Tabitha M Kanogo

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The chapter argues that Kenyan male political leaders sought to determine how and which women would give birth in maternities as a mean to establish power and authority over women’s bodies. Maathai’s struggle for Uhuru Park in Nairobi was motivated by the need to salvage a recreational space that offered the urban poor a reprieve from their overcrowded slum dwellings. As Kanogo demonstrates in discussing runaways and converts to Islam, women asserted agency in the space between customary and statutory law. As we see in the penultimate chapter, the frailties of scientific knowledge, accentuated by colonial parsimony, were exposed in rural hospitals with inadequate maternity facilities.

Depending on their location, low-income Kenyans endure different challenges, but they all face poverty in common. Powerful politicians, like the late president Daniel arap Moi, attempted to stifle her efforts, seeing her as a threat to their undemocratic government. 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. Her husband requested a divorce only eight years after the wedding, claiming Maathai was “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control” (p.Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. Contrary to previous studies, which have presented women in colonial spaces as helpless, hers finds that those in colonial Kenya had ways in which they negotiated against adversity, and even influenced diverse social processes. 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.

Entwining archival material and oral testimony, Kanogo emphasizes women's 'opportunities for physical and cultural migration from old ways of life to new ones' (p. While she was unsuccessful in attaining a seat in parliament in 1982, Maathai was elected as a member of parliament for the Tetu constituency under the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) banner in 2002. 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. 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.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. This work is a tribute to the women of Kenya, especially female Mau Mau veterans, whose valor was altruistic. In their response to the machinations of the colonial system, the squatters were neither passive nor malleable but, on the contrary, actively resisted coercion and subordination as they struggled to carve out a living for themselves and their families…. In this biography, Tabitha Kanogo follows Wangari Maathai from her modest, rural Kenyan upbringing to her rise as a national figure campaigning for environmental and ecological conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty until her death in 2011. 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.

Consumed by a desire to achieve political freedom for all Kenyans, she pursued her quest for democracy and respect for human rights in multiple ways, such as demonstrating at Uhuru Park’s Freedom Corner with the mothers of political prisoners and vying for political office. It is unsurprising that the following chapter is given over to bitterly resisted attempts to restrict or prohibit clitoridectomy. A social history of the Kikuyu squatters in Kenya, and their place in the composition of Mau Mau, and subsequently influenced decolonization. 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.To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Oxford: James Currey Publishers; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2005. 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. 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.

Tabitha Kanogo's current book project explores diverse situations of child and youth endangerment in colonial and contemporary Africa with a specific focus on Kenya.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. Chapter one on women’s legal and cultural status covers “the formative, deeply fractured and fluid” period of 1910 to 1930 in which the colonial administration attempted to codify women’s status under customary law.