homes, and have therefore been given rooms in their parents’ or brothers’ houses. Some family members have taken off to live in urban areas and only appear in the village during important functions such as weddings, naming ceremonies, or funerals of close relatives and during the Christmas holidays in the month of December. These changes do not signal the end of jamii structure or mitaa lifestyle. If anything, they reflect the Tanzanian rural family’s attempts to adapt to changing economic and social conditions while respecting each family member’s individuality. On the other hand, growing heterogeneity among families in Tanzania’s rural community can be noted since the introduction of structural adjustment programs SAPs in the 1980s. There has been increased poverty resulting from SAPs in Tanzania, with women bearing the brunt of the burden of poverty, especially women in the deep rural areas such as Hai and other marginalized sections of society such as pastoralist Maasai in Arusha. As a consequence, food security has become a major problem for many rural communities. Due to cultural conditioning, any shortage of food affects women the most. When the family budget shrinks, the quantity of food shrinks, and women’s needs are the first to be slashed because women eat last.

Ru r a l Tr a nsf o r mation and Wome n: The Changing Lifestyle of the Rural Family The landscape and appearance in many parts of Tanzania are changing and are quite different from the world that Sally Falk Moore encountered a few decades ago, in the 1970s. The little hovels (huts) built from grass and mud often huddled together in clusters of ten to twenty are being replaced rapidly by modern houses mainly of walls built with

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bricks, stones, and roofs of corrugated iron sheets, or mud walls and roofs of corrugated iron sheets. Many areas are getting access to piped water and some electricity. There are many factors that can explain these changes. There has been a shift in economic activities. Also, many people are finding employment in urban areas and many invest back in the village, on houses. Thus, the economic changes have been a major factor in altering the character of rural areas as well as changing the face of agriculture and rural farming. From the 1990s, there have been many attempts to provide clean water and proper sanitation. There also has been more focus on schooling and healthcare. In a sense, the government has attempted to “modernize” farming and agriculture. The significant interest in movement to urban areas has been curtailed by the government policy of returning those found without proper work in urban areas to rural villages. This relocation program has ensured slow urbanization in Tanzania and made life in urban areas better. Therefore, there is less pressure in urban areas compared to rural areas where population pressure, such as in Hai District, is high. Many parts of rural Tanzania have access to the radio (the radio was a major instrument and part of the need of spreading propaganda during the high noon of ujamaa) and cell phones (largely as a result of wireless revolution of the 2000s). Tanzania has also had a huge success with rural newspapers. The changes in rural areas are leading to transformation in values. First, there are many examples of this impact. Second, there is a dispersal of members of the family to many parts of the country due to jobs in the civil service and other areas away from home. Third, there is a diminished role by grandparents in the growth and development of grandchildren and their isolation from their own children. Fourth, there is the breakup of the extended family, which has led to the emergence of individualism (equality under the law and respect for choosing one’s career, living arrangement, and marriage). Fifth, there is the changing attitudes about nature (from feared to conquerable or developable), where people are taming areas that were long left alone, such as virgin forests and rocky places. Sixth, there is a partial shift to economic rationalism, where rituals and ceremonies are now considered under economic terms and sense. All of these developments have led to new focus and dynamics in economic and social development in rural Tanzania. As a result, the Tanzanian rural family has undergone a major change. Patriarchal family relations are weakening, and the emotional bonds between couples and their children in particular are emphasized more than to extended family members. Mutual agreements in spacing houses and

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housing arrangements between parents and children have given impetus for the further differentiation of lifestyles for each married couple in a family household or homestead. There are new trends emerging that are capitalistic and threaten the fabric of families. There are new changes in the assignment of farm management responsibilities to the family successors and encouragement of everyone to participate in farming regardless of gender. There is also a shift away from treating farm heirs (sons who remain in the village and their wives) as “unpaid workers” by parents. There is now demand to provide such sons and their wives with some wages or some income from the farm. Each family member is increasingly being accounted for, and days when men went out to drink and came back home to eat and sleep are disappearing. Everyone is being asked to account for their sustenance. Everyone is expected to work in order to eat: old and young, men and women. While the jamii and mitaa have remained significant units of social and economic relations, the changing demographics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in Tanzania have been caused by an increase in the number of children couples are having because of improved mortality and better lifestyle. Many children are surviving beyond their fifth birthday. Overall (with regional variation), the size of a Tanzanian rural family has become bigger but has stabilized at about five children per couple. In urban areas, families are much smaller, dictated largely by economic demands, circumscribed by housing and other factors such as better education for couples and better access to medical services. In rural areas, the phenomenon of live-in employees and other laborers who were considered as members of the family in the past are also disappearing. Although the family farming business is still the interest of inheritance, only those without stable jobs in urban areas consider family lands important because they are investing in urban housing and more land elsewhere. Although family assets continue to be passed down generation after generation, this is no longer dominated by male children, because girls are also demanding part of the inheritance from parents. Those without Western education are regarded to be on the lower ranks of the social order, which is problematic. Farm heirs have less-disposable income than their white-collar peers in cities such as Dar es Salaam and Arusha. In fact, men from rural areas have a hard time getting wives because of the heavy labor awaiting women on farms, and very few women are willing to get married to men without formal employment in some town or city. In order to marry, some men are changing the sharing of farm responsibilities and chores; they are willing to chip

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in and share responsibility, otherwise they will be abandoned. Therefore, traditions are changing as women begin to negotiate for more space and power on rural farms. Unfortunately, however, women in rural Tanzania are still unpaid for their labor in many rural households, with little chance of selfreliance. As we shall see for the case of Mama Mona and in other women’s stories, traditional views of gender roles and women’s work have remained strong. As agricultural productivity has continued to rise and even change, the division between productive labor and housework is becoming clear. Because of gender role prejudices, women are increasingly shunted into housework—with their labor noted as “underground work.” Farming women, thus, have been defined as mere help to their husbands, who are the “entrepreneurs” of the modern farming industry in rural Tanzania.

B eyo nd U J A M A A : E mergenc e of I ndiv idual ism in Rur al Tanz an ia Rural families in Tanzania today, particularly those engaged solely in agriculture (but excluding those in depopulated areas and in regions like Arusha dominated by the nomadic pastoral Maasai ethnic and Dodoma dominated by the nomadic pastoral Gogo) have evolved from farming units dominated by patriarchs to autonomous entities. Sons are not waiting for parents to die before they demand their inheritance. They are demanding their share so that they can implement their own land management style. Some of the young people have been to school, have better land management skills, and are able to improve yields on their inherited lands. In other words, the family structure has not done away with much of Tanzania’s traditional rural family. Despite the increasing dissimilarity in the generations and lifestyles of family members, what is happening is that the three-generation family setup is barely holding on or that the families themselves are falling apart, hence, not totally changing to a new household model. Land scarcity in areas such as Hai district means that sons are inheriting smaller and smaller lands, some of which are exhausted through many years of continuous farming. These lands lack nutrients, and only the use of fertilizers can bring about increased productivity. There are many conflicts over land, as siblings and neighbors fight over land demarcations and access to water and roads. These tensions have led to individualization and heterogenization, affecting farming families. Today’s farm families tend not to be coherent in this sense, because brothers and neighbors are rising up against each other, while

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families are shrinking. Due to these changes, traditional inheritance systems have almost faltered, for there is nothing to pass around. Rising populations and decreases of land in rural villages have particularly weakened inheritance of family assets and exacerbate enmity among siblings and between neighbors. Notable changes in rural families can be summarized as follows: (a) unaltered jamii structure, (b) increasing emphasis on the emotional bonds between couples and their children and not extended family members such as grandparents and maternal and paternal aunts uncles, and neighbors (c) a shift to farm management by individuals rather than collective family management, and (d) an increasing difference among lifestyles of family members. The second change has been problematic since the introduction of SAPs in the 1980s. These changes have brought about new changes. First, there is increased responsibility and participation in decision making and farm management by women. Second, there is decreased treatment of women as unpaid workers and provision of their personal budgets by men. Third, there is increased individual human networking outside the family structure. It must be added that the third characteristic represents a shift away from traditional forced bonds to relationships based on choice. This has paved the way for the creation of new human pipelines in the family and community. In this context, the bases for individual expression are being established; at the same time, communities are evolving into new forms of relations and networkings. It is worth noting that differences in everyday lives of the family members are caused by intra- and intergenerational differences in social relations, networking and activities, which manifests itself in the differences in the standards of living. Thus, the differences between men and women in rural Tanzania has nothing to do with one’s gender per se, but by the social and economic changed that have created individualism, while at the same time, individualism in the midst of poverty becomes impossible, living the majority of people, especially women in a state of dislocation. In many farming villages in Tanzania, the number of women accounts for approximately 60 percent of the total farming population. This makes the role of women very important in agricultural production as they handle important tasks such as seed preservation and are responsible for planting, weeding and harvesting. At present, the number of women leaders in community has been increasing. Rural women leaders and opinion leaders are in their fifties and sixties and they play a key role in changing the rural family, societal dynamics, and behavior. These women were born during the post–World

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War II period and were among the first generation to receive an education just before independence. The majority of these women have lived in rural areas throughout their lives, except a few who were born in urban areas and who began farming only after marriage. The majority of the women began to seriously take on leadership roles in their thirties, after giving birth to their children. Some (very few) were born in towns and the cities to families of white- and blue-collar workers and had no previous knowledge of or experience with agriculture. Ironically, it was this unawareness that allowed them to view themselves as active individuals at the time when agriculture and rural farming villages were in trouble. Their activities have expanded from their own farms and lifestyles to the community and even to the urban areas. They have also been involved in farmers’ markets, direct sales, processing agricultural products, passing down traditions and creating new ones, community building, managing local resources, responding to environmental issues, welfare for the elderly, acting as liaisons with urbanites and consumers, and more. As a result of these new spaces and energy by these women, now own their businesses. One kind of income generation activity in rural Tanzania is called the “Rural Women Enterprise.” The enterprises are promoted and receive support from the Ministry of Agriculture, the local government units, and agricultural cooperatives, among others. A bank catering for women’s interests has recently been created, the Tanzania Women’s Bank. Women’s involvement in farming and leadership roles has changed agriculture and rural society gradually but steadily. At present, rural women have overcome many difficulties and have become important key persons in developing agriculture and rural life in Tanzania. However, they still belong to a minority. After independence, various supporting efforts, including seminars and rural women organizations, have been delivered for improvement of abilities and social position of rural women. The Ministry of Agriculture, agricultural cooperatives, and microenterprises are supportive of such endeavors as well. Since the 1990s, a new type of woman is emerging in rural Tanzania. This is a woman who is negotiating for her right place and space in society. Such women are seeking ways of self-reliance and self-realization. Many rural women try to manage the divergent life vectors of family balance, couple-based living patterns, and individualism in order to live empowered, subjective lives. Although this is leading to tensions between them and their in-laws and some men, there is a sense in which their actions are respected as part of social change that is inevitable. These women emphasize and promote gender balance in management of family incomes. They are supported by various

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organizations and progressive men. The new arrangement seeks balance among the lifestyles of the same and different generations. It allows and recognizes an individual’s lifestyle and simultaneously promotes a shift to new farming family relations, with equal partnership among family members and genders. Since 1990, women’s roles in agriculture have finally begun to be recognized in Tanzania. There seems to be a realization that in order for the farm management to improve, the positions and roles of both men (heirs) and women must be clarified. There seems to be recognition of the fact that in order to improve productivity, family members must respect each other’s individuality and learn to see each other as partners. The jamii system is capable of flexibly responding to these new management and lifestyle changes to support contemporary society’s diverse family structures and lifestyles. The further development of agriculture and farming lifestyles will depend on the creation of new relationships within the rural family in Tanzania. Despite all these social and economic changes and social transformation, women in rural Tanzania have still very few ways of escaping from any situation that they do not like. This is because one of the salient characteristics of rural farming communities in rural Tanzania is the low mobility of families and individuals: people tend to continue living in one place for generations. Most of the time, women have to negotiate their lives where they live. This is particularly relevant in examining the problems of family asset inheritance and sustaining the needs of family members living together, which accompany the likely future of the jamii as the dominant paradigm for the rural family in Tanzania. Because of this tendency, the phenomenon of “multigenerational permanent residence” is often viewed as natural. However, given today’s socioeconomic situation, the rising birthrate in Tanzania, and the infiltration of individualistic values, the jamii and, for that reason, problems previously mentioned are gradually falling out of step with the contemporary society. When this happens, women will likely be forced to continue shouldering an unfairly heavy burden. This will adversely affect their independence. Therefore, it is necessary to create diverse family structures using the stem family. Systems of family inheritance and supporting the needs of all the members of a large family should be introduced to the community. In the end, the rural family will likely remain the center of the jamii structure in Tanzania. Looking at the examples of women interviewed in this study, we will see how systems of farmland inheritance must be developed, simultaneously respecting individual rights and ensuring secure and stable transitions. The transformation of family

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relationships has to be constantly negotiated in agricultural administration. These women have sought to change the premodern patriarchal jamii practices of management transfer and inheritance. This exceptionally difficult issue is, in fact, already being addressed in communities around Tanzania and is one that all the chapters in this book deal with.

Mak ing Meani ng : U nder s ta nding Ashi k u’s S i tuati on There are two explanations that feminists routinely resort to when confronted by cases such as the one of Ashiku. One focuses on women’s elevated position as wives and mothers in indigenous African political organization; others have traced the history of women’s marginalization as a result of being wives and mothers. From this corpus of literature, we can delineate two opposing paradigms: one that hinges largely on the romanticization of high-social status accorded to wives and mothers in traditional society and another that points to the danger of being tricked into subordination and invisibility as wives and mothers. According to the former paradigm, mothers had enormous social power and cultural capital in their various societies until the imposition of European colonial rule and the Victorian gender ethos, when such power was undermined or entirely eroded. The latter paradigm holds that in the current postmodern condition, wifehood and motherhood can best be explained as the lingering inhibitive of women’s rationality, agency, and individuality that characterize the modern woman. In her analysis of formal political institutions, cultural norms, and status of women in Nigeria, for example, Gordon (1996) shows how “male’s authority and power over women is located in and exercised through the extended family” (7). She notes that, historically, the sexual division of labor in Africa was organized in such a way that women were the primary caregivers. They were also responsible for food cultivation, processing, or both. Others have made the same observation arguing that, through the institution of marriage, women have become properties of their husbands’ lineages, losing all of their personal rights and self-identity (e.g., see Ogundipe-Leslie 1985). Women’s losses are men’s gains. Ogundipe observes, as the institutions of marriage and motherhood further invest men’s existing powerful positions in the kinship system and interpersonal relationships with wider political and economic meaning. More recently, in her exploration of the history of African womanhood, Thabitha Kanogo (2005)

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reported, “In their roles as daughters, wives and mothers, women find themselves occupying positions straddling the old and the new; the boundaries are permeable, but crossing them is fraught with distress for all involved. Self-identity and womanhood in their various forms, including acceptance in one’s natal family, peer group, wifehood, inlaw, grandparent, or member of women’s councils are all at stake” (84). At the same time, the picture of why women decide to assume a role of wifehood despite the above observation is not quite as clearcut as Kanogo and others suggest. In the previous chapter, we saw how women made decisions and acted without depending on men or on their being women. A range of perspectives, such as viewing gender as the source of a woman’s subordination have been proposed. In West and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of “doing gender,” has come to be one of the most influential and widely appropriated ideas in many fields of social research (Wickes and Emmison 2007). For example, doing gender, as West and Zimmerman suggest is a condition in which women participate in social and cultural norms. On this they say, [Gender] is unavoidable because of the social consequences of sexcategory membership: the allocation of power and resources not only in the domestic, economic, and political domains but also in the broad arena of interpersonal relations. In virtually in any situation, one’s sex category can be relevant, and one’s performance as an incumbent of that category (i.e., gender) can be subjected into evaluation. Maintaining such pervasive and faithful assignment of lifetime status requires legitimation. But doing gender also renders the social arrangements based on sex category accountable as normal and natural, that is, legitimate ways of organizing social life. Differences between women and men that are created by this process can then be portrayed as fundamental and enduring dispositions. (145–46)

Kanogo and West and Zimmerman provide descriptions of how powerful one’s gender is in one’s thinking and decision making. Each references the role of gender constriction; Kanogo’s report describing women’s gender role restricting them, such as women’s circumscision for men’s pleasure. On the other hand, West and Zimmerman conceptualize gender role as mechanism to differentiate women from men. This binary dividion is unequal where men are assigned a higher value than women. Pairing these two scholarships helps provide some depth to the description of gender role, but, as usual, we cannot discern the actual development of a woman’s knowledge system.

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Understanding how one comes to “do gender” or assume a certain role requires a recognition, that is, what one does, does not come from the inside one’s head, but is a combination of individual interest and social pressure. Moreover, it becomes clear that the “gender” or “difference” may refer to differentiated opportunities where each gender must negotiate. Cultural and semiotic scholars suggest that human subjectivity develops. One is exposed to cultural forms, including what one is expected to be or do, and these expectations are normally unwritten, but are common knowledge not interpreted in the same way by everyone. Rather, people develop social norms in which every individual is expected to follow. But this also depends on the individual’s predispositions, including cognitive abilities, emotions, and social and cultural positions. When we pay a little attention to Ashiku’s story, we come to realize that what she thinks and decides to do correspond not only to her exposure to what it means to be married but also to shun away from what is culturally considered as “an old maid.” In this context, Ashiku considered marriage as of more value than spinsterhood, and therefore her thinking including emotion, motivation, and motive; decision making and actions were shaped not by her being a woman or by direct influence of her mother and aunt but are conditional to her local environment. The answer to the question of how to describe Ashuku’s situation does not lie in either of the two paradigms listed. Rather, it lies somewhere between them, irrespective of her education as a graduate scholar. It is important that any true assessment of women’s knowledge systems in Africa must be understood within their social and cultural contexts – what are social and cultural contexts that mediate women’s thinking and actions? Poststructural, postmodern, postcolonial, and other critical scholars suggest that human thinking develops within one’s specific social context. This is to suggest that women’s knowledge develop as they make sense of their social situation. This knowledge does not necessarily fall under one philosophical given or within different categories of knowledge, such as: conceptual knowledge, conditional knowledge, content knowledge, declarative knowledge, disciplinary knowledge, discourse knowledge, domain knowledge, episodic knowledge, explicit knowledge, factual knowledge, metacognitive knowledge, prior knowledge, procedural knowledge, semantic knowledge, situational knowledge, social cultural, strategic knowledge, tacit knowledge and what have you, but on the process

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of meaning making and as a process of learning, which is tacit to construction of identity. However, as we look more closely at what this means for women in this study, we quickly recognize that not everybody makes sense of her situation in the same way. Rather, each woman made sense of her situation and acted according to her personal goals. For example, Amina was ready to accept any man who came along with a proposal of marriage. To her, a woman’s destiny is marriage and raising children. Amina had tried to get a man to marry her for a while and this is what she said: Nothing matter to me than to have a family and raise children. Because Amina’s goal is to get married and have children, in the language of women’s knowledge system she falls under “doing gender.” Anna believes that marriage and motherhood enable women to achieve their goals in life. A woman’s goal to her is respect, as she says: ‘what is more to a woman than to be respected? Without marriage and children no one respects you.’ She also believes that respect for women come from women themselves, the way they respect their husbands and in-laws. Although Anna believes respect is reciprocal, she also believes a woman canno be respected if she is not properly married and have children, as she says: ‘how can people respect you if you are not married? People respect a properly married woman, who also respects her husband and in-laws. Because Anna’s goal is to earn respect, in women’s knowledge system, she falls under “womanhood.” Sheekya sees marriage and motherhood, not as destinies for women but as among the many pathways through which a woman can reach her goal. However, Sheekya is also concerned that many women do not use their capacities enough to reach their goals, but use their wifehood and motherhood as leverages, as she laments: ‘some women use their marriage and motherhood as qualifications. I think it is important for women to use their knowledge and other skills when it comes to pursuing their ambition. Women, in my view, can achieve their goals in life without using their husbands and children.’ When asked how can this be possible she had this to say: ‘be independent thinkers, perhaps, develop their own ambitions separate from those of their husbands and children, acknowledging their strengths and weaknesses, learning from their friends and peers.’ In the language of women’s knowledge system, Maria is concerned with women’s transformation and resurrection without the constraints of gender and womanhood. In all three examples – Amina, Anna and Maria, life goals are the same. However, each has a different strategy to reach it, depending on their strengths (predispositions), resources (both ideal and material) and motivation, conception of the goal (as interesting, as doable, as relevant, and weighed against competing

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goals). Furthermore, the three women use their predispositions, situations and knowledge systems to develop their goals and strategies to achieve them. When we pay a little attention to what women think and do, we come to realize that an individual woman’s thinking and actions correspond not only to the exposure to certain texts, signs, and discourses but also to their predispositions, these include inner feelings, inner motivation, attitude towards self and life and ways one approaches life and solve problems. As we can see, different factors contributing to Ashiku’s thinking and decision making, and therefore it is difficult to generalize her actions. Although many of the forces that shape women’s knowledge systems are cultural-historical ones, it is the way their life-course trajectories are mediated by wifehood and motherhood that is the focus of this chapter. I deal with several different but related themes in this area. First, I examine the institution of marriage and the discourse of wifehood within the imagery of women in Tanzania. I then examine how young women in Tanzania destabilize the local notions of marriage by marshalling their knowledge systems offered by their social organizations and connections. Here women’s knowledge systems are so deeply embedded in one’s social position and age that, unlike in other chapters, women’s knowledge system cannot be meaningfully discussed without women’s social connections. Marriage is so entrenched in women’s social lives and plays an important role in shaping their thinking and behavior. Later, I examine issues of wifehood and motherhood as ideals, with a focus on the work of Oyewumi. Just as the notions of womanhood discussed in Kanogo’s work and gender in West and Zimmeman, I use interview data to problematize certain aspects of Oyewumi’s analysis of motherhood in Africa. I do not deny that wifehood and motherhood in Africa are revered. However, my conclusion is that the forms of methodologies that these scholars use to describe these institutions draw explicitly from cultural relativism. They need to be expanded to capture the real dynamics and creative women’s knowledge systems in negotiating their lives within and outside marriage, wifehood, and motherhood. Closely connected to this expansion is the material presented in the final section to elude so much of social and cultural binaries common in feminist literature. This last area helps us understand how women use their knowledge system to appropriate their positions despite constraint within the marriage structure.

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Ma r rying and Being M ar r ie d: Th e I ns titu tio n o f Mar r i age i n Af r i ca As we have already seen, the meaning of marriage to a woman and the processes of accommodating ideas from family and friends, making choices and alternatives, and finally making a decision to marry, to divorce, or to remain in marriage cannot be confined to a single event, but instead occur across overlapping knowledge systems. The representation of marriage as a process rather than single event in sub-Saharan Africa has long been recognized in studies of Bledsoe and Pison (1994) and Meekers (1992). Women play a key role in this system, not necessarily because marriage is considered a good thing to a woman or because marriage has been socially defined as a destiny for women, but because of their role in the system of marriage. The role of women in the marriage system in Africa is expressed in what women contribute to marriage. The woman is expected to contribute not only her reproduction and production labor5 but also their knowledge systems that help in cementing or eroding the relationship men and in-laws. The overlap between the two spheres is an essential point of departure for analysis of the value that women attach to marriage institution. In her study of the experiences of women in married life in AdoOdo, southwestern Nigeria, Andrea Cornwall (2001) draws a connection between the increase of women’s autonomy and the decline of their earnings especially for the married women. Cornwall’s analysis highlights the exploitation of married women in the context when married women are left to take care of the children on their own; while at the same time, the discourse of marriage cast those who are not married as outcasts. Cornwall notes that in Ado-Odo “women’s options were limited. Only infertility, madness or extreme maltreatment were recognized as reasons for women of reproductive age to extricate themselves from arranged marriages; the practice of the levirate left widows to be inherited by a relative of their deceased husband.” Further, Cornwall reports the “Older women told me that women who misbehaved would be brought into line by harsh punishment by their husbands by the approval of their fathers” (2001, 70). Cornwall’s analysis of women’s situation in Ado-Odo suggests that women had no agency or any safety net apart from their relationship to their husbands and their fathers. Following Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, Cornwall goes on to depict the constraints of a woman’s social position: “Those who fled home without a good reason might be sent straight back home to their husbands” (ibid., 70). Cornwall tries to correlate women’s social

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position and the treatment they get in their marital home, including few options available for them. Her analysis suggests that women’s subservient position reproduced their treatment in marriage relationships. However, there are a number of criticisms that can be voiced. In Chapter 4, I identify the basic weakness of reproduction theory, and the same basic critique applies here, namely that women’s social position cannot be a cause for their illtreatment, but people’s intentional suppression and domination is the cause. Thus, in the attempt to illustrate the practical side of women’s knowledge system in a specific social activity, like ‘marriage,’ we can read expressions of women’s agency and their own definition of their struggle. We can also see the location of gender struggle that is missing in many feminist scholarships. More specifically, this chapter argues that the examination of women’s experiences in Africa must focus on the micro-relations of gender and women’s knowledge systems as expressed through the institution of marriage. Although the portrayal of maltreatment of women is important, this is certainly not the way to understand the formation and role of women’s knowledge systems. Indeed, the discourse of maltreatment of women in the marriage institution is as much a symptom of what women actually endure, as it is a determinant of it. Of course, as noted, even more novel to conventional understanding of women’s experience in marital relations, women are portrayed as passive, waiting for a husband to make decisions without any agency. Without bringing in what women also do, we cannot understand the whole picture of women’s position in creating knowledge in the past or at present. The analysis from previous chapter strongly suggests that women have various ways they negotiate their lives. One could even go so far as to argue that studies such as that of Cornwall express colonial biases that ignore the complexity and diversity of women and their situations and the discursive principles and practices that shape reality, without consulting women. Henrietta Moore (1986)6 draws a connection between the space and women’s role and a woman’s right as a wife with the social meanings to married women in Endo, an ethnic group in Markwet, Kenya. Moore’s analysis highlights the space of women as follows: “Women have only limited rights to, and control over, productive resources and such rights, including their rights over their own children, are contingent upon men. However, both men and women are bound by the marriage ‘contract,’ and since this ‘contract’ requires a man to supply his wife with land and livestock, his control over these resources is not absolute.” Moore goes on to say that “Male control is constrained by

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the fact that women have certain rights to produce resources and will try, whenever possible, to maximize their claims” (67–68). How do these ugly situations figure in the everyday lives of women in rural Tanzania? In this research, it was the social position accorded to women that disproportionately shaped the discourse of marriage. It was very common, for example, to hear stories of girls describing how difficult it was to finish college and get a job before they got married. Others described their struggle in choosing between marriage and employment or of further education. In the following interview, for example, Joyce talks about her struggles to finish college: she battled with the notions of being too old or for being associated with an old maid if she finished college without a husband. At one time, she used her study partner as a shield, but this worked only for a short period of time before her “shield” became a thorn to prick her. When asked about her ideas about marriage, she described her life as follows: College girls live such a hard life. When you don’t have a boyfriend, people think you are a lesbian, or too choosy. After college, these ideas might have circulated and men shun you will be too old to be married. While at the same time our male colleagues just want to play with girls, they are not ready to marry. When a girl gets a serious man outside college, our male colleagues think she is after money and they call her a prostitute. It is hard on girls in all ways.7

Another woman, Songosia Kimweri states that she is very interested in getting married but she had not found anybody who had offered a marriage hand. All her male friends did not want to marry her, and she was becoming frustrated. Like the women quoted in the previous interview, with her focus in getting a possible candidate to marry, Songosia is not at ease until she is married, so choosing among the males who show interest is made more difficult. She describes how men have become choosy and she associates her bad luck with her black skin and big morphology. When asked the reasons she thinks men shun away from asking her for a hand in marriage, Kimweri had this to say: I am not so sure. I think men, especially those with education and money, prefer younger girls, light-skinned and slender girls. I had this man, and we have been friends for about ten years. Last year, just from the blues, I heard he was going to engage another girl, half my age. Talk of men. Maybe I should have been more active than waiting for him to propose, but I did not want to sound desperate. But this is

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Certainly, “it is hard in all ways” is an important message that Joyce and other women in this research sent loud and clear. It sums up the distinctive pattern of contradictions that women face on a daily basis. Such messages allow us to see the links between the social discourse of marriage and the foundations of women’s knowledge systems. Sylvia was in a monogamous marriage when she turned eighteen. After her third daughter, her husband decided to marry another wife in hopes of getting a son. Sylvia was a nurse, and here is what she said: I would very much like to leave and take care of my children, these three—pointing to her daughters (who were about six, three and one years old) hawatanishinda [meaning she will manage on her own]. My mother and other relatives cannot hear of a divorce. Divorce, they say, is for bad women. Besides, they think women who divorce their husbands for any reason are selfish, and they only think for themselves, while they have children to also consider. Children who are raised by single mothers are targets of ridicule. Their peers tell them your mother is a bad woman [which means prostitute]. So I have to stick to this marriage which is killing me inside. I think women cease to live when they become mothers. So I am staying, not because of anything, but for my daughters.

This description focuses on the “social problem” discourse of single mothers and children of single parents. Talking to Sylvia more, however, I found that her position was more complex than her account or her rationalization of staying because of her children. Sylvia’s own mother lived nearby and had a posh home, left to her by her late husband, Sylvia’s father. Sylvia came from a much respected family. Her mother did not believe in divorce. She thought divorced women were immoral and children have to be raised in a home of two parents, a father and mother. What is more, Sylvia agrees with this despite that her husband only saw her twice a week. So if Sylvia did break her marriage, she would not only be doing something morally wrong, as a woman and mother, but she would also cause conflict with her own mother and the community that held her in a high respect, and she would jeopardize her children’s innocence. In fact, her staying in this miserable marriage

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was not passive or ignorant, but it would be irrational to forsake all the respect she gets from being a wife despite suffering. What comes clear in Sylvia’s story is that women who enter into marriage without including their families and friends found it extremely difficult to navigate when things go wrong. For example, the Sylvia outlines exactly how important her mother was in her marriage. We see how, in conjunction with the effects of her social position as a married woman, a Muslim and a mother, her decisiotn to stay is justified. The comments of all the three women reveal the degree to which the discourse of wifehood interwoven with women’s needs and interests shape women’s knowledge systems, which in turn, shape the ways they make decisions. The public character of wifehood and motherhood can be discerned from the following two aspects. First, the social and cultural dimension—marriage and motherhood—takes the form of social and cultural capital. Some of the social capital that a woman accrues as a result of marriage includes firmly entrenched within partriachal arrangements associated with a male as sole important member of a community. Gaining this cultural capital, a woman will be identified as an ideal woman. Some of these social and cultural capitals act as mediations as women make decisions to marry or to remain single, based on what they consider to be morally or socially acceptable. Thus, unlike the notions of marriage as to attain economic goals, the social and cultural character of marriage and motherhood cannot be said are women’s choice. We will see that the discourse of marriage is an important tools for denying women’s agency, which at the same time, becomes a source of women’s knowledge system. In my analysis, I focus on detailed examples from the actual marriage rituals in order to explore fully the significance of women’s knowledge system in the institution of marriage. Specifically, I shadowed Ashiku’s marriage arrangements, starting before, during, and after her wedding and the overlapping spheres of activities. In these activities, we will see the unique character of women’s knowledge systems that develops from solidaristic networks and how these networks emerge and function. We will see how women’s knowledge systems are often oriented to se networks. I also show how these networks are rooted in women’s social position more broadly and how these positions become strength, rather than weakness and contribute to the collective goal of ensuring that marriage is successful.

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Structuring Effects of Women’s Knowledge Systems in Marriage Institution In any marriage arrangement in Tanzania, there are many activities going on before and after the wedding ceremony and women are usually at the forefront of every activity. As seen in many other parts of Africa, women are active and through many activities that have been identified as “women things,” the practical side of women’s knowledge system as a collective action for change can be seen in marriage arrangements in Tanzania. Wedding rituals in Tanzania include what is termed as a kitchen party, a send-off party, wedding proper, and kitchen initiation party. Although these are public events, women are the most involved to make these activities a reality. What do these activities look like, and how does the women’s knowledge develop and how it is used As a means of describing the dynamics of marriage rituals and the role of women’s knowledge systems in them, I present my observation of Ashiku’s wedding where I was invited from the very initial preparation to the end. Ashiku’s wedding preparations started with a kitchen party and ended as she was shown to her own kitchen as a married woman. I hihlight the involvement of women, as they used their networks to make the whole process a reality with a goal to illustrate women’s participation their role, while at the same time, “doing gender,” and constructing “womanhood.” The research presented in this part of the chapter suggests that women share their knowledge and teach others, the knowledge that would fall outside of usual ‘knowledge system.’

K itc hen Party The kitchen party is usually a premarital tradition in many societies in Africa that involves a woman who is about to get married and her immediate circle of friends and relatives. In most cases, kitchen parties are strictly women’s parties where women bring gifts to the new bride many of which concern cooking, from which the party derives its name. Also at this party, experienced women teach the new bride on many issues related to marital relations, housekeeping, motherhood and childcare. In most cases, kitchen parties take place in the bride’s natal home. In Ashiku’s kitchen party, among the most important invited women were from high social status including from the church and from the women’s legal office. Other invited women were relatives, neighbors and friends. Any invited woman was allowed to share experience and

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to give advice to the bride to be and to other women present. In this way, the bride to be as well as other women learned from each other through the kitchen party ceremony. The following are excerpts that I found key in this ceremony. From the church: As a Christian wife, you are a helper of your husband; that’s a woman’s job. A woman’s territory is the home. Remember, you are the heart of your husband and he is your head. The heart beats soundlessly, thus you should not make much noice for any reason. Knowing your role and position in marriage is important and will make your home a place of peace and harmony.

From the legal: As a woman, you should know your rights in marriage relation. Know that you are an independent but with strong ties to your husband. Look for legal help whenever you encounter marital problems. Upon divorce, you are entitled to inheritance.

From the floor: Cleanliness is a woman’s weapon. I mean, being clean in the body and your house. A clean body will always attract your husband and a clean house attracts everybody. . . .

