Veranstaltungen

This talk concerns women’s protest in colonial Tanzania. Stephanie Lämmert looks specifically at how the role of Usambara women has been silenced in the protest against agrarian change after the Second World War. Drawing on gender and labour scholar Lyn Ossome, she is thinking of this silencing of women’s activism as a form of structural violence; a violence that characterizes the relationship between the colonial state and women’s reproductive labour. It is a violent relationship in so far as the colonial state does not address women as subjects, but silently assumes their labour. Indeed, women’s labour guarantees the functioning of the colonial political economy. She therefore perceives the silencing of women’s labour and agency as a methodological problem for historians, and suggests that we need to think further about the implications of this violent relationship between women and the colonial state in order to interrogate the sources in a more comprehensive fashion.

Stephanie Lämmert is a historian of East and Central Africa and affiliated with the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany.