Lisa A. Lindsay

Daughters of the goddess, daughters of imperialism : African women struggle for culture, power and democracy

* 1. Introduction. * 2. African women present realities and which way forward? * 3. A history of class transformations: contemporary womens organizations in Nigeria. * 4. Class contestation in NCWS and other national womens organizations. * 5. Class and gender dynamics in professional womens organizations: rhetoric and practice. * 6. Gender and class in campaigns and civil discourse. * 7. Class and gender in child abuse. * 8. Womens healthcare and discourses on reproductive health. * 9. Gender, class and voices: women and the 1986 National Political Debate. * 10. Women in local government: a comparison. * 11. Gendering grassroots democracy: the womens committee system. * 12. Class corruption and womens mobilization: the cult of First Lady. * 13. The politics of womens committees in a multicultural and multiethnic society: lessons from Britain and South Africa. * 14. Conclusion.

Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: gender, ethnicity, and class in the nationalist movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann (pb

networks, in the long run, encouraged property crime. Most important for Burton’s overall picture is that Dar es Salaam escaped particularly serious crime. Official anxieties reflected any increase in crime, not a growing tendency among Africans to commit crime. Burton subtly reminds his readers that the perception of crime and the number of criminals arrested have as much to do with how the state deals with crime as actual incidents of criminal activity. One aspect of Dar es Salaam’s urbanization which could have been fleshed out in greater detail is the city’s relationship with its rural surroundings. Burton cites a great deal of demographic data on Africans journeying to Dar es Salaam, yet further analysis of the socio-economic forces promoting migration and how migration patterns changed over time would have proved illuminating. Labour historians have long discussed the uneven proletarianization of African workers who kept one hand in subsistence and another in commercial production. Did rural–urban migration work in similar ways for men and women? Treating Dar es Salaam in such a way may have offered new insights into the nature of urban Africa and colonial attempts to control their subjects. Yet, this point speaks to issues beyond the scope of the work. Burton skilfully uses a wide range of source material ranging from archival records at all levels of the colonial administration, from the Colonial Office down to the daily concerns of colonial men on the spot, as well as contributors to the editorial pages of city newspapers. While his primary objective is to deepen our understanding of how the colonial state sought to maintain colonial order in Dar es Salaam, he provides readers with a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary African casual labourers such as rickshaw boys, street hawkers and petty thieves scratching out an existence in a city where they were not wanted. Burton’s book provides a rich and dense vision of a colonial city in Africa and manages the complexities of such a history with agility.