After the wedding, the new bride was welcomed to her home, and another party, known as the kitchen party initiation, was held on her behalf to bestow her a kitchen, where she will be cooking food for her family. Unlike in the kitchen party where the bride-to-be was quiet, learning from those who had been invited to teach her the way of womanhood, she was expected to be active and cook a traditional meal to feed all the women invited. This was also the time to test her knowledge of obedience to her kinship by serving the most senior woman in the clan to the very junior. The meaning of this ritual was to show to the elder women in the clan that the new bride not only had acquired appropriate knowledge but also had taken time to acquire cooking skills and this was taken as a good sign as wife, mother and daughter-in-law, It would be considered an insult and unforgivable mistake to offer food to a junior woman before her senior. In case one mistake, the new wife could be fined. In any case, the initiation party was an avenue for the new wife to show her knowledge, not only of

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her kin but also of cooking, generosity, and humility, the three most important characteristics of African woman. In contrast to most analyses of women’s struggle for changes in legal or economic status, especially those which focus on the large structural issues of laws, economy and politics, women’s knowledge system in marriage institution produces a very particular notion of women’s agency that is limited to macro analyses of the structural constraints and change.9 This work is very important, mapping out the quality of women’s agency and specific activities that women engage in. Building on the works discussed in the introduction, we can better understand that women’s knowledge systems are very much mediated by women’s participation in social and cultural activities. This observation is important not only for its detailed micro analysis of the foundations and formation of women’s knowledge systems, and for looking for ways we can incorporate this knowledge in curriculum.

Resistance and Subversion o f Mar r iage Struc ture The last portion of the preceding sections straddles the line between issues of women’s knowledge systems within marriage institution As we have seen, the everyday life of women is an important space to understand the women’s dynamic lives and source of their knowledge systems. In the everyday life of women in rural Tanzania, marriage is an important social institution with a series of laws and customs that regulate woemen’s thinking and behavior. Because of these social norms and values, which normally are infavourable to women, women find themselves negotiating them. We could say that this social relation of a one man and one woman arrangement is rooted in the dynamics of the historical development of colonialism and Christian mission and therefore in effect stamps marriage with an important racial and religious character. The everyday lives of women in marriage institution is particular importance to the analysis of foundation of women’s knowledge system, but we cannot ignoe other social and cultural contexts that also shape marriage institution, such as religion, political situation, economic and historical context.

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C o nc lus i on This chapter focused on several key ways in which women’s knowledge systems develop. I began by discussing some of the most obvious ways that we conceptualize knowledge, Then I went to show how we can conceptualize women’s knowledge systems particularly. In this chapter I illustrate how women in rural Tanzania used marriage institution to construct knowledge and negotiate their lives. This appropriation and negotiation were used as funds or resources and cultural model I have described in this chapter. The goal was to show how our everyday life shape our thinking, perceptions and and behavior and in turn, how these shape our everyday life. Such reasoning can lead to what I call warrantable interpretation of construction of knowledge as construction of identity. A warrantable interpretation, as Carol Lee (2007) suggests, “is one for which the reader can support claims both from the text in question, knowledge of the world, and knowledge of this author, other authors, and other texts” (55).10 Making women’s stories explicit and public serves more than theorizing them. Bringing to view these stories entail emotional and social commitment as well. When women are grappling with social situations they find themselves in, it is particularly important that, not only the researchers, but also the curriculum designers, teachers and development agencies consciously attend to these multiple, dynamically interrelated dimensions of sources of knowledge. The next chapter examines ways in which women communicate and construct knowledge through khangas.

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Chapter 3

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S pea ki ng through Fashion K H A N G A as Medi ato r o f Wo m en’s Knowle dge Sy st em

T

H A K U N A K A M A M A M A ( There I s N o ne Lik e Mother )

he above saying is among the many proverbs one can see in khanga in East Africa. The saying “Hakuna kama mama” is among many that have made people stop and think. Whether read on a khanga worn by a woman, or written on a khanga given or received as a gift, such sayings create in the wearer, the giver, the receiver, or a bystander what is known as “epistemic contradictions and transformations” (Vygotsky 1997b, 292). That is, it creates in the obsever, ideas, insights and emotional feelings. This is to say that, sayings in khanga are fashions and texts with powerful messages to change one’s perspective about the people and the world in which they live. They touch a special place, not only the mind, but also emotion. For example, the word, mama, which means mother, is considered to be the pillar of society. She is an “essential building block of social relationships, identities, and indeed society” (Oyewumi 2003, p. 1). Whether this is true or not, when proclaimed in a khanga, it has power to make people think.1 In the section that follows, I would like to point out how khangas have functioned as fashion and important inventories of knowledge as well as archives of social and political commentary. In her book Fashioning Africa, Jean Allman (2004) challenges the idealistic view and notion of an Africa that is represented as static in fashion, an Africa that is often depicted as lacking in creative energy

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and fashion consciousness. What is even more fascinating and insightful about Allman’s book is its recognition of the influence and power associated with fashion and how African women have in fact used this trend very articulately to represent their interests and aspirations. Allman asserts persuasively that fashion is important, in ways that have not been recognized by other studies on Africa, by showing how it is “represented, constituted, articulated, and contested through dress.” She argues that forms and manner of dress are an “incisive political language capable of unifying, differentiating, challenging, contesting, and dominating” (Allman 2004, 1; emphasis added). In one of the most penetrating studies on dress in Africa, Allman demonstrates how the politics of clothing are important in society, for they can play roles beyond mere fashion statements. They can be used to change lives and shape behavior. She suggests that just as politics must adjust to meet the needs of new situations and emerging societal dynamics, styles of clothes are altered to reproduce such transformations. Going beyond Jean Allman’s study, this chapter seeks to bring to view the use of khangas2 by women as an illustration of one kind of women’s source of knowledge systems in Africa. It not only shows how women wear these clothes but also how they fashion them while using them as instruments of power and control. Like novels, graffiti, cartoons, and other creative renderings, the act of wearing a khanga and writings on khangas and related text can be regarded as a form of literary genre, where knowledge is produced, used, and disseminated mostly by women. This chapter demonstrates how khangas have created, structured, and routinely provided learning experiences as well as produced knowledge and articulated women’s influence and authority in society. Through the use of a variety of sayings, idioms, proverbs, slogans, metaphors, and art, khangas influence and shape people’s everyday thinking and behavior. Proverbs like the one above, which people see on an everyday basis, is consistent with contemporary learning theories, which help substantiate the case for women’s knowledge systems to be seen as legitimate and useful means of teaching and learning. This legitimization is important as there remains much skepticism about the quality of women’s knowledge systems in Africa. An explanation of how khanga sayings, idioms, proverbs, slogans, and metaphors influence people’s thinking and behavior is part of this legitimization.

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Women a nd Fashio n, Fa shi on for Wom en Fashion in Africa, like manners of dressing all over the world, is not surprisingly associated with women. Women are custodians of fashion. For centuries, women in Africa have taken fashion as an important opportunity to not only makes social statements but also to “speak out” as well. While women’s history in fashion is often difficult to reconstruct in Africa because of trivializing its usefulness, khanga provides an interesting platform and inventory that can keep the histories of women’s fashion intact. Khanga has been a space for women to learn, make meaning and construct knowledge although this important role has not been recorded. It is because of this important recognition of khanga as women’s fashion and as repository of knowledge and construction of history that I seek to examine khangas as useful devices that can be used in understanding the role of women in creation of knowledge. Based on the analysis of khanga used by women in East Africa,3 this chapter presents several evidences in support of the efficacy of khanga as one form of women’s knowledge systems in Africa. First, it summarizes evidence from the interviews on the role of khanga among women in Tanzania as an important artifact to communicate, facilitate meaningful interaction, and create knowledge. At the same time, these data emphasize that scientific knowledge—school-based learning and knowledge construction, while necessary—is not sufficient for being effective in modern and changing world. Second, I make the case that in an important sense, the khanga is a social and cultural artifact with respect to the ways in which it is used to communicate, to forge relationships, and to provide an avenue for learning and knowledge. This conclusion is buttressed by a selection of empirical examples from other parts of Africa where forms of oral culture have contributed to the development of society. Each of these cases underlines the complementarily of the material and symbolic aspects of khanga. Third, I point to a small but rapidly expanding corpus of research that indicates social artifacts such as khanga as important tool for knowledge creation. With these data in hand, I return briefly to underline my basic contention that women are not passive receptors of knowledge but active constructors of knowledge. In this chapter, I seek to make a strong case why we should learn from khanga as an avenue for teaching, learning, and constructing knowledge. Khangas use a variety of sayings, idioms, proverbs, slogans, and metaphors.

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Und e r s ta nding the P roc ess of K now led ge P ro du c tio n thro ugh K H A N G A The sayings, proverbs, metaphors, idioms, and slogans on khangas demonstrate the creative and innovative dexterity of women in Tanzania.4 In addition, khanga is a symbol, that is, everybody in a community who sees a khanga knows the meaning it embodies because this type of cloth has been worn for generations. Thus, its historical origins makes its cultural symbol stronger. The younger generation normally learns the meaning of khanga at an early age, when a girl is told to wear a khanga when going in certain places or performing certain activities. Some girls observe their mothers and older siblings wearing khanga and later they imitate. In the process, girls come to understand the importance of khanga and develop interest to know the meaning of the words on them. Beck (2005) has studied ways in which khanga is used in East Africa, “there are two ways which are used to communicate with kanga: either a woman wears a kanga for others to see, respectively a woman is seen to wear a certain kanga and understood to communicate” (2005: 134). These are among the many ways that khanga is used in Tanzania. Khanga plays important role in transmitting knowledge. In addition, khanga has inspired a lot of hope and created a unique platform for women’s expression. They have come to be not only avant-garde creative pieces that are nuggets of knowledge by women, but they also represent a form of text and voice. Many of the sayings, metaphors, and proverbs have developed into popular forms of daily knowledge that is shared, debated, and inspires. They are regarded as part of the mainstream and given meaning in society. For example, a saying like ‘hakuna kama mama’ has inspired elites to advocate for mothers. This can be seen in the policy of maternity leave where women in Tanzania are given 84 days paid leave get a new baby. Sadly, many of these expressions have been copied and imitated by commercial producers who have used them without acknowledging the creative and artistic inputs of women. They have no idea that women construct and use these sayings not only as communicative devices, platforms for articulating their feelings or grievances, but also as forms of dialogue and negotiation and conflict resolution. Women use khanga as a force for shaping society, and expressing and demonstrating their creativity. They see the khangas as an opportunity to make things new, to go beyond the traditional boundaries set for them and create a space for them to create knowledge and negotiate identity. We can correctly interpret the roles of khanga as art and philosophical and political statement. In their art form, khanga has

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been used to break down barriers and penetrate areas that women could not reach with spoken words. Since khangas are mostly won in public, they have been used to reach large crowds as a result, to which they have disseminated their information. They have used the khangas to break through the traditional boundaries of negotiation and dialogue, by speaking to all segments of society, both young and old, men and women. They have used khangas to break gender boundaries and navigate tight spaces. They have used them to break and navigate against gerontological divides as well as gender and cultural tensions. There are thousands of sayings, proverbs, and metaphors displayed on millions of khangas today in East Africa as well as across the world. Many people do not know where the sayings, proverbs, and metaphors have originated. They have been produced by ordinary women whose creativity is never acknowledged. Because they are unique forms of knowledge, khanga are commentaries on social, economic, and political issues. Therefore, they should be viewed as texts. They have all been used to examine a diversity of styles and ideas. The sayings, proverbs, and metaphors share the desire to create new notions of knowledge, ways of speaking back or returning the gaze. They reject the societal logic of pigeonholing or straightjacketing women into antiquated cultural spaces where they are silenced and marginalized. Khangas have opened the door to a variety and versatility of subsequent academic research on clothing as media and mouthpieces. Refreshing, too, is the khangas intermixing of social and political commentary, satire, fine art, literature, popular print, and advertising imagery. The khangas also deal frankly with the implicit sexual and popular culture penchant for certain body types during historical periods, where women could not protest or challenge misrepresentations of their activities and actions. Undeniably, khangas have developed from being spaces of social commentary into politics, economics, and literally everything under the sky. Women have used sayings on khangas as both displays of protest and denunciation, as well as for decorative purposes. They have also used khangas to celebrate their own beauty and power and to accustom their eyes to visions of themselves as leaders and citizens. Fairy tales or not, khangas are my idea of a successful brand that provides the wearer with a distinctive signature and creative genius. Khangas are also sources of history. They are reliable commentaries on events that take place in society and have the capacity to provide a penetrating disclosure of women’s thoughts and ideas. In the 1960s, many themes of khangas in Tanzania revolved around uhuru (independence) and postcolonial celebration. They show women expressing the

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need for independency, access resources such as education. Many sayings of the time, such as “Uhuru ni kwa waliosoma” (independence is for the educated”), “wanawake pia wanataka masomo” (women also need to be educated), or “uhuru ni kwa wote” (independence is for all”), are demonstrative of the clamor for equality and rights. In the 1970s, the themes of the khangas began to shift to address women’s grievances against the postcolonial state. They began to ask questions and demanded answers. Examples include “mbona wanawake wamesahaulika” (why have women been forgotten?) or “wanawake walipigania uhuru pia” (women also fought for independence). Thus, the khangas integrate the past and the contemporary, mixing new and old sayings, and are reliable vehicles of recording the past. They are also reliable vehicles of studying the past and can be used as reliable barometers of the social and political climates of the past. On khanga, one can read words that evoke memories and create nostalgia. Khanga create memories of their past, making people to wonder, ‘how did this happen?’ For example a saying like, “Usisahau mmbachao kwa msala upitao,” (do not forsake precious mat for a passing fake one). This means khanga imprints the past, and the present into the future. They can be studied as reliable texts, like we study books. In doing so, they add an extraordinary ritual and folkloric nuance to the knowledge of East Africa as a whole. In the art of everyday life, these women triumph over the imposed history of marginalization and the colonial and postcolonial history of domination and of oppression. I have had the opportunity to meet and hold conversations with some of the women who have contributed in coining and formulating sayings, proverbs, metaphors, idioms, slogans, and metaphors in East Africa. Two of them, Mama Fatuma and Mama Abdul, stand out because they have been in the business of coining words for over three decades. Their words are found all over the world, but they have never been acknowledged beyond the little money they are paid. These women put a lot of thinking in creating these words. The words are philosophical and informative. Mama Fatuma and Mama Abdul’s vignettes point us toward the complex flow of creativity from these women in Tanzania, across presumptive borders because their sayings and compositions have become part of the mainstream. What these women (who are indeed authors in their own right) highlight is the radical encounter of the past and present as well as their understanding of relations between mainstream knowledge and woman’s knowledge, in that while mainstream leans more on information, women’s knowledge, on the other hand, leans more toward questioning, probing and directing. Their sayings also express their

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takes and interpretations of cultures in the postcolonial setting. Some of their work also reveals unanticipated trestles of affiliation that link urban and rural populations in a vast country with disparate populations such as Tanzania. The sayings, proverbs, and metaphors can also indicate regional disparity. They reveal diversity. They highlight the difficulty, and indeed the futility, of atavistic attempts to be part of the mainstream while also maintaining group purity or even gender solidarity. The use of holistic terms such as wanawake (women) rather than akina mama (mothers), used by many politicians, is a clear objectification of the wider appeal in their work. They seek to speak to all women, old and young, married and single, mothers and childless. By combining elements of indigenous and other cultural forms such as Islam and Christianity, these women are engaged in a radical aesthetics of double-coding, where a saying can have two meanings. There are times when a saying can have even three (triple-coded) or more meanings. It takes a lot of thinking and reflection to come up with that type of knowledge creation. It requires not only creativity but also mental prowess. One finds this strategy of double-coding or triple-coding illuminatingly present in the work of authors of these sayings, proverbs, and metaphors in East Africa, such as Mama Fatuma and Mama Abdul. Mama Fatuma’s proverb, “nipe uji mpaka nishibe” (give me porridge until I am full) might be used to ask for literally more food or for material assistance. It might also mean that one is not getting enough money from her spouse and is therefore asking for more. The saying might also mean that the woman is not getting enough conjugal time with her husband, especially in polygamous situations, and is therefore asking for more. Mama Abdul’s slogan “nipe nikupe” (give me, and I will give you) has also multiple meanings. One meaning is simply the literal one: the wearer is asking for mutual respect. She is asking for reciprocity, saying that if you give her respect, she will return the favor by respecting you in return; it is clear. The other hidden and somewhat vulgar meaning might be that the wearer is asking to be paid for whatever services she provides. She might be a waitress at a restaurant or a seller at a market place. Therefore, one needs to approach these sayings carefully and with a lot of reflective thinking. Not all of the sayings and metaphors are intended for the general public. Some are coined for certain occasions and specific situations and need to be approached as such. Many of these sayings, proverbs, and metaphors are clearly couched in postcolonial visual presentation by these women as well. Good examples are the new form and types of the paintings that we see on khangas with clear images and motifs

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that go beyond mere words. A good example is the work of Ashina Mlandege, the Tanzanian female artists whose drawings are receiving increasing attention in newspapers and the khangas industry and fashion world. In the next section, I seek to examine the dynamics that khangas present as social commentaries, inventories of history, and platforms where women articulate themselves, using the work of Ashina Mlandege. I also interrogate ways through which khangas can be seen as social artifacts of society, through which we can see and experience society through women.

K H A N G A a s Artifac t for L ear ni ng a nd Co ns truc tio n of K now le dge Khanga as a women’s attire, is also an artifact and, by necessity, women’s collaborative tool that helps them to develop cultural competence and general knowledge (Beck 2008). In the context of knowledge creation and construction in postmodern and global context, the language of artifact acquire new currency. A variety of newly scholarly literature in teaching and learning have one or the other of this term in their studies. Yet surprisingly, there has been relatively few attempts made to theorize this term in education or in women’s and gender studies. Here I will attempt to explore the analytical purchase of artifact in learning and construction of knowledge. I delineate specific features which may save to distinguish deep learning from surface learning. Inter alia, I suggest that the concept of artifact should be understood in terms of its usefulness in learning and construction of knowledge. The activity of learning and constructing knowledge require that learners use artifacts, such as signs, instruments, procedures, machines methods, laws and the like are essential (Kuuti, 1996). Inscribed within the concept of artifact is the notion of mediation. Learning or construction of knowledge within constructivist theory is distinguished from classical or behaviorism theories through the concept of mediation. Within constructivist theory, learning and knowing no longer occur through the use of senses but rather is mediated activity. It turns the dominant logic of dominant theories of learning that reduce knowledge to the purely intellectual realm on its head in some ways, and points to knowledge construction as not merely mental constructs, but social and cultural processes within real-people’s life as they engage in transformative activities in the world. Vygotsky argued that artifacts, or tools serve to organize human thought and the development of experience. Vygotsky (1982) identifies language in particular as key in the organization of thought,

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arguing, it is through language that people get to understand the meanings of words, events, actions and intentions. Without the language it is impossible to know, to think appropriately, communicate experience, or understand what is expected of us. From Vygotsky’s perspective, artifacts facilitate the transaction of learning. Following Vygotsky’s framework, Leontyev conceptualizes learning as a process by which people make meaning through mediation. This view is in opposition the idea that learning is a mental processes occurring within the head (Leontyev, 2009). According to Leontyev, the mediated process of in meaning making exists wherever an individual, as ‘subject’, needs to learn or know something. Something here can be termed as ‘object.’ The transaction of learning or construction of knowledge therefore, can be conceptualized as subject (the learner), object (the subject matter) and activity (the actual activity of learning). Leontyev is at pains to point out that: The expression ‘objectless activity’ is devoid of any meaning, that is, engaging in the activity of learning wihough subject matter is fruitless. Meaningful subject matter is important in the activity of learning, and this meaning is made through mediation. The object; of content is meaningless if it is not mediated. True to the spirit of cultural-historical approaches, White emphasized the importance of artifacts and mediation in the learning acivity and its psychological implications: With words man creates a new world, a world of ideas and philosophies. In this world man lives just as truly as in the physical world of his senses. . . . This world comes to have continuity and a permanence that the external world of the senses can never have. It is not a succession of disconnected episodes, but a continuum extending to infinity in both directions, from eternity to eternity (1942, p. 372)

Vygotsky, Leontyev, and White together offer a conceptual grid for understanding learning. According to this grid, learning consists of a subject (learner), an object (either a subject matter or a goal), and mediational tools and signs (such as metaphor, sayings, proverbs or pictures). Khanga has not been subjected to rigorous scholarship to understand its profound social and cultural significance in Africa, and this is the primary focus of this section. Khanga, as artifact, consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, to communicate the message. First, khanga can be described as a cloth that women wear, as a way of negotiating their identity. Of course, some women dress in the most expensive

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khangas, most of which are usually produced in Nairobi, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and other major cities. Other khangas come from Zanzibar, Morogoro, Mwanza, Zanzibar, the Middle East, South Korea, China, and India. Khangas from each of these places have a different level of quality and the wearer communicate certain message. The least-admired khangas are those from India and China. Many of these khangas are mass-produced in places as far as Taiwan. These khangas are cheaper, and therefore any woman can afford a pair. One would be identified as a woman of substance or of consequence by the khanga she is wearing. Thus, unlike typical cloth, khanga cannot be restricted to plain clothing. Khanga, in this conception, has two social values: mixture of elements for communicating meaning at the level of interaction and for forging relationships. Moreover, the communicated message is specified as symbols that are usually meant to represent something (i.e., an idea, a proposition, a question, evaluation, etc.). In this sense, khanga are by nature directed toward an unspecified public audience. Second is the aspect of the social dimension: the message on a khanga is used to communicate something, especially when it is given as a gift, usually at certain occasions such as customary festivals (marriage, end of a mourning period the birth of a baby), religious festivals (Idd al Fitr, Idd al Hadj), or as farewell gifts for someone travelling. Wearing khanga and sayings on them can be conceptualized as artifacts or learning mediation.Women’s construction of sayings in the khanga and using khanga as a fashion, should be seen as both knowledge creation and an appropriation of khanga as an artifact to mediate their learning and knowledge construction. This creative production of knowledge through khanga is a result of women’s strong embodiment of culture, which helps them to engage in shaping their world in a manner that is creative and unique. Thus, khanga as and mediator of learning provide a clear alternative to the narrowly mentalistic and individualistic notion of learning and how knowledge is created. The construction of knowledge through khanga, and an understanding of it, serves the practical purposes of khanga as a source of knowledge that can change the world. This definition is useful in the present context because it points to its symbolic value that is not normally appreciated and often is hidden from scientific scholarship, and it needs to be brought into clear view. Thus, khanga is among the most creative social artifacts that women in East Africa have used for centuries to communicate, forge relationships, and negotiate identity. One of my research participants noted, “Khanga is our gazeti and radio, or you can call it television

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of women. Every woman knows what message is communicated through a certain khanga. It is rare to misunderstand the message, and if it happens, it is not the fault of the interpreter. That’s why many women do not want to wear a khanga that may contradict their intentions. This is what we have learnt and which we teach our daughters” (Mabula 2004).5 As already mentioned, khanga has been used to mediates women’s learning, thinking and construction of knowledge. This leads us to believe that, khanga is women’s armory. A chosen khanga communicate strong message. How can we dispute the effectiveness of khanga in transmitting women’s knowledge systems in rural Tanzania? How does communication with khanga relate to science and development? Indeed, what counts as knowledge, science or development become subjective especially when the producer is not from the dominant group in society. In this context, khanga can be considered as a pathway for women to negotiate borderlands, but at the same time, it has been considered as fallacy and women’s thing. This is because, through khanga, women can say the unsaying without saying anything, but their point gets across. The following story illustrates this observation focusing ways a woman can cross the boarder that she could not without the use of khanga. It is a reconstruction of a strategic communication that allowed her to say something that she could not communicate verbally or in normal channels of writing.

Uzuri wa mke ni tabia sio sura (The beauty of wife is character, not her appearance.) When Aziza got married to Ali Hamisi, Kudu, her mother-inlaw mayasa Jumbe and her sister-in-law Kashinde Hamisi had just accepted the fact that Ali married a woman of his choice and not of their choice. As a present to her sister-in-law, Aziza bought a beautiful khanga with the above saying. It is important to understand a larger context in which the two women live to understand why it was necessary for Aziza to communicate through khanga than to communicate the message verbally. When Ally was courting Aziza, his mother, Mayasa and sister, Kashinde did not approve of this relationship and there had been a long and unfruitful debate against Aziza. Without their approval from his mother and sister, Hamisi went ahead with marriage arrangements. In their sulking mood, Mayasa and kashinde accepted the defeat, but

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not before they had confided to their friends about their distaste of Aziza, in the context that she was too old and ugly to be married in their family. In many families in Tanzania, mothers and sisters prefer younger wives for personal reasons, but also younger wives are more innocent and easier to oppress and control. Aziza heard about this and she was not happy. It is normally unheard of in many traditions in Tanzania to hear in-laws quarrel and this is the reason that led Aziza to use khanga instead of voicing her dismay. Being of the same age with Aziza, Kashinde had not married despite having a string of suitors. While both mayasa and her daughter, Kashinde had waited for a long time for a proposal, no man came along to propose, at least not before Kashinde’s younger brother got married, and Aziza came to the picture. So the relationship between Aziza and her in-laws though on the outside seemed to be fine, underneath it was a different story. The fire underneath came to be sparked by the present of khanga with those words. Both Mayasa and Kashinde interpreted the act of a gift of khanga and the word on it in the background of Kashinde’s failure to get married, but according to Aziza, her action was a reflection of herself as of good character. Whether it was a reflection or projection, Aziza’s action communicated a message of superiority in terms of character (tabia) and inferiority of her sister-in-law in terms of beauty (sura). By playing using the two terms character (tabia) and beauty (sura) in the context of marriage, she defended herself, while criticizing her mother-in-law and sister-in-law for their unjustified criticism. The act of a gift and the words on the khanga were meant to communicate intentional message, which worked perfectly. The example above proves that khanga is artifact that women use as a tool for communication and at the same time it mediates their thinking and learning.

K H A N G A a s Metapho r for L ear n in g a nd C o ns truc tio n of K now le dge Although the literal meaning of metaphor is narration of events, they have, expressive content, weaving details, characters, and events into a whole. In order to make sense of khanga, both as a fashion and a tool for learning, metaphoric aspect of khanga is particularly significant. I link khanga with metaphor for two different but related reasons. Firstly, khanga is usually used to make statements and communicate messages, and second, the sayings on khanga mediate our thinking. The first reason is more important because the statements on khanga

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deal with helping people to know important issues, events, and ideas. The second reason has to do with knowing what to do with the message. Producing knowledge that can help people to know, think, and to use that knowledge to solve problems is difficult in many formal teaching and learning situations. It is especially difficult to for teachers whose history of schooling has been dominated by a recitation around right and wrong answers. It is clear from the interviews that thinking through khanga was familiar and easy to interpret the message, than thinking through what they learnt in the classroom.

What is Metaphor ? Metaphor is the re-presentation of an entity as something else that is not the same but shares one or more similar attributes. A metaphor brings together two domains that are distinct and somehow incongruous, but whose juxtaposition can be made sense of. Contemporary work on metaphor stresses that it works on two levels: conceptual and linguistic. A stretch of language that creates the possibility of activating two distinct domains is said to be a ‘linguistic metaphor’; such language forms can include similes and analogies, provided there are grounds for claiming distinct underlying domains (Cameron 1999). The words on khangas for example, in the saying “nipe uji mpaka nishibe, uji” will be the topic, and “nipe mpaka nishibe” will be the terms of the metaphor. Linguistic metaphors are devices that are a typical coded form of written expression (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). They involve verbs and other word classes, as well as nouns: “Uji can make one full.” Interpreting saying on khanga metaphorically requires an understanding of the gap between the Topic and Vehicle domains to be crossed, so that the Topic is understood somehow ‘in terms of’ the Vehicle. Interpretation will also vary across individuals, depending on how familiar they are with particular metaphorical uses of language. Individual variation is particularly relevant when considering experts or researchers in a domain, who may experience interpretation problems that women do not.

Th e Ro l e o f Metaphor i n L ear ni ng Boyd (1993) distinguishes metaphors used for theory building from metaphors used pedagogically to explain concepts (i.e. on the basis of their discourse function). The former, ‘theory-constitutive metaphors’, are often highly structural, with systematic links between relations in the two domains. They can help construct theory and become

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an integral part of ‘expert’ scientific discourse. Theory-constitutive metaphors will be part of what people need to learn. Vygotskian sociocognitive theory provides a theoretical account of learning as both social and individual. Conceptually, learning metaphorically can be seen as including the process of moving from subjective knowledge to objective one as the learner make sense of words, concepts and events, and no better vehicle to do this than khanga.

Wo men’s K now l edge C ons truc tor s: Th e C a se o f Ashin a M l andege In her art, Ashina, the daughter of a Chagga Christian father and Makonde Muslim mother, documents her struggle with the profound personal and political issues historically surrounding her identity as a muslim and Christian in Tanzania. Ashina came to art relatively late in life. Ashina graduated from art school at the University of Dar-EsSalaam in 1986. This isalso the year President Julius Nyerere resigned from the presidency in Tanzania, after spending a quarter of a century as president. Her work registers the attendant tensions and concerns of this historical moment, which is also hers represented by the end of the rule of a Christian president and start of the rule of a Muslim president. To Ashina, it was also the end of one identity and beginning of another. The stepping down of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere also meant the end of ujamaa, a socialist program that President Nyerere had started in 1967 after the Arusha Declaration Policy paper that described the ideals of this socialist program. The year 1986 was also important, not only to Ashina, but also to many Tanzanians because it was when a Muslim, Ali Hasssan Mwinyi, became president of Tanzania. I would like to foreground here one of her pivotal paintings, Mwanamke (1986). It is the painting of a muslim woman who is full size at the center of the picture, with many people and is the largest figure. She is surrounded by smaller people—mainly men, wearing muslim attire and western suits. This painting combines methods of Chagga and Makonde perspective painting and Christian/Muslim pointillism to a stunning effect.6 In “Mwanamke,” Ashina ironically quotes and densely refigures previous artistic productions in East Africa, especially Makonde ones, intensifying and heightening the atmosphere of brusque, startling anxiety that works through her rejection of some of western motifs that exaggerates female body parts such as breasts and lips. “Mwanamke” depicts the female figure as strong and big. Her head is not covered (a rejection of Islamic codes of dress for women). Her eyes look big,

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and her left hand gestures as invitation, her index finger pointing to her chest, while the right hand points ahead, to the future, with a lot of authority. She is confident and is dressed modestly. She also looks defiant and unperturbed. It is the figurines and images that surround the woman that tell a more important story, the great unsaid. Many of the figures and motifs represent images of men and women who surround this woman. They all seem to hold her in awe and admiration, for she is certainly the center of attraction. This rendering leaves no doubt that this is a deconstructionist and postmodern painting, for it represents female triumph and defeat of all obstacles. The centering of the woman is an accurate rendering of social scenes, in many homes in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa, and the world where, during meals, women are surrounded as they distribute food to the entire family. Whoever gives food gives life. The painting of Mwanamke on the khanga shows the central role that women play in society. There is a European man in the motif, standing next to the feet of Mwanamke and looking confused, with a gun strapped to his back and a cigarette in his mouth. He is perhaps a mercenary but now contemplating his next move. He is too small to be noticed by Mwanamke or to be a danger to her. If she steps on him, he will be gone. Below her feet is a kofia (a hat) and another man wearing a long robe. He represents a Muslim and is standing with his hands on his head, in surrender. He is also perhaps contemplating his next course of action. He is too small to be seen by Mwanamke, who is looking ahead. Whatever his decision, it will not affect Mwanamke’s, for she has decided to move on, to go ahead, with or without him. There are also images of African men looking to where the woman is pointing. Some of the men are looking ahead, while others are looking on her chest, some are looking back. Mwanamke is not bothered by their actions, for they will not affect hers, as she is moving on. The painting is complex and needs a lot of decoding, but many women who have seen it or wore the khanga seem to understand its meaning, and they love it. Ashina’s double-coding of indigenous and Christian/Muslim traditions on Khanga exposes an unsettling environment of cultural hegemony, while, at the same time, it speaks about khanga as living, changing, and reflecting of the broader political and social order in which it appears. Ashina, most importantly, interposes a new scenario into the settings in women’s standing in Tanzania: a strong female body, well built, unswerving, and not needing to be rescued, one that is not helpless, crying, or dancing, as spectacle. Mwanamke mirrors social, economic, and political changes experienced in many parts of

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Tanzania throughout history. It is a response to colonialism, religious subjugation through Christianity and Islam, as well as dictates from cultural and societal structures and institutions by many ethnic groups against women in Tanzania. In Mwanamke, the essential ground of indigenous African and hegemonic Christian/ Muslim identities are now populated with tripwire or booby trap questions located in this motif of hybridity and double vision. The work of hybridity unearths the symbolic cultural violence inherent in the history of Tanzania and the brutality of European and Arab presence and subjugation of the indigenous populations through external religions such as Christianity and Islam, as well as rejection of some tendencies in some ethnic stipulations against women. At the same time, through this double-coding, Mwanamke highlights the incompleteness of the modern indigenous search for identity among Tanzanians. This is an identity that Julius Nyerere sought to create throughout his presidency, a uniquely harmonious Tanzanian identity that is yet to emerge. This is sharply underscored in Ashina’s use of space. Avoiding the linear arrangement of space of the European colonial oil painting in which the indigenous is clinically separated from the colonizer, Ashina deliberately yokes the colonizer and colonized into the same space but where the European and Arab are part of the spectacle and not at the center of the motif. Boundaries between the European and Arab, on one side, and the indigenous, on the other, are collapsed, and antagonistic spaces of colonized and colonizers are folded into each other in a violent and eruptive manner, in which the indigenous woman provides direction as the leader and not the usual African, European, or Arab male. Therefore, the work of the women in Tanzania as represented by these khangas then points toward a larger inventory of associations in the conceptualization of culture and identity than one finds in the many scholarly writings on Tanzania. The artistic unity, imagination, and delicate detail of the piece speak volumes about how knowledge is produced by average women. Contrary to some critics, the extensive commercialization of women’s drawings and sayings has not had a negative impact on artistic and imaginative quality or has it destroyed the originality of these women. Mwanamke represents the old and the modern. The figure represents an artistic tradition that has evolved in response to the historical and economic forces affecting women in Tanzanian society throughout the past to the present. Just like the khanga, her art is a story that unfolds in reverse chronology from the contemporary

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artistic hybridity to its historical and cultural antecedents, which not much has been written or is known. Mwanamke embraces all aspects of women’s knowledge systems and points to how women’s contributions have been ignored in knowledge creationand in society in general. Despite the genius inherent in the artistic works of women like Ashina, some Western scholars have questioned their authenticity, referring to them as “ethnic art” or “folk art,” essentially designating them as unsophisticated and therefore inferior. They have described them as expressing tradition, ascribing them to some forms of “mock primitivism,” hence rendering them insignificant and unrefined, lacking complicated motifs and philosophy. They point out that such art has absorbed influences from anywhere, adapting and molding them to their own uses and needs and, in the process, losing any originality. There have been more laudatory reviews of Mwanamke and other paintings by Ashina, which have certainly outweighed dismissive ones over the past few years. The laudatory reviews point out that the works of art are original, creative, imaginative, visionary, sophisticated, rare and unique, vibrant, powerful, whimsical, natural, and astounding. Despite these rave reviews, there are still critics who see African art as unoriginal. Such assessments might make observers think that the great works depicted on the khangas by artists such Ashina are pandering to influences such as the market. Female artists like Ashina share this dilemma with counterparts in other world regions and at other historical moments, but they are judged according to a more static standard than their Western peers: they are expected by diverse elements within their audience to remain true not to themselves but to some larger force vaguely defined as “their culture.” Mwanamke, like many other paintings and sayings on the khangas, shows originality and creativity. And there is persistence of binary polar descriptors such as “authentic” and “commercial” in assessments of women’s contemporary African artistic production. Such misrepresentations need to be discarded. We also argue against the deeper dichotomy between “traditional” and “modern,” which lingers beneath the surface of even supportive commentary on the creative work of these women. These false divides obscure the essential dynamic of the historical reproduction and evolution of these works of art, sayings, idioms, proverbs, and metaphors. The critics do not give any attention to the fact that these women have found patrons for their works for nearly a century, especially among fellow women, manufacturers of textile, as well as tourists, shopkeepers, and other international consumers. In fact, many observers believe that expanding

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patronage over the past century has acted as a catalyst for a kind of khanga artistic renaissance. It has provided manufacturers and women who have been involved in creating sayings and doing the paintings such as Ashina with a steady income and permitted them to make of their work a profession to which they could devote their attention and fullest energies. These factors, combined with increasing competition among artists, have led to noticeable improvements in the quality of works produced and to increased social status for master artists as well as consumers.

