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.

The sexuality of mobile women unnerved administrators and elders, who reacted by attempting to codify the abduction of women, divorce, rape and polygamy within the law, as described in the second chapter. 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.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.

Of all the processes of rapid social change, the final chapter demonstrates education had the greatest transformative effect for young women, but was a common site of contestation between male heads of households and their junior female relatives. 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). 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.Though customary law circumscribed the parameters in which women could exercise sexual mobility, individual women employed multiple strategies in engaging in sexual exchanges. Kanogo brings the reader back in time by juxtaposing Maathai's major life events and achievements with the sociohistorical context of Kenya. 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. 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. In 1977, a year after joining the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK), Maathai founded the GBM as a project of the NCWK. Your wings are too little and your beak so small, you can only bring a small drop of water at a time. A most important and readable book, which is meticulously documented and explores the complexity of women's experiences in colonial Kenya. 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….

She fought unremittingly to save urban parks, most notably, Karura Forest and Uhuru Park in Nairobi—both of which still exist today.

There, she began her long career as an activist, campaigning for environmental and social justice while speaking out against government corruption. She implies that Europeans and African elders seem to have conspired to oppress women legally, so that "under the colonial administration . Depending on their location, low-income Kenyans endure different challenges, but they all face poverty in common. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.A social history of the Kikuyu squatters in Kenya, and their place in the composition of Mau Mau, and subsequently influenced decolonization. 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. first two chapters set up the foundational argument of the book: that there is no monolithic portrayal of African women’s status and identity in colonial Kenya, but that individual strategies and engagements with figures of authority resulted in varied ideological and geographical migrations. While the GBM is known for its tree-planting campaigns (thirty million trees were planted over the span of her career), the program also promoted conservation, social justice, and democracy. 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.