Tabitha M Kanogo

Product Information

For over three decades, Wangari Maathai waged a fierce battle for environmental conservation, human rights, democracy, sustainable development, gender equity, and the eradication of poverty. If colonial rule was such a dominant factor, this raises the question that Kanogo, unlike Lynn Thomas, leaves unanswered: what happens to concepts of womanhood in the post-colonial era? Chapter five reviews colonial efforts to codify customary marriage law in the 1920s and 1930s to argue that contradictory and parallel bodies of colonial and customary laws permitted and sometimes limited women’s attempts to determine their marriages. Though customary law circumscribed the parameters in which women could exercise sexual mobility, individual women employed multiple strategies in engaging in sexual exchanges. This chapter emphasizes a second thread in the book that determining African womanhood was a contested process on the eve of colonial rule and that the colonial moment introduced further elements in the already complex process of formulating Kenyan womanhood.

Furthermore, African Womanhood is part of a continued wave of literature in African studies that seeks to complicate the understanding of colonial rule beyond binary of African resistance and colonial hegemony. In the same chapter, she intimates at some gender conspiracy, of men against women--which neutralizes her previous representation of the colonial system as "liberating" and "privileging" to the agency of African women.By following the effects of the all-pervasive ideological shifts that colonialism produced in the lives of women, the study investigates the diverse ways in which a woman's personhood was enhanced, diminished, or placed in ambiguous predicaments by the consequences, intended and unintended, of colonial rule as administered by both the colonizers and the colonized. She implies that Europeans and African elders seem to have conspired to oppress women legally, so that "under the colonial administration . In trying to determine the age at which women reached majority (if they did so at all) and thus legally existed independently of fathers and husbands, administrators set out on a path fraught with contradictions. Chapter four argues that the increased monetarization of dowry in the late 1920s reflected the shift from marriage as a community event to an individual event. As an activist and ambassador for environmental conservation and ecological sustainability, she spurred a movement that gained a global following.

In presenting the Nobel Peace Prize to Professor Wangari Muta Maathai in 2004, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, alluded to the multidimensional nature of this remarkable woman’s public career: Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment. Though this type of separation between men and women in studies of colonial projects in Africa has been seen as artificial (Oyewumi, 1997), through cases of the pawning of women, she shows how women surmounted obstacles to survive. Kanogo, (1980) ‘The Historical Process of Kikuyu Movement into the Nakuru District of the Kenya White Highlands: 1900–1963’ Ph.There, she began her long career as an activist, campaigning for environmental and social justice while speaking out against government corruption. Her relentless efforts empowered, and continue to inspire, many women and girls, environmental activists, and marginalized groups across Kenya. Indeed, Maathai was a woman of many firsts: she was the first faculty member and chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi, the first woman to earn a doctoral degree in East Africa, and the first person to be convicted of contempt of court in independent Kenya. Your wings are too little and your beak so small, you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.

Despite population increases, land alienation for settler agriculture, and the freezing of boundaries, families had to share the same pieces of land, which became increasingly degraded over time. Many viewed the reforestation, terracing, and other conservation measures as useless interventions that did not address the primary reason for the depletion of soil fertility and erosion. She casts women as victims whose morality, sexuality, and physical and socioeconomic mobility society sought to control.The conclusion to which the experiences of women in colonial Kenya points again and again is that for these women, the exercise of individual agency, whether it was newly acquired or repeatedly thwarted, depended in large measure on the unleashing of forces over which no one involved had control.

But as [the other animals] continued to discourage it, it turns to them without wasting any time and tells them ‘ I am doing the best I can. Kanogo also demonstrates the link that Maathai saw between political corruption and environmental degradation. With a focus on the few highly educated, Christian women, there is a tendency throughout to stress the historical specificity of the colonial period.Male and female kith and kin, Local Native Council members and political leaders, missionaries, and state officials attempted to control Kenyan women’s status through legislation and social control. Legislation tried to prevent child marriage, encourage demonstrations of women's consent, introduce formal registration and assign guardianship of children to widows in case of a husband's death. They are at least reading copies, complete and in reasonable condition, but usually secondhand; frequently they are superior examples. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account.