Reply to Jean Davison and Kinuthia Macharia

Extract

In their recent review of my book, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990, Jean Davison and Kinuthia Macharia take me to task on several issues, in particular that I only included women in my study, that I blamed Kikuyu men for victimizing women in a “patriarchal” system, and that I used exclusively economic explanations, called “reductionism,” in analyzing causes of historical changes. These allegations misrepresent this work seriously in my view; moreover, the review seems to be based on partial knowledge of the book, since most of its content is not addressed. A responsible review usually begins by telling potential readers what the book does. Since this one did not, I would like to rectify matters by doing so, while addressing the allegations made. The book is a study of the evolution of the dried staples trade in the Nairobi area, a trade carried out at the retail level almost exclusively by women. It focuses particularly on beans, a women's crop, using the evolution of, and policies toward, beans in Kenya as a template for what happened to women under colonialism in particular. To avoid gender bias and set this trade in context I did a large census of seventeen Nairobi area markets covering the whole trading population (some six thousand traders) and a smaller sample of over a thousand traders, of whom one-third were men. Brief marital histories were obtained from that sample, as well as trading histories. Lastly, I had a very small sample from whom life histories were solicited; these were only staples traders and all were women, as befits a study of staples traders. All of this was supplemented by extensive archival and secondary source research.