Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890 - 1990
368
Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890 - 1990
368Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253211514 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 11/22/1997 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
Trouble Showed the Way
Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890-1990
By Claire C. Robertson
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1997 Claire C. RobertsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21151-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
African woman I want to praise you the way you work in this world. Oh bless you! Translation of Kiswahili song composed by Elliot Ngubane
Should the new markets of eastern and southern Africa develop lines of sex division in buying and selling comparable to those which characterize the markets of the western and central parts of the continent, it seems likely that not only the economic position of women, but their place in the social order in general may undergo change.
M. J. Herskovits
Central Kenyan women traders and farmers were and are key actors in the development of the trading and market gardening system that feeds Nairobi. Their accomplishments represent an unheralded achievement that remains hidden partly because government persecution has pursued some of their activities. While women supported their families and took pride in their capabilities, their work was also essential to the transformation of the economy to fill the needs of the large Nairobi urban agglomeration to such effect that their lives--their relationship to their bodies, to relatives and children, and to other women involved in organizational attempts, were also transformed. Their efforts belong to the economic, social and cultural history of Africa as much as, for instance, those of Gold Coast cocoa farmers, but this history has been ignored, disclaimed or discounted as unimportant. And yet, their achievements were grand in sum, durable, transformational, and intentional. In effect, central Kenyan women reclaimed themselves by pursuing trade. This book chronicles those efforts, but also the ambivalent implications of some transformations for the women who furthered or instigated them. The increasingly convoluted world capitalist economy, race, class, ethnicity, and gender all were imbricated in the processes that caused their problems. However, they used links welded most solidly out of gender-shaped experiences in efforts to overcome the trouble that showed them the way to Nairobi.
The herstory of women traders stands at the intersection of gender, business, and labor history, with all the contradictions implicit in such a location. The view presented here is shaped by multidisciplinary lenses into a faceted invocation of the experiences of those in a city-in-the-making. Here we see the fundamental importance of women's work in creating a new world, but also how they overcame difficulties by using collective strength predicated upon the old world and delineated by the objectification imposed upon women by colonialism to mediate and transform the new situation. In so doing women offered a reconstruction of gender that has transformative value for the society. Contravening the stereotype of East African women as docile farmers, this history explores the symmetry of symbolic and material categories in making beans and other dried staples the focus of a commodity-based history of trade that foregrounds the heretofore submerged voices of those whom colonialists and tourists found/find invisible. If they were noticed, they were not wanted, like the beans in the maize fields of colonial agriculture officers promoting maize monoculture. Here I will argue that colonial experiences were key in the transformation of precolonial trade--in which women and men performed complementary roles--to a gender-segregated trade of ever increasing importance for women and men.
The progressive segregation of trade by gender, as well as landlessness and urbanization of women in large numbers, then facilitated the contemporary situation in which women traders are more autonomous but still usually act in the collective interests of their families, whose composition has been redefined, and of their coworkers. These transformations brought new ideas of self-respect among women that are helping to engender societal reconstruction, but the gender segregation fostered by colonialism in the divide-and-conquer strategy that was effective in many realms of African life now threatens to overwhelm the survival capabilities of even the most determined.
This story of women traders, of the beans they trade/d, of the development of a food provisioning system, and of the changing construction of gender and male dominance, focuses on central Kenya, first on the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya who dominate among Nairobi area traders, and second on Kamba women, for whom Nairobi trade is more recent but rapidly increasing. These traders are experiencing the full impact of an increasingly unified world economy in which some have been marginalized further and a few have expanded their businesses beyond Ukambani and Kikuyuland. They feed Nairobi, but they also now conduct much of the dried staples trade all over Kenya, an expansion of central Kenyan women's trade that will be documented here from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. While these traders now are mostly among the poor within a neocolonial economy whose comprador class claims for itself the right to perpetuate an increasingly rapacious capitalism, at the same time they have utilized creatively the interstitial opportunities presented by small-scale businesses. To do so they grappled with pervasive male dominance, which solidified with the impact of colonialism and changed its form to maximize its advantages. It did not, however, always succeed.
