Tabitha M Kanogo

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If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. In 1977, a year after joining the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK), Maathai founded the GBM as a project of the NCWK. Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (James Currey London; Heinemann, Kenya: Ohio University Press, U. 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. 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.

This chapter emphasizes a second thread in the book that determining African womanhood was a contested process on the eve of colonial rule and that the colonial moment introduced further elements in the already complex process of formulating Kenyan womanhood. Her political activism was at times considered subversive, and her confrontation with agents of the regime occasionally resulted in arrests.African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1950 », Cahiers d’études africaines, 187-188 | 2007, 785-786. She married an aspiring politician during her postgraduate studies and had three children after obtaining her degree in 1971. In continuation with the work of other scholars of colonial and customary law, Kanogo argues the colonial state’s interventions in inventing customary law and creating an embryonic colonial legal system opened up spaces in which women seeking to leave undesirable marriages could successfully petition for dissolution. Kanogo's biography could empower a new generation of environmental activists to follow in the footsteps of Maathai—seeing just how intertwined the fights for both environmental protection and gender equality truly are.

Kanogo’s African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya traces the history of womanhood in Kenya amidst social, cultural, and economic changes in the period of colonial rule from 1900 to 1950. 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.In presenting the Nobel Peace Prize to Professor Wangari Muta Maathai in 2004, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, alluded to the multidimensional nature of this remarkable woman’s public career: Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment. 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). These changes resulted in--and often resulted from--increased mobility for Kenyan women, who were enabled to cross physical, cultural, economic, social, and psychological frontiers that had been closed to them prior to colonial rule. Chapter five reviews colonial efforts to codify customary marriage law in the 1920s and 1930s to argue that contradictory and parallel bodies of colonial and customary laws permitted and sometimes limited women’s attempts to determine their marriages.