Co nc lusi on There is no doubt that khanga has been instrumental in helping women to learn, know, construct identity, forge connection, and function more effectively in their everyday life situations in East Africa. In the context of giving women a voice, khanga has mediated a communication for women who may be shy to voice their views; therefore, it can be applauded. It is also clear that khanga has produced shared understanding and the possibility for women to participate more effectively in society, whether in taking care of their families, children, and living peacefully with their neighbors and friends. As artifact material, as well as a logic-rational mode of thinking, khanga illustrates its power in mediating logical thinking; it also stands at the center of the artifacts and material in that it is both a cloth to wear and a text to be interpreted. Khanga is obviously the one medium for women’s networking and hence an avenue for learning and knowing. This chapter has provided a brief look at the intersection of gender and the construction of knowledge through khanga. I examined the unique role of khanga commonly used by women in East Africa. The works of cultural scholars served as a point of departure from which I discussed the importance of artifacts and metaphors in teaching and learning. We saw that women’s culture and women’s knowledge systems in their everyday lives goes on in a variety of spheres of life, even often in the absence of khanga. In this chapter, I argue that khanga is important venue for teaching and learning as it embody artifact and metaphor, the two important features in teaching and learning. I further argued that an important feature in designing learning environment for women is to understand their experiences, most of which are gained through khanga. In this work, I have tried to accomplish the following: debunk the longheld view that khanga is just a cloth and the messages on them are

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‘just women’s thing;’ demonstrating the importance of khanga in teaching and learning. It is this connection between khanga and teaching and learning in formal setting that help teachers and curriculum desiners think more critically about the nature of subject matter for women through such understandings. The following chapter examines the value of African knowledge systems and the efforts to recover them within the framework of “development.”

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Chapter 4

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I nside Society The Ro l e o f Wo men’s K nowle d g e Systems in Afr ica’s Development

I

I ntro duc ti on

ndigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in Africa have inspired the technology and physical, social, and cultural values of many researchers, which by and large have remained reciprocal, classless, and efficacious. The discussion on this matter, which has been gaining currency among postcolonial scholars, is usually motivated by a growing realization that locally generated knowledge can be used to change and improve not only the human condition but also agriculture and other natural resources. This scholarship constantly links knowledge systems in Africa and elsewhere with development, where in the dictum of development policy, knowledge like that of ordinary women (such as that of Mama Mona discussed later in this chatper) is seen as marginal and meaningless. In the recent past, we have witnessed an intensification of interest in resuscitating knowledge systems in Africa, a concern that focuses on improving living conditions as well as securing the survival of indigenous and marginalized peoples, languages, lands, and cultures (Sandoval 2000). African knowledge systems have become a center of interest in the fields of education, health, agriculture, communication, and development. They are also a center of scientific research, and scholars have reinvented past memories around the general history of African knowledge systems to illuminate important knowledge that has been marginalized and regarded as meaningless in the past. They

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have combined African communal stories in their own voices, ritual, music, and poetry and the dialogic interactions emanating from African art and oral traditions. Through them, scholars have been able to recover new information. This is in response to the importance of allowing the mainstream to engage and incorporate aspects that have been silenced for many years. While IKS in Africa are now considered as significant and therefore equivalent to other forms and types of knowledge systems found elsewhere, this realization has not been without some critics. There have been attempts made by some scholars to subject African knowledge to some measurements. Despite this unwillingness to accept that African knowledge is sound and superior and has every attribute in its own right, there is now an overwhelming amount of research that places African knowledge on the same pedestal with other knowledge (Odora-Hoppers 1998). Based on the little research that has been conducted on African IKS, there seems to be an emerging consensus on what characterizes this knowledge and what are the effects of the current interest on them (ibid.). Despite this massive interest, there has not been systematic research on how IKS have shaped the lives of women and other marginalized groups in Africa and elsewhere. How do the initiatives to revive IKS, while they do not recognize those knowledge systems as equal partners, for example, affect women? As will become evident in this study, the interest in IKS in Africa has implications for development and how women are looked upon. Thus, the aim of this chapter is twofold. My first aim is to examine the value of “endangered” African knowledge systems (many of which are embedded in oral traditions) with specific reference to everyday activities of women in rural Tanzania. The second aim is to scrutinize the present efforts that are engaged in recovering knowledge systems in Africa. The objective is to understand and decode the ambivalence toward them and their effects on women. I contend that in order to understand the contributions of women’s knowledge systems more fully and to resolve some of the ambivalence toward them, a comprehensive view of their contribution to the development of the continent needs to be developed and articulated. I argue that the agenda of current initiatives in incorporating women’s knowledge systems into the mainstream of economy and society did not have women’s needs and interests as the focus but those of African governments and international organizations. For example, even though New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has been conceived by Africans to revive African indigenous knowledge, its agenda is by and large dictated by northern interests. These initiatives are aimed

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at tapping local knowledge and ideas for public availability across the world, especially the realization that African herbal medicine has efficacy against diseases, such as diabetes, that have defied Western medicine. The initiatives are also for extraction and claiming ownership of what they consider important, without acknowledging those who produced them. This has been the case for the mwarubaini (neem tree) whose medicinal properties were discovered by African medical practitioners, and yet today the tree parts are sold globally without the Africans benefiting from patent, trademark, and property rights like their Western pharmaceutical counterparts. Africans are denied opportunities to gain from the results of their knowledge and ideas. If any collaboration occurs between the women and the researchers and political elites, attempts are made to inculcate into them Western ways of thinking instead of promoting their ideas. Before discussing women’s accounts, however, this chapter introduces key theoretical strands touching on ways in which women’s ideas have developed and why they have been undermined or marginalized. I discuss the concept of women’s knowledge systems, showing how women’s knowledge systems are useful in society. I use illustrations of women’s knowledge at work (such as Mama Mona) and how they influence lifestyles of people in rural Tanzania. This is followed by discussion of the current effort to revive women’s knowledge systems and activities in Tanzania (as well as elsewhere in Africa). I analyze the value of “endangered” African oral traditions with specific reference to everyday activities of women in rural Tanzania. In the section that follows, I provide a theoretical discussion of ways in which women’s knowledge systems have been studied and how they are located with the existing forms of knowledge in the world, specifically in rural Tanzania. I try to locate the place of women’s knowledge within the large framework of women and feminist frameworks in Africa and the rest of the world as well.

A S na p s h ot o f Wo me n’s K now le dge in Ru r a l Tanz ania : M ama M ona About 4:00 AM, Mama Mona was awakened by a knock on her door and insistent calls of “Hodi hodi?” (Anybody home?). Before opening her door, Mama Mona swiftly put on her robe and sandals as she responded gently to her neighbor’s call. Without much commotion lest she wake up her sleeping grandchildren in the adjacent room, she stepped out into the cold breeze of the early morning as she focused her eyes on her two neighbors standing outside the only entrance to

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her traditional house. The distressed faces were hidden from her view. The forlorn faces with anxious eyes were hidden from Mama Mona as the two parents helplessly held their two-year-old son. “We have not slept the whole night,” blurted Nsee’s mother, untying the boy from her back where he was securely tied with khanga (cloth wrapper). She unceremoniously handed him to Mama Mona, with a look of “save me” on her face. Nsee was among the many children who she had helped in delivering. He was three years old; Mama Mona had several times seen him vibrantly and energetically playing with his peers. As her strong hands took Nsee from his helpless mother, Mama Mona was greeted with a yellowish, slimy vomit that slightly missed her eyes. Without any hesitation, as usual, Mama Mona acted quickly, carefully examining the fresh vomit that was slowly rolling down Nsee’s mouth. She ran her hands on the boy’s forehead and stomach, all the time asking questions, pricking on his body with her index finger, and watching closely for a body reaction. Mama Mona inquired about what Nsee had eaten, at what time, and when the condition started. She also asked if he was still being breast-fed and if he was reacting to breast-feeding. All this happened rapidly, and within minutes, Mama Mona knew what was afflicting the infant. She told the parents not to worry too much, for the problem was not uncommon or alarming for toddlers like Nsee. Mama Mona spent most of the morning with Nsee after supplying some medicine that she had ground in a wooden mortar, trying to observe his every movement. She had asked the parents to leave Nsee with her for a few hours and come for him afterward. This was common practice, and people trusted their children with her. On weekends, her ten-year-old daughter helped her with taking care of such children. Once Mama Mona had administered medication to Nsee and the two parents left their son in her hands, she instructed her daughter to prepare some porridge for him. The mother and daughter continued to observe Nsee and take care of him until his mother came for him at midday. After two days, Nsee had recovered fully. This is an account of what happened in Lawate, which is akin to the common life of many people in rural Tanzania.1 The interactions like that of Mama Mona and her neighbors have been like a lifeline to many people in rural communities of Africa by minimizing deaths, hunger, and other social maladies. Women’s knowledge of various issues such as infectious, viral and snake-bite diseases, procreation, edible and cultivable fauna and flora; processing, preservation, and storage technologies; building and cloth making has increasingly proved to be productive, sustainable, and ecologically sound, especially

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under extraordinarily difficult conditions such as lack of a modern health facility. Being the most skillful and knowledgeable on children’s health issues in Lawate gave Mama Mona a pretty secure space in the community. People were comfortable in disclosing to her what may be considered family secrets. Through this, she could get a lot of information about people. This was a form of power. Unlike other members of her community, Mama Mona could ask questions that dealt with sexual life and relations, the kind of food the families ate, and whether a woman was pregnant, breast-feeding, and the like. Although some might have found some of the questions invasive, they had no choice but to tell the truth, hence finding themselves under her mercy. Mama Mona used the information to build social capital and power. Although Mama Mona was not a medical doctor, Nsee’s parents, like other neighbors, knew that she had knowledge about children’s illnesses and she could help them in healing their sick child. The curative efficacy of her medicine was never in doubt, for it worked, just as it had been working for others in that community. Once Nsee became better and the parents resumed their usual activities, the two neighbors continued to communicate on the development of his health, and Mama Mona’s daughter continued to listen and observe. Most Tanzanians rely on a wide range of women’s knowledge systems well modified to suit the local needs and conditions. Mama Mona, her knowledge and her healing practices like many women in rural Tanzania and elsewhere, can be termed as “a voice from the margin” that never gives up. She clearly struggled against many odds to negotiate the pain and inhumanity of history around her. She was exercising her right of all to “be,” to “exist,” to grow, and live. She can also be seen as seeking a place that has been denied to her and her lot. For many years, people in Yuuri and Sufi have depended on women’s knowledge systems for their survival, and these have enhanced their ability to integrate selected external elements such as health care and education into their everyday life. This has broadened their options and has acted as a lifeline of their survival. For example, before they make a decision to seek opinions from medical doctors, veterinarians, or agricultural officers, many people in rural communities consult with their neighbors and friends. Thus, women’s knowledge systems remain significant, and their efficacy is utilized in many parts of Africa to this day. As custodians and organizers of this system, women like Mama Mona have been identified as illiterate and thus, “unemployable,” despite the fact that such knowledge has helped minimize deaths in the current shortage and expensive modern health services.

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Every village has its fair share of women whose knowledge has been time-tested and accepted as legitimate. During the colonial period, women’s knowledge systems in Africa were disrupted, due in part because of power imbalance, so granting women power to influence others and society would be the last thing to fit in the colonial mind-set. During the colonial period, campaigns were mounted to discredit women’s knowledge in favor of Western education and formal schooling systems. The missionaries especially advised their followers not to use knowledge and experiences gained from home and community. These included mother tongue languages and other forms of knowing. What many do not know is that these racist views and practices did not end with colonialism in Africa but were foundations of what we are seeing today. For example, many policies and guidelines of education in Africa are guided by philosophies that regard women’s knowledge systems as local and informal and very different from those obtained from formal learning institutions. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)are two international organizations that provide funds and advice to African governments on the provision of education. They provide advice to these governments on what should be counted as knowledge and what should not. These two organizations are effective mechanisms to ensure that women’s knowledge systems remain traditional, local, and private.

C a mpa ig ns a nd Researc h on Ind ige nous K now l edg e in Po stc oloni al Af r i ca In the recent past, we have witnessed a growth of interest in IKS as valid and vital knowledge sources (Chimaraoke, 2001; Nafukho, Amutabi, and Otunga 2005). This recognition is directly related to the growing realization that locally generated knowledge can be used to change and improve, for example, agriculture and natural resource management. There has been an interest to research and document IKS worldwide. Why have IKS become a center of interest in the fields of education and development? What is the major objective of this campaign and research? Have IKS become efficient and important in Africa? Postcolonial and postmodern. Nowhere is the interdisciplinary approach more meaningful than in discovering the importance of silences, allowing us to engage in the multidimensionality, multifocality, and multivocality of African societies.

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The World Commission on Environmental and Development (WCED 1987) and the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which put the environment firmly on international development agendas (UNCED 1992), were among the leading international organizations to influence radical approaches to “community-based” strategiesto environment and development. The visions of WCED and UNCED were based on the moral argument that conservation goals should contribute to and not conflict with basic human needs. This has been emphasized in development for the last two to three decades, especially in the 1980s—which, by some, has even called the decade of participation (Chambers 1983). Sigler (1983) has given reasons why it is important to incorporate grassroots in development initiatives worldwide. It is because the very existence of minority groups is often denied by political leaders of nation-states. This refusal to acknowledge the presence of a minority group is an easy way to deny that group any claims of right (see Sigler 1983). In 1985, the Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities was to receive from its subcommission a text that defined minority as a “group of citizens of a State, endowed with ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics which differ from those of the majority of the population, having a sense of solidarity with each other, motivated, if only implicitly, by a collective will to survive and whose aim is to achieve equality with the majority in fact and in law” (Lerner 1991, 9). The Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities was clear in its mission and objectives concerning the specific interests of minority groups and to determine more precisely the problems they face in the nation-state: “The very existence of minority groups is often denied by political leaders of nation-states. This refusal to acknowledge the presence of a minority group is an easy way to deny that group any claims of right” (Sigler 1983). Minorities of various types exist in different countries. They suffer from many forms of discrimination. Many undergo terrible forms of technical and legal disabilities as well as prejudice inherent in laws and regulations. Because of legal forms of discrimination, very few opportunities are open to them.2 These relate to employment, ownership of property, educational rights,3 curtailment of their religious,4 and cultural rights and discrimination, in general (see Thornberry 1992). Many of these rights may be at the level of state policy and also, at times, at the family level. At the state level, there may be few schools for women or the physically and mentally challenged in society. At the family level, people suffering from various forms of disabilities

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are often pressed to take up vocational training such as tailoring and handcrafting, while the able-bodied people receive a formal education. Thus, states and families willingly or unwillingly participate in discrimination through laws or regulations. Most of the knowledge produced by indigenous groups is also regarded as marginal and often suffers discrimination as well. Rights of people who exist on the margins of society have been ignored for a long time. Two additional, contemporary, international uses demonstrate the continued evolution and expansion of the scope of indigenous rights. First, the World Bank Operational Directive 4.20 on Indigenous Peoples (1991) defines indigenous peoples as “social groups with a social and cultural identity distinct from the dominant society that makes them vulnerable to being disadvantaged in the development process.” The World Bank also characterizes indigenous peoples with close attachment to ancestral lands, self-identification as a distinct group, an indigenous language, customary social and political institutions, and the presence of subsistence-oriented production. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights’ Special Report on Indigenous Issues has also considered the impact of development projects on indigenous peoples. The report highlights human rights’ concerns and democratic participation, noting that indigenous peoples “are still considered in many countries as second-class citizens whose needs and aspirations are seldom taken into account by the powers that be” (24). These recent developments focus on indigenous peoples as distinct groups within nation-states that are separated from large-scale economic activity and threatened by development and a “national” interest that is beyond their control. Their vulnerabilities and the threat to their rights as humans are portrayed as the result of being “second-class citizens” who are shut out of nation-states’ normal channels of decision making.5 For purposes of definition, one could say that minorities encompass a much wider group of persons, and indigenous people form part of that wider group. Women are part of minority groups in Africa. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund IMF, which were so focused in their enactment of policies for Africa, have recognized the need for local solutions for local problems. They have acknowledged the fact there can never be a prescription of development but the need to be inclusive, the need to consult and involve all stakeholders. If Africans have no strong sense of what it is they stand for, it will be correspondingly easier to lead them away from previously established values and change them into something else, into net consumers of external prescriptions from abroad. They will become

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guinea pigs of the international development industry, grounds on which every experiment in ideas and models will be bounced off and results recorded, to benefit real people. Could resuscitating IKS in Africa be going through a smooth experience? Are African governments recognizing that IKS are the way forward? Do they know the potential inherent in local knowledge systems, which they have ignored for generations as a result of embracing Eurocentric models that worked to the advantage of foreign masters? Do they know that any knowledge that is foreign runs the risk of rejection if not accepted by the cultures of the people among whom it is supposed to operate? The premise taken by many governments is that if local people participate in mainstream politics, there will be a win-win situation. It is argued that if IKS cannot contribute sustainably to local livelihoods, then they stand little chance of survival (Emerton 2001). The governments have built infrastructures such as schools, water supplies, and health facilities to achieve this goal. Emerton (2001) has critiqued this move, arguing that generating broad development or social infrastructure is necessary but may not be sufficient for communities to engage and benefit from these initiatives. In Africa, the African Union has declared the 2000s as a decade for African traditional medicine. This declaration is a recognition of the importance of indigenous knowledge in the continent’s health sector. With this declaration, there followed the formation of a number of traditional healer’s associations across Africa in countries such as Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia and legislation related to IKS. These commissions, declarations, and policies have been taken seriously by different countries in Africa. The government of South Africa, for example, has put in place the policy for IKS since 1998. This policy provides guidance on how to strengthen indigenous knowledge for contribution to social and economic development in the country (Department of Agriculture, South Africa 2008). In the same year, the government revised the National Forest Act No. 84 of 1998 and recognized for the first time the links between community conservation and commercial forestry. This is in response to recognition of the role played in people’s livelihood by trees, woodlands, and the resources. The act places greater emphasis on the value of indigenous forests and prohibits destruction of indigenous trees without license (National Forests Advisory Council 2001). The IKS in rural Tanzania are scientific and predicated on rationalism, logic, and empirical science. In many African societies, IKS are universal in their principles, for they describe, explain, predict, and negotiate with nature (Nafukho, Amutabi, and Otunga 2005).

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They engage in complex knowledge structures that include farming methods and techniques; food processing and cooking methods; complicated dietary formulae and recipes; medicine; creative activities such as sculpting, art, and pottery; and complex issues such as mathematics, metallurgy, and construction as well as climatic and weather knowledge and healthy lifestyles. IKS have implications for sustainable development, capacity building, and intellectual development in not only Tanzania but also the rest of Africa. Contrary to some studies that have assigned an inferior position to IKS, I suggest in this study that IKS have all the scientific characteristics found in any science and need not be assigned any station commensurate to any other science or knowledge. IKS in Africa exist and function in their own merit. IKS in Africa have always negotiated with nature through practical and sequential processes such as hypothesis formulation, experimentation, and observation and can forecast or predict phenomena with uncanny accuracy. Like knowledge production elsewhere, IKS involve multiple phases of experimentation through trial and error. Like the medicine of Mama Mona demonstrates, it takes long before one can discover what works. For example, the efficacious qualities of a concoction or herb can only be confirmed after many years of observing and noting its therapeutic qualities. In rural Tanzania, indigenous knowledge is shared. It is largely communal, transferred from one group to another and transferred through generations, from adults to children. Knowledge is accessible, communal, and not protected by patents, trademarks, and property rights. As Mama Mona’s case demonstrates, the mode of transmission of indigenous knowledge as well as sharing is collective rather than personal. Entrenched in the services, professional advice and products associated with IK are reciprocal structures that are quite flexible and negotiable compared to what is obtained in Western circles where such knowledge and products are shrouded in secrecy, commercialism, and commoditization. For these rural communities, the nerve center of growth and nourishment is neither the market nor the profit motive, nor is it predicted on economies of scale and mass production. It operates on simple principles of societal need and humanism, on very high moral ground that does not survive on exploiting others. Previous studies on IKS have always tried to juxtapose them to Western education and knowledge. I fault such comparisons because the two operate and function differently: one is capitalist in its pursuit, while the other is strictly humanitarian and does not seek to amass wealth at the expense of others or to exploit the ignorant and vulnerable. Of course, many previous studies on IKS have been conducted

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under structures of intellectual dominance and dependence associated with colonial and postcolonial hierarchies and power elites, where Africa and its knowledge systems are looked at using Western microscopes and telescopes. Since this study’s focus goes beyond empowerment, I would like to suggest that African scholars need to evolve strategies of deconstructing misinformation that has been embedded in Eurocentric colonial and postcolonial education, including the discriminatory exclusion of non-European accomplishments, innovations, and knowledge; the misrepresentation of data; furtive naming; and several other strategies of colonization and disempowerment. It is the reason that I do not want to discuss such mundane issues as women liberation movement in this book, for it suggests that African women have never been liberated until the ideas of women’s liberation arrived on the continent. It is also to suggest that the empowerment of African women is a project of Western rescuing, part of the Western civilizing mission, and yet the opposite is the case. Proliferation of “industrial” cancers and other “industrial” diseases (or diseases that accompany Westernization) that afflict the human race have caused a reevaluation of knowledges that have been neglected in the past, such as IKS. Treatment for cancer, obesity, heart conditions, diabetes, asthma, and other diseases have benefited directly from traditional African pharmacologists through plants such as mwarubaini (the neem tree). The movement toward tapping into herbal medicine and proliferation of herbal supplements and teas is a reaction of such realizations; this can also be seen in the rush to eat organic foods and use natural manure and fertilizer and less chemicals in food production, a realization of the healthy habits of rural dwellers. Environmental degradation, global warming, and hazards brought about misuse of the environment can be solved by lessons learned from rural dwellers in Africa. Mama Mona was able to treat her patients successfully, and they were satisfied. IKS are therefore a source of clinical healing and have curative significance in rural areas in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa. This is different from the colonial demonization of such knowledge. This knowledge was marginalized and distorted in order to be dismissed. African healers were trivialized and neglected through privileging of Western medical practices, whish was a mistake that has costa lot of lives. Listening to these women and seeing what they do makes me realize just how they have been underappreciated and underestimated in the past. We need to tap into their creative and intellectual resources as we continue to search for solutions to global problems. They are part of the solution rather than the problem, as has been

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the assumption in the past. IKS is certainly relevant and indispensable for environmentally and ecologically sensitive activities in rural Africa. Seeing women grow and harvest their own food and keeping healthy by constantly working made me realize that rural areas were economically sustainable and did not need the complicated development plans that are constantly imposed on them. These women engaged in reciprocal activities that made them happy. They exchanged raw and cooked foods. They shared their stories and experiences. They were self-reliant, and their activities were not extravagant. They did not harvest more than what they needed. The lack of urban luxuries such as refrigeration made them eat fresh food. The location of grocery stores in markets away from the village made them walk to the shops daily, hence the engagement in useful exercise. As Mama Mona, who functions as a doctor, nurse, and pharmacist, demonstrates, African medicine is holistic and goes beyond the limitations of the physical body into the psychological as well. This is quite the opposite of Western medicine, which regards that the body, mainly in terms of individual parts, is derived from the germ theory of disease. Among the common principles and procedures utilized in African traditional medicine are hydrotherapy, heat therapy, spinal manipulation, quarantine, bone setting, and surgery. Incantations and other devices of psychotherapeutic dimensions are often applied. Western-based pharmaceutical companies often send agents to tap the knowledge of traditional African pharmacologists. The alignment of dislocated bones and the treatment of collarbone fractures have been documented. Indigenous fermented foods in many parts of rural Tanzania have usually been derived from millet, finger millet, sorghum, maize, yams, tubers such as cassava, sweet potatoes, cereal legumes, oil seeds, tree sap, honey, milk, bananas, some fruits, and various other local products. These women are aware of the balance of the microorganisms involved in fermentation. They know the correct ways of generating enzymatic reactions, as well as balancing the nutritional and preservative qualities. They also prepare alcoholic beverages, with safe ingredients and alcoholic levels. These indigenous food processors are aware of the significance of the various agencies through experimentation. In many parts of rural Tanzania, the principle of evaporative cooling was integrated into the building activity and continues to this day. Mats have been utilized as part of the decor and also to be saturated repeatedly, to cool the room. Today, many people engaged in informal sector of economy, such as mama ntilie (food venders) and small entrepreneurs such as those under the trees (jua kali) are increasingly

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applying this traditional knowledge. The more research that is conducted, the more these centers apply the knowledge gained. Many countries have created ministries that deal specifically with IKS, in recognition of NEPAD’s focus on this. Similarly, South Africa recognizes and acknowledges the role of African IKS in development. It recognizes the need for all people to have continuous education from both fields—Western and African— in order to participate actively in all levels of society. This appears as a fascinating story where a country acknowledges and supports everyday life knowledge. In such a context, the real knowledge is recognized and appreciated in its own right without relating it to the narrowness of modern education. It is a recognition that one can learn without literacy and numeracy, because many societies in Africa have remained oral but have engaged in various forms of learning. In the medical realm, the government of South Africa uses local people to contribute to research on natural resources, and more funding has been allocated to studies of IKS. This promotion had precipitated in a significant increase in research: in the last ten years the number of publications from South Africa in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology has increased from about 20 to 55 percent of all African publications (Jäger and van Staden 2001). NEPAD has taken the initiative and commissioned researchers to bring to view the importance of indigenous education and IKS. This is in response to certain forces that are impeding a sense of common interest and common goals in African societies. NEPAD is conscious that when there is no common interest and common goal, problems ensue. We know that such efforts in the past have come to naught. In Ghana, there has been recognition of and support for IKS by creating and instituting various associations under the Ghana Federation of Traditional Medicine Practitioners’ Association (GFTMPA). Under the umbrella of GFTMPA in 1991, the Ministry of Health established the Traditional Medicine Unit, which works directly with traditional healers (Romero-Daza 2002). Likewise, these efforts have been taken up in Mali, where in 1968 the government of Mali established Phytotherapy Institute as the first research institute for the study of medicinal plants (Diallo and Paulsen 2000). This institute became a collaborating center of the World Health Organization for research traditional medicine in early 1990s. One of the primary objectives of WHO is to establish a mechanism to assure that traditional medicines become complementary to conventional medicines. Tanzania became interested in traditional knowledge and celebrated the first African Traditional Medicine Day in 2003. Singling

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traditional healing, Nyerere has noted, “Traditional [medical] practitioners are regarded by elites as ignorant and dangerous—at least in public, for many of those who most denigrate them consult them in private” (Nyerere 1991, xxii). He was interested in health issues that particularly bothered the poor, especially in rural communities. The celebration of people’s knowledge of healing in Tanzania was taken positively as many people in Tanzania are increasingly adopting the practice (Diallo and Paulsen 2000; Romero-Daza 2002) and the country has been acknowledged internationally as an example of good practice (e.g., see Strangeland et al. 2005). The urgency of recognizing traditional medicine has been due, in part, to the inefficacy of conventional health care systems, and many people have come to realize the efficiency of herbal remedies (Scheinman 1998; IRIN 2006). The acceptance of traditional healing by the government of Tanzania and elsewhere and increase adoption of the practice must be understood against the background of inefficacy and inefficiency of conventional health care system and the holistic nature of traditional health care services (Gessler et al. 1995). In the field of agriculture, the government has supported programs such as those of rainwater harvesting in the semiarid areas (see Mbilinyi et al. 2005) and indigenous ecological knowledge of pastoralists such as Maasai (Oba 2001). The government of Tanzania was very clear in its mission and objectives concerning the rights of the minority groups in the country. The three key features toward that end were a mechanism to control access to natural resources within the community, utilization of techniques for conserving and preserving resources, and customary norms and procedures for control, acquisition, maintenance, and transfer for natural resources (Luoga 1994; Luoga et al. 2000). But why should the government control the access to natural resources? Why should there be new techniques to conserve and preserve them? Why should there be new norms and procedures toward natural resources? While local government reform in Tanzania was “to improve the quality of and access to public services provided through or facilitated by Local Government Authorities” (United Republic of Tanzania 1999b, 12), there is a mismatch with the three key features concerning the rights of the minority. From the key features of the mission and objectives concerning the rights of the minority groups in Tanzania, one cannot help but notice that the government is out to control and inhibit local people from accessing natural resources. The excitement about traditional medicines, while might seem a way forward, many governments in Africa seem to work within the colonial framework, that could not see the efficacy of traditional knowledge

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systems; traditional healing and medicines as well as traditional way of conserving environment. That is why during the process of decentralization in 1968, local people were not given tenure to their land nor permission to access natural resources (Shauri 2000). Apparently, while the rhetoric is to acknowledge and to support the IKS in practice, this is not a reality There has been little activity to show that decentralization was meant to benefit the grassroots movement. This might sound like pessimism, yet it is important to note that it does not make any sense when we go to the local people with the language of “control” and “preserve,” While we know these people have been controlling and preserving the environment for many years. This explains why many people in the rural communities do not trust government officials. As Hodgson (2002) observed, local people have been either physically removed from protected areas or have politically denied a right to participate in the formulation of policy on natural resources. This was in addition to skepticism, lack of trust, and even hatred between authorities and the communities. The governments are obviously aware of the problems brought about by the “protectionist approach” to conservation or “fortress conservation” (commonly known as the “fences-and-fines” approach; Adams and Hulme 2001). Yet, there is a growing consensus that the protectionist approach has failed to protect wildlife in Africa. However, the government is interested in establishing a niche for itself in the international community at the expense of the people. Protection of natural resources rather than people would place the country in a good position in the global community. This is obvious when we see the imposition of numerous costs on local communities in cash and livelihood terms. For example, there is always a clash of interest between the protection of forests and wild animals where people in rural communities depend heavily for fuel, herbals, and food for their economic survival. Scholars who have studied contemporary political strategies for reviving IKS have strongly urged that the benefits of schools, roads, dams, and some employment far outweigh the costs of lost agricultural production, lost grazing, and natural resources, such as bamboo, water, thatching grass, medicinal plants, and sites for beehives. Thus the critical scholar’s assessment of the prospects for resuscitating IKS in Africa is inaccurate when she states, “Providing communities with economic incentives to conserve wildlife means ensuring that they are better off in financial and livelihood terms with wildlife than they would be without it, at the same time as overcoming the root economic factors which cause them to engage in economic activities which threaten or deplete wildlife resources” (Emerton 2001, 226).

