Gender, Power, and Agency: Re-evaluating the British Imperial Experience, by Dr Apurba Chatterjee

File:Suttee scene, with circle of spectators (6124598495).jpg

The representation of Suttee, or widow burning by an Indian artist working for British clientele, dated c. 1800. Europeans considered Sati as the absolute scourge, leading them to understand Indian society as notoriously cruel. British government saw the banning of Sati (wherein Indian initiative was nothing less than that of key importance) as the triumph of its civilizational values⁠— the ultimate gift to downtrodden native womenfolk. In reality, however, women’s question was rather marginal to colonial overtures on Sati, which were aimed more towards the domination of Indian life and culture. 

Eighteenth century was a global age for Britons: the burgeoning British Empire made it possible for them to travel and produce verbal and visual narratives of the sites visited, that in turn, came to inspire their compatriots at home to venture out, enamoured by the lure of new sights, senses, and tastes. This lure hardly just experiential; the material dimension of travel and settling in alien lands was not lost on the British. New places brought them new opportunities of livelihood, social status, and not to forget, cultural and intellectual capital. While novel geographies altered Britons, impacting their health, habits, lifestyles, and even personal relationships, they gave their imperial presence meanings in ways that suited their own ideas of self and identity. As a result, visions of no man’s land, savagery, adventure, discovery, and civilization were conjured, that validated Britons and their actions with regards to the vistas they found themselves in.

As historian Dror Wahrman has pointed out, the latter half of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of gender distinctions that we now understand as normative. An important factor that warrants an equal consideration is that of the idea of race. The confluence of race and gender in this period was crucial to the formation of standards of masculinity and femininity and the limits of those. Empire was a driving force in this process, and the notions of the feminine or masculine had come to be defined and determined by the dynamics of power and differentiation. Imperialism brought into sharper relief the ideas of gender and gender-based roles considered (or not) as appropriate. Empire was a gendered business and its attitudes reflected back on a world brought closer through movements of goods, peoples, services, plants, and animals, based again on imperial nodes and networks. The results, however, more often than not, were those of estrangement, violence, decay, and destruction.

The ideas of virgin, feminized lands to be controlled by European male explorers, visions of the exotica surging an erotic charm, and of lascivious, local women with insatiable sexual appetites leading the vanguards of empire astray— became parts of the imperial imaginary. When it came to British women abroad, their potential was discernible from the very outset. Empire gave them the opportunity to ‘man-up’ and take charge in a manner that often would not be possible at home. Managing large households teeming with native servants, British femininity got a first-hand taste of what it meant to keep together and rule an empire. Women got to become domestic goddesses, embodying marital loyalty and the charisma of virtuous motherhood as bearing and rearing generations of imperial statesmen.

British women were also proud of themselves as ‘free’, unlike their counterparts in eastern despotic lands who were castigated as backward, downtrodden, and unfortunate victims of their own societal conditions. These assertions came at a time when British administrators were confronted with resistance from native female rulers and stateswomen who, in contrast to British women, enjoyed real socio-political power. The idea of colonized women as inferior, in fact, was part of limiting their agency. It enabled the British to exploit the sexual, maternal, diplomatic, and political labours of their native partners and concubines, known as bibis in India. Children born of such unions were taken and shipped away to be raised as British, while their mothers faded away into obscurity, having almost never been acknowledged publicly in the first place.

Native men were also entrapped within the hierarchies of race and gender. While the African hypermasculinity baffled Europeans, to British artists like William Hodges, Indian men looked like tender females with slender bodies. British idea of colonial masculinity veered constantly, according to their interests of imperial power and authority. For example, Belligerent native rulers were viewed as tyrants and those whose kingdoms were taken over by Britons were deemed as meek, effeminate and inept, in early colonial India. In the later period, criticism of colonial administrators became a mark of effeminacy while fighting on the British side signified true-blue martialness. British manhood was forged in the crucible of empire; its representation extending beyond war and administration on to the pursuits of pleasure, sports, and cultural refinement.

Although largely denied, empire remains at the heart of our existence. As we understand gender as a socio-cultural construct, it is imperative that we acknowledge how imperialism is an inextricable component of the social and political order in question. This, in turn, would help us evaluate how gender bias is ultimately connected to a discriminatory schema that has benefitted and unfortunately, still benefits some parts of the world at the cost of others. The recognition of our imperial inheritance is the way forward as we seek to imagine and build more inclusive, equitable, and above all, humanitarian futures together.

File:Boating (6124606361).jpg

Boating, dated c. 1920, by one of the renowned Indian painters of the twentieth century, Jamini Roy. 1920 was a crucial year in Roy’s career, as he moved from a predominantly Western aesthetic to Indian folk artistic traditions. The painting here is vibrant, in the spirit of celebrating the Indian everyday life. The centrality accorded to three women in the image (with one of them raising a finger, perhaps a sign of her esteem) is worthy of note. 

Dr. Apurba Chatterjee is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Science at the Department of History, University of Reading. Her present research deals with the visual regime of medicine in late colonial India.

A Brazilian Woman’s Story: Changing Identities between Slavery and Freedom in the 1880s, by Visiting Professor Maria Helena Machado

On 2nd March 2022, Visiting Professor Maria Helena Machado delivered a fantastic presentation to the Gender History Research Cluster students and staff at the University of Reading. If you missed the Women’s History Month event, read on for brief summary of Professor Machado’s lecture. You can also read her forthcoming chapter in the edited volume Boundaries of Freedom.  

Mina Yoba, Augusto Stahl, Rio de Janeiro, (1865) Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

In the 1880s, a woman known by two names — a “25 year-old fula (dark skin mixed race), missing her front teeth” — zizagged between the coffee regions of the Vale do Paraíba and the Capital of the Brazilian Empire. Always itinerant, always seeking the freedom to come and go as she pleased, the free Benedicta Maria da Ilha (who was also the enslaved Ovídia) rambled from place to place, hiring out her domestic services and forging bonds with multiple protectors, who would later willingly defend her when she was “unjustly” imprisoned as a fugitive slave. In a peripatetic life that always circled back to the capital city of Rio de Janeiro, Benedicta/Ovídia protagonized multiple flights, misadventures, and hairpin shifts in fortune. An extensive judicial complaint detailed Benedicta/Ovídia’s many comings and goings. In it, our protagonist presented a narrative — her own narrative — of an identity built around constant displacement. Yet meticulous subsequent investigations — which privileged the voices of her master, of judicial authorities, and of medical-legal experts — toppled this constructed identity, concluding that she was indeed Ovídia, a woman enslaved to Major Fernando Pinheiros, a well-established resident of the Imperial Capital. This study unravels during the final years of slavery in the 1880s, a time marked by the widespread dislocation of people at various stages of liberation — slaves, fugitives, and the newly free, seeking new social and geographic spaces in which to recommence their lives. Yet these processes of physical displacement were highly gendered. Men and women coming out of slavery clearly faced different social challenges: among women, the path to autonomy had to be continuously negotiated within the private realm of domestic labor and explicit personal dependency.

Professor Maria Helena Machado is a Levehulme Visiting Professor from the University of São Paulo. We are delighted to have her with us for Women’s History Month.

 

LGBTQ+ History Month: Coming Out in the Archives, with Amy Austin and Vicky Iglikowski-Broad

Join PhD Student Amy Austin in conversation with Vicky Iglikowski-Broad, principal records specialist in diverse histories at the National Archives, as they discuss accessing LGBTQ+ histories within the archives.

Together, Amy and Victoria explore the challenges of navigating hidden material, and the opportunities for uncovering rich and diverse life histories if you know where to look! From national police archives, to regional records, to personal papers and family histories, research of sexualities, queer histories and gender nonconformity is reaching new heights.

Listen to their discussion below to find out more about LGBTQ+ histories ‘coming out’ in the archives.

You can visit the National Archives new exhibition ‘Beyond the Roar‘, which explores forgotten histories and includes collections on LGBT lives.

If you are interested in conducting archival research of your own, this handy National Archives guide will point you in the best direction to start!

Amy Austin is a PhD Candidate in History, specialising in transgender history of modern Britain. You can also catch Amy on the podcast Surprisingly Brilliant, discussing transgender identities in 1800s Britain with Susan Stryker and Laurie Metcalf.

Vicky Iglikowski-Broad  works as Principal Records Specialist in Diverse Histories at the National Archives, developing collections on the black British civil rights movement including the UK Black Power Movement and the trial of the Mangrove Nine, as well as the development of LGBTQ rights and queer spaces.

Sugar and Slavery: Reproductive Mills, by Jude Reeves

Reposted from Reading History blogs.

I have been given the opportunity to share my experience working as an intern at the Mills Archive Trust on Watlington Street, a registered charity dedicated to the protection and preservation of records of milling history, in the summer of 2021. My placement was funded by the University of Reading’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities (UROP) programme, which offers six-week funded student research projects, supervised by a member of staff, in the summer vacation before final year.

This placement involved exploring how sugar milling during the era of slavery contributed to the development of new global markets in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. I researched the role played by enslaved people, especially women, in sugar milling and how this changed over time. I researched technological changes in sugar milling and I also considered the legacies of the subsequent decline in sugar milling on Caribbean islands in relation to the rise of tourism on the islands. My findings have all been collated into a digital exhibition which can be accessed, below. These are important subjects to research as Britain as a nation increasingly confronts its colonial past and seeks to develop more inclusive histories and associated teaching resources.

My placement saw me moving between the office of the archive and the university library to utilise both places’ resources, supervised by Emily West in the Department of History, and Liz Bartram, Director of the Mills Archive Trust. It was my first chance to be in an archive – COVID has a lot to answer for in that respect! Having begun university in 2019 and then going into lockdown in March 2020, this was my first opportunity to gain hands on experience in heritage and to get to physically touch history and learn in such a visual way. When I began my placement, I knew very little about the history of milling and so I was apprehensive about how I would settle into the research. It turns out, it was far more accessible than I expected. The first two weeks of my placement were full of reading, reading, and more reading. Getting my head around the topic and building my confidence were my top priorities of the first couple of weeks to make sure I felt confident going into the next stage of my placement.

The second half of my placement was surrounding the creation of the literature for the digital exhibition, including making use of the Mills Archive Trust’s extensive collection of images related to sugar milling. It made me focus in on selecting the best material that I had collected and collating it into a coherent narrative for the audience to view. This was where I felt I gained the most from my time at the archive, I was introduced to a totally new way of writing and presenting material. Until this point, I had only written in an academic style and in a rather passive voice. This was the first time I had written in such a direct way and it helped me develop an understanding of the way curators present digital exhibitions.

Partaking in the UROP scheme has been a truly formative experience. It has given me the opportunity to explore different areas of history and various jobs in the heritage sector. It has further invigorated my desire to work in curatorship in the future and I cannot thank Liz and everyone else at the archive enough for taking me under their wing and giving me this fantastic experience during possibly the most seminal period of my academic life.

Jude Reeves is a third-year student studying History and English Literature. Her UROP project focused upon creating a digital exhibition which displays the links between sugar milling in the Caribbean and the treatment of enslaved people, especially women. See here to view the digital exhibition of Jude’s UROP project at the Mills Archive Trust.

Learn more about the Mills Archive Trust and the University of Reading’s UROP programme.

Jude will be giving a presentation about her project via MS teams on Wednesday 27th October at 1pm. To receive the joining link, please email e.r.west@reading.ac.uk.

