Using a wealth of previously misread or neglected documentation, Grier demonstrates that children and adolescents were a major preoccupation of settlers in the mining and agricultural sectors, of domestic service, and of officials whose task it was to provide conditions favorable to the accumulation of capital. By doing so, she uncovers how the youngest workers resisted attempts to control their mobility and labor. Young workers and migrants employed passive and active forms of resistance to assert or maintain their autonomy from patriarchy, capital, and the state. In addition to being the...

There is an adage that the Igbo have no kings. Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings focuses on an area in Igboland where, contrary to this popular belief, Igbos not only have kings, but female kings. It is an area where women served as warriors and even married many wives. Women in Nsukka Division feature as prominent actors in a complex and diverse set of interactions, relationships, and manifestations unmatched elsewhere in Igboland. Thus, the author argues that researchers cannot adequately analyze the political landscape of Nsukka Division (or any other African society, for...

Beginning in the late 1930s, a crisis in colonial Gusiiland developed over traditional marriage customs. Couples eloped, wives deserted husbands, fathers forced daughters into marriage, and desperate men abducted women as wives. Existing historiography focuses on women who either fled their rural homes to escape a new dual patriarchy-African men backed by colonial officials-or surrendered themselves to this new power. Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya 1890-1970 takes a new approach to the study of Gusii marriage customs and shows that Gusii women stayed in...

This book examines the mentalities of various communities within a district of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Focusing in particular on white administrators and missionaries in the Melsetter District, it combines linguisitc/lexical analysis with historical interpretation, in an attempt to reconstruct what whites and Africans actually meant by the words and practices they used in interactions with each other. Jeater provides a detailed study of translation work in Mt Selinda, an evangelical mission; it also examines formal and informal court hearings, to contrast the perceptions and meanings...

Ufipa, a labor reserve for Tanganyika, witnessed minimal colonial development. Instead, evangelization by White Fathers' Catholic missionaries began in the 1870s. By the 1950s, the missionaries had secured varying degrees of political, economic and social authority in the region, witnessed by the fact that the vast majority of Fipa had converted to Catholicism. "Fipa Families" examines how this happened from the Fipa perspective.

Written primarily for scholars and students of African colonial history, mission history, and family and childhood history, this study is based on a rich...