Writing Self-Reliance into Respectability

Abstract

In her 2003 publication, Bi Inaya employed the concept of enunciation to introduce the three languages spoken in colonial Zanzibar. During the colonial era, few Zanzibari women were literate, and girls were not taught to write because elders feared they would write love letters to boys. Elders’ anxiety over female literacy was both literal and metaphorical: the desire for the boy and the desire to write were one and the same, and both led girls astray. Yet many schoolgirls embraced literacy as the most valuable skill they acquired in school.2 In contrast to girls who learned only to read and recite the Quran in Arabic, those who completed the full primary course at the government school could, with varying degrees of success, read, speak, and write in Swahili, Arabic, and English. Most schoolgirls and female teachers played down the seriousness of elders’ concerns, but they also worked hard to defend themselves against this ideology by, for instance, emphasizing pronunciation over writing. While Islamic studies mimicked Quranic schools and domestic science seemed another way to get them to do chores, academic subjects were novel to girls who knew that this knowledge was denied to their mothers and grandmothers. Literacy (expressed in both oral and written forms) became the means through which girls and women broadened the discourse on heshima to include space for women’s economic mobility; in this way, they wrote self-reliance into respectability.