Black History Month: Celebration Through the Lens of a Zimbabwean Female Liberation Fighter, by Shingi Hopkins

Maggie Caroline Katsande, former liberation fighter

Black History Month is a celebration of outstanding excellence from the black community. In the spirit of celebration, this blog explores the feeling of jubilation amongst female liberation fighters of the Second Chimurenga of 1965-79. The Second Chimurenga resulted in a ceasefire which liberated Zimbabwe from the white British minority government of Ian Smith. Thus, there were two critical moments of celebration for those involved in the liberation struggle: first, the end of the war marked by the ceasefire as a result of signing the Lancaster Agreement 1979 and, second, 18 April, the official date of when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe after the British-supervised independence election of 1980, which resulted in Robert Mugabe becoming the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. 

I asked a former fighter what celebration means to her when she remembers these two events. Maggie Caroline Katsande, who joined the movement at 15, stated the following about what these dates represented:

‘When the ceasefire was called, we were not pleased. We thought it was a trap. There were rumours that when we arrived at the camp, we were all going to be killed point-blank. So it wasn’t a happy day’.

The imagery of the ceasefire in Zimbabwe’s collective memories is that it was filled with song and dance. The triumph and strength of those who were responsible for the country’s liberation is vividly represented in videos, pictures and books on the liberation struggle. In reality, after years of living in the terra incognita of Mozambique working as a political commissar, trust was not easy, and celebration was not immediate.  

In contrast, her memory of the 18 April celebrations (when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe) was filled with the hope of a new dawn for the nation she for which she fought. Finally, there was a purpose to the journey she had embarked on several years before. Maggie continues: 

‘We were happy, but we were still vigilant because we were taught to be always vigilant. Although we were on edge because we were commanders in a group, there was a sense of security, so we celebrated in full. Our hearts were full of happiness about what we had achieved. We cried tears of joy, but we were still ready to fight if anything happened’. 

Looking at the current Zimbabwe Maggie states: 

‘When thinking of Zimbabwe today, we celebrate because we managed to see a free nation. At the same time  sad because my fellow Zimbabweans who fought with us did not manage to see Zimbabwe today. They never made it out of the war and are not here to see it. Therefore, celebrating is bitter-sweet’. 

Celebration during Black History Month brings up a complex mix of emotions. We celebrate the accomplishments of the movement of equality for black and ethnic minorities, but do not forget that for us to celebrate today others had to suffer. As questions continue about the long-term impact of the changes professed during the second wave of Black Lives Matter and meaningful representations of diversity & inclusion in practice, we can see parallels with the complex, mixed emotions Maggie felt as she celebrated liberation in our experiences of celebration during this Black History Month.

Shingi Hopkins is a Phd student in African History at the University of Reading. She specialises in Zimbabwean history during and after colonialism with a keen focus on the feminist movements and ideals throughout that time.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Literature Prize, and a Challenge to White Fragility, by Dr Heike I. Schmidt

Reposted from University of Reading History Blogs

NPR, the US American public radio station, was broadcasting some critical reporting on the day of the announcement of the 2021 Nobel Literature Prize, 7 October. The journalists were discussing that, while the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o had been nominated many times, surely again the Nobel Committee would name not an accomplished and celebrated author from the global south, let alone a black writer, but to what many would be an obscure artist or eccentric choice of usually a white male from the west. Then the news broke that Zanzibari born Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Prize, the only second black African author, after Wole Soyinka from Nigeria in 1986, among a list of white writers from the region spread across 1957 to 2008. This set news agencies scrambling to find information on Gurnah and his work.

Much can be noted about this, not least considering that in addition to older forms of oral literature such as epics, Africa’s rich literary output since the mid-20th century in the genre of the novel has not merely added to or enriched the literary corpus. A British colleague pointed out to me a few years ago that literature is what was written by British authors up to 1900 and another colleague added that of course in English lessons at school one reads authors whose first language is English. The range of views on what that corpus encompasses still includes a significant articulation of ignorance, white privilege, and indeed what Robin DiAngelo coined ‘white fragility’, here the fear that ‘the other’, i.e. in this case non British English writers, the global south, black authors, has produced art that does not just rival but that stands shoulder to shoulder with works from the west.

Abdulrazak Gurnah (*1948)
By PalFest – originally posted to Flickr as Abulrazak Gurnah on Hebron Panel, CC BY 2.0

When fellow Zanzibari born and British based artist Lubaina Himid won the Turner Prize in 2017, annually awarded to a British Artist (based or born), she was the first black woman to achieve this prestigious honour since its inauguration in 1984. Himid emphasises how much her positionality as a black woman informs her art and chosen role as a cultural activist. In whatever manner Abdulrazak Gurnah wishes to identify – black, Zanzibari, diasporic, after having lived the majority of his life in Britain – his art must be foregrounded in this critical discourse of the asymmetry of power in cultural, economic, and global relations between the west and the global south.

The Nobel Prize committee issued the Literature Prize announcement and press release with this explanation: Gurnah won ‘for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.’[1] This author cannot claim to have read all of Gurnah’s literary output. But there are two aspects that as an Africanist and gender historian one may take some issue with. The verb ‘penetration’ is an unfortunate choice for various reasons not least because it has been shown that it represents an androcentric and sexualised view of power and forcefulness that was part of the colonial and imperial discourse.[2] More importantly, one particularly celebrated work by Gurnah is his tremendous novel Paradise (1994) which is a beautiful, troubling, and wonderfully complicated exploration as a coming of age story of a boy, Yusuf. It is set in the early colonial period in what today is Tanzania, consisting of the mainland, first colonised by Germany as German East Africa from the late nineteenth century – and then after World War I handed over by the League of Nations to Britain as mandated territory when it was renamed Tanganyika – and the islands of Zanzibar which were under British rule. Both gained independence in the early 1960s and after a revolution in Zanzibar chose to join as the Republic of Tanzania in 1962. Gurnah carefully situates the novel indicating that German rule had arrived without engaging the theme of colonialism at all. Instead of, to paraphrase the Nobel announcement, ‘penetrating the effects of colonialism’ what Gurnah does brilliantly in this novel that made him globally famous is to look into the complexities of Swahili society and the lived experience of a boy pawned by his parents from a Swahili town in the interior to the coast.

Hamish Hamilton: London, 1994

The complex negotiations that characterised identities of the western Indian Ocean became even more pronounced in the nineteenth century. The volume and geographic reach of the East African slave trade increased after abolition in the Atlantic, and the Sultan of Oman moved his capital city to Africa, anointing himself the Sultan of Zanzibar, as it was here where the emirate was generating its wealth and where direct control of the merchant activities was important, with the main palaces facing the harbour, with the warehouses at their feet. The exceptional choice of composing this coming of age story of a boy before abolition of slavery on the islands of Zanzibar in 1897 and on the mainland in 1922 was, when first published, and is to this day mesmerising and astonishing. Who could one be in this world? With the boy Yusuf experiencing both bondage and accompanying a slave trading caravan into the interior, first love across ethnic boundaries with the complicated articulations of slave, Swahili (free or unfree), Indian, and Arab as some of the identities, in a predominantly Muslim world where Islam having arrived a thousand years before, the reader is literally and metaphorically taken on a moving exploration of self. One of the uncomfortable identity markers is the African and Arab othering of non-Muslims as washenzi (Kiswahili: barbarians, uncultured people) in contrast to Muslims as ustaarabu (Kiswahili: civilised). In the understanding of the time washenzi could be enslaved.

The novel Paradise challenges western stereotypes of Africa as a continent of tribes, as Africa predominantly shaped by the black Atlantic, as Africa south of the Sahara a Christian world region threatened by recent Islamicist extremism. It takes the reader on an at times uneasy path, accompanying Yusuf growing up as he negotiates manliness and masculinity and tries to find a place in the world he inhabits, something that existentially all humans do as a rite de passage through puberty. For many westerners, and especially those with white privilege, that lived experience appears safe, achievable, and certainly well-deserved. What maybe is most astonishing about Gurnah’s literary achievements is that he weaves narrative without pointing an educational finger. His art invites the reader to travel and explore the human experience that we all share, takes us to raw and even painful places but also the magically beautiful and secluded garden where Yusuf experiences the longing of first love.


Dr Heike I. Schmidt is an Associate Professor in African History at the University of Reading, specialising in gender, colonialism, violence & conflict, nationalism, and identity. Dr Schmidt is currently writing a gendered history of violence and the colonial encounter.

[1] The Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/press-release/, 7 October 2021.

[2] Much has been published since. For an early treatment, see H. I. Schmidt, ‘”Penetrating” Foreign Lands: Contestations over African Landscape. A Case Study from Eastern Zimbabwe’ Environment and History 1, no. 3 (1995), 351-376.

Celebrating Black History Month: Citizenship, Belonging and the Political Imagination of Women in Rhodesia, by Shepherd Mutswiri

I was struck by the imposing Irish symbols and their historical meaning. The Irish Defence Forces marched on stage holding the Irish flag which had been chosen as the national flag during the Irish War of Independence in 1919.  As I sat there, I heard the national anthem and I looked up with a great sense of belonging and pride. Then we all stood up and pledged our fidelity to the Irish State. The Army Band under the command of Captain Carroll provided the music that day. The carefully choreographed ceremony was celebratory, and the mood was jovial, but it was the simple but poignant display of patriotism that was immensely moving. It left an indelible impression on me. Since then, my identity and belonging were intricately interwoven with the past and future of the Irish State, while being immensely proud to be Zimbabwean. When I look back at this internalization of symbols and images on the day of my Irish citizenship ceremony, I realise that identity is not static.

I had been a bit fraught wondering how long my application would take, but it turned out not to be an arduous wait. Alan Shatter, Minister for Justice (2011-2014) cleared a backlog of over 20,000 citizenship applications and in 2011 introduced the first-ever citizenship ceremonies in Ireland. Shatter was born to a Jewish family in Dublin. He remarked on the day of my citizenship ceremony how immigrants had contributed positively to Irish society.  Sadly, his reputation went up in flames in 2014 after a report by a barrister raised concerns about whether Minister Shatter had properly investigated complaints by a whistle-blower concerning Garda (national police force) misconduct. He would later write in his book that, ‘After my resignation from government all of the allegations that led to my political downfall would be discredited and established to be entirely untrue by two different independent statutory Judicial Commissions of Investigation’. He observed that ‘truth and justice matter but they do not inevitably win out’.[1]

Often tied to the idea of citizenship is the question: what underlies a sense of community and how is it constructed? Anderson (2006) suggested that communities are imagined through print culture.[2] Allman (2013) suggested that it is time to go beyond imagined communities that were formed through a shared print culture and explore how community was constructed through forms of culture such as song and dance to excavate claims of nationalism in performance.[3] This idea tests the limits of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities.

Belonging is an ongoing process that involves membership in, or exclusion from a community. In this regard, when people negotiate identities, it is done so with other people’s consent.  Newcomers to a community may not be imagined to be part of that community and shared identity might not necessarily be extended to them. Furthermore, others may choose not to seek belonging or reciprocal obligations that come with certain social identities. The concept of belonging is central to our understanding of how people ascribe meaning to their lives. The ascription of ethnic identities is a common subject in African studies. Ethnic naming and how people were categorised into distinct groups during the colonial period is also essential in researching belonging. Worby (1994) observed that the power to name others, and the authority to create maps and boundaries to categorise ethnic identities and culture formed an important part of colonisation.[4] These divisions had the potential to undermine or marginalise certain groups. A similar concern with the interaction between inventions and imaginings has been central in Terence Ranger’s writing on Zimbabwean history. His early work situated this dialectic in the form of contestation between collaboration and primary forms of resistance to modern political nationalism.[5] His complementary perspective on resistance and imaginings provided a more dynamic counterpoint in the face of any repression and oppression.

I would like to go back to the point Alan Shatter made about truth and justice. It resonates with what Cornel West, a scholar of African American studies perceives to be important in any discussion about gender, race, or equality. He states that ‘The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak’.[6] In analysing the transition from the imperial system to nation-states, some voices have been misrepresented or ignored. Oppressed peoples have often used religion and culture to express their freedom. In the 1940s and 1950s, Africans were driven off their land by the colonial state and put into Reserves which led to crippling overcrowding in Makoni, Manyikaland in Zimbabwe. In 1965, the then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson sought to decolonize Southern Rhodesia and bring majority rule, but the Rhodesian Front (RF) led by Ian Smith’s minority government resisted the ‘winds of change’. To avoid majority rule, RF illegally declared independence from Britain. Although Britain was still legally responsible for Southern Rhodesia, it had great difficulty asserting power to end Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from 1965-1979. In the 1950s and 1960s, people in Makoni were desperate to align with anyone who would help them fight land alienation as a result of RF’s policies. Unfortunately, the revolutionary nationalists did not have it easy either. Nationalist parties were banned, and their revolutionary leaders were put into detention in 1964 and for 8 years there was no formal organisation of African opposition in Makoni. The banned political parties formed African National Council (ANC) and pinned their hopes on a Bishop of the American Methodist Church, Abel Muzorewa to lead the party in their absence.[7]

Women’s agency has previously been marginalised in political discourse and they were often regarded as passive observers in nationalist discourse. However, in Makoni, Ranger argued that the ANC nationalist party acquired most of its energy from the political participation of Rukwadzano Rwe Wadzimai (RRW), a women’s self-help group within the American Methodist Church.[8] The RRW women played a huge role in nationalist activities by taking part in pro-Muzorewa political protests. This mobilisation added to the fight against the colonial state, engendered by an idea of citizenship and belonging. In 1979, for the first time in the country’s history, citizenship was expanded to incorporate black Africans after Ian Smith conceded to ‘one man one vote’ to Rhodesia’s 6.5 million blacks and 268,000 whites.

Frederick Cooper has challenged historians to investigate the dynamics of citizenship in colonial Africa. Citizenship was not just about rights, but about belonging to a political unit that could make demands on its citizenry.[9] Social movements could also operate within the imperial system and make demands on the colonial state. More importantly, the political imaginations of workers, peasants or women did not always fit neatly into the nationalist framework.[10] We must reflect on the ethical importance of respecting these deeply interwoven narratives. To accommodate various imaginativeness that existed in Rhodesia, we must recapture the political imagination of RRW women through the appropriation of Christian theology and culturally idiosyncratic agency. This will require going beyond Benedict Anderson’s print capitalism’s explanation of imagined communities to looking at how political imagination was performed and articulated.

Recently scholars have looked at music and dance as forms of culture that not only construct but reflect claims of nationalism in performance. The performative art of song and dance had meaning in the lives of RRW women. Perhaps now we can begin to ask questions about how a sense of community can be constructed through songs and dance. This will allow us to get a clearer picture of the important roles played by women in mobilising and performing nationalism.

Shepherd Mutswiri is a PhD Student of History, specialising in nationalism and religion in Zimbabwe between 1960 to 1980.

[1]Alan Shatter, Frenzy and Betrayal: The Anatomy of a Political Assassination, (Dublin, 2019), pp.7-9.

[2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, 2006), pp. 9-37.

[3] Jean Allman, ‘Between the Present and History: African Nationalism and Decolonization’ in: John Parker and Richard Reid (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford, 2013), 10-11.

[4] Eric Worby, ‘Maps, Names, and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20, no. 3 (1994), pp. 371-92.

[5] Terence Ranger, ‘Connections between “Primary” Resistance Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa’, Journal of African History, 9, 3 and 4 (1968); ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

[6] Cornel West, There Is Joy in Struggle, Harvard Divinity School. (2019).

[7] Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago, 2015). p.214.

[8] Terence Ranger, Religion and Rural Protests: Makoni District, Zimbabwe, 1900 to 1980′, in J. Bak and G. Benecke (eds), Religion and Rural Revolt, papers presented to the Fourth Interdisciplinary Workshop on Peasant Studies, (British Columbia, 1982). p. 329.

[9] Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York, 1996). pp.266-268.

[10] Jean Allman, ‘Between the Present and History, p.10.

 

Great Expectations in Zimbabwe: (White?) Femininity and Womanhood, by Dr Heike I. Schmidt

Summer in Zimbabwe is a time of expectation. As the days become warmer, eventually the nights lose their biting cold, and the breath is no longer visible in the morning. It is a time of waiting for the rain. With only one rainy season to bring the sustenance that ancestors, god, and climate – despite its change – provide in nurturing the nation, the waiting can turn into joy or eventually to desperation if the rains fail and drought leads to famine. Meanwhile rural landscapes are transformed, announcing impending summer, as msasa trees sprout new leaves, red before changing into magnificent fresh green. With the relentlessly bluest late winter skies, free of clouds, the shade of msasa trees creates hues of red and pink, and beautiful views stun as the spectacular.

Msasa Tree, Nyanga, © Heike I. Schmidt

One legacy of white settler rule that lasted until 1980 in Zimbabwe is that urban planning included the creation of colour schemes for each city through the planting of at times exotic trees, seasonally turning entire streets and even boroughs violet, yellow, read, or orange. During summer, descending the mountain pass into Mutare, it looks as if the city is on fire, dowsed in the red blossoms of the flamboyant trees.

Flamboyant Tree, The Avenues, Harare 1975, © Wikicommons

                       

Cassia Tree, Mount Pleasant, Harare, © Heike I. Schmidt

Most resonant with the theme of summer love are the jacaranda trees that line the Avenues in Harare, originally a middle-class neighbourhood reserved for white residency, just north of the capital city’s centre. Their effect is quite similar to lilac, evoking the senses and enticing desire. But experiencing jacaranda trees in Zimbabwe is also decidedly different from early summer lilac in Europe.  Jacaranda begins to blossom as winter vanes and the rising temperatures and the expectation of rain settles into one’s body, noticing the first clouds arriving, walking along the Avenues under the canopy of light purple blossoms, the scent caressing one’s senses. When wind, and eventually the rains, strike the trees, the petals tumble to the ground in a shower of violet scent that in darkness resembles snow.

Jacaranda trees, Avondale, Harare, © Heike I. Schmidt

From the perspective of white lives, Zimbabwean summer as a time of love, passion, and self-recognition, has maybe been best expressed by Doris Lessing. Already in her debut novel, The Grass is Singing (London, 1950) did Lessing capture the colonial encounter between white and black lives in the colony magnificently, by directly addressing gender in juxtaposing her main characters, the white madam and the African worker on a run down farm. The novel shows the necessary and tragic failure of the primacy of white privilege, here in the guise of a poor white farming couple. The crackling of the tin roof of the farmhouse under the stifling summer heat, as these white lives become undone, remains a palpable reminder with the reader long after setting the novel aside.

Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013), © Wikicommons

Born to British parents in Iran and having spent most of her childhood and formative years in what then was Southern Rhodesia, Lessing published a series five fictionalised memoirs, Children of Violence (1952-1969), four of which are based on her life in Zimbabwe until she left for London, thirty years old, in 1949. In the second volume, A Proper Marriage (London 1954), her protagonist Martha lives in Harare during World War II. Pregnant with their first child, her husband occupied with his own concerns, Martha feels overwhelmed, lost, and recognises that having become a colonial wife did not bring her the freedom and self recognition for which she is yearning. She struggles with her life, doubts her decisions, and finds herself reduced to her heavily pregnant body that makes her uncomfortable and restless as she is expected to be out of sight, proper and respectable, in a small flat in the Avenues. The summer heat and the pounding rain make her feel isolated, lonely, and undone, until one day, when her friend Alice visits, also expecting, they decide to go for a drive. Lessing observes that even before they leave the flat the decision and getting up to act upon it recovers the women’s self respect. It is that moment of no longer seeking validation from their husbands and society, of recognising that they connect with the world they live in themselves, that the curtain of rain is not a prison wall, in and of itself is an act of self-recognition. Lessing then has the women move beyond the confines of marital and maternal respectability by driving through Harare with Martha’s friend Alice heading for the maternity clinic. They move with hardly any visibility, themselves invisible in the summer rain. After stopping, Lessing first lets an African man, a ‘worker’, walk by, with Martha assuming all he is thinking of is shelter from the rain. This is a significant pause in the narrative, a reminder that these women inhabit a white world, driven by white privilege. There are no African characters that appear, only African workers and servants at the margins, expected to be loyal, subservient, and unnoticed. Seeing this man, his wet clothing stuck to his skin, rain water running down his chest and splashing up his feet, is a potent reminder of this artificially created world of white privilege and at the same time the reality of a lived experience that entails more than one masculinity, more than white manliness as the guiding light into femininity and womanhood.

Gloriously, forcefully, with the reader invited to feel passion, relief, joy, to read on smiling, taking deep breaths and being breathless simultaneously, Lessing has Alice park the car opposite the clinic, next to a stretch of veldt, an open area of uncultivated and unused land one can find to this day in inner city areas. As soon as the African man is out of sight, the women undress and run screaming through the grass, relishing even the cuts on their skin, embracing every sensation. It is the touch of rain, of water on the ground, of the grass, the mud under their feed, not a man’s touch – in this strictly heteronormative account – that gives pleasure and sets the women free. Martha, seeing a water hole in the ground glides in and shares her euphoric experience with a frog and a snake. She transforms the desperation of loneliness into the joy of solitude. Martha is whole – without her husband, without society. As the rain eases and the sky lightens Martha lets the rain wash the mud off her body and runs back to the car where she and Alice get dressed just in time before being discovered. Back in her flat she takes a bath to cleanse herself of the experience, albeit reconciled with the corporeality of her pregnancy.

At a time when body shaming and mental health are prominent in the (social) media and impact all genders and all ages it may just provide a moment of reprieve to read Lessing’s account of a young woman empowering herself by reclaiming her body, and here embracing the sensual pleasures of summer. For Martha, love does not require a romantic partner or societal approval. What is transformative is a mindful moment as she allows herself to lose her bearings in the summer rain and experiences finding herself in doing so.

Much can be added, such as the choices of young African girls, climbing hills and mountains in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe in 1918/19, praying, seeking authority from the Holy Spirit to stay out all night, unsupervised, with some emerging as prophetesses. The sheer joy in the faces of postmenopausal women claiming authority as they are the only members of local communities safe to enter the spiritual forests of the highlands, stripped down, bared breasts, to gather food when the rains do not arrive and for ritual purposes, while all others are prohibited. The rural female sphere of riverbed gardens, where males have to ask permission to even transverse and are not permitted to join, a place of banter, speech, and exchanges. Married women joking about a soldier who ‘lost his penis’ as he was lured by a juzu (Shona: female water spirit) and was then punished for his sexual appetite aroused by what appeared to be a young beautiful woman. An elderly female chief enjoying that men who suffer from old age impotence have to wear something red to signal this malady to the world.[1] It is easy to forget such sheer joy of femininity and womanhood and Doris Lessing reminds us magnificently that sometimes letting go of our boundaries, of the norms we embrace or wrestle, may allow us to find ourselves – or indeed just to practice at times the sheer childlike delight of a daring nude splash. The dramatic tension built up with the coming of the rains, the sensuality of the red leafed Msasa trees, and the seductive embrace by Jacaranda’s scent, colour, and touch are one path one can follow to such an experience of empowerment in a summer of love.

Dr Heike I. Schmidt is an Associate Professor in African History at the University of Reading, specialising in gender, colonialism, violence & conflict, nationalism, and identity. Dr Schmidt is currently writing a gendered history of violence and the colonial encounter.

[1] Heike Schmidt, Colonialism and Violence in Zimbabwe: A History of Suffering, (Oxford & Harare, 2013), chapters 3 and 6 and ‘Shaming Men, Performing Power: Female Authority in Zimbabwe and Tanzania on the Eve of Colonial Rule,’ in Gendering Ethnicity in African History: Women’s Subversive Performance of Ethnicity, eds. Jan Shetler and Dorothy Hodgson, (Madison, WI, 2015), 265-289.

Love is an action word: Reconciling academia and activism, by Chessie Baldwin

Tigray Youth Network, 25 April 2021

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
– 
Elie Wiesel, US News & World Report (27 October 1986)

Over the past ten months, I have used my academic research to speak about the ongoing Tigray War in Ethiopia, specifically the weaponization of gender-based and sexual violence. As deliberate communication blackouts continue across the region, the federal government has benefitted from the ambiguity allowed through the spread of misinformation and disinformation about the war, the crimes, and the perpetrators. In response, academics, journalists, humanitarian workers and community leaders have stepped up to their intellectual responsibility to combat harmful manipulation of history and politics as tools of the conflict. I suppose I am one of them.

There are those who don’t think academics should engage in activism at all, claiming it compromises the objectivity of academic research.[1] The two are indeed not always natural companions; scholars, after all, trade in complexity and depth while activism requires snaps and facts. Nonetheless, many historians and philosophers have engaged in activism quite openly and successfully, from Voltaire, to Mary Wollstonecraft, to Benedict Anderson. The rise of public history and public historians since the 18th century has certainly made this more mainstream, with organisations like History Workshop and Subaltern Studies Group forming explicitly activist agendas in their research orientation.[2] Alongside these movements has been the quite phenomenal historical work by non-academic activists, whose efforts to uncover, explain and ‘do’ history should not be underestimated.

Challenging dominant scholarly perceptions of knowledge production, Aziz Choudry suggests, requires recentring understandings of activist scholarship that are not tied to higher-education models and practices.[3] LGBT+ history, anti-racist work, intersectional feminism, indigenous knowledge system preservation and anti-war theorising (amongst others) are negotiated and enacted in public spaces. The resulting interventions in human rights and social justice both inform and are informed by intellectual frameworks, resources, and contributions.[4] In other words, academia and activism exist in a mutually dependent relationship. They enhance each other and, most importantly, they exist together, whether they want to or not.

There are four ways in which academia works explicitly as a site for activism:[5]

  • As a means to produce knowledge to inform progressive social change. In this category, academic research can help disrupt systems of oppression or injustice and direct action, in policy, law, and public debates.
  • As a means for conducting research which itself involves social change. This might be called ‘action research’, where activism is academic work in that it holds intellectual value for its own sake.
  • As a site for progressive strategies of teaching and learning. Pedagogy can be a means for mobilisation, organisation, learning and un-leaning as a form of activism. As undergraduates spend a great deal of time revising the myths of history taught in schools and public discourse, the classroom is a space to critique which voices have been privileged in collective historical narratives, and why.
  • As an institution whose power relations themselves may be challenged and reconstructed. As structures which can perpetuate elitism through hierarchies of class, age, gender, and race, higher education institutes can themselves challenge dominant power relations in their decisions and practices.

The process of historical research and writing (or, perhaps more accurately, rewriting) takes this further still. Despite claims of objectivity and neutrality in pursuit of a reasonable representation of ‘truth’, the epistemic is political and it is personal. The past is always framed through the lens of the present, and of the individual context of the researcher. Choices about which voices to include, which voices to exclude, which scholars to engage (and not engage), what language to use, which methods, mediums of public engagement, and more, are all decisions imbued with reflections of the person. Even those most committed to their rationality cannot escape such choices. Howard Zinn contested that archivists (deciding what to preserve, where, and how) are not neutral actors as they tend ‘to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about [their] ordinary business’.[6]

Historians who sincerely consider, analyse and critique their interpretations are themselves engaging in a form of activism. They ask difficult questions and face difficult answers, like: ‘Who am I to speak about this?’, ‘Does my position uphold systems of injustice?’, and, when history becomes a question of national security, ‘What space should I take up in this discourse?’.

Engaging in activism as a historian, and engaging in history as an activist, compels the researcher to explicitly address their positionality, focus, relevance, and which voices they centre in their work. It complements and improves accountability, representation, and integrity in the research. More than this, however, the act of ‘doing’ history is inextricably about change. Change in re-evaluating narratives, re-interpreting sources, revising theories and reviving debates; change in the way we remember the world as it was and how we see the world as it is. Perhaps then, it is not that historians can be activists, nor that they should, but simply that they are.

Chessie Baldwin is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Reading, specialising in women’s narratives of conflict in Tigray. You can watch Chessie speak about the ongoing war on Tghat Forum, or visit Tigray Youth Network to learn more.

[1] Thomas Wells, ‘Academics Should Not Be Activists’, 3 Quarks Daily (2018).

[2] Yuliya Yurchuck, ‘Historians as Activists: History Writing in Times of War: The Case of Ukraine in 2014-2018’, Cambridge University Press, 29, 4 (2020).If this is an article then reference incomplete.