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As Thomas-Slayter observes, “Those who are marginalized and powerless are likely to be both unorganized and silent” (1994, 1486). This threat is especially evident in rural areas in many African countries that are characterized by symptoms of the kinds of weaknesses in civil society and democratic processes. One of the biggest challenges remains is “to ensure that the people who neither have the capacity, nor the desire to participate, are involved in the development process” (Botes and van Rensburg 2000, 46). Contemporary strategies to resuscitate traditional knowledge often see communities as homogeneous, antienvironment, and natural resources. This is misleading because people in communities are diverse and coexist in both consensus and conflict, with a variety of interests and ideologies based on location, gender, ancestral heritage, religion, age, and other differences. Despite their diversity, they have been protecting these resources for centuries. Hoben et al. (1998) have argued that without secure rights of access to natural resources, rural people do not have a long-term interest in managing them or participating in their conservation. He has pointed out that without the assurance that their access to the natural resources on which their livelihood depends are protected against arbitrary appropriation by government or private outsiders, they are unlikely to invest in improvements on the land or to be eager to manage and protect natural resources. Much of the research on and activities in grassroots communities tend to use a blanket language, such as “the people,” “community,” and “local people.” The only time their diversity is mentioned is when they are in trouble and when they go against the suffocating laws and imposed policies, but not in acknowledging their creativity or innovation. By extension, the grass roots are not expected to be conformists and never dare to wonder why things are the way they are. They are not expected to think differently but to blindly follow the orders. Those who do not follow are termed “outcasts,” “rebels,” and “radicals.” The grass roots and their knowledge systems appear as objects of research to be observed, monitored, and changed. While the rhetoric is to resuscitate their knowledge system, in most cases, it is a way of denying their validity, a right to existence, to land, to knowledge, and to movement, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of their language and other modes of expression. For example, Nafukho et al. correctly pointed out that “most African technological inventions are never recognized as such but are regarded as mere cultural phenomena and are assigned to lesser categories of invention, where they are often denied patents in Western nations. African traditional

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songs are good examples of this tendency, as they are never regarded as material to be copyrighted despite the creativity that goes into them” (2005, 29).

Th e E v isc er atio n of Women’s K now l edge Sys tems In order to contextualize and explain process through which IKS has emerged in Tanzania, I want to trace the social and historical transformation of the country together with the idea of development in post colonial Africa. In doing so doing I want to begin by posing the same question that critical scholars have posed: What is development? I suggest that this is far more difficult to answer than mainstream pundits would have us know. To address the question critically, it is crucial to situate the current status of women’s knowledge systems in Africa. One of the most efficiency way to understand this status is to trace its history, for history tells us about our past strengths and weaknesses, thereby giving us the opportunity to improve. Therefore, without tracing the history of IKS in Africa we will not know its weaknesses and strengths and we will most likely not be able to contribute to what is currently happening but go along with theories that have been developed to cast this knowledge as local and inconsequential. The history of IKS in Africa is necessary if we are to contribute to theory and practice of environment and development. It will aid significantly in planning and future course of action. The history of IKS in Africa evolves within the social change and practice of development in post-colonial Africa within the Western social thought. The western thought about development has largely been influenced by the modernization theory. This theory was shaped by the 19th century conception of progress and managed change prominent in the works of early social theorists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Although Marx was pessimistic about modernization as the theory for development, he agreed that change and development come along deliberate human intervention. The doctrine became, ‘developed’ societies could determine how the ‘less-developed’ would develop (Cowen and Shenton 1996). Influenced by these ideas, emboldened by notions of civilizing mission and concerned with accumulation in the impending post-colonial period, colonial governments, in concert with international development agencies, especially the World Bank, sought to manage accumulation in Africa and other post-colonial regions. International experts partly drawn from Western universities drew Africa’s “development plans.”

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Couched in the language of (and sometimes backed up by statistics on) what Africa lacked and needed, the plans contained prescriptions and strategies for modernizing Africa. Development and modernization were largely seen as one and the same thing - being like the West, and it entailed traveling along the route that the West supposedly traveled. Changes at the economic, social, cultural and psychological levels, which mirrored the dominant values in the West, were recommended for the development of Africa and other underdeveloped regions (see the key proponents of this view (McClelland 1961; Rostow 1960; Lerner 1964; Deutsch 1966; Janowitz 1964, 1967; Huntington 1968; LaPalombara and Weiner 1969). The dependency theory that launched a blistering and sustained attack on modernization theory, especially because of the latter’s lineal ideas and neglect of the root cause of underdevelopment. The issue became, underdeveloped countries were not developing because of colonialism and imperialist exploitation. Thus, within dependency framework, Africa’s underdevelopment came to be seen as a crisis of center-periphery. Some other scholars who claimed allegiance to Marx argued that capitalist exploitation is not really the problem. Rather Africa has had too little capital-ism (Warren 1982), especially the industrial variety (Kay 1975). Clearly then both those who saw development as internally generated and those who saw it as externally induced found a way to hold Western thought up as the model. The lived experiences and views of Africa’s local peoples were hardly taken into account. While a few attempts were made in some countries to respond to some of dependency theory’s concerns, by far the dominant approach has been modernization. What has not been widely recognized is how easy it was for states in the underdeveloped countries to fit the rhetoric of dependency theory into the practice of Keynesian development model - state intervention in the name of selfreliance—which, however, leaves the structures of dependency and capitalist exploitation in place. Most of Africa’s political leaders and scholars were enamored of the modernization theory. They were mostly trained by Western scholars who subscribed to that perspective (and African scholars influenced by them). It was and remains the model promoted by the credit wielding and development agencies as well as the transnational corporations (TNCs) that held the promise of investing in Africa. African universities and research findings have largely passed these on to their students and citizens through the development courses and policies that favor western though about knowledge and development. IKS and

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traditional and ways of practices are often either dismissed as irrelevant and inhibiting development and civilization. Looking at the campaigns and strategies to resuscitate knowledge systems in Africa entails two things, among others. First, the strategy underscores the intimate relationship between African knowledge systems and economic development. This is problematic because emphasis on tangible profit necessarily overshadows intangible benefits. Lack of accepting intangible benefits as important means failure to acknowledge what sustain economic development (see GibsonGraham 2006). Knowledge systems are structured by relativist notions of what counts as “truth” (or “reality”) and, hence, by the conception of reality as being bound up with power structures in society, the “regimes of truth” (Foucault 1979a, 47). In resuscitating knowledge systems in Africa, the question of what counts as knowledge within women’s truth and reality does not fit very well in our logic because of the dominant European thought that constructed ideas about women according to the colonizer’s self-image of what knowledge is (Derrida 1978). While women might have certain knowledge, it will always be seen as “local,” indigenous, traditional, and natural, without being considered as knowledge in their own right (e.g., Levi-Strauss 1966). Spivak (1988) has shown how the conceptions of truth and reality reflecting dominant culture reinforced by the structures of power commonly prevent women from articulating their truths by speaking for themselves. In what follows, then, we will first articulate in more detail in what respect current frameworks of resuscitating knowledge systems in Africa fail to grasp the unique nature of those knowledge systems and how this limitation imminently leads to the silencing of those knowledges. I will subsequently present an alternative cognitive framework that understands knowledge systems as social practice. Because of our methodological commitments to both human practice and decolonization, we will illustrate this framework with the authentic case study of real women in rural Tanzania introduced previously and who have been identified as illiterates and embodying local and subjective knowledge. While I recognize the difficult task of speaking about African women’s knowledge systems in general terms because of the risk of implying misconceived ideas that these systems are homogeneous, I acknowledge the different and quite often unique social contexts within which African women are located, their unique social and cultural environments, and the ways they interact in their everyday lives that allow for a general analysis of their knowledge production as a

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category, an approach that I, as an insider, am comfortable to adopt in this book. Nigerian feminist Amede L. Obiora, who shares the same sentiments that what humans do, is to a large extent shaped by our specific values, because people tend “to generalize from their situated perspectives and realities that are influenced by assumptions” (Obiora 1997, 277–88). Behind this argument is the claim that women’s knowledge systems are also relative, most especially because they are “tacit” and therefore bound to be biased. Thus I claim that it is when we look beneath the Western radar of ‘scientific’ and ‘controlling’ to what works in local environment that we can develop workable policies that can favor both the local and political elites’ goals. It is a state of being, a struggle as we see in the case of Mama Mona. In other words, women’s knowledge is an aspect of their local environment and what they know, what they do and how they operate cannot be decontextualized from their environment. It is inaccurate to describe women’s knowledge systems as “unstructured” or “informal.” Norms, values, and practices shape and sustain activities and interactions of the everyday lives of the women in this study. Moreover, what structured women’s knowledge systems is nothing other than their continuity in participating in social and physical environmental activities. Furthermore, social norms and values also structured what constitutes women’s activities based on individual woman’s social position and ability. This section introduces two women in rural Tanzania. Although much of IKS has already been lost or destroyed, yet, elder women offer knowledge and perspectives richly endowed with what kinds of practices and meanings flourish, not as mere remnants of the past, but as rudiments of sustainability and hope for the future. The women in rural Tanzania are in tune with their environment. It was common to see a woman walking through her farm and talking to trees, plants, animals and birds. This practice of talking to animates and inanimates was an everyday ritual for most elderly women in this esearch. Mama Mona put it very eloquently: When I wake up in the morning, the first voice I hear is that of birds. Therefore, I have to talk to them before proceed to milk the cow. I have to talk to the cow, otherwise, how will she give me her milk without talking to her? I also have to talk to her to allow me to clean its shed. In the preparation of breakfast, I have to draw water for it. This allows me a chance to talk to trees, the wind, the insects and the water itself. When I was young girl, everything was green, water was plenty, cows did not get sick often and birds were in large numbers. I remember my mother spending a lot of time with birds, animals, plants, trees,

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the wind and the rain. People have become too busy to acknowledge these important things in our planet, and they are now disappearing one by one. For example, we no longer hear birds singing as we used to, but I have managed to befriend one bird and this I must greet and talk to every morning. Likewise trees, animals, insects and the wind. These share the world with us, so we must acknowledge their presence.

Mama Mona accentuate the significance of sustaining connections with the environment and everything in it. From this narrative, it was apparent that women cared for what made up their everyday environment. Another woman, Farida Alfayo discussed the way women use their knowledge systems to conserve environment. Water used for washing dishes and clothes were re-used for irrigation. Farida boasted, “nothing goes to waste. Old clothes are used as cleaning wrappers, old cooking pots for planting flowers. Firewood remaining after cooking are preserved for later re-use. Everything is important, nothing is inconsequential. Women in rural Tanzania have managed and conserved their environment for many years. While their experiences can be conceptualized as advanced knowledge systems highly specific to local environments and ecosystems (Cruikshank 1998) as they are acknowledged as valuable in the scientific community, their contribution in the development of society is not counted. Women, particularly in rural communities, often remain silent and invisible; they do not attend meetings, and their knowledge systems become muted. Rather than identifying their knowledge systems as being without structure and without intent, these everyday activities are often highly structured, perhaps too structured. The question on what knowledge systems are about (human practice or activity, way of knowing, and so on) is a spurious one according to contemporary notions of knowing as inherent to human practice (e.g., Lave 1988). According to such perspectives, women’s everyday practices cannot be seen apart from knowledge construction and a way of knowing. Thus, women’s everyday activities have to do with a certain level of sophistication in the development of skills and the solving of problems required for and closely bound up with the construction of knowledge. Closely related to these aspects are tacit modes of knowing both knowledge and their construction, which is inherently hard to describe. As well, the everyday activities of women are a collaborative enterprise, and therefore the knowledge constructed has a social component. More so, the understanding of knowledge as “justified true belief,” which is a common denominator of scientific

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knowledge, appears to be inappropriate for characterizing ways of knowing that have to do with everyday life (Certeau 1984). As Nafukho et al. (2005) have noted, there is a need for dialogue and negotiation between various knowledge systems including those of women. There is a need to remove suspicions and comparative bias, in which knowledge created by African women is regarded as “traditional” and inconsequential, while what is Western is regarded as “modern” and progressive. Women’s art of traditional teaching through storytelling, riddles, proverbs, and idioms is as ancient as the people themselves. Most African societies acknowledge the fact that oral traditional teachings facilitate the inculcation of socially desirable values such as hard work, honesty, thrift, and wisdom. Throughout the centuries, women in Africa have passed on knowledges and ways of knowing. Elsewhere (Swai 2008), I have shown how women in Tanzania act as keepers of knowledge despite the disruption. I showed the disruption, through colonialism, of traditional ways of teaching. I state that colonialism introduced money, taxes, and wage employment, which destroyed the traditional infrastructure and dragged the Tanzanian women into the dominant capitalist system. Although there was no specific legislation forbidding traditional ways of teaching, the introduction of the capitalist systems brought tremendous changes in Africa, a common practice in every colonized society.

Co nc lusi on In view of the discussion above, the strategies to revive IKS in Africa ought to be understood as a social practice. This view of strategies to bring to the mainstream the previously silenced knowledge systems as a “social practice” focuses not so much on how the government and other organizations can resuscitate women’s knowledge systems, but rather on how the government officials and women understand knowledge in the current postmodern society where alternative knowledge systems are accepted and legitimated, calling into question the colonial authorities, who conceptualized African knowledge systems as primitive and backward (Semali 1999). It is through this understanding that scholars can meaningfully reflect critically on world realities and thereby question dominant practices and challenge the existing social order (e.g., see McKay & Hornberger 1996). In this idiom, successful strategies to bring to the mainstream the knowledge systems in Africa will only take place if the government, researchers, and women are allowed to sit together and critically reflect on the dominant practices and social order. This includes respecting cultural norms, giving voice

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to women, acknowledging place-based knowledges, and valuing the wealth of knowledge that women have created without identifying it as “indigenous” or “local.” This is because such identification is rooted in negative attitude and inferiorization of women’s knowledge systems. The next chapter is concerned with the production of dislocation of women’s subjectivities in Africa, using the life story of Doris for illustration.

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Chapter 5

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The Genesis of Wome n Di sempower ment The C as e o f Kili ma nja ro

I ntro duc ti on

T

his chapter examines the everyday life of women in Yuuri within the context of struggles displayed by women, from the farm to the house. I use the life stories of Doris Ngabanu to illustrate the daily struggles of women in this part of the world, especially how they negotiate and dialogue with everyday obstacles. I seek here to relate notions of empowered woman with personal needs and interests, as well as societal circumscription and boundaries and how women in rural Tanzania have been able to overcome them. This chapter entails a concern for the production of dislocated subjectivity, including the means by which it is created, maintained, and reproduced. While in the previous chapter I analyzed women’s account of their womanliness, this chapter analyzes its process and impact on society. I reconstruct this in real life, using Doris for illustration. Through Doris, we get a sense of womanliness as situated social act and performance, as well as agency, rather than imposed hegemonic culture. In this chapter, I show how the stereotyped images of a woman affect women’s self-image, belief systems, and values. I emphasize the role of place and everyday social practice in shaping a woman’s sense of being and belonging. I contrast the dynamism of women in rural Tanzania to the static notions of femaleness and vulnerability. I underscore the heterogeneity and fluidity of women’s agency

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and decode the complicated ideologies that constitute their world. I show how a woman’s sense of being is exercised, contested, and reworked at a variety of levels in a woman’s life in rural Tanzania, ranging from childhood, to girlhood, to womanhood. It is articulated in relation to multiple, contradictory, and often opposing interpretations of a woman’s needs and interests. I also stress the role of the state and global economy in configuring the political and discursive terrain upon which one comes to be identified as a Tanzanian woman. Though this identity is composite, unstable, and constituted along multiple axes of difference, it acquires coherence and durability within the context of specific acts and events. Accordingly, I demonstrate how the state, in its process of integrating women into global economy, signaled the emergence of Tanzanian womanliness that is contested and challenged as women try to negotiate their needs and interests in these processes. The chapter provides a trajectory into the Chagga knowledge system, which is mostly operated by women. Chagga women have an amazing capacity to feed their families. They are the custodians of knowledge in agriculture and many other fields. They determine the farming or agricultural cycle of the community. They have knowledge about climate and the weather. Chagga women determine food security. They decide what is to be cooked and what is to be stored. They are the custodians of Chagga dietary secrets and recipes. In the past, women preserved and stored food. They knew the science of granary construction and building. They planned for the family and often ate less-durable crops first, such as pumpkins, and ate grains later, because they had a longer storage life. Chagga women also functioned as societal “doctors” (as herbalists, traditional birth attendants, etc.). Chagga women are also societal psychologists and work as diviners and seers. They are engineers and have designed many of the irrigation canals, roles that they have played for hundreds of years. These are issues that these chapter grapples with, by affirming the central role of women in the Chagga society, one that has been there and has not required any “empowerment” because it has been present but has simply not been studied and unraveled.

Outsider’s Surprise in Yuuri: The Supremacy of Women and Indigenous Knowledge When Bruno Gutmann, a German missionary, visited Kilimanjaro in the 1800s, he noted that Chagga’s most distinguishing attribute was their specialized and sophisticated ways in utilizing their local

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environment. He was surprised by the sophistication with which they managed their lives and the patterned life. Contrary to what he had heard back home about Africans, the Chagga were organized and had morning, afternoon, and evening activities clearly planned according to the rhythms of their environment. As he crisscrossed the region, he noticed that Chagga women were quite hardworking and knowledgeable. They worked their farms and fed their families. They also knew medicine as well as the local terrain. They knew where to grow strategic crops that were used during periods of scarcity. Their active engagement in farming, handcraft production, and trade not only puzzled him but also greatly amused him. He confided some of his thoughts in his writings, saying, “The women never seem to get tired. They work from morning to evening. Without them, the Chagga would cease to exist” (Gutmann 1914). Of course, Gutmann exaggerated his admiration of the Chagga. All societies need both genders to exist, and no one gender should be more important than the other. Gutmann was making the point that Chagga women pursued their roles energetically and honestly. These women were obviously different from any that he had seen. They were diligent, committed, and devoted to their roles in society. These women were willing to go out of their way to sacrifice for their society. They were simply doing what they had done for generations, keeping the families and society fed and cared for. They surprised Guttmann because they defied the stereotype of women. To Gutmmann’s Europe, a woman was supposed to be meek, helpless, and vulnerable. The Chagga women were bold, energetic, and defied Guttmann’s own perception of what a woman should look like or do. He was shocked. Although women were clearly visible and played important roles, many studies on the Chagga have tended to downplay the role of women by only mentioning them sparingly. This is not surprising because many of those who wrote about the Chagga were outsiders who came from highly patriarchal societies. They came from societies where kings and “big men,” not women, were the centers of history. However, it is important to note that whenever Chagga women are mentioned in these early accounts, it is usually to appraise their hard work or bravery. They seem to suggest a women’s role was critical in the existence of the Chagga society. Many of the early accounts of Chagga and Chaggaland by Europeans were like any that informs such encounters—replete with gazes as well as surprises, marvels, and exoticness. The earliest account by a European comes from the travelogue of missionary Johannes Rebmann. Rebmann’s account of his journey through Chaggaland in 1848 reveals his fascination of the

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snowcapped Mount Kilimanjaro more than the people, obviously, leave alone women (Rebmann 1849). Of course, one does not expect much from Rebmann, but what we learn from his account is what is not said. He describes the Chagga as fearless and had stopped his movement to the west when he reached Chagga country in 1848. There were better and more holistic accounts of the history of the Chagga afterward. There was Charles Dundas, whose study was more specific and mentioned some activities by women (Dundas 1924). Dundas was uncomfortable with the role that women played in Chagga. They lived and worked in the public space. They defied Dundas’s own “Victorian” prism, and he confided this to his diaries. It was not until 1940 that we start to see more interest in the activities of Chagga women. In 1940, Otto Friedrich Raum published his study on the role of childhood among the Chagga (Raum 1940). His focus, like those of other white men before him, was the Chagga men. But like those before him, it is what he did not write, the silences, that is important. The great unsaid is why these Europeans were so fascinated with the Chagga society. Did they fear for the Chagga men? Was there something that they found unique and wanted to unravel? Of course, Dundas was fascinated by the power of the Chagga mangi (king) and was happy to be honored by the Chagga. For Otto Friedrich Raum, his desire seems to have been to understand why women were so dominant among the Chagga, why they seemed to do everything. He was fascinated by the way society the Chagga society was so egalitarian. The work of Kathleen Stahl is one of the earliest to document the place and prominent role that women played in Chagga society (Stahl 1964). Her study examined some of the roles that women played that had not been examined by previous studies. She wrote, “The women feed the [ethnic group] and keep it sustained. In the past, they also fought along men as warriors. The women never get tired. They seem to work throughout the day and most part of the night” (Stahl 1964: 48). Stahl reports that women were involved in social organization of society and politics as well. This is a theme that is developed more elaborately by Oliver Maruma (1969) in his study of politics among the Chagga. We learn from him that mkamangi (the wife of the Chagga king) had a lot of power and authority. She was responsible for food security (almost like the minister of agriculture, which is one of the most important portfolios in modern governments). She also ran the king’s household and ensured that guests were taken care of properly. She was the mangi’s principal assistant because he did not have a deputy. S. J. Ntiro (1972) has also given an illuminating examination

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of the Chagga society. His study indicates how roles were defined by culture and society. The Chagga live in the same geographical area with the Maasai, and some of the cross-cultural influences are clearly visible in this study. Like the Maasai, the Chagga are highly patriarchal. In a later study, Sally Falk Moore and Paul Puritt (1977) have also added to our knowledge of Chagga, especially the role of women. The women worked on the farms, they traded at the market, they were caregivers and played other roles such as decorating homes and doing some handicraft production. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the 1880s, Gutmann was so taken aback by the prominent role that the Chagga women played in the public as well as private space. Gutmann was surprised by the skills that women had, which could only be explained within their local communities and were quite different from any that he had come across. As he went through Chaggaland, walking through the field he saw women at work, busily going about farming. Gutmann wondered about their farming techniques, which he termed “intercropping and rotational.” Gutmann saw abundant food crops and was surprised to see that the Chagga were self-reliant in food supply. He knew that this self-reliance was brought about by the hands of women. Women produced the bulk of the food crops. Gutmann saw an abundance of yams, sweet potatoes, finger millet, and a variety of vegetables produced by women. As the reader follows him into Chagga homes, Gutmann was clearly impressed by what he saw. He tells how he was presented with lots of food. He was presented with porridge made from finger millet, mixed with honey and milk, which was then the most common Chagga breakfast. On other occasions, he drank porridge made from finger millet flour with yams or sweet potatoes. Gutmann saw Chagga women visiting villages and attending to people’s health and spiritual needs, dressed and adorned in various ways, and young girls with beautiful braided hair and older women wearing bracelets on their hands and ankles. He was puzzled to see the married ones with shaved heads glittering in the sun. Most of the women wore handmade dresses, and Gutmann says they were pretty and impressive to look at. He saw these women in many places, carrying handmade baskets full of farm produce from the farms or going to marketplaces to exchange the surplus of their labor with other communities inside and outside of Kilimanjaro. He saw Chagga women travelling as far as Upare, Arusha, and Magadini, carrying their products on their heads. He notes how some of the women carried loads so heavy that when he tried to carry some himself, he could not lift up some of the loads, let alone carry them for miles. These women were

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clearly stronger than a European man! Gutmann also saw the women coming back after a day, a week, or two weeks with earthen pots, salt, soda ash, and a variety of other trade materials. When he visited their homes, on invitation, Gutmann saw handmade mats in the Chagga homes and artworks on walls. The decor was impressive, and he writes about the items he admired, such as embroidery, beads, and paints. Gutmann did not see cash or any formal exchange when women traded their produces, but he saw a lot of women with wealth, prospering and happy. Barter trade fascinated him. Even when he learned to speak the local language, he was still baffled by the art of trade and the coded language of business. These women were more sophisticated than the London Stock Exchange, for they knew the real value of their property and item. They weighed chicken so quickly that he wondered how they registered the weight. When he tested their accuracy, he found that their weighing was almost 100 percent accurate. They would exchange the same weight of beef with chicken. It was similar exchanges between beans and maize. When he visited the local market places, he heard, “Is the hen laying eggs?” and soon afterward the buyer was testing by touching the hen around its anus and either affirmed or disputed the seller’s version. There were also variations in the transactions because some were determined by quality versus quantity. This Gutmann confirmed. He would see a woman getting a pot in exchange for milk, or milk for fish, or honey for a cock, or a bracelet for a pot. He was mesmerized by the logic of these women. They were geniuses and were good at what they did. One needed to stay and live with them longer in order to master their trades and knowledge. They could not simply be studied and understood in one or two years. One needed to study them for life in order to understand them. When Gutmann visited Chagga homes and was invited to their ceremonies, he observed how the Chagga worshipped their gods. He was told that these gods were known as Iruva, or Yaave, and that they had supreme powers. They respected their deities. They were not religious but loved God. They had seers, both men and women. The Chagga had prophets who foretold the future. They had medicine men and women. Their spiritual life was intriguing and complex. The seasons and the spiritual world were connected in the most amazing way. The Chagga had an incredible climatic and weather prediction knowledge that amazed Guttmann. By looking and interpreting signs from insects, plants, and animals and reading wind patterns, the Chagga had great knowledge of their environment and most of this knowledge was held and preserved by women. Climatology was in the

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realm of agriculture, the domain of women. Women determined the right times to grown certain crops. Gutmann was mesmerized by the way the Chagga communicated with their family members who were long dead in the form of a spirit mediated by their gods. When the people trusted him, they started inviting him in more private spaces and activities. In their sacrifices, Gutmann saw that when a Chagga family planned to do an important activity, such as a wedding, pregnancy, a birth of a child, travelling, planting, or harvesting, they prepared beer and slaughtered animals for sacrificial purposes. On the day of sacrifice, Gutmann observed a slaughter of an animal and a spill of blood and beer followed by prayers. He was surprised by seeing that the people left some food and beer in the sacrifice place and listened attentively to the feedback from the dead, which was transmitted through a special person in the clan. Gutmann thereafter participated in the celebrations. Ironically, while Gutmann and other missionaries on Kilimanjaro described such beliefs in detail, they also encouraged people to shun away from them. In his diary, for example, Gutmann reflected his observation of Chagga religious practice as follows: The so called [sic] primitive races are not childish organisms and easily manageable as some believe. Not only does the spirit of past generations live within them, but extinct cultures also smolder within their souls. Would, therefore, that in addition to bringing in the disintegrating influences of our civilization, the colonial powers might come up soon, and with increasing emphasis, with constructive and considerate development programs, so that the indestructible life forces do not flare up unexpectedly like flames from a ruined structure, but that they be engaged creatively and effectively in indigenous forms for service in the total community. (Gutmann 1914, 19).

The expansion of missionary work in Kilimanjaro and Tanzania was closely associated with colonization process. In many ways, missionary work was the most direct strategy to prepare for colonization. In his Carl Peters and German Imperialism 1856–1918: A Political Biography, Perras, for example, illustrates an account of a Chagga leader with his discussion with a missionary Alfred Steggall who said: “God sent me to Kilimanjaro to exterminate the black man” (200). This shows that in Kilimanjaro, missionaries banned any traditional activities that seemed to be in contradiction with Christian teachings, thus making Christianity not just a belief but a matter of life and death.

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By the 1930s, the German missionaries had ensured that Chagga women had been restricted in movement, activities, and behavior. In the church, they were encouraged to wear a head cloth and dress made by the missionary wives. Those who persisted in handmade cloth or left their heads uncovered were seen as awkward Those who resisted Christianity were able to keep up with their activities and trade, but those who were converted attended classes in reading the Bible, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children and husband. After World War I and II, when the Germans lost the war, many Chagga women had been converted to Christianity, one of the traits that identify Chagga women from the rest of women from other ethnic groups in Tanzania. However, even after the missionaries had ensured that the movement and activities of Chagga women were been restricted, they went ahead and established stations across the mountain, dividing the region among themselves, restricting people into small plots, while taking a large portion of their land for themselves. In this land, which came to be known as white plantations, they cultivated coffee. They also encouraged people to cultivate coffee in their small plots known as kihamba. Other land that was not good for coffee cultivation was known as shamba, and this is where women produced food crops. Coffee production eventually became the predominant commercial agricultural activity for all the Chagga on the mountain. This increased from 100,000 trees in 1916 to 987,175 in 1925 (Iliffe 1979). With the transformation from product-based to cash-based economy, as well as monocropping, women found themselves travelling long distances to the family shambas, after working in the coffee plots that normally surrounded their homes.

Good, Ol d Yu ur i: Power b eneath t he L an d The Yuuri community, which is situated in the Hai district, is a part of a highland of extensive home garden areas, the coffee–banana belt. Annual mean rainfall is between 1,200 and 2,000 millimeters. The community is effectively isolated from the main road going to Moshi and Sanya Juu townships on the southern part. On the north, it borders a national forest in the Loitoktok district in Kenya. To reach there from the two townships, one must either walk the seven miles to the main road or board a pickup and sometimes a tractor. The road from the main road, Lawate to Yuuri, proceeds in the general northern direction. It crossed a stretch of countryside with its own attractions; here and there one would see an open plain, stretching as far as the eye

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could see. When the sky is clear, one would have a glimpse of snow on top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and creeks (small streams) formed from glaciers from the top of it. Today, a general landscape of the Yuuri community is small plots of coffee berries, diseased coffee, unproductive banana trees, corn, beans, and sunflowers. I could see farms with potatoes, tomatoes, and a variety of green vegetables. For an indigenous person like myself, I did not miss that this rural community had undergone a huge transformation. The traditional coffee plantations have been replaced by food crops, and the clusters of trees that effectively protected coffee and banana farms from direct tropical sun were long gone, giving way to bare land suffering from wind erosion, unreliable rains, and floods. Along the main road, I could not help to feel a sense of nostalgia for the lonely public water pumps, installed in the early 1970s, most of them broken down, without water. I later learned that in recent years, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) had installed water pipes, catering for few individuals who were able to pay for installation and the bills. The two streams that people used to get water for cooking, laundry, and for animals were long dried up, and those who could not afford to pay for water were forced to the only one unmaintained public water point, where they patiently waited for their time before they make a long walk back to their home with a bucket of water on their heads. In many households, they practice mixed farming or the farming system in which they do intercropping. In these intercropping arrangements, people cultivate food crops such as maize and beans in coffee farms. Many families have farms in the lowland, along the main road—Lawate and Donyomuruo—where they cultivate maize (Zea maize or corn), millet (Eleusine coracana), and beans (Phaseolus vulgaris). During the rainy season and cultivation time, people make daily trips to the lowland plot. In recent years, women in Yuuri had complained about the lack of space for food crops and fodder for the animals and water. What are the realities of women in Yuuri in the current global economy? What are the gender hierarchies and the hierarchies among women that are still visible among the Chagga today? How are these related to notions of empowered women? I argue that what prevents women from developing a sense of power in a global economy is because of the lack of opportunities to aggregate their potential, needs, and interests. This section presents Doris Ngabanu’s story of growing up as a child, life as a schoolgirl, and life as a woman, underscoring the womanliness that her mother and other relatives, the school, and marriage

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had instilled in her. Doris was cutting corn grass with a cutting machine run by diesel in her home in Yuuri when I arrived. She stopped the machine, shook the grass from her, and extended her hand to greet me. “You have a powerful machine there,” I announced as I extended my hand to greet Doris. “Indeed, but I borrowed it for a day to help me cut these grasses. They are too hard to do by hand,” she charmingly responded, wiping her hands and smiling. “I am lucky to be in the group; otherwise, I would not know how I would do with dry grass like these. Cows cannot chew them unless you cut and soak them overnight in salt or soda ash. Green grass is a commodity these days, who dreamt to see such a thing? This thing called commercial agriculture will take us to hell.” She took off her apron and folded it neatly, while escorting me to two chairs she had set under a nearby mango tree.

Doris: The Phenomenon of Empowered Woman A short, light-skinned stout and lighthearted woman, Doris was a mother of ten, a peasant farmer, and the most powerful woman in Yuuri community. While most of my fieldwork was in many places in rural Tanzania, I spent several months in the Kilimanjaro region, participating in social and cultural activities alongside my research participants, who are members of the Chagga community, one of fortyfive ethnic groups in Tanzania, and one of the ethnic groups that has been repeatedly looked at as a model of successful “development” (Moore 1978). This experience helped me to understand more viscerally the context in which the experiences of women emanated, how they were shaped and transformed. Understanding the genesis of the experiences of women like Doris is significant if they are to be contextualized in larger social and economic contexts. It is also important given that conditions for Chagga women have become precarious since the coffee price crashes in the 1970s. The recent withdrawal of the state from social services can be among the contributing factors. Another can be a stop from supporting women, children, and youths, due to introduction of structural adjustment programs (SAP) during the 1990s (Gibbon 1998). Being the eldest daughter in her family, Doris took her responsibilities diligently. She learned many things from her mother and other relatives, but she is very reflective of who she is and how she came to be what she was. Here is her story. I was born the first of nine children in 1953. I have four brothers and four younger sisters. I grew up in a village called Mbweera, the last

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village bordering the famous Mount Kilimanjaro on the northwestern side. I moved to Yuuri when I got married at the age of fourteen. My grandparents and parents were also born there. My mother delivered me at home in a traditional mud-walled house with no electricity or running water. She was assisted by her mother-in-law who had knowledge of childbirth and who came to be known as “traditional birth attendant.” Like many other Chagga, my parents kept cattle, goats, sheep, and chicken. My grandfather was a Lutheran evangelist who did his work by visiting villages and attending to people’s spiritual and health needs. Converted by the German missionaries who visited Kilimanjaro in the 1880s, my grandfather was charismatic and progressive, discouraging anything resembling tradition. He discouraged herbal medicines, divining, and traditional birth attendance and encouraged prayers by laying hands on patients and providing holy water. When there were disputes, he encouraged diplomacy rather than the local custom of fighting. In general, my grandfather acted as a leader in spiritual, health, and political matters. He did not associate himself with those who resisted Christianity. My grandmother provided a stricking contrast to my grandfather. Although she was soft spoken, immaculate as she always wore a veil-like cloth on her head, she did not follow everything that my grandfather held dearly and preached. When women were discouraged from planting finger millet to avoid making local beer, my grandmother continued planting finger millet in her farm and helped women who were giving birth. When in other homes, people had switched from millet porridge to drinking tea as breakfast, in my grandmother’s home, finger millet porridge was never missed, and children loved to visit with her in the hope that they would enjoy her traditional cooking. My grandmother was an instiller of hope. She was meek and worked tirelessly in her farm and instilled hope to all her children. Some of the older women still remark, “Your grandmother was a great woman, she could resurrect the dead.” Some have commented that no woman had lost a baby in her hands. She also treated infection, snakebite, and food poisoning. “Many other healers tried many herbs, but your grandmother would look at you and know.” Her home was a home of everybody, and this used to create problems when missionaries visited. One incidence has remained in people’s memory of her all these years, partly because it nearly caused her life. It was one of those days that the missionaries visited people unannounced or without invitation. It was Saturday and my grandmother, as usual, was attending to people who had come for one health problem or the other. When the man of God arrived uninvited, he saw many people in my grandparents’ compound and he later came to realize that they were not there for worship but the wife of his clergy was practicing the forbidden practice.