The goals of this study are multiple and intersecting; in delineating the history of women's trade in the Nairobi area I will stress its integration into the East African economy from the late nineteenth century to the present; illustrate the reciprocal effects of changes in trade and family structure; look at efforts at control of women and by women of their lives; outline the impact of discrimination and persecution by the Kenyan state in its various incarnations; and commend the pervasive independent reconstructive efforts undertaken by these working-class women. After examining the construction of gender in late nineteenth and early twentieth century central Kenya, I will carry out an ethnobotanical analysis of the symbolic centrality of some varieties of beans for Kikuyu women that shows the history of beans in Kenya to be a template for the history of women. As women were caught up in colonialism, marginalized, and devalued, so beans were displaced as a staple in favor of more profitable maize in a prototypical case of agricultural imperialism. Next, pieced together from varied sources is a tandem history of the women's dried staples trade in the Nairobi area and of attempts to control it. The history of Kenyan women's trade suggests that one answer to the long-standing but by now tedious debate over the dominance of local or foreign capital in the development of Kenyan capitalism can be found in this true grassroots commerce in exclusively local commodities by those whose existence has been neglected in previous studies. That development, however, both preceded colonialism and proved to be of limited value for capital formation due to the impediments faced by women and their commitment to the collective welfare. The changes in marital and organizational strategies for women facilitated by involvement in trade are analyzed next, incising the theme of working-class women's increased autonomy that they have channelled into ever stronger collective efforts.
Theoretical Premises
At the core of this story is the struggle over control of women's labor. Male dominance, sometimes less exactly called patriarchy, is not a fixed phenomenon, but is situated historically and changes along with the society that encodes it. It was firmly embedded in Kikuyu and Kamba socioeconomic structure and British colonial thinking and cultural practices. The interaction of these structures in the colonial experience generated strong socioeconomic and political changes. Colonialism in central Kenya encountered relatively unstratified societies and stratified them, using pre-existing lines of cleavage to produce class formation, which proceeded apace. Gender relations then became embedded in a web of conflicts—between older and younger Kikuyu men, between British-appointed Kikuyu authorities and anticolonial movements, and ultimately between the poor and the better off. In this respect the case of Nairobi area traders illustrates how, when economic and social interests coincide, colonialist and colonized men may cooperate in the attempt to control women. More often, however, their interests did not coincide and African men found their efforts to reconfigure gender and control women, which became an essential part of the nationalist movement, not supported by the British. Such efforts were a critical element in the objectification of women that segregated their interests from those of men. After independence controlling women became a core issue in nationmaking for male authorities, although the aspects of women's labor men wished to control changed. If, as I suggest, the desire to control women's labor lay at the root of many attempts to control women, the assertion of women's rights to control their own labor, and by extension their bodies, has both assured the survival of, and transformed, the peasant women's groups out of which the traders' groups arose. Together women sought solutions to their troubles and struggled for autonomy through their work.
Central Kenyan women to a great extent predicate their identities upon their work and have been roused to protest most when that work is impeded, exploited or distorted. Guy called "the continuous acquisition, creation, control, and appropriation of labour power ... the dynamic social principle upon which ... precapitalist societies were founded," and stressed women's productive labor in this regard. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, preeminent Kenyan writer, stressed the importance of work to the extent of making it the defining feature of history, a belief that coheres with the experiences of these women. "History is ... about human struggle: first with nature as the material source of the wealth they create, food, clothing and shelter; and secondly, struggle with other humans over the control of that wealth. Labour, human labour, is the key link between the two struggles." The intricate intertwining of work and identity, so presciently forecast by Simone de Beauvoir in her emphasis on transcendence through commitment to a life projet, is here recast into a working-class context. If women's work has been the means for their exploitation, organization around it has also centered their attempts at empowerment and the reformulation of their collective and individual identities.
If African working-class women construct themselves and are constructed on the basis of their work, elite women suffer from Western influence that has (since the Industrial Revolution) imposed notions of invisibility or impropriety upon women's work. The influence of nineteenth century European middle- and upper-class notions of women's domesticity in convincing the world that women historically were housewives has been such that the importance and prevalence of women's work outside the home has been almost completely ignored until recently. In stressing the critical importance of women's labor for the creation and perpetuation of male dominance, I am countering a tendency to underestimate its centrality in venues ranging from contemporary Western feminist theory to Kenyan government and development policies. Before industrialization there was little meaningful distinction between work inside and outside the home. A key motivation for male dominance was that women's labor was essential to survival and control over women's labor to male accumulation of surplus. The Engelian distinction between the productive and reproductive functions of labor that saw women's labor inside the home as unproductive because it did not generate profits for employers (surplus value) ignored the profits it generated by supplying related men with unpaid services. Lerner located the source of women's oppression in women's biological reproductive labor, although she led the way toward establishing that concepts of subordination originated in men's desire to control women. Sacks, Leacock and others, following Engels, linked the rise of private property with corporate kin control of ownership to the subordination of women that accompanied the rise of socioeconomic differentiation. Edholm, Harris and Young extended the definition of reproductive labor to include socializing and maintaining the labor force. They did not go far enough.
