Tabitha M Kanogo

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Meanwhile, the urban poor are an expanding population with little wiggle room in their crowded cities. Maathai's approach was to raise awareness among rural communities, especially women, about environmental degradation (i. Depending on their location, low-income Kenyans endure different challenges, but they all face poverty in common. A social history of the Kikuyu squatters in Kenya, and their place in the composition of Mau Mau, and subsequently influenced decolonization. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account.

She casts women as victims whose morality, sexuality, and physical and socioeconomic mobility society sought to control. African Womanhood is deeply imbedded in Kenyan colonial archives, the historiography of Kenya, and combines and analyzes rich individual accounts of Kenyan women. The story of the hummingbird trying to put out a massive forest fire while all the other animals stand by totally overwhelmed and powerless is a befitting analogy to Maathai’s relentless effort to curb environmental degradation despite daunting political opposition, intimidation, shaming, and even physical abuse.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. In the past, communities had practiced shifting cultivation to enable some of the land to lie fallow and thereby regain its fertility, but this was no longer possible during the colonial period. 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 story of Mohammed Mathu, (Richmond Canada): LSM Information Centre, Life Histories from the Revolution series. She is the author of African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50 and Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau.

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. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.The emergence of individualism amongst Kenyan women and girls, Kanogo argues, involved “normative and geographical migration” (p. Kanogo shows how "the intervention of the formal procedures of colonial law influenced the cultural status of women and allowed them to find new avenues for self assertion and agency within the confines of [culture] and customary law" (p. It is unsurprising that the following chapter is given over to bitterly resisted attempts to restrict or prohibit clitoridectomy.

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.Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. If this service has not had a CQC inspection since it registered with us, our judgement may be based on our assessment of declarations and evidence supplied by the service. 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.

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.The treatment of education is particularly fine and the preference for a country-wide perspective instead of a local study is welcome. Another prominent aspect of Maathai’s public career was her deep concern for the welfare of the average Kenyan, or mwananchi. 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. Women and Mau Mau in Kenya, with an introductory essay by Jean O’Barr (London: Macmillan Education). I am also grateful to the anonymous readers whose candid comments I found useful in the later stages of preparing the book.