Tanganyikan Nationalism as 'Women's Work': Life Histories, Collective Biography and Changing Historiography

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Periodical article

Title:	Tanganyikan Nationalism as 'Women's Work': Life Histories, Collective Biography and Changing Historiography
Author:	Geiger, Susan
Year:	1996
Periodical:	The Journal of African History
Volume:	37
Issue:	3
Pages:	465-478
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Tanzania
Subjects:	nationalism TANU women politics History and Exploration Women's Issues organizations Historical/Biographical Equality and Liberation
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/182501
Abstract:	Few historians have questioned Tanzania's dominant nationalist narrative - a narrative created over 25 years ago. Biographies written in aid of this narrative depict nationalism in the former Trust Territory of Tanganyika as primarily the work of 'a few good men', including 'proto-nationalists' whose anticolonial actions set the stage and provided historical continuity for the later Western-oriented ideological work of nationalist modernizers. The life history narratives of women who became activists in TANU in the 1950s disrupt this view of progressive stages toward an emerging nationalist consciousness. They suggest that Tanganyikan nationalism was also and significantly the work of thousands of women. Women activists did not simply respond to TANU's nationalist rhetoric; they shaped, informed and spread a nationalist consciousness for which TANU was the vehicle. This article is based on interviews with TANU women activists conducted in 1984 and 1988 in Dar es Salaam, Moshi and Mwanza. Notes, ref., sum.