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After his usual prayers, he called my grandfather aside and inquired from him why he allowed his wife to mix heathen and Christianity. The missionary gave my grandfather an ultimatum, either to divorce my grandmother or allow them to cut off her fingers to ensure that she would stop her trade. After a long discussion, prayers, and pleading, it came to be decided that her three right-hand fingers be cut. So when I was born, I saw my grandmother with only two fingers, the thumb and small finger on her right hand. It was a funny sight, but she did almost everything despite the forced handicap. My grandmother also liked to tell stories of her ancestors, especially when the white people came to Kilimanjaro the first time. She narrated the story of a white man called Bwana Ongilo walking through the family land where her mother was getting ready for planting. Although she was still young, the whole scenario was very vivid in her mind as she vividly remembered her mother’s cry, “You cannot take this land from us. This land has always been part of this family, this clan.” My grandmother narrated sadly how her mother cried of despair as the men pushed her away when she sat down at the border where the demarcation was to be, signifying that they would no longer cross the border. The taking away of her ancestors’ land dislocated her family and forced her father and other community members whose land was also confiscated to work in the land for pay. Of the stories that my grandmother liked to narrate, there is one that was special and which I vividly remember. My grandmother narrated the story with passion. It was of Nrile. It was a story about a young girl who did not listen to her mother’s instructions and who broke all of her pots. Nrile was very playful, and it was this one day that her mother sent her to draw water from the stream, cautioning her that she was carrying the only remaining pot, and therefore to take extra good care of it. Nrile ran to the river, for she wanted to prove her mother wrong. She drew the water and carefully put her pot, full of water, on her head, ready to go back as fast as she could. Before climbing the last hill, she saw, on her left, two girls playing ready. In the back of her mind, Nrile knew she was not supposed to play, but she rationalized, “Let me play only once, and I will go back quickly and mother will not know.” Without bothering to put down her pot, Nrile started playing ready, and before she knew it, the pot fell off her head and broke into small pieces. Nrile was faced with two dilemmas: in her home, there would be no other pot in which to cook the food; second, she could not go home without the pot and the water. Sensing the dilemma in which Nrile was in, the two new friends consoled her, telling her not to worry because they had a solution to her problem. They told her in their home there were many pots and they would not mind giving one to her with a condition that she had to follow them to their home, which was behind a nearby forest.

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A promise of a new pot sounded like a very kind suggestion and without thinking twice, the trio started a journey toward the forest. After just a short distance in the forest, they saw many hungry ghosts surrounding them and she came to realize that her new friends were also ghosts with long teeth and producing funny sounds. In a blink of the eye, Nrile was torn into pieces and became a dinner to the hungry ghosts. That became the end of Nrile, and implicitly, bad girls always have bad endings. My grandmother would always end this story by a proverb: “Those who do not listen to their elders . . . will break their legs,” and we would finish the proverb in a chorus. My father was born in 1922 and was among the first public officials in Yuuri, apart from those who worked in the colonial plantation. My father was also part of the first generation to leave their home and families behind because of work. Because he was a teacher and there was no school in Yuuri, he used to go to Kibohehe to teach and would come back on weekends. My mother was a short, stout woman and married my father in her teen years, the usual age for marriage then. My mother was left to take care of the family, farm, and animals, while our father was away teaching. Although she attended formal school and did very well in her standard four examinations, she was not allowed to leave home to attend school in a boarding school, where colonial officials were ready to offer her. This broke her heart, but there were not many girls who left home for any reason than marriage in those days, so it was not too painful for her at those times. She, however, has come to regret missing that chance when she came to see women becoming teachers and nurses. So my mother’s life remained rural, and although she knew how to read, write, and do simple arithmetic, she attended women groups in the mission and later adult education classes where she learned sewing, ironing, and some domestic chores. I was the oldest daughter and naturally was very close to my mother, and she came to be a great influence in my life. This is because almost as soon as I could walk, she would ask me to help her. My mother taught me how to be responsible. I watched my mother cooking, taking care of my younger siblings, fetching water, collecting firewood, and cutting fodder. When I was old enough, she asked me to help her with these chores. Sometimes I enjoyed these activities, sometimes I was frustrated and hurt that I was the one supposed to clean the house and watch after my siblings. When they cried and I tried everything and they would not keep quiet, I also cried. What kept me going was when my mother would tell me, “You are fine.” I also watched my mother work in the farm. She tilled the soil, plucked weeds, and picked coffee. She did not mix food crops in the coffee farm. She planted food crops such as maize, beans, and sunflowers in another farm, which was far away, along Lawate-Moshi road.

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The coffee farm stretched from our house towards the hill. When they flowered, the white flowers were beautiful, and it remained for a few weeks before giving way to small berries. Before the harvest, the berries turned bright red. My mother was only allowed to weed, pick the coffee, and prepare it for sale but she was not allowed to sell it. When the coffee was ready, we waited for our father to come home to sell it. To sell the coffee, you had to be a member of Kilimanjaro Natives Cooperative Union (KNCU). Only men were members of KNCU. While my mother could sell coffee, she could not get the money. Only male members of the family were allowed to touch the money from coffee sale. Because my father was away most of the time, he would write a letter to the official to allow my mother to collect the money. I remember [on] one occasion, the officials refused to give her the money for the sale despite the letter from our father. My mother needed the money to pay a veterinarian because our cow was ill. When she arrived home, my mother broke down crying so hard. This was the first time to see my mother crying. Despite the fact that my mother was the one taking care of the coffee, family, and animals, she had no freedom to touch the money. The following day our cow died. This was a big loss to the family. In 1960, when I developed the capacity for learning, my mother enrolled me in school to start class one. When I was growing up, not many girls went to school, but my mother wanted me to acquire [an] education that would help me to get employment and enable me to lead a different life than her. I liked all my teachers, and I did everything that we were told to do. I took pride in reading English and doing mathematics. I also liked science. I really wanted to go on studying, but like many children, I did not pass standard seven. This was hard to believe, and it took me a long time to accept that I will no longer go to school. There were no private schools as there are now, so after my education, I continued helping my mother in the fields. Besides farm chores, I also involved myself in a lot of activities in the church—teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, and cleaning the church. One day my mother asked me if I had someone in mind to marry me. I said I had friends but was not ready or interested to get married (at least at that particular time). There was this young man who was in a choir group and we liked each other, but we had not thought of marriage. When I confided this to my mother, she laughs, telling me that I did not know the difference between darkness and light and that I was to open my eyes and direct my ears to the right direction. I think this drove the point home, though I laughed about this conversation. From that time, the idea of being a pastor’s wife was interesting. Church ministers were respected people in the community, and many girls would be happy to be called by “pastor’s wife.”

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As my mother had predicted, one day the pastor asked me if I would be interested to be his fiancée, and I agreed, and after two months, we got married in the church. In the beginning, I thought it would be fun to be in charge of my own home and life. Unfortunately, for me, right after marriage, my husband was transferred to another parish far away from home, leaving me to take care of my unborn child, our new home, animals, the farm, and his old parents. But life was not as I had expected. It was very hard for me to take care of my own home and children, take them [the children] to the hospital, and take care of his elderly parents. But as a newly wedded daughter-in-law (mwalyi), nobody expected me to fail in any of these backbreaking activities. For example, my mother-in-law expected me to work on their coffee farm, cook for them, and cut fodder without caring about how I could manage to work in two homes all by myself. At first, I tried whole-heartedly to do all the chores that she assigned me. But with the complications of pregnancy, my energy went down. I could not work as many hours as I used to. This caused a lot of trouble for me because she thought and said I was too lazy to be a pastor’s wife. What troubled and saddened me more was that she did not consider my health even after telling her I was expecting a baby. I was very confused with all what was happening, but I could not confide it to friends, neighbors, or even to my mother. Everybody thinks am the happiest woman in the community as a pastor’s wife. I don’t want to break their hearts. In that way, they trust me with their secrets. Being a pastor’s wife, I am expected to teach other women about love and service. So my problems have become my secret. When I had my first baby, in 1970, coffee was plenty, and the price was good. The market for coffee was so regular that many people till all the land even the spaces that were initially left for grazing were filled with coffee trees. Yuuri was known as a place where the creeper grass and fern beautified the place, which was also where cows blossomed. In those days, women had money and men did not ask what their wives did with their money. New mothers were showered by gifts of food including milk, meat, and bananas. If a woman failed to get these foods, she would have to use another way to congratulate the new mother such as bringing fodder for the animals, firewood, clean her house, or do her cooking for her for the whole day. The food for the mother must always be bananas cooked with milk or meat. As was tradition, I was confined in the home nursing my baby for three months. My neighbors and friends helped me with other chores. My co-wives took turns in cleaning the house, tending to the animals, washing, and taking care of anything that needed done. These were also a tradition all over Kilimanjaro. Women helped each other when one had a baby. But you will not see women visiting and helping each other nowadays. This is partly because there is no longer money from coffee due to coffee berries disease. This started when I had my second child

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in 1972. Many people are no longer able to help others. Many women could send their children to school; nowadays, many have been forced to take their children out of school. It was not common to see young people in the village during school, but now they are everywhere, doing nothing. Many girls have left home to find jobs and a better life. Going to towns to work has come to be an attractive option for girls and for the survival of their families. It is certainly true that life in town is better, but one should recognize the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, which we are now seeing. We have come to accept death of our children as inevitable, as a way of life. Being a pastor’s wife, I am expected to be a women’s leader, thus, being a member of women’s group is natural for me. I am responsible for ensuring that other group members attend the group weekly and participate in the agreed group’s activities. I assumed this leadership position since I moved to Yuuri, twenty year ago. All these years I have seen changes that are heartbreaking. A month will not pass without hearing that a son or a daughter of so and so is very sick, and, before long, you see they are here to be buried. Because many families are economically affected, children have come to be a source of support. The church has urged people to scrutinize the activities that their children do in towns and cities. Even though many children have decent work, the church believes that many engage in activities that are contrary to the Christian teachings. But we cannot blame these children because they are indirectly forced to work away from home so as to support themselves and their families.

Liv ing and True H i s tory : Situating C hagga Women i n H istory There seems to be a consensus that colonial history and capitalist economy are the twin sites from which the current experiences of women in Kilimanjaro and other places in Tanzania and Africa emerged. Indeed, many processes and practices in Tanzania are capitalist and exploitative of women’s labor in nature. As seen in Doris’s life, her current life has shaped by many larger processes including the introduction of Christianity, coffee production, and curtailing of women’s traditional activities and movement. The lives of Chagga women have been cautiously and purposefully shaped toward unremunerated activities, a life that seem to be dislocated in the current capitalist society. Accordingly, the lives of Chagga women have come to suit only locally appropriate roles of wife and mother, dependent on male partners. Those who venture outside of this discursive boundary become prone to HIV and AIDS. This analysis finds inspiration in the insights and concepts from studies of global politics and gender in the analysis of women’s

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personal experiences as political. In brief, studies of global political economy often focus on global processes and practices (e.g., Enloe 1989), source of social difference in society. At the minutest level of interaction, with powerful empirical commitment, the “common sense”—if there is such a thing—must reside within the individual people and groups’ common sense. The collective common sense and collected practices that help constitute the notions of women’s empowerment are experienced at the individual level, in everyday interactions (Suleiman 2003). Theories of social reproduction (Althusser 1972) suggest that in a capitalist society, people must be reproduced in order to maintain the status quo. According to the social reproduction model, Doris was taught appropriate gender roles in many settings. Though she had her own needs and would like to pursue personal interests, such as marrying her choir sweetheart, her autonomy was limited by the potentials of being a pastor’s wife, a role that might not help her become socially accepted but impede her in achieving what she wanted in life. Bourdieu’s (1977a, 1977b) theory of culture reproduction is important because, among other things, it helped clear fresh space for understanding the struggle in Doris’s life. The relationship between the women’s preoccupation with a cash crop economy is satiated with paradoxes, ambiguities, and uncertainty when this economy is pegged on men and on international market place. Though women did all that was required, they were not allowed to enjoy the profit of their labor, not because they had nothing to do with cash, but because they were women. The relationship between women’s labor and what they realize from it is a pattern of fractal recursivity (Irvine and Gal 2000). Mathematically, a fractal is a rough geometric shape that is self-similar at different scales. Concern for economic development was paramount in Yuuri, where women were engaged in various economic activities including cross-border trading. Like village communities around the world, everybody knew what everybody was doing, and economic success ruthlessly reinforced the notions of a woman’s value. Over the next weeks, I watched women’s interactions and listened to their conversations. Their low income and lack of it could not be concealed in these interactions. Despite their lack of income and alternatives in life, women in Yuuri had constructed a worldview in which they had cast themselves as ambassadors of modernism and purity to the countryside as Ngarami laments:Being a girl and growing up in Ngarinanyuki (a rural area in

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Northern Kilimanjaro) is hard enough without adding to not being able to know what your life is going to be. It was easier for my brother because he was born with a farm and a house ready for him. For me, I was expected to find my own farm and a house. . . . After completing standard seven I have tried many things. I lived with my sister once, but she had her own problems to deal with and I did not want to add any of my own to her. I moved out to live with Hamisi (her boyfriend) and do small business. These things you see here, I get them from Taveta (a name for the market center on the border between Tanzania and Kenya). My parents don’t want to accept my life, they think I am Malaya (a prostitute), and call me many names (W 23a/c).

The majority of women in rural Tanzania suffer “triple dislocation” of being poor, and then being women, and then being in a rural location. In their dislocated state, many have fewer opportunities, while they are under pressure from numerous sides. As farmers, they are limited and disadvantaged by being women, and customarily, many cannot directly inherited from their parents. Those women who have inherited, their farms are in arable land. Many rural women in Tanzania are also experiencing accelerating economic hardships as a result of the implementation of Structural Adjustment Program (SAPs) in the early 1990s which reduced state support for key social services and supports such as food subsidies, health and education (Mbilinyi, 1993). Finally, HIV/AIDS is claiming a truly unbelievable toll in many rural families in Tanzania. As families bury their dead, and women losing their husbands, children and neighbors, the care burden brought by the sick and dying is on the shoulders of women, not to mention the stigma of HIV carriers and witchcraft. Cultural barriers, lack of resources and being in rural location, many have the feeling of being imprisoned in their family and community. Negative attitudes toward women in rural Tanzania have been influenced by growing outdated government development plans that are insensitive to the needs of women, as well as problems of consumerism and unrealistic aspirations by society. Much of the negative attitudes against women are also fueled by a barrage of sexist advertisements and get-rich schemes. There are, of course, few token appointments of women to positions of influence such as the cabinet, but these are like drops in the ocean when computed against the present population figures of Tanzania. Women in rural households experience more violence compared to their urban counterparts, largely as a result of poor policing in rural areas as well as a change of attitudes in urban areas. There are a lot of peer pressures and new

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ways of looking at a “good” man in urban areas. The role models in urban areas are usually successful African men as well as Hollywood characters. Although women in any type of job work as hard as men do, they are paid lower wages. But women in urban areas still suffer oppression and marginalization like their rural counterparts. The only major difference is that they have access to social services and good infrastructure. In urban employment, there are still many women at the lower levels and very few women at the top where decisions are made. The only advantage women have is that they are not likely to find themselves walking five kilometers in search of water. In rural areas, role models remain the old, patriarchal dictators who rule their households like little empires, where they wield absolute power, with veto power over everything. This violence is perpetuated by those sections of society that benefit from maintaining the status quo, such as the male household heads who cannot cede any power to women, unless woman circumvent them. Thus, it is the ways that women have created ways of circumventing the household autocracy that provides an interesting glimpse into the resilience of women. Their resilience cannot even be compared to that of the sphinx, for they never say “die,” even as they experience oppression. They are always evolving new ways of dealing with adversity, engaging in constant rebirth. In many parts of rural Tanzania, gender discrimination is largely supported by culture and religion. For instance, if a husband commits adultery, the wife is not expected to question. Violence against women in the domestic and social spheres has increased in the last ten years, in both Tanzanian cities as well as rural areas. This violence has taken on many new forms, such as the increase in killing influential women in urban and rural communities. One sad incidence occurred in a rural community, where a women’s group leader involved in animal husbandry activities was beheaded by thugs, just because she was becoming too influencial. Psychologists have suggested that this increased violence is a result of frustration by men who cannot find employment and who feel that their manhood and masculinity are threatened. They feel frustrated and helpless. The attack on a woman’s body is seen as a form of revenge and taking back their manhood. There has also been an increase in actions that accompany rape, such as humiliation, stripping, and beating, especially of women who are seen to be defying societal norms. Sometimes the attacks are opportunistic. These women may not necessarily fit a certain pattern but only happened to be at a wrong place at the wrong time. Schools have not spared this frustration. Many schools are experiencing strikes largely as a result of the realization by learners that they will not get

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jobs when they graduate, due to prevailing economic hardships. They decide to go on strike to get even with the ruling party. As women suffer violence in many parts of Tanzania, there has been little protest from men, who are more concerned about their own coping with hard times. Domestic violence is the most powerful instrument for suppressing the rights of women as equal partners in the family structure and economic matters in rural Tanzania. Wife beating, desertion, denial of property rights, and ill treatment of wives and widowersare all manifestations of the deep-rooted beliefs that the male is superior, the head of the family, and women are only important when they strive to make men happy. Domestic disagreements are first discussed at family meetings with the purpose of maintaining the status quo, by patching differences rather resolving and stopping oppressive situations. While Angeremi accepted many of the traditional obligations to her family and considered herself a modern woman, her sexual activities created a contentious relationship with her parents and neighbors. As cynical as the women in Yuuri were with modernism, it was clear that they were not bereft of moral values. To the contrary, mothers consistently taught their daughters in precolonial times to be modest and that premarital sexual relationships are frowned upon. This may seem like patriarchal control over women’s sexuality or men’s anxiety over the hymen of women. Such perspectives remain quite explicit in feminist studies, and these arguments are most often posited in terms of women’s subjugation. But in Yuuri, a virgin bride is exalted and respected all of her life; those found to be not virgins might be asked to return the wedding presents. In this way, despite all contradictions in their lives, women are expected to adhere to traditional norms of sexual values and female purity that we have seen throughout African history. Following the privatization of land and water, ordinary work and labor for women in Yuuri became twice as precarious and intensive. Cooking; taking care of children, the old, and the sick; feeding the animals; cleaning the house and washing clothes; and other women’s primary activities became more difficult and more time-consuming. To cook, a woman had to do a lot of work to prepare a meal. One had to take a trip to a public pump for water. Here she could be in a queue line for one or two hours. Then she has to get firewood. This could take about an hour, and then the actual cooking could begin, which was done on a traditional wood stove: three-stone supporting a pot. I could only imagine how stressful the cooking chore was.

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Most women complained about the lack of water and firewood. This was especially true in Yuuri where there was only one public pump to cater to more than two hundred residents, and a forest where one could get firewood was an hour’s walk away and one had to climb a hill to reach it. The trees for firewood were becoming scarcer as people continued to farm even along the water streams. Few families allowed their neighbors to prune their trees for free. Many cut trees and sold the wood. Thus, to get good firewood, one had use the whole day or buy it from a neighbor or the marketplace. Beyond the physical difficulties of a woman’s life, there were psychological and emotional things to negotiate. A constant presence in the vicinity of fire-burning wood means a woman was constantly exposed to smoke. I observed that a woman with red eyes was prone to being accused of many evil things such as sickness, lack of milk in a cow, and lack of rain or failure of crops. Whenever there was a crisis in the community, women with red eyes were suspected of witchcraft or of some kind of evil. But the idea of red-eyed women as possessing magic powers to harm the community never became topics of formal or even open informal discussion. Instead, neighbors, friends, and families express their suspicion whenever a red-eyed woman visited and others disassociated themselves or cautioned their children not go to the houses of such women. One would hear, “Since so and so passed here, my child has been crying without stop. I suspect that woman saw her”; or “I saw so and so going toward that direction”; or “So and so was carrying a basket with a hen. Where was she taking it to?”; or “I saw a gourd in her kitchen, but I don’t think it was for milk. Something else must be in that guard.” While initially those suspicions and rumors circulated in secret within the private sphere, such as the household, after some time, they reached the public, and they were not a surprise to anyone. The repeated suspicions and gossips divided people against their neighbors, friends, and families. Clearly, women were the focus of the community gossips. Once, I joined a big gathering of villagers for exorcising the alleged witches. The designated day for such an activity was a village market day, and many people from the neighboring communities were in attendance. Among the accused was Ngarami Koli, Shangure Ngugana, and Beriwa Halaseri. All three women were hardworking and were engaged in border trading. The one to exhort them was Kidedea, a witch hunter from the Sambaa ethnic group in Tanga region. Kidedea was notorious for identifying witches, and he boasted of being able to “see” anybody who possessed dangerous charms, which he did apparently to the exclusion of his own charms. According to him, the accused women

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were vivid in his “water,” and he could see their dangerous charms that were directly connected to bad omens befalling the people, the animals, and their farms. Seeing Kidedea mentioning the problems that were directly touching many people raised hopes of many, and people were set to do anything that Kidedea instructed. Although Kidedea could not disclose exactly how the witchcraft worked, his explanation made a lot of sense to confirm people’s doubts and suspicions. This powerful sorcery, according to Kidedea, was concealed under the cooking stones of the women’s kitchens. Surprisingly, people did not seem to realize that Kidedea was using their own words to judge and condemn the women. Instead, people used Kidedea’s words to confirm their suspicions. They used their seemingly red-eye cue to condemn the women, who were to be punished for something they did not do. The alleged women and some of their relatives and friends who I interviewed later have conflicting feelings about the accused women. On the one hand, they believe there are supernatural, which are beyond anybody’s objective thinking. On the other hand, they did not know how these good women could inflict harm on people, animals, and plants. Mankya Alfayo, who had been accused earlier of witchcraft on two things—the deaths in her marital family and bearing only girls—had this to say: “I don’t know where people get ideas that one is a witch. In my case, there were many deaths in the family . . . then people thought I was the one who was killing them . . . my own husband started to doubt me and refused to eat the food I cooked for him. He eventually stopped completely from coming home, and when he visited, he accused me for wanting to kill him and all the members of his family.” Mankya angrily wipes away a tear and says, “I did not believe what I was hearing. I wanted to die, I stopped eating, but I had to breastfeed my daughter. I was so confused. It was as if I was no longer of this world, for nobody gave me a chance to prove my innocence. I realized I had to run away, so I left everything and fled. I knew what would befall me in view of what had happened to other women” (Swai 2006). Experiencing again the harshness of their lives and that there was a pointer to the cause, anything was a possibility. This was reinforced when they saw their relatives and friends in the hospital, many dying from unknown or unacceptable disease. In the marketplace, I was struck by a growing number of men. In the early times, one would only see women and children, and the local marketplace used to be known as a singira ya vaka (women’s market). Only a few men could be seen in it, most of who were coming from the far communities of Arusha or Tanga. These were nomadic people who

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moved from one market to another with their businesses. People used to call these hwakers washihiri, a name that represented “men traders in the marketplace.” One hawker is mshihiri and many are known as washihiri. I had not known any mshihiri from Yuuri locality. But at the time I was doing this study, the number of men equaled that of women, and I could see many men from Yuuri. As I came to learn later, the number of men in marketplace increased because of decline in coffee production. In this hard hit to the economy, men had taken up activities that traditionally were considered “women’s activities.” As in many economic activities, women were finding it difficult to compete with men, particularly in products that needed large amounts of money. Thus, although women wish to achieve imagined development and economic independence, just like men, their lack of support, be it of land inheritance or education, would not allow them to realize their dreams; either good or bad, it remains in their imagination. I was soon to experience the harsh treatment of women in the context of inheritance. Although Tanzania has granted women’s rights over land (Tsikata 2003), I noticed a lot of land disputes in Yuuri between sisters and brothers. One incidence of sister-brother land disputes was based on who has more right to their father’s small lands. A daughter had been taking care of the material needs of her old parents for many years, and she had been tilling her parents’ land to produce the food. Her brother wanted to inherit the land (after he had sold his own farm) because he was a male. This brought up a very big clash to the extent that the brother threatened to cut his sister into pieces and bury her in the farm. Although it was agreed that the sister should continue working in the farm, in reality, the brother still had the right to the land. Part of the difficulty in women’s inheritance in Yuuri is how to merge the multiple overlapping authorities dealing with disputes (government land officers, party officials, customary land tribunals, and the courts). This was especially true in the hesitance, delays, and lack of certainty and finality in the resolution of disputes. This arbitrariness creates opportunities for favoritism and corruption, which normally men come to get the land. A key to understanding women’s experiences and how they constitute the private spaces is to analyze the social and economic position that they occupy. Furthermore, the nation-state processes, multilateral financial institutions’ interventions, and top-down notions of development are avenues for understanding the role socialization of women into gendered and citizenship in a woman’s life. According to Rubin (1996), within the context of gendered development, women

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are treated as social capital, in the exclusion of their individual needs and interests. For example, Doris came to see her social and economic problems as private and secret, because of the ongoing power of gendered interpretations of “woman” and its relationship to her social position as a pastor’s wife. Transnational political networks that contribute to the reshaping of development interventions are characterized by negotiation, conflict, compromise, and compliance (Edwards and Gaventa 2001; Gwynne 2003; Haas 1992). And as the proliferation of images of women in film, media stories, and education policy debates related to the ways in which women have come to represent the stakes upon which the nation and global depend (McRobbie 2000). Gerwal and Kaplan (1994) describe “transnational” as the context in which it is unfeasible for nation-states to resist the constraints of neoliberal economics (see also Spivak 2006). It is hard to foresee the contradictory impacts of neoliberal politics and stories on women’s lives. One crucial outcome of global restructuring in the lives of women like Doris is the shifts in the boundary between paid and unpaid labor and “productive” and social reproduction tasks and performances. Behind the scenes of the “free market” in monetized products, women’s labor, often invisible yet centrally important at household, national, and global scales (Nagar 1997) remains unacknowledged and supported. Integrated in the global economy, Chagga women are faced with a multifaceted challenge to their rights and justice as global citizens (Jay and Apter 2002). Their work and lives have been reorganized by means of structural adjustment policies, without their rights being “globalized”(Kerr and Sweetman, 2003, 3). As Doris points out, women respond to global restructuring through joining efforts as a strategy to respond to this pervasively gendered political economy, which, to her, is unjust and unsustainable. A premise of the success of neoliberalism depends on the integration and exploitation of local places. While geopolitics highlights the global economy as the producer of privilege and social constructions, there is disagreement on how it shapes women’s subjectivities in local places. Scholars argued that local places intersect with wider power geometrics so that local places are not always the victims of the global, yet while globalization enters all sectors of human life, the needs and interests of those lives are not globalized. In this chapter, I illustrated how women in Yuuri interacted with the global economy and how transnational economic forces stripped their needs and interests were stripped from them.

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C o nc lus i on There is no doubt that the capitalist and global economy has played a significant role in the lives of women in Yuuri. They have been the processes of isolating women from their traditional activities while at, the same time, impeding them from activities that would help them negotiate global processes. How modernity and globalization have shaped the experiences of women in the periphery location remains unknown, as it has not been well studied. Unlike the experiences of African women in capitalist and global economy studied by other scholars, women in Yuuri are active, appropriating the dominant cultural symbols to maintain. On the one hand, women are not victims, unaware of the structural causes of their situation and thus lack of options to achieve their dreams. On the other hand, women recognize the oppressive structures working against them. Nonetheless, for many women, experiencing a sense of powerlessness, they not only advocate for their individual needs but also defend their families and community, yet, at the same time, paradoxically reproduce their own powerlessness. The next chapter analyses power dynamics in the context of women’s participation in development groups in rural Tanzania.

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Chapter 6

4

Knowledge Is Power and Power Is Knowledge The Po l itics o f Wo m en’s E mpowe r m ent

T

I ntro duc ti on

his chapter examines power dynamics in the context of women’s participation in development groups in rural Africa. In the previous chapter, we saw women’s construction of knowledge from their own worldview. Unlike the previous chapter, this chapter presents the participation of women in government-initiated groups and allows us to understand how power operates in rural settings as opposed to formal and organizational structures. I situate the establishment of women’s groups within the broader histories of rural communities, many of which have tended to be marginalized in previous studies. Therefore, I provide a brief historical examination of their origins in precolonial times, their survival in the colonial setup, and their contemporary engagement with global transformational forces. This discussion culminates in an outline of several basic approaches and strategies that women use in mobilizing and performing “development.” I show how they have used these groups to create spaces for themselves while, at the same time, isolate themselves yet still participate in development. My interpretation of this process is meant to integrate broad critical historical perspectives on women’s participation and empowerment with social relational analyses of ongoing women participation practice. Having said that, I would like to start this chapter by pointing out that I believe all knowledge is produced in order to create particular

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forms of power (positive and negative types). I am aware of the that power and its cousin empowerment have been overused to the extent one feels like their utilitarian values have already been eroded, and yet when you come to think of it critically, there is not any one activity that does not involve power on our everyday operations. The least understood connection is that between power and knowledge. Power is based on knowledge, and the production of knowledge depends on power in order to receive acceptability in the larger society. Power and knowledge are therefore intimately and intricately intertwined. They support and reproduce each other, and they both gain mutually from each other’s use or success. This is because power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its honest and nefarious intentions. African feminists such as Ifi Amadiume (1987), Marjorie Mbilinyi (1994), Ayesha Imam (1997), Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997), Amina Mama (1996), and Tabitha Kanogo (2005) have examined the whole question of power and women in Africa. They have argued that the broader understanding of the current condition of women in Africa is essential to understanding the conscious goal of development on the continent, as well as understanding power relations in society. This chapter does not focus on women’s participation in women’s groups as a way toward their empowerment, but instead it examines the character of a set of ideological and dispositional strategies and tools that mediate their thinking and decision making in forming and participating in women’s groups’ activities. The presentation of data in the second half of the chapter sketches the basic character of the background knowledge, experiences, and concerns that women find themselves in as they make sense of who they are while they continue to participate in what is considered to be a way toward their empowerment. I interrogate women’s responses on their motivation for empowerment through participation in education and in women’s groups through frameworks of power as articulated by the work of scholars like Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault to illustrate the dimensions of the idea of women empowerment. The notion of power and how this is appropriated by society needs to be understood vis-à-vis women’s roles in development in rural Tanzania. The experiences that gave rise to this common sense were not idiosyncratic but were continuous with the creation of active-dominant and passive-subordinate relationships as well as the logic of the modern traditional woman and, as such, the empowered powerless or oppressed woman. In the section that follows, I provide a critical evaluation of power parameters and how they are framed in women’s groups.

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Women’s Groups as Movement: P l atf o r ms o f Ne g oti ati o n I would also like to look at women’s groups as “movement.” Movement, here, refers to a wide array of practices or tactics of existence as related to the work of these women’s groups in rural Tanzania. I regard movement as the redefinition of personal and social space in everyday life, the constant shattering of experience that characterizes (though not exclusively) women’s history and geography in rural Tanzania. These multiple dynamics existentially link the particular trajectories of women in rural Tanzania to the fate and fortunes of other groups in the country, and cannot therefore be studied in isolation. Movement, therefore, is not only a matter of the transaction of distance, not just a matter of style, but it also has profound epistemological value in its critical and reflexive role in the constitution of rural dwellers and the constitution of rural women in particular. My analysis exposes the contradictions in Tanzania, its capricious hierarchies, its differentiated gender categories and experience and partial application of equity. I show how the actions of these women are important, embodied in the popular acts of the masses in movement, in agency, of taking charge of their own destiny, of seeking new grounds of survival and alternatives within the constricted choices offered in a capitalist social order in which women have increasingly been peripheralized. When it was first published in 1986, Women’s Ways of Knowing broke new ground on how knowledge is created, understood, and finally, used (Belenky et al. 1986). Belenky et al. showed that there were variations on how women and men produced knowledge. They pointed out that these variations were based not on biological differences between women and men, but on the different social, economic (such as division of labor), and political institutions. Whereas they showed how knowledge is created, understood, and used, they did not show how it is retained and maintained. I would like to show in this chapter how knowledge is sometimes used to retain and maintain power. I would like to suggest that this is the reason for the intensification of trademarks, patents, and property rights. Power reproduces its own structures of domination through knowledge. The preponderance of certain forms of knowledge depends on power for sustainability. Therefore, other forms of knowledge that question the mainstream or accepted forms of knowledge often find opposition from the guardians of the acknowledged forms of knowledge. As a result of this, there is always tension between the mainstream forms of knowledge with its paradoxical liberal, modernist tinge, and the

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setting of a “development” agenda. Such agenda is always grounded in various emancipatory economic, social, and political projects. Resistance to these projects often creates tensions. It is these tensions that I want to address in this chapter, and I begin by examining how the work of women’s groups has opened the way for me to explore the role of these groups in deploying power and negotiating for space in society over the years. For me, gender and class logics often ride the undersides of the rapid rationalization of the modern state in Tanzania. I suggest that gender and class logics are products of the postcolonial state. These logics are articulated in the following: the consecration of efficiency and scientific management paradigms, the separation and bifurcation of society into high culture and the low, the antithesis of private versus public life, and the opposition of the elite in Dar es Salaam versus the masses in places like Iringa, Lukani, Musoma, Mlandege, and Korogwe. All this has served to unleash the mad totalitarian and fascist forces that now define modern reality in Tanzania and other captive African economies today. The work of women is always linked to a larger dynamic than a particular place or locality or moment in history in Tanzania. We need to be cautious of the dangers of vanguard women leadership and its disconnection from the resourcefulness of the masses. When this type of vanguardism occurs, as Paulo Freire (1970) and Wilson Harris (1989) argue, we have leaders with “illiterate imaginations” enforcing the latest agricultural program in rural areas or urban literacy project without the organic input of the masses. Many of them are rooted in the conditions of production of capitalism itself, its modes of organization, and its colonization of the life world. That is to say that capitalism’s bureaucratic organization, efficiency planning, and its means-ends rationality radically reduce and subordinate human creativity and imagination to commodities for exchange production and profit making. In this matrix, women in rural Tanzania are rendered powerless and used as pawns and work horses for satisfaction of the urban elite and intelligentsia.

