This is a study of the genesis, evolution, adaptation and subordination of the Kikuyu squatter labourers, who comprised the majority of resident labourers on settler plantations and estates in the Rift Valley Province of the White Highlands. In absolutely groundbreaking depth, this book shows why research on vaginal fistulas must incorporate feminist understandings of bodily experience to inform future practices and knowledge. Drawing on face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 30 Kenyan women, it paints a rare social portrait of the heartbreaking challenges for Kenyan women living with this most profound gender-related health issue – an experience of shame, taboo and abjection with severe implications for women’s wellbeing, health and sexuality. By employing critical feminist and post-colonial perspectives, it shows how “leaking black female bodies” are constructed, ranked, stratified and marginalised in global maternal health care, and explains why women in Africa are at risk of developing vaginal fistulas and then having adequate treatment delayed or denied. This book reveals the structures of poverty, power, patriarchy and imperialistic health policies that underpin what the World Health Organization calls the “hidden disease” of vaginal fistulas in Africa. 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. In 2004, Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership of the Green Belt Movement, a conservation effort that resulted in the restoration of African forests decimated during the colonial era. There, she began her long career as an activist, campaigning for environmental and social justice while speaking out against government corruption. Originally trained as a scientist in Kenya and abroad, Professor Maathai returned to her home country of Kenya with a renewed political consciousness. Wangari Muta Maathai is one of Africa’s most celebrated female activists. 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. Over and over, women found opportunities to act amid the conflicting policies, unintended consequences, and inconsistent compromises that characterized colonial rule. The conclusion to which the experiences of women in colonial Kenya points again and again is that for these women, the exercise of individual agency, whether it was newly acquired or repeatedly thwarted, depended in large measure on the unleashing of forces over which no one involved had control. 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. The transformations that resulted from these reworkings involved the negotiation and redefinition of the meaning of individual liberties and of women's agency, along with the reconceptualization of kinship relations and of community. The study thus tries to historicize the reworkings of women's lives under colonial rule. 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. The pertinent institutions and practices include the legal and cultural status of women, clitoridectomy, dowry, marriage, maternity and motherhood, and formal education. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women. This book explores the history of African womanhood in colonial Kenya.
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