Abstract
The Arab Girls’ School, the first government school for girls in Zanzibar, opened its doors on June 1, 1927. An immediate positive reaction from local elites set the tone for the school; subsequently, girls’ education became one of the most promising features of the colonial administration. The school hosted siku kuu (“special days”), such as Prize Giving Day, when the sultan, his wife, and top-ranking British officials came to celebrate the achievements of students. Bi Salama, who attended the school at the time, insisted that schoolgirls were on their best behavior on these occasions. Students and teachers sat “properly dressed,” wearing their headscarves, buibuis (long, dark pieces of cloth that fully covered women’s bodies), and clean shoes. Sitting quietly, properly dressed, both teachers and students demonstrated to public audiences that they were “very respectable” Muslim women and girls.1 These scenes reassured parents that their daughters would grow up to become “good Muhammadan wives and mothers.”2 Support from the sultan and the Arab elites who collaborated with British officials to open the school won over skeptical parents. The early success of the school, in terms of gradually increasing both enrollments and public accolades, surprised officials who assumed that Muslims would oppose educating their daughters.
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Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II: The Dialectics of Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997). In colonial Africa, African women were trained in domestic science partly so that they could replace male servants in white settler homes. See
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Mohamed Kassim, “‘Dhikr will Echo from all Corners:’ Dada Masiti and the Transmission of Islamic Knowledge,” Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies 2, no. 7 (2002): 104–20; and
Alice Werner, The Advice of Mwana Kupona upon the Wifely Duty from the Swahili Texts (Medstead, Hampshire, UK: The Azania Press, 1934). See also see
Ghislaine Lydon, “Inkwells of the Sahara: Reflections on the Production of Islamic Knowledge in Bilad Shinqit,” in The Transmission of learning in Islamic Africa, ed. Scott S. Reese (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2004), 39–71. Muhammad S. Umar, “Mass Islamic Education and Emergence of Female Ulama in Northern Nigeria: Background, Trends, and Consequences,” in Reese, The Transmission of learning, 99–120.
On girls’ private lessons in the home, see: Porter, “Resisting Uniformity,” 624; Interview 020501, Bi Inaya Himid Yahya, Zanzibar Town, February 8, 2005; Margaret Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890–1975 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); and
Emily Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1989), 71–75. Princess Salme, the daughter of Sultan Seyyid Said, recounts how she learned Arabic, Quranic lessons, reading, and arithmetic from a female Omani teacher in the mid-nineteenth century.
Women also entered leadership positions in syncretic organizations in Islamic Africa. Bori healing communities in Nigeria and zar possession groups on the Swahili Coast combined pre-Islamic and Islamic religious practices and offered women new options for escaping oppression. See I. M. Lewis, Ahmed El-Safi, and Sayed Hamid A. Hurreiz, eds., Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 1991);
Linda Giles, “Sociological Change and Spirit Possession on the Swahili Coast of East Africa,” Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1995): 89–106.
Amina Ameir Issa, “The Legacy of Qadiri Scholars in Zanzibar,” in The Global Worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, Identity and Space in 19th and 20th-century East Africa, eds. Roman Loimeier and Rüdiger Seesemann (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006): 343–62. When she was a little girl, Mama Asha learned the Quran from a woman named Bi Mwanaidi. Interview 120401, Mama Asha (pseudonym), Zanzibar Town, December 6 & 13, 2004.
Issa, “The Legacy,” 345–48. Issa defines Tariqa as “the institutional expression of the mystical tradition in Sunni Islam known as Sufism.” These tariqa centers were popular among former slaves and other marginalized groups searching for new identities and access to resources as part of the drastic social and economic reorganization that occurred in the post-emancipation era. See Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 19. August Nimtz states that in Bagamoyo, “The solidary incentive of the tariqa were… attractive to women, whose social and religious options in the prevailing Muslim milieu were fairly limited. After Quran school, which was usually attended before puberty, a woman’s participation in organized religious activities was restricted because she either could not or was not expected to pray at the mosques.” He goes on to explain how women’s entry into the tariqa centers greatly increased after women’s dance societies were broken up in 1936. See
August H. Nimtz, Jr., Islam and Politics in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 130.