Following Kusterer, I will place women's "domestic" labor in the productive realm because it generated profits for men and formed an arena for struggle between women and men. Kusterer excoriated those Marxist political economists of the 1980s, who defeated the feminist attempt to place housewives and their work inside rather than outside the working class and the capitalist mode of production, as "technically correct, theoretically sophisticated and also essentially incorrect and fundamentally irrelevant." In his view they had ignored the feminist challenge to explain the subjugation of women as a necessary step toward ending it. He then emphasized the importance of women's unwaged work, saying that productive work takes place within the household, and attributed the Victorian Marxist underestimation of domestic work to "peculiarly male misunderstandings of the nature of production." "Things once separated from nature by human labor [which fall within the Marxist definition of manufactured goods for whose production wages are paid] require constant continuing inputs of human labor to keep them from returning to nature [labor dismissed by Marxists as unproductive because unwaged and therefore not contributory to surplus value]," he said. Women's unwaged labor within and without the home is therefore productive labor. Even in orthodox Marxist terms, it contributes to surplus value in allowing related male wage workers to work longer hours for more pay. Here I have tried to emphasize economic causality and process without the disadvantages of some variants of Marxist and neoclassical analysis by abandoning androcentrism, eschewing the assumption that only wage workers have agency and importance in forcing change, and emphasizing the vitality and instrumentality of those involved in petty commodity production and services that are not pre-capitalist holdovers but intimately connected to the uneven expansion of industrial capitalism.
Women's labor, moreover, is absolutely essential to the economy, even though usually unrecorded or underestimated in value. Without it the economy, and the society, could not function. Many have dismissed as trivial the usual reasons men give for beating their wives; indeed, the beating is condemned all the more for being done because dinner was not ready at the expected time. But the issue of women's provision of domestic services is not trivial for many men; it may make the difference between just getting by or having leisure time, surviving comfortably, with constant problems, or not at all. For most African families rural women's labor was/is the basis of survival, and there is no practical distinction between tasks done within and without the home. In central Kenya such labor produces/d and prepares/d most of the food and now is crucial for cash crop production.
Control over women's labor, whether waged or not, was/is therefore worth contesting, which is/was an inevitable result of women's urbanization. Coontz and Henderson emphasized the role of kin relations in the control of women's labor, saying that "the oppression of women provided a means of differential accumulation among men," while Hirschon stressed that "the differential capacity to recruit labour ... is a crucial aspect of inequality in gender relationships," masked by an ideology of sharing within households. Labor control is a critical resource essential to gender stratification and class formation; for instance, the majority of slaves held in Africa in the nineteenth century were women because they did most of the agricultural labor necessary to generate wealth. We can, therefore, situate control over women's labor historically.
Looking at conflicts over women's labor and its products is of particular relevance to studying how women developed the local and long-distance dried staples trade in the Nairobi area. Women's (and men's) labor in trade and agriculture was a key factor in the accumulation of wealth within households; the threat of losing control over that accumulation became a locus of conflict between men and women under colonialism. One consequence of colonialism's intentional class differentiation among Kenyan Africans was to raise the stakes regarding male control of women's labor. If land in and around Nairobi became contested terrain under colonialism, the object of quarrels between white settlers and Africans, governments of various kinds and traders of both sexes, so did the profits of trade and agriculture between women and men.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trouble Showed the Way by Claire C. Robertson. Copyright © 1997 Claire C. Robertson. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments and Dedication,Note on Currency and Measures,
I. Introduction,
II. From Njahe to Nyayo: Beans and the Evolution of Agricultural Imperialism in Kenya,
III. The Development of Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890 to 1940,
IV. "Various Nefarious Happenings": Trade, Wars and Traders' War, 1940 to 1963,
V. "Here We Come Only to Struggle": Changes in Trade, 1964 to 1990,
VI. "Seeking the Freedom to Raise my Children": Changes in Marriage,
VII. Organizing: Women and Collective Action, 1920 to 1990,
VIII. Trouble Showed the Way; Conclusion: Empowerment?,
Bibliography of Works Cited,
Index,