[3] Aziz Choudry, ‘Reflections on academia, activism, and the politics of knowledge and learning’, International Journal of Human Rights, 24, 1 (2020).

[4] Choudry (2020).

[5] Michael Flood, Brain Martin & Tanja Dreher, ‘Combining academia and activism: Common obstacles and useful tools’, Australian Universities’ Review, 55, 1 (2013).

[6] Howard Zinn, ‘Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest’, The Midwestern Archivist, 2, 2 (1977).

Gender identity and Sexuality: A Fiery Relationship, by Amy Austin

While researching the history of gender identity I have come across numerous debates over a variety of issues. Appropriate terminology, categorisation, the genesis of gender fluidity are all hotly contested issues and let’s face it, as historians we love a good debate. One of the most contentious issues is the relationship – or lack thereof – between gender history and the history of sexualities. Scholars such as Jay Prosser have expressed the legitimate concern that combining studies of historical sexuality and gender identity leads to the silencing of gender fluid individuals who become amalgamated into narratives of same-sex attraction or economic necessity. This silencing is particularly prevalent in cases of individuals who presented as male before the advent of sex reassignment surgery. Billy Tipton and James Barry are among the historical figures who have been ‘reclaimed’ by women’s history as ‘passing women’ who adopted male identities to follow their chosen careers and pursue female same-sex relationships.

This antagonism between gender and sexuality is not only an academic concern. A cursory look at LGBT+ activism reveals the frequent marginalisation of transgender, non-binary and gender non-conformity within the movement as a whole. Equally, the countless cases of sexual and physical violence against transwomen speaks to the degree to which the conflation of gender and sexuality can have devastating results. Gwen Araujo’s murder in 2002 by four cisgender men, two of whom she had previously had physical relationships with is a case in point.[1] Their use of the ‘panic’ defence allowed the defendants to misgender Araujo as male, thereby portraying her as a man who ‘deceived’ them into homosexuality.

Gwen Araujo

Araujo’s gender identity was reduced to her genitals by her murderers. Historical gender non-conforming figures often suffer the same fate. Bernice Hausman has argued that transgenderism – or ‘transsexualism’ to use Hausman’s term – cannot exist before the development of sex reassignment surgery.[2] The reconstruction of the genitals is what makes a person transgendered. It is true that the individuals considered in my own research would not have recognised the term transgender or identified with it. However, their personal testimonies mirror modern autobiographical accounts from transgender individuals and their experiences are evidence of gender fluidity that predated surgery and modern terminology. The category of transgender may be a modern construct, but it seems very misguided to assume that a label creates an identity. Hausman’s argument not only ignores the numerous individuals who identify as trans who do not physically transition, but it also returns us to the preoccupation with genitals in determining gender. This begs the question, has the merging of gender and sexuality led to the dominance of genitals in LGBT+ studies?

Despite the array of potential sexual activities, the focus often rests on penetrative heterosexual intercourse which excludes a myriad of experiences. In terms of gender identity, the focus on genitals is even more reductive. As a cis gender woman, the idea that my female gender is solely dependent on my biology is diminishing and misguided; how much more insulting for individuals who are misgendered due to their bodies?

All of the points above suggest that a complete separation between gender history and the history of sexualities is needed. At the start of my research, I was certainly passionate about stressing the difference between gender non-conformity and sexualities, partly due to the constant assumption that transgender history was an offshoot of queer sexualities rather than gender identities. However, I have quickly discovered how frequently the two areas not only overlap but impact on each other. The lives of Roberta Cowell and Michael Dillon, the first trans woman and trans man respectively to undergo sex reassignment surgery are prime examples.

Michael Dillon

Michael Dillon identified as male from childhood. Dillon acknowledged his female physicality and in his early years was compelled to live as a woman, but his gender identity was always unequivocally male. For Dillon, his transition merely enabled him to live more easily as a man without being questioned by outsiders as to his gender. It did not originate his male gender. Dillon’s physical transition also did not influence his sexual preference for women. On the other hand, his inability to father a child led Dillon to avoid any romantic relationships throughout his life with the exception of Cowell who ultimately rejected him. Dillon believed that ‘[o]ne must not lead a girl on if one could not give her children’,[3] and when the only woman whom Dillon felt would understand his experiences refused to marry him he remained celibate.

Roberta Cowell

In contrast, Roberta Cowell’s sexual orientation was inextricably linked to her gender identity. Vehemently homophobic, Cowell stressed her heterosexual attraction to women prior to transition when presenting as Robert, marrying and fathering two children. Following her surgery, Roberta was again heterosexually attracted to men while during the transition Cowell identified as asexual.[4] Clearly then, in certain cases gender and sexuality cannot be completely segregated without losing the nuances of individual narratives.

Dillon and Cowell also demonstrate the importance of a more individualised case study approach to queer histories. As historians the obligation to impose our own interpretations on individuals is often inescapable, particularly where no concrete information remains. The reclaiming of figures as either homosexual or gender variant leads to the construction of rigid categorisations which do not account for the rich variety of identities and sexualities that exist both historically and in the present. The best approach then would seem to be that of any good relationship, where both parties – in this case gender identity and sexuality – are considered in tandem as complimenting one another in the light they can reciprocally shine while maintaining their status as distinct facets of identity.

Amy Austin is a PhD Candidate in History, specialising in transgender history of modern Britain. You can also catch Amy on the podcast Surprisingly Brilliant, discussing transgender identities in 1800s Britain with Susan Stryker and Laurie Metcalf.

[1] Anon., The Murder of Gwen Araujo and the “Panic” Defense, [website], (N.D.), https://www.queersiliconvalley.org/the-panic-defense, (accessed 21 July 2021).

[2] Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (North Carolina, 1995).

[3] Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka, Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions (New York, 2017), 125.

[4] Roberta Cowell, Roberta Cowell’s Story (New York, 1954).