Elisabeth McMahon, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 143–44. According to McMahon, the concubines of elite men sometimes paid for Maulidi festivals. See also Hanni Nuotio, “The Dance That Is Not Danced, the Song That Is Not Sung: Zanzibari Women in the Maulidi Ritual,” in Loimeier and Seesemann, The Global Worlds, 187–208.
Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari, Customs of the Swahili People: The Desturi za Waswahili of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari and Other Swahili Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 55–56. The somo may be someone in the family or a close friend of the family who became the girl’s confident, whereas the kungwi was usually an African woman hired to care for and instruct the girl during the seven-day period and often again on the night before her wedding. Sometimes the somo and kungwi were one and the same (Interviews: 061301, Bi Mouna Albakry, London, June 29, 2013; 120801, Bi Fatma Baraka, Zanzibar Town, December 20, 2008; 120802, Bi Kidude, Zanzibar Town, December 22, 2008). See also Strobel, Muslim Women, 11, 19.
Laura Fair, “Identity, Difference, and Dance: Female Initiation in Zanzibar, 1890 to 1930,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 17, no. 3 (1996): 146–72, 151; Strobel, Muslim Women, 196–202.
W. H. Ingrams, a British official recording the customs of Zanzibaris in the late 1920s, noted that, in Pemba, after the dance ceremony, “girls to be married are sent for a short course of instruction with an old married couple.” W. H. Ingrams, Zanzibar. Its History and Its People (London: Stacey International, 2007 [1931]), 242–43.
Corrie R. Decker, “Biology, Islam, and the Science of Sex Education in Colonial Zanzibar,” Past and Present 222 (2014): 215–47.
There were thirty-four girls on roll at the Comorian School in 1931 (ZEDAR 1931, 13). Bi Inaya attended the Comorian community school before continuing her education at the government school. The Comorian school taught girls Arabic reading and writing, math, and other academic subjects in addition to Quranic studies (Interview 020501, Bi Inaya). According to Jean-Claude Penrad, the founders of such schools took notes from mission schools on how best to introduce secular lessons into the religious curriculum. See Jean-Claude Penrad, “Religieux et profane dans l’Ecole coranique. Le cas de l’Afrique orientale et de l’Océan Indien occidental, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 43, no. 169/170 (2003): 321–36.
Moaddel, “Conditions for Ideological Production”; Randall L. Pouwels, “Sh. Al-Amin B. Ali Mazrui and Islamic Modernism in East Africa, 1875–1947,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 13, no. 3 (1981): 329–45. See also
Anne K. Bang, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925 (London: Routledge, 2003).
Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 202–3.
Prita Meier, “Building Global but Meaning Local: Reading Sultan Barghash’s Politics of Architecture,” ZIFF Journal 2, no. 9 (2005), 77, http://www.swahiliweb.net/ziff_journal_2_files/ziff-2005–09.pdf, accessed on March 22, 2014.
Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California, 2008), 108.
Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 78–80.
Abdul Sheriff, “An Outline History of Zanzibar Stone Town,” in History and Conservation of Stone Town, ed. Abdul Sheriff (London: James Currey, 1995), 14. Similarly, the House of Wonders was connected to the domestic quarters of the sultan’s palace by passageways that ensured “privacy and seclusion for users of the space” (Meier, “Building Global,” 78).
B. G. Martin, “Notes on Some Members of the Learned Classes of Zanzibar and East Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” African Historical Studies 4, no. 3 (1971): 525–45.
In fact, Sultan Khalifa bin Harub, who oversaw the opening of the AGS, set up a pension for Salme, his aunt, in 1922, just a year before she died. See Sir John Gray, “Memoirs of an Arabian Princess,” Tanganyikan Notes & Records, 37 (1954): 69. The sultan was married to Sayyida Maktuka, sister to the Sultan Ali bin Hamud who initiated modernist education in Zanzibar. Many Zanzibari women today tell the story of Salme when talking about general fears that a woman might “break heshima.”
M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 70, 103. Combs-Schilling also states that sons were a real sexual threat to the father’s wives and concubines, women who may not have been blood relatives of the sons.
Rachel Devlin, Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 102.
See Corrie Decker, “Fathers, Daughters, and Institutions: Coming of Age in Mombasa’s Colonial Schools,” in Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vasconcellos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010): 268–88.
