Tabitha M Kanogo

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No rating/under appeal/rating suspended – there are some services which we can’t rate, while some might be under appeal from the provider. Kanogo also demonstrates the link that Maathai saw between political corruption and environmental degradation.

Chapter six examines protracted missionary efforts to medicalize Kenyan women’s birthing practice beginning in 1908 through the 1940s. Maathai was a global environmental icon and change agent when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and joined an elite group of just seventeen women who have received that award from its inception in 1901 to 2018. Continuing her fight for social justice, Maathai joined the pro-democracy movement and focused on overthrowing Moi's authoritarian regime. Those seeking a comprehensive introduction to the subject should look no further, although the work of Luise White and Lynn Thomas is more innovative. In the first chapter, Kanogo examines the dilemma of African women within the milieu of two oppositional legal frameworks--precolonial and colonial--and how women dealt with them, with varying degree of success.

She believed that it was not a matter for tomorrow and that the environment is [an] everyday issue . 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. Rather, the analysis of women and girls’ negotiations of “the colonial moment” reveals heterogeneous stories of contradictions, conflicts, and negotiations in determining women’s’ agency, social standing, and identities. As exemplars of colonial modernity, Christian women were experiencing significant change in every aspect of their lives, including childbirth. Though customary law circumscribed the parameters in which women could exercise sexual mobility, individual women employed multiple strategies in engaging in sexual exchanges.

To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. Kanogo brings the reader back in time by juxtaposing Maathai's major life events and achievements with the sociohistorical context of Kenya. These shortcomings added to suspicion caused by the employment of male dressers as midwives, the marginalization of traditional midwifery and the accommodation of expectant mothers in wards alongside the sick. She casts women as victims whose morality, sexuality, and physical and socioeconomic mobility society sought to control. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work.

She shows how colonial administration, missionaries, and indigenous customs variously used clitoridectomy, dowry, marriage, maternity, and motherhood to control African women. In African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50, Tabitha Kanogo utilizes archival sources and interviews to interrogate political and sociocultural structures and practices that shaped and controlled women's lives in colonial Kenya.

The fluid nature of customary law in the precolonial period allowed, for example, individual widows to oppose levirate while leaving little legal recourse for women who had been subjected to sexual violence. Chapter seven on formal education is the richest chapter, analyzing some gripping oral testimony by individual Kenyan women who struggled to obtain secondary and post-secondary education in the 1930s through the 1950s. 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. While readers with a prior knowledge of colonial Kenya will find little new, they will appreciate the diligent survey of the burgeoning studies of African women. However, her pursuit of these issues, for the public good, challenged political interest groups and elicited extensive opposition from the government.

It is unsurprising that the following chapter is given over to bitterly resisted attempts to restrict or prohibit clitoridectomy. Maathai transformed the lives and worldviews of millions of people across socioeconomic and geographic divides, helping some of them overcome their impoverished and dejected livelihoods to become ardent conservationists empowered to improve their lot in life. The book is structured around Maathai’s life stages, focusing on milestones and noteworthy events within each chapter. She is the author of African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–50 and Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, both available from Ohio University Press.

The others are Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia from 2006 to 2018, and Leymah Gbowee, Sirleaf’s fellow Liberian who was involved in peace advocacy work among women.The chapter argues that the few women who traversed normative and geographic boundaries to obtain degrees reflected change in how their communities viewed the economic, social, and cultural positions of women. At the time of her death in 2011, the movement had mushroomed into a multipronged organization that continued to promote a holistic approach in focusing on environmental protection, the strengthening of rural communities, and the economic empowerment of those involved in the movement; today, GBM has chapters all over the world. She pursued a master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Over and over, women found opportunities to act amid the conflicting policies, unintended consequences, and inconsistent compromises that characterized colonial rule.