Wo men G ro ups and Power to Mobi lize : The Idea and Movement in Tanz ania In Tanzania today, it is difficult to find a rural community that has no women’s group(s) instituted under the umbrella of the national education system. Everywhere we see women’s groups, where women attend weekly for economic, social, political, or cultural activities for

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empowerment and development. Women groups, as employed in this study, refer to the avenue in which the government chose to empower women. Robert Chambers argues that such groups in Africa were set as an essential ingredient in notions of democratic citizenship and sustainable development within the framework of a reformed state. Women’s groups in Tanzania have a history, and several Kiswahili terms can be used to describe them. Three most common names are maendeleo, nkumbaru, and kikundi. Maendeleo refers to a group of women that was formed by a church or mosque. During the 1940s and 1950s, missionaries mobilized women to form groups that focused on religious duties and instruction, domestic education, and income-generation activities, respectively. Nkumbaru are women’s groups that are specifically for literacy and educational activities. These were formed following independence, under the wing of the political party, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and later, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). The women’s organization Umoja wa Wanawake Tanzania was specifically for giving women a voice in politics. Kikundi refers to a group of women under which women organized themselves to do various social and economic activities such as cooperative shops selling basic commodities while also engaging in activities such as clothes making, cookery, childcare, and other small income–generating activities including poultry projects and brewing (Mulligan-Hansel 1999). Women’s groups in Tanzania emerged within specific historical and political economic relations. During colonial times, in the 1940s and 1950s, missionaries and colonial officers configured how to mobilize women for religious duties and instruction, domestic education, and income-generation activities (Mulligan-Hansel 1999). The traces of the colonial period can be seen in the organization and the content of women’s groups in Tanzania even if after independence in 1961. For example, mobilization of women for the economic development of the nation is still the goal; furthermore, the structure of the groups as well as the curriculum used to resemble that of colonial times. Cooke (2003) has shown the connection between the principles of colonial administration and today’s development plans and activities that stress the concept of participation. He argues that participation in national projects owes to the principle of indirect rule exercised by the British colonial administration in Tanzania. Indirect rule refers to the cooptation of the chiefs to the colonial administration system aiming at participation of “natives” in the administration (Lugard 1965). That women’s participation in development programs often remains limited (Cooke and Kothari 2001) and sometimes becomes even merely a government trick rather than a real space for empowerment

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reflects the idea of indirect rule. It is the colonizer or the development agency that has the power to enable participation and simultaneously sets the limits to participation and empowerment. In women’s groups, it is typical that women are called to participate in a process already established by someone else and the limits of participation are set by the “facilitators” (Vincent 2004, 113; Mayoux 1995). In such instances participation is more of a process of legitimating of the government than for an actual process of empowerment. The component of women’s empowerment was fuelled by feminist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and the scope of these groups were considerable. For example, the repeated references of women as a marginalized, disadvantaged, vulnerable, and potentially alienated group was a positive revolution toward women’s ability to organize and articulate their concerns and make their voices heard. One could argue that participation in women’s groups symbolized a shift from the virtual absence of women in public spheres to have them become a public presence and interest. It is an avenue for an increasing range of women’s representation, where they can air their voice. Prior to this period, in the 1950s and 1960s, women’s voices as well as their movement were curtailed. For example, women who participated in organized groups were accused of bad conduct and for misleading other women from being good women in their homes (Geiger 1997, 76). In settings such as in the media, women participating in organized groups were often demonized and infantilized (see Mosha and Johnson 2004, 77). These curtailing practices precluded women from meeting the criteria of modern nationalists during struggles for independence (see Geiger 1997 and Mascarenhas 2007). In spite of threats to their sustainability, women do appear to have hope even in the midst of market forces where demand and supply policies seek to drive them under or put them down. It is instructive to note that collective action as practiced in these women groups is the principal sustainability mode for the groups. The women groups were used as a strategy for enlisting citizen participation in the rural development initiatives of the early 1960s and were part of familyhood (the ujamaa program) that dominated Tanzania from the late 1960s to 1980s when the architect of ujamaa, President Julius Nyerere, stepped down as president. The Tanzanian state used its resources to patronize the women’s movement in Tanzania and impose leadership on it. By virtue of being a one-party state, the CCM policy governed every aspect of life in Tanzania. The women’s organization increasingly served the interest of a patriarchal political regime. Despite these political efforts to capture the movement, for a significant number of the women groups except

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for those initiated by opportunistic politicians, their groups might be seen as basic strategies employed by women to cope collectively with the problems and opportunities of social and economic change. This is especially the case given the increasing burden assumed by women in the changing rural social division of labor. Women’s labor, however, intensified over and above their traditional chores meaning they had to produce for their own consumption as well as for the market. This permeated the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the contemporary period that saw the development of women’s groups (rotational credit associations) whose basic objective is to pull resources together, popularly known as “merry-go-rounds” in Tanzania. The women’s groups at this point mainly addressed new social demands brought about by Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). Ideologically, the new social set of women’s movement that emerged in the globalization era was influenced by Western feminist movements whereby motherhood was no longer privileged as the determining factor of womanhood. The new movement polarized the women’s movement, with clear distinction between urban and rural grassroots women in terms of mobilization. They have greater interconnection with the colleagues in the west and north as opposed to their sisters in the grassroots. While there are certainly shared ideals such as property inheritance and patriarchy, there appears to be a big gap in the way the elite women address the rural women’s issues. Critical Discourse Analysis has not been used in the understanding of women’s participation in economic development, social action, and the political process. Earlier approaches to the study of women’s issues appear to have eluded women’s agency in the sense that women’s voices are stifled. This CDA theory pays attention to how women have been constructing and deconstructing power relations at various levels. Women in Hai District engage in activities of production and reproduction not only in terms of material needs but also in terms of sustainable modes of optimism and enthusiasm. These activities include small-scale farming, which includes growing of subsistence crops such as vegetables, poultry keeping, goat rearing, and cattle rearing as well growing of crops like maize, beans, and drought resistant crops like cassava and millet and cash crops like coffee. In the recent past, the Hai district is often characterized by lack of rainfall largely as a result of environmental degradation and increasing climatic changes. The women however have continued to “survive” despite various threats to their sustainability. The current study has established that women consider private spaces and collective action as key to their sustainability.

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S ituating Wo men’s Empower me nt in a G lo bal Contex t The idea of women’s groups did not appear in Tanzania until the early 1980s. The connection of women’s groups with the ideas of women’s empowerment were originally invented in the West and later spread to other parts of the world. As the wheels of rapid social, political, and economic changes gathered momentum in the late 1980s, global and neoliberal forces fashioned education policies without much resistance from national boundaries between developed and less developed countries (Castells 2001). From the 1980s, education came to be recognized as the driver, not only for productivity and growth, but also for creating a sense of community. In Tanzania, the idea of “education for women empowerment” assumed new strength and power and women’s groups under adult education were at the forefront in education policy in Tanzania in 1980s. President Julius Nyerere underlined his commitment to organize the society to make it possible for each individual to develop herself or himself fully while contributing her or his best to the growth and betterment of society. Nyerere argued that the principle of freedom should be accepted as the foundational principle for synthesizing individual and common interests. Nyerere believed that socialist education was a means through which women would learn the important values of society. Nyerere saw gender inequality as “an impediment to socialist transformation” (Geiger 1982, 45), stating, “By virtue of their sex, [women] suffered from inequalities which had nothing to do with their contribution to the family welfare . . . This is certainly inconsistent with our socialist conception of the equality of all human beings . . . If we want our country to make full and quick progress now, it is essential that our women live on terms of full equality with their fellow citizens who are men” (Nyerere 1968, 109). This pronouncement, though, was seen as vitalizing women, giving them new strength and power to set their own priorities; this, however, was taken as a negative—women collectively would diverge from national development plans. The concern for the Tanzanian state and Nyerere’s nervousness and uneasiness with diversity in Tanzania also indicated the clout that women’s emancipation might have done to the sovereignty and national unity. The Tanzanian government sought to direct them toward a state-coordinated development through adult education. Mushi shows how this was made possible: adult education programs were developed within the parameters of socioeconomic conditions of the country (Mushi 1995). Mushi indicated that the

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curriculum changed from that of abstract subjects to the practical knowledge and skills. Mushi is quick to point out the “socialization” part where women were expected to “acquire skills and knowledge needed to enable them to function effectively in their community and to sustain and advance their literacy skills” (ibid., 174). This conscious provision of education to women for effective participation in statecoordinated development was intensified in many adult education programs in Tanzania. The whole period of the 1980s and part of the 1990s, the government set up many educational structures and programs including simple village libraries for each village in the country, rural newspapers, radio groups, and folk development colleges. Pending the launching of these structures and programs all over the country, women’s knowledge and creativity were severely curtailed and restricted. For example, traditional knowledge systems that women used in the farms, child care, and soil management came to be replaced by new information about new technologies for efficiency in farming and the institution of childcare. The government’s prescriptions for efficiency and global competition, it increased a control and surveillance over women’s knowledge and activities. The concern for the Tanzanian state and the government also indicated the increasing uneasiness between the global movements and women’s knowledge systems and ways of doing things especially in rural communities. Adult education programs flooded the landscape of Tanzania, coupled with new information on “how to,” and added new complications by imposing new ways of thinking and doing things, such as using industrial fertilizers and hybrid seeds, which most women adopted. These new technologies implied the primacy of readymade knowledge and resources at the expense of women’s traditional knowledge production systems, which were rendered obsolete. In such conditions, women’s knowledge systems and capacities were declining. Unfortunately for the country, even after the idea of women empowerment became fully functional, their knowledge production capacities were too eroded to resurrect. The erosion of women’s knowledge production capacities occurred at a time when the government was losing much of its power and control to the global forces in the 1900s, when neoliberal politics were reintroduced in Tanzania. Left with ceremonial roles, the government concentrated on a cultural role, which primarily involved establishing control over people, stifling their creativities with the propaganda of “empowerment” through participatory approach that had permeated the global landscape. Driven by the imperatives of extraordinarily grinding poverty and disenfranchisement of the majority of women in rural

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communities, Tanzania’s government saw the only way women can be adaptable and responsive to these new circumstances was education. As a result, more space has opened up for women’s organizations with a view to lead to their individual and collective empowerment (Kabeer 1994; Rowlands 1997; Sen and Grown 1987; Young 1993). Empowerment was considered to be the only software women could use to erase their “internalized oppression” (Rowlands 1997). Beyond the ability to read, write, and do simple arithmetic, clearly women’s empowerment through women’s organizations is under siege. Women’s groups in Tanzania have mostly been framed within a broader debate about women’s empowerment. The challenges of a global economy, while may tackle gender inequality and other social and cultural differences, may sometimes deny women a voice to express themselves. In the aftermath of the three global initiatives and conferences on equality, development, and peace, linked to the sectors of employment, health, and education, the United Nations decade for women (1976–1985) has produced four world conferences for women: Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and Beijing in 1995. Women empowerment has become the staple in any debate about women and development. The classic oxymoron “women empowerment” has come to mean women conforming to social and cultural expectations, a practice that Kabeer nicely puts, “status is likely to be antithetical to empowerment” (1999, 457). Looking into the different effects the participation in development programs have on African women, we see that there is a fundamental acknowledgment of women’s contributions in their households, food production systems due in part, a power to organize, articulate their concerns and make their voices heard. On the other hand, in modern society male dominance in all spheres of human endeavor is normally negatively correlated with women’s participation in development (Oyêwùmi 2005). A survey conducted by the Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA), between April and June 2003, indicates, in terms of equality in politics in Tanzania, a dream of women holding any position of power will not become a reality any time soon. Moreover, “According to the survey women constitute 63 (21, 3 percent) of the 295 parliamentarians and that number is likely to remain static until end of 2005 when the country will hold its next general elections. Interestingly Tanzania is one of the few countries in the 12 member political and economic SADC grouping which has institutionalized Affirmative Action, but the survey noted that although country’s Constitution gives the President powers to nominate ten

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members of parliament, out of nine he has appointed so far only one is a woman.” In Tanzania, the machineries of parliament are also dominated by men. The report further adds, “The Speaker, Deputy Speaker, the Clerk of the National Assembly as well as the Attorney General are all men. Also eight out of nine Parliamentary Standing Committees are led by men . . . Women also do not feature very strongly in the country’s cabinet, which is the main body that advises the President on all matters of the government including public policy. The cabinet has 27 Ministers of whom only four (15%) are women” (Nkya 2009). These types of statistics draw our attention directly to the gender-based character of empowerment and participation in development under a capitalist society. Indeed, several African critical scholars (e.g., see Zeleza 2006) observe that despite a positive response to the growth of the women’s movement and intensified struggles for democratization, the global record of women’s representation in politics and power in general is dismal. In general, we see both an overestimation of empowerment of women through participation in development programs, on the one hand, and a bifurcation of power position for women in politics, on the other. Likewise, the dislocation of women in Africa presented in Chapter 1 indicates struggles that women undergo to fit in their homes, communities, and modern society. Clearly, there has been some sort of gender revolution in Africa. However, I suggest that the character and dynamics of this revolution tells more about gender relation, equality, and more participation of women than about the empowerment of women. The history of women’s empowerment through education is closely linked to the liberal tradition in Western Europe and North America about the rights of individuals. In Tanzania and elsewhere, the evolution of the concept of women’s empowerment embraces the liberal tradition about what it means to be empowered. It reflects changing ideas about women, power, and development. It is slippery and hard to trace through time and space. As John Hoist (2002) points out, education for empowerment must be geared towards transforming society It is unhelpful to look for clear and simple “roots” to ideas that in fact relate to each other through time and in complex and fluid way, and that at any given time are held and articulated in diverse ways by different people. Ideas about human empowerment and development, and particularly about ways to empower and develop another, are both subtle and intractable. An account of what we have come to call “women empowerment” is therefore not entirely straightforward.

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Th e Antithesis of Women’s E mp ower ment i n Afr i c a To parse the logic of women’s empowerment on the basis of participation in women’s groups requires that we begin by acknowledging that “empowerment” itself is a Eurocentric construction, historically evolved as a term and category to scientifically demonstrate the feelings of superiority. This is not to say that African societies did not have comparable nomenclature through which one would feel superior, but as Oyewumi suggests, one’s superiority is measured by seniority. Unlike Euro/American superiority, this is flexible and temporary as “it all depends on who is present in any given situation” (1997, 42). This flexibility and temporality do not position people as “powerless, disadvantaged, and controlled” (ibid., xii). Women’s groups in Tanzania are now principally engaged in income-generation activities. These range from livestock and farming to running kindergartens. Women participants, commonly known as women of development (mama wa maendeleo) have more power and influence in the community than those who are not members. Unlike many other women’s groups formed informally, for example, the practice of contributing money to one individual to solve her problems, known as kibati, the members are perceived as having an equal value compared to, the members in the formal women’s organizations. In these formal setting, there is some sort of hierarchy and exclusionary tendencies. Only a few groups that I observed would accept nonmembers to attend to their activities and those who show interests are discussed in the group’s committee and if accepted, they are made to pay a higher fee for membership and to follow the rules of the group. These include paying annual membership and participating in the group weekly and on time. Because only those with money, connections, and time can be members, numerous women, especially young and poor are not members, and are left outside women’s groups. The role of women’s groups in Tanzania is remarkable in discriminatory tendencies, driven by an urge for power and influence. Using power as the lens by which the activities of women in their organization in Tanzania are examined, one cannot fail to notice the strands of hegemony. Discrimination between individual and groups has been a means for and an artifact of historical and contemporary domination, marginalization, and exclusion. Discrimination entails judgment and evaluation, or the exercise of “taste.” Bourdieu’s (2007) analysis of French society moves beyond the classical structuralist definitions of discrimination in terms of social status and role to the embodied

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competences as the products of social class, specifically in their acquired and exercised tastes. Judgments around one’s exposure to a certain kind of information, what is considered empowerment, is part of the tastes that constitute one’s disposition. In Bourdieu’s (1977a) early fieldwork with the Kabyle, distinction and class are indexed in kinship and style (e.g., culinary, household practice) and in systems of exchange of value in everyday community and family life. Habitus is taken in much of the educational literature to refer to one’s acquired cultural capital and total sociocultural disposition (Albright and Luke 2007). But it also entails cultural schemata, structured categorizations and scripts (Holland and Cole 1995; Bourdieu 1998). These constitute logics of practice, guides, and categories for action, agency and everyday decisions. Consider “empowerment” in these terms, not just as a resource that a woman brings to bear in their groups, but also as the peculiarly favorable status, as a chief distinguishing mark from the “other.” Simply, empowerment is realized in duality, where one is empowered and another is powerless. The use of categorical distinction in the assignment of power and powerlessness (see Omi 1994) are objects of power (those who lack certain information and skill) and subjects of power (those with certain knowledge and skills). The institution of modern education has had great influence to determine the time, character, and even emotional tone of those who can be considered to be empowered and those who cannot. While empowerment is sociologically contingent, mediated, and structured by one’s location within political economy, secular ideology, cultural history, and place, the local conceptions of what it means to “be empowered” has traditionally been at odds with the Western conceptions of empowerment (as consistent to the World Bank (1991). Lukes (1986) has dealt with the complexity of power and his framework is relevant here. He says that there are three ways of looking at power and power relations. First, it is oppressive and it is manifested in its tendency. This form of power can be exercised in a collective manner, as in various state institutions, or at an individual level, such as by colonial legacies, imperial, and patriarchal practices. But power can also be challenging, such as the forms of counter power that women’s movements worldwide form. Power can also be a creative force, not only in the sense of arts and culture, but also in the form of the realization of one’s individual potential. The processes of empowerment of women is related to all three dimensions of power where we can see the oppressive power of the existing gender relations, critically challenging them and creatively trying to shape different social relations.

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Second, power operates not only on the level of the state or global but also at various levels of human existence including in various speech acts to the way people are treated in society, including denying people the validity of specific concerns or interests. To Lukes, these specific concerns or interests can be unacknowledged or supported and when they are seen as “natural and unchangeable or because they are valued as divinely ordained and beneficial.” Bourdieu (1977b) calls this the level of the popular opinion, the “common sense.” This is the level of the “natural,” what is generally accepted, what is never contested, not even experienced as unequal. This level of power operates when the government, for example, refuses to acknowledge and support women’s knowledge, or when women’s everyday activities are seen as domestic, private, and not fit for remuneration. Political elites may even be proud of women’s activities, for they are precisely these that make them good mothers and obedient wives and citizens. It is this level that is the most difficult to reach, because it is ingrained so deeply in the psyches of both women and men, often strongly supported by various institutions, such as legal structures, educational and religious institutions and the media. This is where power is masqueraded, acquiesced, and where oppression and exploitation are glorified. A major difficulty here is to determine the difference between women’s specific concerns or interests and those of the dominant class. Women of maendeleo often expressed their contempt toward other women who were not members. At one time one woman who had long disengaged from the group had her child die and she needed a support from the women’s group. Certain women’s group members commented to each other in low voices that “If she thought she was so powerful, why does she need a support from the group.” The woman with the problem told me that they could not get any help from women of the maendeleo because “they think when we get problems it is of our own making, or it is because we are ignorant and backward.” Women of the maendeleo were aware of this allegation. They rated themselves alongside men, who were considered to be empowered and not constrained by women gossips and ignorance. The conception of empowerment constitutes key, though not exhaustive, elements of one’s embodied cultural capital. Women participated in organized groups weekly, come sun, come rain. Even during farming seasons, members were expected to attend the group and those who failed had to give a good reason or pay a fine. Therefore, to keep up with membership and good standing in the group, a woman was expected to attend and participate in the agreed activity whether

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they wanted or not. It was also imperative that members pay annual fees to fulfill their membership set by the organization’s executive committee. Thus, while a woman was struggling to attend the group meetings, she was also expected to come up with a membership fee. Beside attendance and paying the annual fee, a member was expected to participate in the group’s activities such as reading and writing, sewing, cooking, and other activities decided by the group. Beside these group learning activities, those with other economic projects such as a milling machine, a shop, or a farm, these activities were performed in turns. An average time for a woman’s participation in women’s group per week can range from 5 to 10 hours. These interactions are akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s formation of habitus, the processes whereby societies and specific forms of social practice are reproduced. The women’s habitus is structured through their participation in women’s groups; it is a structured arrangement. At the same time, however, it is this same habitus that leads the women to continue participating in the groups and thus to contribute to the perpetuation of women’s participation as a social practice; the women’s habitus is thus a structuring configuration, or rather, as Bourdieu says of the habitus more generally, a structured structure It is generated by participation practices and it generates structured participation. Bourdieu argues that, habitus is both structured and structuring, it a product and producer of social worlds. Linked to the concept of habitus is the concept of communities of practice, which was developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wegner (1998). Both the notion of communities of practice and habitus provide ways of talking about women participation in women’s groups with a common endeavor and who develop a shared repertoire to express their identity (Barton and Tusting 2005) and what Bourdieu (1998) refers to as agentive “position taking” in the face of structural forces of “positioning.” And there are potential moments for a woman to not just participate for the sake of it, but for showing others, and to herself that she is empowered.

Power th ro ugh Organi zi ng: Wome n’s Grou p s, Pa rtic ipatio n, and C ommon Sen se Antonio Gramsci helps to situate the perspective of empowerment within a broader social economic framework. Using the concept of common sense, empowerment holds an almost mythical place in the popular imagination. For women, a popular imagination of education creates an aura of selfhood, a regain of balance and a promise of

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freedom and pleasure. Popular imagination about the role of empowerment plays an important role in women’s thinking and it organizes their thoughts toward an urge to be empowered despite that they do not see a clear connection between empowerment and what they really need. Together, these half-synthesized notions are expressed by the concept Gramsci (1971) called common sense. In the dislocated subjectivity of women, abstract notions of empowerment in terms of power, ability, capacity, and the like are mixed with descriptions of competing negative effects of lack of empowerment such as looser, ignorant, backward, primitive, and traditional. However, the contradictory character of common sense consists of more than just halftruths, myths, and imaginations; it expresses a kind of truth in the sense that it is actively produced out of the contradictory character of empowerment itself. In other words, these contradictions are not as much dependent on women’s condition of power or powerlessness to make what Gramsci called good sense, but a sense of being empowered or powerless is a reflection of the contradictory experience in capitalist society. As I remarked in the introductory part of this book, the additional and other concepts of dislocation occur in order to draw attention to whether women in rural Tanzania’sknowledge and everyday activities and lives in general are acknowledged or supported. In all the women’s groups that I observed, women had joined together in school buildings as a community center. Here they run vegetable gardens, mill machines, shops, animals (cows, chickens, and goats), tractors, buses, trucks, have some sewing machines, and art workshops where women do tie and die and a variety of crotchets. “The state has taken everything taken absolutely everything away from us, even our knowledge and identity,” says Mama Ngabanu, one of the founding members of Tumaini Women’s Group in Hai, Kilimanjaro. She expressed her humiliation at the introduction of Green Revolution funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in her community that prevented people from traditional mixed cropping by introducing monocropping. Mama Ngabanu believed that monocropping and the use of readymade fertilizer denies women access to the farms and generate a culture of dependency and destroy the struggle to reclaim work and self-respect. Women sought to recover their lost dignity through participating in women’s groups and creating their own selfhelp economic activities in a new environment different from their homes where they believed patriarchal system exploited and repressed them. When the introduction of cost sharing was introduced in health and education sectors and nobody would see a doctor without a fee,

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or no child would attend a class without a school fees, they agonized over how to send their children to school, or to the hospital without any income. They wanted to see their children going to school, getting treatment when they became sick. In many groups, women created local banking where each individual contributed and borrowed when she had emergency.

C r i ti c a l Ap p roac h to Wo men Empowe r m en t The popularity of women’s empowerment through women’s organizations in Tanzania is contingent, mediated, and structured by location within the global political economy. According to my interviewees, participation in women’s groups was a means through which women could coordinate efforts to survive the Structural Adjustment Programs that tend to decrease government spending on social services such as education, health, water, and other necessities (Due and Gladwin 1991 and Young 1993). Thus, any analysis of women’s mobilization must be linked to the politics and economics of globalization and their attendant increased unfettered movement of ideas and culture across borders, allowing the needs of capital to dictate life eliminating individual creativity and knowledge. There seems to be a strong connection between women dislocated subjectivities arising with the changes in global economy, with its unequal power relation in the production of knowledge that is very hard to extricate. However, unequal power relation in the production of knowledge can only account for some of the social and power dynamics that we can observe; I add the concept of mediation, in that, women’s knowledge and activities, though identified as important in the development of society, are unacknowledged and supported. Since women’s knowledge production systems has been a bedfellow of globalization programs such as new technologies in fertilizers, pesticides, monocropping, and hybridization, which makes it even more frightening because of the impact that these technologies have unleashed on traditional knowledge systems and activities in rural communities of Africa. In fact, agrochemicals and technologies are explicitly in conflict with organic farming and women’s health. In their study of small farmers in rural Tanzania, Ngowi et al. 2001 wrote that everyday pesticide poisoning remains a serious danger in cash crop cultivators in Tanzania since most small farmers usually do not use precaution and protection (Ambridge et al. 1990). These health hazards contribute to the prevalence of the problems in respiratory, eye, and central nervous system, not to mention other environmental

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problems (Ngowi et al.). Green revolutionists such as Bill and Melinda Gates present arguments disputing Ngowi et al. However, I believe that there is a strong sense in which Ngowi et al.’s argument cannot be dismissed, especially given the stories of many women in this study, and the questionable activities of the Green Revolution in Africa and its environmental legacy. The traditional high-yielding and higher-income benefits analysis that Bill and Melinda Gates have advanced in dismissing activists like Ngowi’s argument, where ecology and human health considerations that demonstrated the interrelatedness of all living things, does not necessarily match the concept of profit maximization. Furthermore, indices upon which human value and “market value” are calculated, and on which Bill and Melinda Gates and other green revolutionaries opposed to Ngowi et al. base their arguments, are never constant for any given country, as they keep shifting, and they are also based on estimates rather than absolute values, as reflected in different ideas about technology, foreign aid, political borders, and environmental risk, the legacy of which continues to shape contemporary disputes about the hazards of the Green Revolution in Africa and its human and environmental legacy. Sociologist Himani Bannerji (1995) has affirmed that knowledge that will allow us to end oppression, and it “cannot be produced in the context of ruling but only in conscious resistance to it . . . it searches the history and social relations to trace the reasons for and the forms of our oppression” (82). She says that we will understand whether education is for empowerment or hegemony when we focus on “real-life processes.” To her, real-life processes must be understood within historical materialism, mediation, and experience. In this study, I examine the everyday lives of women. My interest is not in what women’s experiences are, but what they do with their experience. In this way, I was able to connect women’s internal and external reality. My approach to women’s everyday experiences is akin to that of Bannerji (1995), who argued that there exists “a formative interplay between the subjective and the objective moments” and that “the social and the historical always exist as and in ‘concrete’ forms of social being and knowing” (83). In 2004, more than ten years after the onslaught of the wind of change in the forefront of which has been women’s participation for empowerment, the unmet needs and interests of women become more complex. Similarly, global actors have been developing and designing women’s programs predicated on deeply gendered, sexualized, and racial ideologies that justify and consolidate the hypernationalism,

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hypermasculinity, and neoliberal discourses of “capitalist democracy.” The relationship between women’s organizations and the processes of globalization has led to what has increasingly been viewed as cultural imperialism, where women in Africa and other parts of Third World are seen as playing the role of consumers, where women, regardless of their social or economic status, level of education, and age are encouraged to participate in women’s groups as a way to participate in their own and societal development. It was Susan Geiger whose book TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 defined the struggle to empower Tanzanian women with a hegemonic angle, thereby inviting debate on this concept with regard to all aspects of women’s realities. She defined women’s empowerment as a perpetration of Western-dominant ideologies such as nationalism, freedom, citizenship, and development (Geiger 1997). Geiger points out that women’s empowerment needs to be sensitive to the realities and issues that are important to African women. These include their physical needs in addition to the sociocultural, religious, and legal realms, to political and economic issues (Wieringa 1998). Joan Scott (1989) explains that women’s empowerment is both social and political, embedded in discursive constructions, operating in four interrelated configurations: culturally available symbols (such as what it means to be a woman); normative concepts that usually operate in binary ways (such as being empowered and powerless); the political struggles over these concepts (such as participating or emulating these cultural symbols and myths); and a process of identification (such as who is empowered and who is not for political purposes). Rappaport (1981, 1987) claims that if the concept of “empowerment” is to be taken seriously, people must be regarded as individuals with both needs and rights, and even the most incompetent individuals, having needs they apparently are incapable of catering to themselves, claim more, rather than less, control over their own lives. Promotion of this enhanced control will, however, not necessarily mean ignoring these individuals and their needs. While the traditional tasks of educating women have been to move them from their traditional role by giving them knowledge and skills for the role outside their homes, “empowerment” emphasizes that a woman have certain needs and interests. Rodwell (1996) too points to the element of choice inherent to empowerment and notices that it can be hard for society to accept an outcome that will disturb the social relation. When a woman is empowered, she experiences a feeling power. The important question is what a woman does with the power.

