4 - Raising ‘Mbweni Girls’ in Zanzibar, 1864–c.1926

Summary

In his hypercritical review of the Mbweni shamba in 1884, a missionary named Forbes Capel complained that, ‘Compared with their fellow country women the girls are being brought up as ladies’ (his emphasis). Thoroughly disillusioned with the UMCA's enterprise, Capel protested that ‘the girls were suffering from want of more active employment’. Similarly, in 1884 May Allen despaired that, ‘[t]he state of the insubordination of the girls here is something dreadful’. Farler also complained that the Mbweni girls were ‘so pampered’ and consequently impertinent, disobedient, as well as being indifferent to Christianity. Similarly, Smythies believed they were far too educated for their own good, arguing that, ‘as yet the country is not prepared for the higher education of women, all they need is a good elementary education’. He believed Mbweni girls were, ‘apt to be conceited and not to give their husbands that obedience which is the custom here to exact from them’. Finally, Hine was also extremely negative about the Mbweni girls’ school, complaining that, ‘no sane person would send mission girls from upcountry to be brought up at Mbweni’. This epistolary debate represents a constant tension in the missionaries’ reports regarding the balance between ‘work’ and ‘education’, which reflects the gender conflict among the missionaries and the different African perspectives with which the missionaries sympathised.

This chapter concentrates on the trajectories of the educated female exslaves, referred to as ‘Mbweni girls’ or, in Swahili, ‘geli za Mbweni’. The female students were just as closely monitored as the Kiungani students, but unlike at Kiungani, the ex-slave character of the Mbweni school was celebrated and valued. This was unusual in the wider context of slave status in Zanzibar as slave antecedents were socially shamed. Indeed, Mbweni girls were unique among women associated with the mission for their high level of education, but this did not necessarily ease their troubles when finding marriage suitors or work. Moreover, as Andreana Prichard has argued, adherents at Mbweni took ‘opportunities to […] embed themselves more forcibly and securely into the mission community’.

Female education in Mbweni began in 1865 but the Mbweni Girls’ School (also known as St Mary’s) was only established in 1871.