F. B. Wilson, Report of the Commission Appointed to Investigate Rural Education in the Zanzibar Protectorate (Zanzibar: Government Printer, 1939). Half of the boys’ schools opened between 1920 and 1939 shut down due to lack of support and “parental apathy.”
This was the female equivalent to hanging out at the baraza. My own interviews took place in women’s living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. They often involved casual conversation over juice and samosas or other local treats. For those who were initially wary of me, this time spent getting to know each other was crucial to earning their trust. On barazas and homes as spaces for public debate, see Roman Loimeier, “Sit Local, Think Global: The Baraza in Zanzibar,” Journal for Islamic Studies 27 (2007), 16–38; O’Malley, “Marriage and Morality,” 32–42.
Many Zanzibaris believed that a girl could be ready to marry as early as age nine, as long as she reached puberty before the marriage was consummated. Some girls were betrothed even earlier than this, at age seven or eight to ensure that they would be married before they reached puberty. Elke Stockreiter, “Child Marriage and Domestic Violence: Islamic and Colonial Discourses on Gender Relations and Female Status in Zanzibar, 1900–1950s,” in Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, eds. Emily Burrill, Richard Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 138–58.
Several articles appeared in the teachers’ journal that celebrated the work of the girls’ school and urged parents to keep their girls in school. See Zam Ali Abbas, “Ahsante ya Bibi G. R. Johnson,” Normal Magazine III, no. 8 (September 1929), 122–23, continued in Normal Magazine III, no. 9 (October 1929), 137–138;
Said Himid (teacher at Jambangome), “Shukrani ya Bibi G. R. Johnson,” Mazungumzo ya Walimu VI, no. 10 (November, 1932), 145;
Baba wa mtoto (father of a child), “Hostel ya Watoto wa Kike,” Mazungumzo ya Walimu, VII, no. 3 (April, 1933), 40; and
Kesi Binti Salim (teacher at the ZGGS), “Skuli ya Watoto Wanawake. Furaha ya Maulidi Yetu,” Mazungumzo ya Walimu XI, no. 8 (1937), 126–127. The Normal Magazine was renamed the Mazungumzo ya Walimu (Teachers’ Conversations) in 1932.
Saleh Muhammad, “The Evils of the Instructor of Your Adolescent Girl,” Normal Magazine, IV, no. 12 (December, 1930), 148.
Loimeier, Between Social Skills, 109–112. Some of these ideas came from Egypt. Muhammad ‘Abduh (considered by many as the founder of Egyptian modernism in the 1880s) and his followers (the Salafis) urged the reform or “purification” of Islam from within in order to produce a society that was “progressive, mobile, ambitious, idealistic, and responsibly governed” (Mounah Abdallah Khouri, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt: 1882–1922 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971], 119–20). Roman Loimeier states that Salafi modernists “did not gain a larger audience and remained confined, for the time being, to a small intellectual and arabophone elite” (111). See also Moaddel, “Conditions for Ideological Production.”
Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 75–104. Glassman highlights the role of Arab teachers, and the Mazungumzo specifically, as those who became nationalist leaders perpetuating notions of Arab superiority and contributing to racial conflict in the late colonial period. For more on the collaboration between Islamic elites and British officials over the eradication of initiation in Zanzibar, see Decker, “Biology, Islam, and the Science of Sex Education.”
Ibid. Taarab is a style of music popular in East Africa. See Laura Fair, “‘It’s Just no Fun Anymore’: Women’s Experiences of Taarab before and after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 1 (2002): 61–81.
Not only were they now burdened with another mouth to feed in addition to that of their daughter, but the parents would also lose out on the dower she would bring into the family at marriage. According to Elke Stockreiter, during the first half of the twentieth century, parents or guardians usually claimed a girl’s dower, the gift that the groom gave his bride at the wedding. This was likely because most girls were married when they were still considered “minors.” Elke Stockreiter, “Tying and Untying the Knot: Kadhi’s Courts and the Negotiation of Social Status in Zanzibar Town, 1900–1963,” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2008), 136. On the responsibility of the mother’s parents to care for an illegitimate child, see O’Malley, Marriage and Morality, 163–64.
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Decker, C. (2014). Inducting Girls into the Regime of Respectability. In: Mobilizing Zanzibari Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472632_2
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