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According to Kabeer (1999, 2001), women’s empowerment is a process that challenges and transforms the patriarchal beliefs and institutions that reinforce and perpetuate women’s inequality. It is also a broad process aimed at achieving legal rights and participation in key social, economic, political, and cultural domains (Moghadam and Senftova 2005). Thus, women’s empowerment is not limited to gains in access to education and employment. It also encompasses progress in political participation, cultural expression, and access to equitable legal rights. As economic, cultural, and political globalization continues, the unmet needs and interests of women in Africa continue to be marginalized. Similarly, global actors have been developing designing for women, education programs that Mohanty (2003) calls pedagogies of accommodation, without any critical view on the dominant logic of globalization, social inequities, or the relationship between women’s current condition and their history. This lack of a critical view has led to what has increasingly been viewed as cultural imperialism, where feminist struggle in Africa has been seen as playing the role of agents, spreading liberal views on empowerment and Northern tastes and hegemony across Africa. This study is, therefore, based on the everyday lives of African women into a global context that maintains a system of gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies with the necessary order and control. The concept of women’s empowerment includes both positive and negative effects: it is both narrowing and widening women’s options, increasing and reducing their freedom, and homogenizing and pluralizing their subjectivities. Some scholars such as Wieringa (1994) have argued that empowerment can be analyzed as both a power relation (such as race, ethnicity, and class) and or as a process of becoming (such as being aware, conscious, choice, alternatives, resources, voice, agency, and participation). This dimension of women’s empowerment is linked to enhancing women’s ability to make choices over the areas in their lives that matter to them, both the “strategic life choices” that Kabeer (1999) discusses and to choices related to daily life. For this study, women’s empowerment refers to the promotion of self-awareness, experience, perception, thinking, and even emotions and the pursuit of a good life through collaboration with other people. This view of empowerment is shared by feminist and Vygotskian scholars. These scholars, for example, van der Veer and Valsiner (1991) seek to overcome the dichotomy between thought and feeling. The emphasis is in connected knowing mediated through interaction with others. Indeed, in the current neoliberal and democracy

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and economic system, women are encouraged to work on themselves, through the campaigns of the do-it-yourself self-invention and “a woman can do anything” rhetoric. Through the media, as the selfhelp books and programs that are available to remedy women in crisis, women resolve difficulties and problems by following the guidelines for self-improvement. Much of this picture of women’s empowerment and the subjectivities that are produced in relation to it were, in many ways, prefigured in Marx’s Theory of Alienation. According to Marx (1867/ 1976), human subjectivity in modern society constitutes the total “alienation” of man from his knowledge and labor. What people think and do, Marx declares, does not emanate from people’s talents and motivation, but rather originates from the laws of capitalist commodity production. Under these laws, one’s thought and actions seem to determine the nature of his activity (i.e., thoughts and actions). In other words, what women do shape their belief systems and behavior. Based on this observation, unless women’s knowledge and everyday activities are acknowledged and supported, they cannot become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any significant sense, except the way the bourgeois want them to be. Whereas women’s groups in Tanzania and women’s participation in them are often viewed as helping them to develop a “new consciousness” and “allow them to think of themselves as a collectivity capable of meeting new challenges” (Tripp 1994, 152), their empowerment remains difficult to define and evaluate (Kabeer 1999). Part of the problem is that it is entirely subjective and open to value-based judgments, particularly when we tend to use Western, liberal view of empowerment (Mohanty 1991). Even though women’s participation in women’s groups is also seen as exercising their agency (Rowlands 1997), by choosing to conform to what is expected of them, they may compromise their specific concerns or interests. The argument is that this is antithetical to women’s empowerment and allows them to fill in the gaps left by states in the process of empowerment, occasioning a process that I describe as dislocation. Therefore, the dominance of women’s groups in Tanzania from the 1990s as preferred channels for women’s empowerment in Tanzania should be seen within the context of alienating women from their specific concerns or interests, with the purpose of alienating them from their knowledge and labor. Originating in the global process of rapid pace of social, technological, cultural, economic, and legal changes, promulgated within the liberal view of human rights, women’s empowerment inevitably is connected to larger state and

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national projects, and engendered in the culture of complicity. It is a project that envisions women in ways that does not challenge the normative construction of what it means to be a woman, illiterate and unemployable. The women’s groups, operating under the umbrella of capitalism, are still in the driver’s seat of eviscerating women’s specific concerns or interests, although they may be seen as avenues for bringing to views those concerns or interests. It is against this backdrop that one can see the institution of women’s groups in Tanzania and adult education in particular as a cultural hegemony. In her study, “Women’s Career and Professional Development,” Bhalalusesa (1998) has questioned the motivation for professional development in the lives of women learners, seeing hidden motives and sinister intentions and objectives and perceives it as undermining women’s abilities to shape “their” versions of who they are and how to transform their social and economic positions without sacrificing their marriages. Bhalalusesa argues that the institution of education has undermined the “traditional values and cultural expectations of [women] in their societies” (73). Facing a combination of career aspirations and what is expected of them, many women find themselves making hard choices, including divorce or postponing marriages and children, thereby going against family wishes. In effect, Bhalalusesa arrived at the same conclusions as Colley (2004) did: that education is not for creating equality but to define the other and create educated and uneducated. In other words, women’s empowerment needs to be localized, to promote self-awareness, experience, perception, thinking, and even emotions and the pursuit of a good life through collaboration with other people. The argument put forward in this book is concerned with the current condition of women in rural Tanzania within the argument of empowerment in so far as it can help shed light on their dislocated subjectivities and the more general issue of provision of education to African women, all of which play a role in shaping the development of the continent. The work of Bhalalusesa (1998) provides a useful starting point for a discussion of empowerment common sense in her study of women’s career and professional development. Using in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted at the School of Education, University of Bristol, among six overseas doctorate students from a range of developing countries (in places such as Africa, Brazil, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Southern Europe), Bhalalusesa outlines a form of empowerment common sense. For example, women’s responses explained their perspective and concerns involving empowerment spring from a concern for family responsibilities and

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economic independence, but at the same time, show a sense of attraction to being rational individuals, free from the constraints of femininity, autonomy, and independence. These understandings compose a contradictory complex of their specific concerns or interests. One of the interviewees in Bhalalusesa’s study says, “I also wanted to prove to people that failure in married life didn’t mean failure in everything in life. I had confidence, and the desire to succeed as an independent person. My dream has always been to do my studies abroad and Britain in particular. There is that prestige of studying abroad and above all I wanted to test my academic capability and compare myself internationally . . . I just like and enjoy academic work. I like being an academician and intellectual although prospects of working in academic institution.”(28). First, empowerment does not always have to be militant. Second, the best measure of individual success or achievements is individual satisfaction that societal acceptance. Third, what people achieve has nothing to do with societal expectations at all. We cannot always seek to do what others think we cannot do. To me, that is not empowerment. Another interviewee in Bhalalusesa’s study seems to see empowerment as being predicated in earning a doctoral degree. For me, a doctoral degree does not necessarily lead to empowerment. The interviewee says, After my master’s degree I tried here and there but I couldn’t get a better job. I didn’t like to go back into secondary school teaching. Close family friends and relatives advised me that since I am intellectually capable and independent I had better go for doctoral studies. They had the belief that with a doctorate the sky would be the limit and being a woman who has educated myself out of marriage I would be more marketable since there are very few women with a doctorate degree . . . Well, I hope things will work out positively and if possible become a university lecturer. (Bhalalusesa 1998, 14–21; emphasis added)

I have serious reservations about such notions and terms as “marketability” for they seem to play into the neoliberal concepts of “development” and “market” that are often deployed to make people adhere to exploitative principles of privatization, marketism, and competition. Who establishes the quality and quantity in the marketplace of degrees? Why does one think that getting a doctorate makes them better than others? Or teaching in college is more empowering than teaching in secondary schools? I doubt that a doctoral can make one marketable in the sense in which I see empowerment, for I see this

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notion of getting higher degrees as part of the mass production mentality as well as mass consumption. Being on the conveyer belt of labor does not give one power, but only gives one the chance of joining the conveyer belt. I believe that the process of empowerment does not proceed from being “empowered” but such things as education, but rather being able to understand the rules and laws of society that are oppressive and developing capacities and opportunities to circumvent them. Empowerment does not come because of one’s children or family members. It has nothing to do with role models. It is the reason that I disagree with this woman when she says, “As a woman and mother I felt this was the best example I could set for my children. To grow up professionally as a human being . . . I am certainly sure that I am setting a role model for them to create their own targets in life.” I think that empowerment means much more than playing role model to kids and siblings. Similarly, I do not think that empowerment has to do with the capacity to acquire a husband or not, of getting married, or career choices. Mum, you always look busy! I would like to be like you; always busy yet cheerful. My career means a lot to me. But at the same time it limits my chances of getting a life partner. A career is not a substitute for having a family or getting married. But the chances are less. In my country, men have the mentality that highly educated women are proud and feminists. With my field, things become even worse. Men would like to marry teachers. But for medicine and psychiatric in particular they are hesitant. Very few will relax once they know you are a psychiatrist. I think this is not a respectable career for women. Being in this field, I have isolated myself. (Bhalalusesa 1998, 14–21)

Education for women should not be looked at in terms of a highway to some self-actualization or acceptability by men. These are the wrong reasons for education, using it as means to an end. Whether men in one’s country fear educated women is neither here nor there. The reality of the matter is that even after meeting the standard of expectation, self-esteem and self-dignity remain the cornerstones in determining empowerment. Similar, the next quote from Bhalalusesa’s study demonstrates a powerful range of feelings and observations that, taken as a whole, express the character of women’s desire for empowerment and fears related to a sense of powerlessness in their lives due to lack of marriage and other mundane reasons. One of the interviewee says,

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People look at me as an ambitious academic woman. They don’t see what I was struggling for. In my society I am a failure! I am not married, I have no child . . . My traditional society respects a married woman and a mother. Although my parents have been ambitious for me to succeed, they didn’t want me to be highly educated. To them the 2-year diploma course I did in pre-school education was enough for me to secure a good job like teaching . . . Now I realize that they didn’t want to lose me. Their priority, especially for my mother, was to see me leading a married life at home. But that wasn’t my aspiration. I still wanted to learn more and my dream was to go abroad. (Bhalalusesa 1998, 21)

There is a sense in which “failure” seems to be the unacknowledged and unsaid factor inherent in many of these interviews. The great unsaid is that the interviewees seem to be responding to society, which seems to determine their career decisions. Particularly pronounced in Bhalalusesa’s interviews is the fear that lack of education will affect women’s personhood, fueled by mystification of education and lack of appropriate knowledge, which would open a door for them to progress and develop. One of the respondents in clearly driven by parameters of a husband more than anything else. She says, I had the talent and I needed to upgrade myself. I thought it was for the benefit of the entire family. So I went ahead with university studies. I had a very difficult time. My sister had a strong character and was very ambitious. She got married after her graduation as a medical doctor. Since then it has been very difficult for her to do any postgraduate work because of the family responsibilities. She would either be pregnant if not breastfeeding. The whole life is planned around the children . . . The husband who is also a medical doctor is very understanding and supportive but surely he cannot share the reproductive role! (Bhalalusesa 1998, 22)

The whole notion of seeing a “medical” doctor as the panacea to all problems (or a prominent and rich lawyer as Hollywood would have it) suddenly comes to the fore.

“My H usband Syndrome” In many studies of women’s development and empowerment, it is common practice to find “my husband” mantra suddenly taking over, which leaves a lot to be desired. The husband even determined her career choice, as this narrative suggests.

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My husband doesn’t like anybody to cook for the family except myself. Even before we married he encouraged me to be a teacher. He said teachers have more time with children. I wasn’t interested in teaching but I opted for it because of him. So before I came here I had a very tight timetable. In the morning I would take the children to school and collect them back at 1 pm. At 3 P.M. I would take them to an Arabic school where they would stay until 5 P.M. In between I would do my fast cooking to ensure that everything is done in time. At 7 P.M. my husband would come back and wants dinner. Thereafter, I would do the cleaning up to about 9 P.M. It is from 9 P.M. to midnight that I would now sit down to do office work and prepare myself for the next day. (Bhalalusesa 1998, 14–21)

So much for empowerment! But we are not done yet! Studies that seem to examine and research on women in traditional roles are frustrating in the sense that we do not get to learn anything new. We see chores, children, and the usual “my husband” ranting and mumbling that you encounter a thousand times on the study of women. Here is a typical ranting from Bhalalusesa’s study. When I joined the university, it became more challenging. I was supposed to spend more hours at work. I had to adjust myself. So I would rush home during lunch time and do the cooking. For the Arabic classes I decided to take the next shift (5–7 P.M.). Now here it is even more challenging. All the same my roles as a wife and mother still prevail . . . Importantly, however, is that I enjoy doing this and I don’t feel that I am being pushed. I know it is not easy. But I have no option and above all my husband is very cooperative and he appreciates what I do. (Bhalalusesa 1998, 14–21)

I do not want take anything away from these good women or from the study of Bhalalusesa or even belittle their role. My contention is that there is a lot more than women have done that is outside the box but that has remained unstudied because it is seen as nontraditional and unique. Scholars are often afraid to ask new questions. Indeed, women’s empowerment through education has become an important symbol of power and the kinds of change process that must be dealt with for women to overcome their “powerlessness” needs to be explored in more complex ways than scholars are willing to do. Only then can we genuinely begin to address issues of empowerment of women. Here the ranting goes on. I remember when I sat for the interview to be awarded a scholarship. One of the questions asked was whether or not I was going to bring my

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family with me. Their main concern was about my husband. What will he do? They couldn’t imagine a man leaving his prosperous business to just follow me here and depend on my allowance. I don’t think they ask similar questions to men. However, I am very grateful to my husband. He is a very pragmatic man though not academically ambitious. He is very encouraging. I think that is why we are living together . . . But I am not very happy with the imbalance. I wish he was also doing academic work for we would grow together much better. It could have helped us to be closer and share some intellectual discussions. Nevertheless, as a human being I have to respect his choice. (Bhalalusesa 1998, 14–21)

Symbolically as well as materially, women in Bhalalusesa are of two mind-sets about education and empowerment. One mind-set sees education and the power accrued from it primarily as a tool to transform their sense of powerlessness. The other mind-set approaches education negatively as an impediment to being identified as a woman of substance: good mothers and obedient wives. Often mind-sets were held by the same person. However, Bhalalusesa did not suppose that “women’s career and professional development” was problematic. First, she highlighted unqualified, causal effects of professional development on a woman’s empowerment, and second, she did not differentiate women’s professional development with what women did with their earned professional goal. Lack of critical analysis of women’s professional development and empowerment led her into uncritical findings that for any given professional development, regardless of a woman and what one does with the profession, and under what conditions one finds herself in, a professional woman will always be more empowered than their less educated counterparts. Accordingly, Bhalalusesa made the unqualified declaration that “therefore, women now, especially the educated, have realized that they can also play the role of a ‘provider’ for the benefit of the entire family while at the same time trying hard to maintain their traditional roles as wives and mothers” (1998, 33). While Bhalalusesa identified contradictions, she deliberately refrained from mounting an offensive against the mode and goal of professional development for women—for example, when a woman has to make choices between her personal needs and interests and societal expectations, which she thought must be contradictory (Mohanty 2003, 14–21). This was her major undoing, for she avoided going all the way in her assessment of what it means to be empowered through educational advancement, of using the same lenses and analytical

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framework that adult educators and feminists use. Women’s development through modern education is in contradiction to the societal expectation of a woman, impeding them from using their acquired power to challenge and transform the patriarchal beliefs and institutions that reinforce and perpetuate women’s inequality. Also, unlike the real women’s everyday activities where women have power over their labor, in the formal career, there is no room for women’s creativities, but for accommodating women. Thus, to compare women’s individual needs and interests with societal expectations is fallacious and problematic. Consequently, I disagree with Bhalalusesa’s view of empowerment, which is akin to what Mohanty (2003) calls a pedagogy of accommodation, without any critical view on the dominant logic of globalization, social inequities, or the relationship between women’s current condition and their history. Like Mohanty, I do not endorse Bhalalusesa’s lack of critical view, especially her sanitization of women’s empowerment through professional development. For me, the development of women through education has led to what has increasingly been viewed as cultural imperialism, where a woman’s empowerment is measured through the liberal views and Northern tastes and hegemony, and where empowerment means individualism, competition, and dominance. It is important to remember that education was not simply extended to women for their benefit. In her groundbreaking work, The Origins of Education Systems, Margaret Archer (1979) provides an impressive documentary analysis of the institution of education, specifically national education systems that aimed at establishing modern nation-states. Archer demonstrates how nationalists, in the process of forming a nation state, actively concentrated on creating a sense of community that has led to contemporary understanding of modern education policy and practice. Briefly, according to Archer, the national education systems were systems of formal schooling whose different levels became increasingly systemically coordinated and integrated over time. Archer is quick to point that the system of national education expanded from its tiny elite base, to allow a small trickle of upward mobility and give credibility to the Napoleonic maxim of “the career open to talents.” This conscious state regulation helped the governments increase control over education, providing the majority of funds, licensing, and inspecting schools and teachers, organizing teacher training through growing networks of dedicated normal schools and, in most cases, overseeing national certification and standard school curricula.

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National education is a part of the long process of state formation. The state uses national education to educate citizens and to discipline the military. In his Education and State Formation, Green (1990) argues that national education systems developed as part of the long process of state formation that stretched in a great arch from the late absolutist states to democratic nation states in the nineteenth century. Green wrote that national education was a massive engine of integration, assimilating the local to the national and the particular to the general. In doing so, it created, or tried to create, the civic identity and national consciousness that would bind each to the state and reconcile each to the other, making actual citizens out of those who were deemed such in law by virtue of their birth or voluntary adoption. Anders (2009) and Phillips (1998) argue that national education was not created to promote equality, but to define “the other” (Colley 2004). This rather negative form of cohesion can be seen throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Aldrich (1996) observes, the term “national education,” as employed in the nineteenth century, meant education organized and directed by the wealthy and powerful for the poor and unimportant. Despite that education now plays important roles beyond developing talents for certain careers or creating a sense of community, returning to these historical roots, we see that national education emerged from, was created for, and was instituted for requirements of specific types of individuals. It is easy to agree with the rhetoric of participation that is continuously repeated in the policy documents and guidelines produced by the Ministry of Education. Moreover, once the term is written in the policy, it starts to circulate and reproduce the same rhetoric in the implementation and evaluation. It is through this process of mediation that women’s participation has come to take on its underlying artifact qualities. However, what makes this even clearer is the alternative knowledge systems that women had developed and were using in their everyday lives but what seem to be different, not because they are effective, but because they are not acknowledged or supported. The distinction between national education and everyday education lies in the fact that with national education the concentration is on formal learning and the career path and everyday education remained central to the modern education policy and practice. In this way, national education could be considered more human development. Control was left in the hands of the learner.

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Co nc lusi on This chapter has suggested a way of understanding what cultural critics call the motive level of women’s psychological processes, as well as a way to see how and why the idea of women’s empowerment is patronizing, segregating, and a tool for denying women agency. I’ll continue to add details to the process of dislocating women as I proceed; from this chapter, we learn about women’s general disposition as empowered women and women of substance and how it is rooted in their thinking. It was in reflections on actual participation in education or in women’s groups that the segregation and construction of the other was most clearly elaborated. Education and development served as key signifiers for women’s dislocated subjectivity that opened up space for discussion of some of women’s deepest gender-based desires and fears. The chapter has discussed ways in which women’s groups operate and their implications in rural Tanzania. It has examined the strategies and ideas that women have used to survive. These strategies and tools collectively understood as a form of common sense will help us understand the practice we explored in the previous chapters.

Chapter 7

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Conclusion

I

have cast a broad net in this book. The purpose was to bring to view the stories and experiences of women in Tanzania and expose the social and cultural processes and practices that have shaped their experiences. This study, while the focus was on the everyday lives of women and the meaning they make out of it, has been a voyage of discovery for me. As I observed women and listened to their stories and dreams, I could not help but see myself in these stories and see their dreams in mine, so this is also my story. The challenges and strategies that women use to negotiate their lives bear witness to persistent evisceration of their knowledge and agency. The representation of women in rural Tanzania that I have made here supports the conviction that knowledge is plural and, at the same time, political and that it always opens up possibilities while also closing doors for others. Women, in the face of closed doors, bear the burden of making knowledge plurality possible. In this book, I have proposed a legitimation and support of women’s knowledge systems, their needs, interests, and also their everyday activities. In my opinion, this is the only real contribution that an Africa scholar can contribute to the continent and in the world. There is tension that has run through this book. The argument set out here has drawn a distinction between “mainstream” approaches to women’s empowerment, education, knowledge, learning, and identity. Analysis of cultural-historical empowerment of women in education, development, and marriage in Chapters 1 through 5 shows the complexity of the politics of women’s empowerment. Much of the notions of women’s empowerment and development thinking are problematic, seeking to add women to the conveyer belt of labor. In

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this book, I argue that education for empowerment should go beyond tinkering with certificates and employment. It is not my intention in this book to argue that education is empowering or disempowering. To be empowered is to understand and to be able to question the rules and laws of society that are oppressive. In this book, I have presented research on and discussion of literature in order to make visible the social as well as political-economic relations that mediate any possibility for an acknowledgment and support of women’s knowledge systems and everyday life and by drawing on this research, the book could have taken a number of different directions. My purpose was to try to understand the full range of issues, processes, and practices that mediate women’s experiences across a variety of social spheres—at home, in school, and in the neighborhood. Although women’s knowledge and everyday activities in Africa continue to be marginalized and sidelined, this research went beyond these issues. Women’s social positions are more political than we can ever imagine; they are embedded in the entire landscape of personal experience. The key challenge in presenting this argument was to make this personal political or, more accurately, to make the social organization of African women’s lives visible. It was a challenge that, to my mind, proved to be too difficult for the majority of conceptual approaches to the issues examined in this book. In fact, I argue that these issues displayed an interlocking set of processes and practices that systematically obscure, deny, or denigrate women’s power. The solution to this initial problem was to turn women’s subjectivities political, namely, women’s knowledge systems and everyday activities as important and as of value on their own terms. Throughout, I depended on postmodern and postcolonial theories and concepts. Through reflection on the works of African feminist scholars and in particular Oyeronke Oyêwùmi, Ifi Amadiume, Teresa Barnes, Susan Geiger, and Tabitha Kanogo, my focus was sharpened and I was able to explore the development of women’s subjectivities in many contexts. Throughout the book, I have demonstrated that education and other certain forms of development initiatives have sidelined women’s knowledge systems and suppressed their needs and interests. The study has discussed the various ways in which education has transformed gender relations in Tanzania, especially where women’s everyday activities such as farming, homecare, and healing are not acknowledged or supported. Furthermore, the study has discussed the various ways women’s knowledge systems have been eviscerated and sidelined, creating in women a sense of dislocation and always negotiating their subjectivities. Specifically, it has contributed in historicizing the

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experience women of in Tanzania, locating them in a colonial context where their agency was interpreted as ignorance, backwardness and “traditional.” In the context of postcolonial condition, women have been mobilized to participate in “women’s groups,” education and in development initiatives, the processes and practices that have not transformed their gender relations. Through the process of incorporating women in development projects n Tanzania, I have shown the various levels and forms of disempowering women in Tanzania, denying their language, way of communicating, accessing the benefit of their labor—both reproductive and productive—as seen in lack of acknowledging their everyday activities and knowledge. The chapters presented in this book have provided background to the evisceration of women’s knowledge systems tracing this process back to colonial times to the present, arguing that it is the construction of women as ignorant and devaluation of their knowledge and everyday activities that have contributed to their current dislocated condition. I explored the various forms of practice that developed the individual and collective capacity of women to engage in social change rooted in modern education, Western science, and workplace activity. I argued for the social significance of women’s every day activities and knowledge systems that sustain them. I went so far as to say that it is the lack of acknowledging and supporting these activities and knowledge system that have, in fact, given rise to the dislocation of women’s subjectivities. Among the findings of this exploration was that when women share their stories, when we pay careful attention, we find that they are implicitly describing what I term “womanliness”, a process through which women came to be isolated from their knowledge systems and activities. The evisceration of women’s knowledge systems and illegitimation of their everyday activities provide a more or less direct link to discussions of women’s experiences shaped by postcolonial and postmodern conditions. Paradoxically, in many ways, the last chapter demonstrated that the ways women learn, make meaning, and negotiate their identities mediated by khanga are key to both the reproduction and transcendence of women’s social position. In this concluding chapter, I want to summarize and link the core arguments I have put forth in this book, offer several practical steps for the development of theory of womanliness in regard to the issues of knowledge systems and women’s everyday life practice, and finally, situate the main arguments in terms of the broader implications of key findings. As a means of mapping the key arguments of the book, it makes sense to begin with a brief review of the way I approached the concepts

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of women’s knowledge systems and womanliness (Chapters 1 and 2). Reevaluating the boundaries of meaning of women’s knowledge systems was the first step in making visible the development of women’s subjectivities inherent in their sense of dislocation. I suggest that the dominant notions of womanhood play a role in the way women’s dislocation fits with the everyday lives of women in Africa. In other words, it is not coincidental that the individualization, universalization, and formalization of informal and formal relations, as well as indigenalization of women’s knowledge systems in Africa, are effective means of dislocating women from their labor and from accessing power. These are ideas that make sense under the current postcolonial and postmodern situation of ordinary women in Africa. Chapter 6 offered an analysis that helped to clarify several of the most difficult gaps in dominant understandings of teaching, learning, and construction of knowledge. The detailed analysis of khanga as content and strategy, as well as text for teaching, learning, and construction of knowledge demonstrates the active and practical knowledge systems of women that are involved in shaping people’s thinking and behavior in East Africa. Here we got a sustained look at the tacit process that underlies women’s knowledge system in East Africa. Central to my analysis in this book was the need to situate women in the knowledge-creating enterprise. My study contested the assertion that women’s knowledge systems were not important. I sought to assert that women create knowledge on a daily basis and this knowledge is not bound to the constitution of objectivity or subjectivity and such binaries. This political economy of collective, social, and cultural dimensions of knowledge systems was, in fact, a counterargument to the dominant themes I outlined in the review of theories of women’s empowerment in Chapter 4, which tended to look at women’s knowledge systems as problematic. In the second part of Chapter 4, I analyzed the connection between the dominant forms of teaching, learning, and construction of knowledge in terms of a cultural order and the coding and ranking of knowledge systems focused on differentiation and standardization of learners’ capacity, illustrated by individual autonomy and self-interest. We saw how the insistence of only one way of teaching, learning, and constructing knowledge acts as a gate to other ways of knowing and construction of knowledge. In the everyday lives of women, we see khanga as a medium through which women learn, make meaning, negotiate identity, and develop. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the interview, however, was how women appropriated khanga as an avenue to channel their views,

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communicate messages, make connections, negotiate identity and hence, allow them to construct knowledge. Conceptualizing women’s subjectivity in a critical way was also important to this analysis. Looking at interviewees’ perspectives on marriage and the reasons they want to marry (Chapter 3) demonstrated the component and context of social common sense. This common sense was a complex weave of contradictory dominant discourse about women. The core of this common sense was actively produced in the family, the church, in school, and in the media as well as in the workplaces where narratives of women of substance as married women were propounded. Interviewees tended to mystify marriage in their own lives and even conceived of being married as the “must do” for a woman and not so much as a decision. At the same time, these notions conflicted with many women’s needs and interests. What was considered as a woman of substance, particularly in the context of marriage, diverged from what was more important to a particular woman when individual women took time to reflect on what they really wanted be and to do or who they wanted to share their lives with. Also contradicting a core component of this common sense was the fact that women could live fairly well without marriage and many found being single or waiting for a little longer to make a choice of a husband on their own a much better choice. Although the common sense of marriage was contradictory and fragmentary, it nonetheless played a key role in causing the majority of women with varying degrees of enthusiasm to get married at an early age. Another set of arguments that I made in the book related to the further refinement of women’s knowledge systems in light of my wish to trace the origins of the concept from feminist literature. To begin with, I stated that understanding women’s knowledge systems is not to find the difference between how men and women know, but to understand that human beings know, associate meaning, and make sense out of their existence and what they do. With the emerging recognition of the importance of how different contexts shape what and how one can know in mind, I applied Gilligan’s notion of “care” to suggest that, far from the notions of “power over,” women’s knowledge systems emanate from the position of care and connection, rather than from a hierarchy of rights. I also applied the notions of Black Feminist Thought, developed by Collins to understand the ontology and epistemology of women’s knowledge system, arguing that women’s knowledge systems emanate from the everyday life of women, where they are maintained and transformed as they are transmitted from one generation to another. Building on this point, a

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second refinement contributed by the analysis involved a more thorough and more critical analysis of the social position of women in the production of knowledge. The argument I presented in this book suggests that though the mainstream notions that knowledge is created whenever people have access to cultural tools (language, rules and regulations, etc.); knowledge as an aspect of power is both differentiating and differentiated in important ways. As I have noted repeatedly, recognition of the importance of one’s social position shapes what and how one comes to learn, know, and how the knowledge she produces comes to be perceived and used. However, the advancement of this idea, particularly in the area of women’s knowledge system can go further. For this purpose, I found the works of African feminist theorists indispensable. Specifically, it was the conceptualization that women are active agents engaging in different and multiple social spheres that was key to highlighting the women’s knowledge systems dimensions. Having summarized the relationship between the major findings in the book and the approach to women’s knowledge system I chose to take, in this portion of the chapter I want to review two other sets of findings and arguments that relate directly to the notions of women’s empowerment, which are antithesis to women’s sense of being. The first one is the suggestion that there is a set of dispositional mechanisms that can be collectively referred to as women’s disempowerment. Chapter 4 served as one of the main platforms for this argument, although the concept of women’s disempowerment is implicated in several other places as well. This sense of disempowerment is embodied in a set of processes and practices in identifying, acknowledging, and supporting women’s knowledge systems and activities. These practices are not stagnant; rather, they change with societal ideas about empowering women and incorporating them in development processes. Further, a clue to this disempowerment in the cloth of empowerment, was found in the way women were differentiated and differentiating themselves from others in the notions of them versus us, developed versus underdeveloped and educated versus illiterates. Specific features of women’s disempowerment were elaborated further in Chapter 5, where I traced an oppositional attitude toward khanga rooted in skepticism of anything that does not fall within scientific communities as hard to be accepted. There I focused on various cultural expressions such as stories, theater, languages, and other expressions as avenues for teaching, learning, and construction of knowledge. I began by establishing the important role played by various cultural expressions and communication in teaching, learning, and construction of knowledge. Marginalization of these cultural expressions, I argued,

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affect women in everyday life, in school, and in the workplace, again, suggesting the existence of something more durable than patterned forms of participation across multiple sites. It is my belief that Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa: Exploring Dislocation and Agency is well positioned to offer more than simply penetrating exploration of the process of dislocation of women in Africa. It can indeed add to the tradition of intellectuals with an ethical commitment to a new society that does not continue to cling to colonial structures of binary divisions where everything is understood in opposition, as either this or that, to a society that accepts plurality and diversity of people and experiences. I have also outlined various practical outcomes of policy suggestions that this book could support. For example, consider this statement from a woman in Yuuri: “So my problems have become my secret” (Doris Ngabanu in Yuuri, Kilimanjaro, June 2004). In considering policy perspectives, is it possible to consider women’s problems as political? Is it enough to continue with the old mantra of “women empowerment” while we know deep down that we are disempowering women? Doris suggests that there are public and private problems and much of her social and economic problems have come to be her private secret. Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa suggests that Doris’s statement expresses a deeply embedded hierarchical social position, but also her relation to anything resembling power, however narrow we may define it, remains in her imagination. Doris’s imagination, like those of other women in this book, is also the worst nightmare of feminists. It is a nightmare because women’s private lives are in fact infused with power, backed up by public life. Women’s everyday lives that are unacknowledged or supported, therefore, are about power more than the value of those activities. Likewise, the attitude toward women’s knowledge systems is at least as much about publicly wielded power as it is about their inefficacy in solving human and societal problems. But as the assertion that women’s problems are their secrets is like a palindrome, because it can be washed to read backward as well as forward. Read as “My secrets are my problems,” it suggests that politics of marriage, of unemployment, of knowledge are not marginal issues, but are matters central to the state. Doing this kind of research becomes just as serious as studying military weaponry or taxation policy. In fact, in so far as “my secrets are my problems,” the latter cannot be fully understood without taking into account the former. To make sense of the everyday lives of women in postcolonial and postmodern conditions, we also have to read power backward and forward. Power relations between women and men, between citizens

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and their government involve more than false empowerment and forced participation. Read forward, “My secrets are national,” in so far as ideas about what it mean to be a “woman” or a “man” have been shaped by national policies and development strategies, including education and employment. On the eve of 1990s, it had almost become a cliché to say that the world is shrinking, and state boundaries are porous. We persist nonetheless, in discussing personal issues as if they were national issues. We treat ideas about education, literacy, employment, and poverty without trying to figure out how the global economy operates or how UNESCO and other international organizations such as the World Bank issuing the contents of education policies conduct their business across national borders. Similarly, we try to explain how women’s everyday activities and their knowledge systems came to be marginalized and devalued without unraveling the legacy of colonial officials who turned women into resources along other resources such as land and mines to sustain their empire. Becoming aware that women’s personal problems have been globalized, however, may make one only feel guilty for not having paid enough attention to global issues. When we try to follow what is going on in global politics, we hardly see the issues that touch women directly. Accepting that personal problems are national and global and that global and national are personal, it makes no sense not to see women’s issues on the forefront. The national is personal or the global is personal implies that governments depend on certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their policy affairs. Governments need more than knowledgeable and skilled experts; they need the attributes that constitute expert performance so those experts can respond effectively to both everyday life and in the workplace. They need only military techniques and military combatants who not only are able to understand how and why their governments take the forms they take but who also are able to tell the difference between war zone and bedroom. The implication of a feminist understanding of national and international politics as personal is thrown into sharper relief when one reads “the personal problem is international” the other way around: “The international is personal problem.” This calls for a radical new imagining of what it takes for governments to ally with each other, compete with and wage war against each other. From Doris’s situation, perhaps, the best hope lies in nationalizing and globalizing her problems. The perspectives about women presented in this book seem to be contingent and the potential for empowerment run a risk of reproduction of the same. We saw how women’s perspective of empowerment and those

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of several feminists, shaped by the forms of common sense, often lacked any criticality on what knowledge is for, and for whose interest. What’s more, we expect these tendencies to be particularly pronounced when women remain isolated as individuals and small groups outside of organized collective action, as the most vulnerable members of society often are. In this way, women’s movement as the primary means of bringing women’s problems as political, national, and global continue to be one of the most important source of hope. Specially, women’s movement allows the collective impulses figured in the solidaristic network examined in Chapter 6 to be harnessed to at least potentially affect the relations of teaching and learning. Another use of this research would center on new approaches to education. Building on the discussion in the previous section, a curriculum for critical view on society and culture could focus on consciousness raising around gender, class, race, and age inherent in conventional educational thought and the demystification of the scientific way of knowing, promoting the transformation of common sense into what Gramsci called “good sense.” At the same time, women clearly need to generate discretionary energy, time, and space so that they can respond collectively and creatively to the dynamics of advanced capitalism and globalization. In terms of educational strategy, it also makes sense for women to organize themselves on existing mode of activities that they are engaged in rather than trying to invest new ones. As this book has pointed out, while learning through everyday activities is important, it is not enough to develop specific skills and knowledge. Provided that control lies in the hands of the learners themselves, formalized pedagogically organized learning has a role to play in accentuating, shaping, and linking together the broader and more diffuse learning that women do in their everyday lives. This means that women’s movement to the fore as an important organizing principle. Whether this recommendation is taken seriously or not, however, what is clear is that women’s knowledge systems, learning, and knowing depend on their networks. Learning and creating knowledge within a critical and stable community provides the best opportunity for women to collectively establish, store, and transmit knowledge on issues such as marriage, childcare, economics, politics, and others.

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Notes

I ntro duc ti on 1. I define indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) as a set of accumulated facts that are rational and that can help in understanding and sustaining societal and ecological balance, with the objective of maintaining sustainability. They are multilayered and multifaceted comprehensive facts that help in producing useful and acceptable behavioral activities beneficial to society. IKS are the sum total of information that leads to successful cultural adaptation to environmental conditions (i.e., political, social, and natural), which has been refined over the years by various communities through their lengthy histories of ecological interaction and experiment. 2. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. R. Lewis and S. Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), 49–74.

Chapter 1 1. I define women’s knowledge systems as extraordinary, well-defined mechanisms developed and used by women in dealing with economic, political, social, and environmental challenges using appropriate technologies sustainably. Women’s knowledge systems are rational, scientific, philosophical, pedagogical, and intellectual and operate according to defined rules and regulations in diverse fields such as agriculture, food preparation and preservation, pharmacology, architecture, engineering, irrigation, construction, medicine, forest resource management, weather and climatic knowledge, forecasting and weather management techniques, social relations, psychology, religion, sports, social and political issues, and so on. They are truly scientific and go beyond ordinary survival skills contained in ethnic folklore and crafts. See Philomena Okeke. “Reconfiguring Tradition: Women’s Rights and Social Status in Contemporary Nigeria,” in Africa Today, 2006, 50–63. 2. See Philomena Okeke. “Reconfiguring Tradition: Women’s Rights and Social Status in Contemporary Nigeria,” in Africa Today, 2006, 50–63. 3. Charles Dundas (May 2, 1927). Letter to The Honorable The Acting Director of Education, Tanzania National Archives File 10563.

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4. Although the concept “ignorance” may be a sociological term of reference, it is also historically constructed. In Tanzania, “ignorance” as a concept has interesting etymological history, and several Kiswahili terms can be employed to describe ignorance. Four of the most common are ujinga (mjinga), upumbavu (mpumbavu), umaamuma (maamuna), and ungumbaru (ngumbaru). Mjinga might mean one who is dense and is often used to refer to a person who lacks cultural etiquette. Mpumbavu, on the other hand, is used to denote an idiot or a fool. Compared to mjinga, mpumbavu is considered to be headstrong or too arrogant to acknowledge and accept change and therefore cannot learn. Maamuma is not very different from mpumbavu, but the condition of maamuma is worse because such a person is regarded to be indolent. Ngumbaru is another variety of ignorance and is used specifically for a person who does not know how to read or write. Ngumbaru refers to individuals who are illiterate or uneducated. Ngumbaru has been used in literacy programs to describe those who illiterate. 5. Bruno Gutmann, Das Recht der Dschagga (Munchen, Germany: Beck, 1925), 221. 6. Otto Peiper, “Über Säuglingssterblichkeit und Säuglingsernährung im Bezirke Kilwa (Deutsch-Ostafrika)”, Archiv für Schiffs und Tropenhygiene 14(8):233–59. 7. See David Clyde, History of the Medical Services of Tanganyika (Dar es Salaam: Government Press, 1962), 120–43. 8. Carl Ittameier “Die Erhaltung und Vermehrung der Eingeborenen-Bevölkerung” in Hamburgische Universität Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der Auslnaskunde, Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1923. 9. The focus on the ignorance of women and the inculcation of domestic science for women was also evident in the commissioned study by Dr. Mary G. Blacklock (1936, 224). 10. Here the concept of lifelong learning is taken in the context of living in a knowledge society in which there is no knowledge-based economy. 11. E. Swai “Women’s educational needs analysis for alternative approach to adult education in Tanzania: A case study of Kiroka and Sembeti wards in Morogoro and Kilimanjaro” (Master’s Thesis, University of Dar-EsSalaam, 1999). 12. For more on this, see Maria Nzomo, “African Women in the Public Sector: Status and Strategies for Women’s Advancement,” in Managing Development in Africa: Past Experience, Emerging Challenges, Future Priorities, ed. Sadig Rasheed (New York: Macmillan, 1994); “Engendering Democratization and Empowerment: Women’s Struggles against Political Exclusion and Discrimination in East Africa,” The Encyclopedia of Third World Women, ed. N. P. Stromsquist (New York: Garland, 1996); and “The Impact of the African Crisis on Women,” in African Women: States of Crisis, ed. G. Mikell (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

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13. See Amanda Ellis et al., Gender and Economic Growth in Tanzania: Creating Opportunities for Women (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998). 14. Mbilinyi (1987) recognizes this silence within transformative feminism in Tanzania including those on sexual expression and identity. The silence was also recognized over the following issues: the role of men in the feminist movement, gender versus women, and the role of the state in the feminization of poverty. 15. A wedding ceremony is a ritual that is performed as a preparation of a new bride before her wedding. It is normally carried out by women to teach the brides about what to expect in the married life, what to do, and how to maintain good relationships with their husbands. 16. A kitchen initiation party (Iniingwa iriko) is a ritual performed after the wedding, which consists of cultural activities that a new bride is to perform, including cooking, acknowledging, and showing respect to women in the clan. This ritual is basically a forum in which women of the clan accept or reject the new bride. 17. A khanga or kitenge is a brightly colored piece of cloth that is worn by many East African women. These pieces of cloth may be worn over dresses or as head wraps while working in the fields to keep the dust off the body. 18. Literacy in this context is conceptualized as not so much the process by which people read and write, but rather as the means by which they construct their reality.

Chapter 2 1. See R. Case, (1998). The Development of Conceptual Structures. In W. Damon (Series Ed), D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Vol Eds) Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol 2 Cognition, Perception, and Language 5th ed (Pp. 77–166). New York: Wiley; F. Keil (1998) Cognitive Science and the Origins of Thought and Knowledge. In W. Damon (Series Ed.), D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Vol Eds) Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol 2 Cognition, Perception and Language 5th ed (Pp. 341–413). New York: Wiley. 2. See also Marjorie Hass, “Feminist Readings of Aristotelian Logic,” in Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, ed. C. A. Freeland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 34. 3. See A. Schoenfeld, “Making mathematics and Making Pasta: From Cookbook Procedure to Really Cooking,” in Thinking Practices in Mathematics and Science Learning, ed. J. G. Greeno and S. V. Goldman (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998), 299–320. 4. The word ujamaa comes from the Swahili word for extended family or familyhood and it emanates from Ubuntu philosophy that considers a person as a social being, in that, a person becomes a person through the people or community. Ujamaa as a concept was developed by Julius Nyerere, the

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Notes first president of Tanzania (1961–1985) as a social and economic policy in Tanzania. See, for example, the role of Endo women in marriage in the study of Markwet by Henrietta Moore (1986). Space, text, and gender: an anthropological study of the Marakwet of Kenya. The Guilford Press. Ibid, 1 Interview with Joyce Ngabanu, Dar es Salaam, July 2005.[0] Interview with Songosia Kimweri, Dar-Es-Salaam, August 2005. See Burgess and Beilstein 1996 for an explicit expression of this sort of approach to women’s agency. Carol D. Lee, Culture, Literacy and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

Chapter 3 1. Vygotsky’s Mind in Society (1978) provides the notion of mediation: “sign systems (language, writing, number systems) are created by societies over the course of human history and change with the form of society and the level of its cultural development (7). Vygotsky believed that the internalization of culturally produced sign systems brings about behavioral transformations and forms the bridge between early and later forms of individual development. Thus, for Vygotsky, in the tradition of Marx and Engels, the mechanism of individual developmental change is rooted in society and culture (ibid., 7). 2. A khanga is a brightly colored piece of cloth that many East African women wear; it is basically a wrap. A khanga is roughly five feet by three feet and can be used as a dress, worn over a skirt while working in the fields to keep the dust from their skirts. Khangas are also worn as head wraps. 3. East Africa is comprised of three countries in the Eastern part of Africa: Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. 4. Generally, there is a border pattern around all four sides of the khanga with a central design in the middle. There is always a proverb, usually in Swahili, at the bottom of a khanga. 5. Interview with Mabula Chonya, Dar-Es-Salaam, July 2004. 6. Pointillism is a late nineteenth-century style of painting in which a picture is constructed from dots of pure color that blend, at a distance, into recognizable shapes and various color tones. Pointillism developed out of impressionism, and its best-known proponent is the French painter Georges Seurat.

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C hapter 4 1. Tanzania is inhabited by more than 120 ethnic groups and a wide variety of social relations and indigenous knowledge systems whose ideas are passed from one generation to the next. 2. Opportunities to these groups are mainly in the sports and entertainment fields. See Verman and Douglas(1994). 3. On the marginalization of minorities in the field of education and how this could be redressed, see the essays contained in Minority Rights Group International (1994) and Holmes (1995). 4. On the religious rights of minorities, see Dinstein (1982) and Lerner (1982). 5. Despite the absence of an operative declaration of indigenous rights, the principles of indigenous rights have been institutionalized in the global polity (Ladefoged 2000). Taking the lack of formal, written declarations as evidence of a lack of institutionalization misunderstands the cultural content of the world polity, which includes abstract, theorized principles for action (Strang and Meyer 1993). Furthermore, even in the absence of formal enumeration of rights, these principles have been used by international bodies—such as the World Bank, Special Rapporteur, and Permanent Forum—to guide reform of the practices of a variety of actors, indicating both greater penetration of these norms and the growth of international structure (Schofer and Hironaka 2005).

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Index

action, 1, 3, 5, 17, 31, 39, 40, 41, 42, 49, 53, 54, 55, 64, 68, 70, 76, 83, 85, 89, 92, 95, 117, 153, 156, 163, 171 action research, 3 Adult Education and Extension Services, xiii, xiv, xv, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 137, 154, 159, 182 advertisement, 10, 85 African Union, 109 age, 3, 24, 34, 56, 70, 71, 73, 84, 92, 116, 137, 169, 185, 189 agency, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 17, 30, 35, 37, 44, 46, 47, 51, 71, 72, 75, 78, 81, 82, 112, 117, 118, 125, 153, 135, 156, 157, 163, 165, 170, 171, 180, 181, 183, 187 agenda, 6, 8, 10, 22, 24, 34, 35, 102, 107, 154 agent, 15, 51, 170, 186 Allman, Jean, 81, 82, 197 ambivalence, ix, 18, 45, 47, 102 Amutabi, Maurice, xv, 106, 109, 205, 208 antiquate, 4, 85 Arab, 96, 176, 208, 209 art, 42, 45, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 94, 96, 97, 102, 110, 120, 130, 163, 166 articulation, ix, 31, 37, 40, 47, 49, 50, 82, 84, 88, 102, 119, 126, 152, 154, 156, 161, 163, 166

artifact, 18, 83, 88, 89, 90, 92, 98 artistic, 84, 94, 96, 97, 98 Arusha Declaration, 42, 61, 94, 129, 146, 203, 206, 207 association, 46, 96, 109, 113, 157, 160, 198, 199 asthma, 111 authentic, 39, 97, 119 autonomy, 8, 48, 71, 141, 173, 184 bananas, 112, 139, 200 baptism, 39 Barnes, Sharon, 13, 82, 197 barrier, 18, 85, 142 Beauvoir, Simone de, 10 Bechuanaland, 27 beehives, 115 behavior, 5, 8, 9, 17, 18, 46, 52, 63, 70, 78, 79, 82, 88, 132, 171, 184, 191, 194 Beijing, 35, 160 Berlin, 25 Bhalalusesa, Eustella, 33, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 198 binaries, 17, 43, 44, 67, 70, 97, 169, 184, 187 biography, 3, 51 Blacklock, Mary G., 24, 26, 192, 198 blatant, 31 breastfeeding, 24, 175 brewing, 21, 155 Buganda, 27 buttress, 83

212

Index

cancer, 111 cartoon, 82 cassava, 56, 112, 157 cast, 36, 37, 71, 117, 141, 181 cereal, 54, 112 ceremony, 39, 52, 59, 60, 76, 77, 104, 130, 159, 193 Chagga, 23, 27, 39, 40, 55, 94, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 140, 148, 192, 201, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208 Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), 58, 155 Chambers, Robert, 107, 155, 198 cheap labor, 6 chemicals, 111, 167 child care, 159 Christian, 77, 78, 94, 95, 96, 131, 132, 135, 136, 140, 203 cinema, 10 civilization, 111, 117, 119, 131 class, 3, 6, 7, 11, 18, 28, 31, 32, 33, 42, 50, 88, 93, 101, 108, 132, 137, 138, 154, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167, 170, 176, 189, 200, 207 codes, ix, 3, 14, 18, 29, 39, 42, 44, 45, 47, 54, 87, 93, 94, 102, 126, 130 coherent, 7, 40, 62 colonial, ix, 1, 10, 14, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 34, 35, 36, 40, 66, 72, 78, 86, 96, 106, 111, 114, 117, 118, 122, 131, 137, 140, 144, 151, 155, 183, 187, 188, 191, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 208 post, ix, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 18, 51, 68, 85, 86, 87, 101, 106, 111, 154, 183, 184, 187, 191, 203 commentaries, 81, 85, 88, 97, 201 commercial, 56, 84, 96, 97, 109, 110, 132, 134 common sense, 46

communal, 56, 102, 110, 203, 205 community, 3, 21, 22, 29, 38, 42, 47, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 64, 65, 74, 75, 84, 105, 106, 107, 109, 114, 115, 116, 121, 126, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 143, 145, 149, 154, 158, 159, 162, 166, 178, 179, 189, 193, 197, 197, 198, 200, 205, 206, 206, 208 conceal, 7, 36, 42, 141, 146 confidence, 35, 37, 38, 173 confronted, 43, 66 connected, 22, 44, 48, 49, 70, 86, 130, 146, 170, 171, 199 connected knowing, 49 conscientization, 32 conservation, x, 22, 107, 109, 115, 116, 197, 200 construction, 9, 10, 11, 16, 27, 29, 88, 91, 110, 126, 162, 169, 172, 191 of history, 83 of identity, 16, 44, 69, 79 of knowledge, 4, 5, 21, 42, 44, 46, 79, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 98, 121, 151, 184, 186 of the other, 180 social, 148 of women, 22, 26, 90, 183, 205 contagious, 7 contemplated, 43, 95 contention, 1, 2, 29, 83, 176 contesting, 82 continuum, 89 contradiction, x, 5, 17, 18, 26, 39, 74, 81, 126, 131, 144, 148, 153, 166, 173, 177, 178, 185 Copenhagen, 35, 160, 198 creation of knowledge, x, xi, 8, 13, 22, 43, 83, 84, 85, 172, 184, 186 boundaries, 53 history, 38 critical thinking, 31, 36

Index cultural hegemony, 6, 11 culture, 2, 4, 10, 23, 34, 35, 83, 85, 87, 90, 96, 97, 98, 101, 109, 119, 125, 129, 131, 141, 143, 154, 163, 166, 167, 169, 172, 189, 194, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208 curriculum, 6, 31, 45, 46, 78, 79, 99, 155, 159, 189, 205 custodians, 83, 105, 126 customer, 41 Dar-Es-Salaam, 94, 192, 194, 208 darkness, 27, 30, 138 debunk, 1, 98 decade, ix, 9, 12, 13, 15, 50, 59, 86, 107, 109 for women, 35, 160 decoding, xi, 3, 14, 18, 45, 47, 102, 126 deconstruct, xi, 1, 21, 95, 11, 157 decontaminating, 31 deep-seated, 38 deficit, 13 degradation, 11, 157 delineate, 66, 88 delivery, 3 demarcation, 10, 62, 136 demonization, 111 diabetes, 103, 111 dialogue, 4, 10, 14, 19, 37, 84, 85, 122, 125, 199 dichotomy, 40, 97, 170 dictum, 38, 101 differentiation, 3, 4, 7, 8, 68, 82, 153, 186 diligence, 3 discipline, 21, 31, 36, 179 discomfort, 31 disconnection, 89 discourse, x, xi, 2, 13, 36, 43, 45, 51, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 93, 94, 157, 169, 185, 191, 202 disease, 3, 9, 22, 23, 103, 104, 111, 112, 133, 139, 146

213

disempowerment, ix, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, 25, 32, 33, 40, 43, 44, 52, 111, 182, 186, 187 dislocation, ix, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, 17, 24, 27, 43, 55, 56, 63, 123, 161, 166, 171, 182, 183, 184, 187 dismissal, 4, 46, 97, 111, 168 dissemination, 29, 82, 85 distribution, 95, 207 diversity, xiv, 4, 15, 16, 50, 65, 72, 85, 87, 97, 116, 158, 161, 187, 191, 200 domestic, 1, 7, 13, 24, 25, 26, 56, 67, 137, 143, 144, 155, 164, 192, 200, 201, 202, 205, 208 domination, 2, 3, 9, 11, 13, 27, 34, 45, 55, 58, 61, 62, 65, 72, 86, 88, 91, 93, 108, 118, 119, 122, 128, 132, 149, 152, 153, 156, 161–62, 164, 169, 170, 178, 184, 185 dressing, 42, 83 Dundas, Charles, 23, 24, 25, 26, 128, 191, 200 dynamics, 2, 3, 19, 48, 50, 56, 63, 70, 76, 78, 82, 88, 149, 151, 163, 167, 189, 209 ecosystem, 22, 24, 26, 121, 168 education, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 47, 106, 107, 113155, 159, 163, 164, 177, 189, 192, 197, 201, 209 electricity, 38, 41, 60, 135 emanate, 3, 23, 45, 48, 134, 171, 185, 193 emancipation, 2, 7, 26, 34, 158 emancipation, 2, 10, 154 embedded, 17, 39, 39, 42, 70, 102, 111, 169, 182, 187 embodiment, 48, 98, 119

214

Index

empirical, 29, 48, 83, 109, 141 empowerment, ix, x, 26, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 111, 128, 141, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 184 enlightenment, 22, 23, 28, 36 environment, xi, 22, 23, 24, 49, 64, 68, 95, 98, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119, 12, 121, 127, 130, 157, 166, 191, 191, 198, 199, 205, 205, 108, 209 episodes, 89 essentialization, 4, 49 ethnic, xi, 3, 7, 14, 23, 27, 45, 47, 52, 58, 62, 72, 96, 97, 107, 128, 132, 134, 145, 170, 191, 195, 209 Eurocentric, 109, 111, 162 European, 4, 9, 21, 24, 252, 27, 96, 97, 111, 119, 127, 128, 130, 132, 203 evaluation, 6, 15, 36, 67, 90, 111, 152, 162, 171, 179, 183 evidence, 11, 16, 18, 22, 48, 83, 195 evisceration, x, xi, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 22, 44, 117, 181, 183 exploitation, 22, 25, 26, 27, 71, 118, 148, 164, 203 fairer sex, 12 Falk, Sally, 55, 59, 129 false divide, 10, 29, 97, 188 fashion, 11, 40, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 19, 7 fashioning, 81, 197 feminist, xi, xii, xiv, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 39, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 66, 72, 103, 120144, 152, 156, 157, 170, 174, 178,

184, 185, 18, 5, 186, 187, 189, 191, 193, 199, 200 fertilizer, 62, 111, 159, 166, 167 flexiblity, 110, 162 folk, 86, 97, 156, 191 forecast, 110, 191 foreclosure, 17, 49 forlorn, 104 framework, xi, 4, 5, 9, 10, 16, 39, 45, 46, 47, 49, 89, 99, 103, 14, 118, 119, 152, 155, 163, 165, 178 Freire, Paul, 30, 32, 154, 200 fruits, 112 Fulbright, xiv, 31 funds of knowledge, 46, 47, 79, 106 furtive, 111 gatekeeping, 7 Geiger, Susan, ix, 10, 13, 156, 158, 169, 182, 201 gender, ix, xi, 3, 4, 6, 14, 18, 21, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 3, 6, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 53, 58, 61, 70, 72, 76, 85, 87, 88, 98, 116, 127, 133, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 153, 154, 158, 160, 161, 164, 168, 170, 172, 180, 182, 183, 189, 192194, 197, 199, 201, 209 generation, 6, 24, 61, 65, 84, 109, 110, 127, 131, 137, 155, 162, 185, 195 generic, 46 genius, 2, 85, 97, 130 German, 25, 126, 131, 132, 135, 192, 203, 206 gesture, 95 Ghana, 113, 207 Gilligan, Carol, 48, 49, 185, 201 global, xi, 4, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18, 43, 50, 51, 53, 88, 103, 111, 115, 126, 133, 140, 141, 148, 149, 151, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 178,

Index 188, 189, 195, 199, 200, 202, 203, 208 globe, 2 grandchildren, 56, 60, 103 gravitas, 21 grazing, 115, 139 grown, 32, 160, 207 Gutman, Bruno, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 192, 201 harmony, 4, 77 hazard, 111, 167, 168 healer, 3, 4, 109, 11, 113, 126, 135, 201, 207 hegemony, 2, 6, 8, 11, 36, 95, 96, 125, 162, 166, 168, 170, 172, 178 hierarchy, 48, 111, 133, 163, 172, 185, 187, 202, 205 history, xi, xiii, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 33, 37, 44, 46, 49, 54, 66, 70, 78, 84, 85, 89, 94, 96, 97, 117, 151, 155, 162, 168, 179, 181, 192, 202, 203, 255, 206, 207, 209 HIV, 16, 18, 22, 140, 142 honey, 112, 129, 130, 205 hooks, bell, 10 hopes, 38, 74, 146 house-warming, 39 hunt, 25, 202 hybrid, 96, 97, 159, 167 hydrotherapy, 112 identification, 11, 28, 30, 36, 108, 123, 169 identity, 3, 5, 11, 15, 16, 40, 44, 48, 52, 54, 66, 67, 69, 79, 81, 84, 89, 90, 94, 96, 98, 108, 126, 165, 166, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 193, 202, 204, 205, 208, 209 idiom, 82, 83, 84, 86, 97, 122 ignorance, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34,

215

35, 36, 39, 41, 75, 110, 164, 166, 183, 192 illegitimate, 1 illiteracy, 9, 10, 25, 28, 30, 34, 36, 43, 105, 119, 154, 172, 189, 192 imagery, 70, 84 images, 19, 57, 85, 95, 119, 125, 148 imagination, 4, 40, 96, 147, 154, 165, 166, 187 imagined, 38, 42, 43, 147 in-between, 10 inculcate(d), 26, 31, 103, 122, 192 indigenous, x, 1, 2, 15, 34, 66, 87, 95, 96, 101, 102, 106, 108, 109, 110, 102, 113, 119, 123, 126, 131, 133, 191, 195, 197, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209 inequality, 33, 158, 160, 170, 178, 203 inequity, 1 informal, 1, 12, 23, 106, 112, 120, 145, 162, 184 inherent, 8, 18, 32, 33, 48, 96, 97, 107, 109, 121, 169, 175, 184, 189 insider, 2, 31, 39, 40, 45, 52, 120 Institute of Adult Education, xv, 30, 31, 32 instrumental, 39, 98 intellectual, xiii, xiv, 27, 88, 110, 111, 173, 177, 187, 191 intelligent, xiv, 29, 45, 154 intensification, 101, 153 international community, 3, 115 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 108 invalidate, 1 invention, 2, 10, 36, 116, 171, 206 Kanyeji, Ashiku, 3, 52, 53, 66, 68, 70, 75, 76 Kichagga, 18, 39, 40 Kilee, Ma, 3, 4

216

Index

Kilimanjaro, ix, 19, 23, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 138, 140, 142, 166, 187, 192, 198, 200, 203, 207 Kilimanjaro Natives Cooperation Union (KNCU), 138 Kilwa, 25 192 kindergarten, 27, 56, 162 Kiroka, 28, 192 Kiswahili, 31, 39, 40, 41, 155, 192 kitenge, 42, 193 knowledges, 4, 7, 8, 16, 17, 111, 113, 119, 122, 123 Kuuti, Paikin, 88 labor, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 43, 56, 58, 61, 62, 66, 71, 88, 103, 113, 121, 128, 129, 140, 141, 144, 148, 153, 157, 170, 171, 17, 2, 174, 178, 180, 181, 183, 183, 189 language, 31, 39, 40, 41, 42, 69, 82, 88, 93, 101, 106, 108, 115, 116, 118, 139, 183, 186, 193, 194, 194, 202, 204, 206, 208, 209 Lawate, 104, 105, 132, 133, 137 learner, 28, 31, 88, 89, 94, 143, 172, 179, 184, 189 Lee, Carol, 46, 79, 194, 198 legacy, 3, 40, 168, 188 legitimate, 1, 5, 16, 26, 67, 82, 106, 122, 203 legumes, 112 liberation, 2, 27, 10, 27, 111, 202 lifestyle, x, 25, 57, 59, 61, 65, 103, 110 linear, 96 livelihood, x, 2, 22, 58, 109, 115, 116, 197, 200 Loitoktok, 132 London local, 27, 130, 197, 198, 199 Lumumba, Assié, 35

maendeleo, 40, 155, 162, 164 maize, 112, 130, 133, 137, 157 Makonde, 94 malady, 29 mama mdogo, 41 manipulate, 7, 8 manure, 24, 111 marginalization, xi, 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 26, 29, 30, 33, 36, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 59, 66, 85, 86, 101, 102, 103, 111, 116, 143, 151, 156, 162, 170, 182, 186, 188, 195, 205 marketplace, 87, 130, 141 marriage, 3, 17, 41, 52, 53, 58, 60, 64, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 90, 92, 133, 137, 138, 139, 172, 173, 174, 181, 185, 187, 189, 194, 199, 204 material condition, 18, 41 matriarchy, 17, 197 Mbilinyi, Marjorie, 7, 8, 38, 114, 142, 152, 193, 204 meaning making, 48, 69, 89 media, 10, 50, 51, 85, 148, 156, 160, 164, 171, 185, 200 mediation, ix, 4, 5, 9, 12, 49, 50, 68, 70, 75, 88, 89, 90, 92, 98, 131, 152, 163, 167, 168, 170, 182, 193, 194, 199 medicine, 24, 27, 29, 61, 103, 105, 111, 113, 114, 175, 192, 207 memory, 3, 135, 200, 202 metaphor, xi, 42, 82, 87, 89, 92, 94, 97, 98 microscope, 111 Middle East, 90, 202 milk, 112, 120, 129, 130, 139, 145 millet, 112, 129, 133, 135, 157 misleading, 12, 17, 116, 156 missionaries, 4, 22, 23, 25, 27, 106, 126, 127, 131, 132, 135, 136, 155, 203, 206 Mlandege, Ashina, 88, 94, 98

Index modern education, 6, 9, 12, 13, 22, 27, 29, 36, 43, 50, 163, 178, 179, 183 modesty, 95, 144 Moll, Luice, 46 Mombasa, 42, 90 Morogoro, 42, 90, 192 Moss, 25, 205 mother tongue, 40, 106, 200 mundane, 44, 111, 174 Mushi, P.A.K., xv, 28, 158, 205 Mwanza, 90 Mwinyi, Ali Hassan, 94 Nafukho, Fredrick, 106, 109, 119, 122, 205 Nairobi, 35, 90, 160, 206, 208 Nakanyike Musisi, 27 narrative, ix, xi, 11, 14, 16, 17, 44, 45, 50, 52, 54, 121, 175, 185, 197, 199 native, x, 6, 23, 25, 138, 155 navigation, 75, 85 negotiable, 110 negotiation, xi, 3, 4, 5, 9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 24, 27, 42, 50, 52, 62, 65, 66, 68, 72, 79, 84, 90, 91, 105, 109, 125, 126, 145, 181, 183, 184, 185 neoliberalism, 4, 148 New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), 102, 113 normal, 4, 8, 33, 67, 91, 108, 169, 172, 178 nuances, 17, 39, 45, 48, 86 nugget, 2, 54, 84 Nyerere, Julius, 9, 34, 94, 96, 114, 156, 158, 193, 206 obesity, 111 objectification, 5, 7, 11, 16, 17, 89, 116, 135, 139, 142, 142, 144, 147, 163, 175 obtrusive, 47

217

Odora-Hoppers, Catharine, 2, 102, 206 Ogola, Margaret, 13, 36, 37, 206 omission, 26 oppositional gaze, 10 oppression, 28, 30, 31, 86, 92, 143, 144, 149, 152, 160, 163, 164, 168, 174, 182, 200 option, 5, 8, 48, 71, 72, 105, 114, 140, 149, 170, 176, 179 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 106 othering, 8, 52, 136 Otunga, 106, 109, 205 outcast, 71, 116 Oyêwùmi, Oyeronke, 10, 13, 36, 37, 70, 152, 160, 162, 182, 206 painting, 87, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 194 parochial, 2 patent, 103, 110, 116, 153 patents, xv, 52, 56, 59, 61, 62, 74, 104, 105, 175 pathway, 10, 69, 91 patriarchy, 5, 7, 8, 17, 26, 94, 55, 58, 60, 62, 66, 127, 143, 144, 156, 157, 163, 166, 170, 178, 201 patronage, 98 patronization, 8, 156, 180 pedagogically, 2, 30, 31, 32, 93, 170, 178, 189, 191, 197, 200, 208 penchant, 85 permanent, xiii, 38, 65, 195 personhood, 9, 175 pharmacologist, 111, 112, 191 pharmacetical, 103, 112, 200 philosophical, 1, 45, 46, 68, 84, 86, 191 pigeonholing, 53, 85 pivotal, 21, 222, 51, 94

218

Index

poetry, 102 policies, x, 4, 6, 8, 14, 34, 35, 38, 54, 60, 84, 94, 101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 115, 116, 118, 120, 142, 148, 156, 158, 161, 178, 179, 187, 188, 194, 197, 201, 203, 206 policy, xi, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 30, 34, 38, 43, 44, 49, 54, 55, 58, 66, 67, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 94, 95, 103, 107, 108, 118, 120, 126, 131, 135, 141, 148, 153, 154, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 181, 182, 184187, 189, 191, 192, 197, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209 poverty, 7, 15, 17, 18, 56, 57, 114, 142, 162, 179, 201 popular culture, 10, 85, 204 postcolonial, ix, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 18, 51, 68, 85, 86, 87, 101, 106, 111, 154, 183, 184, 187, 191, 203 postmodern, xi, 4, 15, 51, 66, 68, 88, 95, 106, 122, 182, 183, 184, 187, 201 potatoes, 56, 112, 129, 133 poverty, 1, 4, 22, 28, 59, 63, 159, 188, 193 power, instruments of, 82 powerlessness, 1, 149, 163, 166, 174, 176, 177 predetermine, 8, 48 privilege(d), ix, xiii, 21, 27, 40, 58, 148, 157 property right, 103, 110, 144, 153 proverbs, xi, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 97, 122 public sphere, 40, 145 quarantine, 112 quiescent, 36

race, 3, 6, 14, 18, 47, 50, 51, 111, 131, 170, 189, 197, 208 racism, 22, 24, 27, 106, 201 rationality, 1, 2, 46, 55, 63, 66, 74, 75, 98, 108, 109, 136, 154, 173, 191 reciprocation, 56, 69, 101, 110, 112 relative(s), 4, 25, 41, 55, 59, 71, 74, 76, 88, 120, 133, 136, 146, 173 representation, xi, 5, 12, 21, 22, 29, 38, 49, 51, 52, 71, 85, 97, 111, 156, 161, 181, 209 reproduction, 6, 9, 12, 14, 22, 24, 27, 34, 71, 72, 97, 141, 148, 157, 175, 183, 188, 197, 199 rescue, 95 research, 101 restrain, 3 revealation, 1, 9, 10, 22, 44, 51, 75, 87, 17 rice beer, 21 ritual, 39, 60, 75, 76, 77, 86, 102, 120, 193 roles, 4, 8, 9, 13, 25, 26, 27, 29, 62, 64, 65, 67, 82, 84, 126, 127, 128, 129, 140, 141, 152, 159176, 177, 179 rupture, 2, 6 rural communities, 1, 17, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 42, 55, 56, 58, 59, 104, 105, 110, 114, 115, 121, 143, 151, 159, 167 rural dwellers, 111, 153 sacred, 21 satire, 85 sayings, xi, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 98 school, 3, 11, 12, 14, 16, 24, 25, 30, 41, 47, 56, 57, 60, 83, 93, 94, 106, 107, 109, 115, 133, 137, 138, 140, 143, 166, 167, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 182, 185, 187, 199, 202, 205, 207

Index science, xi, 6, 34, 91, 109, 110, 126, 138, 183, 192, 193, 198, 200, 203, 204, 207 scientific knowledge, 83 scope, 9, 46, 108, 156 scrutinize, 18, 47, 102, 140 secrets, 38, 105, 126, 139, 145, 148, 187, 188 seldom, 6, 108 self-disempowerment, 8 Sembeti, 28, 192 Sen, 32 sewing, 29, 137, 165, 166 sexism, 22, 24, 142 sideline, 5, 15, 43, 182 sieve, 7 silence, ix, 11, 36, 39, 44, 45, 46, 50, 52, 85, 102, 106, 122, 128, 193 slogans, xi, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87 social capital, 75, 105, 148 socialization, 6, 8, 11, 16, 49, 55, 147, 159 social relationship, 48, 63, 78, 81, 151, 163, 168, 169, 191, 195 social status, 2, 5, 66, 76, 98, 162, 191 societal logic, 85 sorghum, 112 South Africa, 109, 113, 198, 199, 200, 202, 206, 207 sow, 38, 203 space, ix, 10, 13, 14, 17, 22, 39, 42, 52, 54, 58, 62, 64, 72, 78, 83, 84, 85, 96, 105, 128, 131, 133, 139, 141, 147, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 180, 189, 194, 204, 209 spinster(s), 27, 68 Stahl, Kathleen, 128 stereotype, 12, 16, 19, 37125, 127 stories, x, xi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 37, 39, 40, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 62, 73, 79, 83, 102, 112, 125, 136, 148, 151, 168, 181, 183, 186, 191, 204

219

straightjacketing, 53, 54 strategic devise, 22 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), 57, 59, 134, 142, 148, 157, 167, 200 subjectivity, 3, 4, 5, 14, 18, 44, 51, 52, 68, 69, 125, 169, 171, 180, 184, 185 subject matter, 13, 89, 99 subordinate, 7, 152, 154 Sufi, 105 surgery, 112 survival, 3, 54, 107, 110, 157, 167, 180 sustaining, 2, 65, 121, 191 syllabus, 31 symbol, 42, 57, 71, 83, 84, 90, 96, 149, 156, 169, 176, 177, 198 sympathy, 28 Tanga, 145–146 Tanganyika, 23, 26, 27, 155, 169, 192, 197, 199, 201, 202 Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), ix, 10, 155, 169 telescope, 111 tension, x, 38, 43, 62, 64, 85, 94, 154, 181 tentative, 32, 37 Thabita Kanogo, 5, 66, 67, 70, 152, 182, 202 thatching, 115 therapy, 110, 112, 113 trademark, 103, 110, 153 traders, 41, 147, 208 traditional,3, 4, 6, 13, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 36, 42, 43, 44, 46, 56, 62, 63, 66, 77, 84, 85, 97, 104, 106, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 126, 131, 133, 135, 140, 144, 147, 149, 152, 157, 159, 163, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 183, 200, 201, 206, 207, 208

220

Index

transcend, 4, 11, 183 transformation, 4, 6, 9, 10, 14, 23, 254, 25, 34, 35, 39, 54, 59, 60, 65, 69, 81, 82, 117, 132, 133, 151, 158, 189, 194, 201, 208, 209 transmition, 84, 91 transnational corporations (TNCs), 118 trust, 38, 39, 74, 104, 115, 131, 139 typification, 4 Uganda, 27, 109, 194, 205 Ujamaa, 9, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 94, 156, 193 uneducated, 7, 11, 33, 43, 172, 192 unification, 82 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 106, 188, 205 universality, 7 University of Dar-Es-Salaam, 94, 192 unmask, 21 unsubstantiated, 7 Usambara Mountains, 25 vague, 47, 97 vehicles, 86, 93, 94 veiled, 13, 15

voice, x, 14, 15, 26, 35, 37, 38, 40, 44, 53, 72, 84, 98, 102, 105, 120, 155, 156, 157, 160, 164, 170, 198, 201 voluntary, 39, 179 vulnerable, 41, 57, 108, 110, 127, 156, 189 Vygotsky, Lev, 81, 88, 89, 194, 208, 209 wanawake, 86, 87, 155, 201 wayward, 3, 199 web of relations, 48 wicked, 3, 199, 202, 205 witnessed, 43, 101, 106, 181 womanhood, 3, 5, 12, 13, 32, 49, 66, 67, 69, 70, 76, 77, 126, 157, 184, 202 World Commission on Environmental and Development (WCED), 107, 209 World Health Organization (WHO), 113 yams, 112, 129 Yuuri, 3, 105, 125, 126, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140141, 144, 145, 147, 148, 187 Zambia, 109 Zanzibar, 90