Women’s reproductive capacity and women’s sexuality have always been objects of policy, whether governmental, religious, societal, or private. The breadth of policies—from macroeconomic to microeconomic, social to political—that affect population growth is striking. Government policies, the subject of this chapter, range widely: wars and military recruitment; emigration and immigration policies; tax systems; benefits such as family allowances or, more broadly, social insurance schemes; public health and maternity services (whether free or available on payment of a fee); contraceptive and abortion laws; public housing and taxes or exemptions on private housing; laws that assign adult women the status of minors and that regulate family affairs such as minimum age at marriage; penalties for adultery; policies that cause hunger and starvation and policies of famine relief; policies that cause disease to spread and public health measures to prevent or arrest contagion; education policies, whether free or not and whether available to girls and boys alike, and language requirements that pose barriers to education; race and sex barriers to employment; and, finally, even the death penalty.
Every colonial government in sub-Saharan Africa employed some or all of these policies in efforts to regulate population growth. Most of the policies fall into one of two categories: either their intention was to alter the demographic structure of the population (pronatalist or antinatalist policies) or their demographic impact was an unintended or inexplicit consequence (for example, laws punishing adultery).1 Note that women more often bore the burden of such policies than men and that the only direct regulations on men’s reproductive lives involved intercourse with minors and forced intercourse.2 Ultimately, widespread poverty and the lack of equal opportunity laws for social advancement had the greatest impact on women’s reproductive lives. The impoverishment was neither incidental nor accidental: when large regions were so impoverished that wage labor became part of the life cycle, the supply of laborers flowed most predictably.3
In colonized Africa, sexual control was a fundamental class and racial marker embedded in a wider set of relations of power, though the underlying relationships between gender prescriptions and racial boundaries were rarely explicit.4 Sexuality was tied to politics at several levels and in numerous ways: men shuttled between male-only hostels at the workplace and family life in the village (a way to reproduce a labor force cheaply), but such migratory patterns could also foster social disorder and political dissonance. Ostensibly, colonial powers saw stable family life as a way to depoliticize discontents. But paradoxically, colonial regimes divided families and segregated regions of reproduction from the sites of production, thus creating migrant labor systems. Yet they also tried to tie them back together. European administrators repeatedly linked family ideology and political agendas in Africa, and they argued about the costs and consequences of domesticating African reproductive practices. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler ask why sexuality was so politicized under certain colonial conditions and not others.5 Why did family organization become so central at certain moments of economic restructuring and political crisis and remain ignored at other times?
Historically, all African societies, like all societies across the globe, had population regimes, managing family size through a variety of social controls and practices. These controls included infanticide; birth spacing through prolonged breast-feeding and the imposition of taboos on sexual relations before a baby was weaned; the use of herbal contraceptives, abortifacients, and manual techniques to interrupt pregnancy; age at marriage; and social controls on sex between unmarried couples.6 Many of these controls and practices changed after colonial conquest.
The foundations of colonial control of African women’s lives were, first and foremost, customary laws. Marriage and property arrangements were the basis of sexual relations and therefore of demographic trends. Changes in these arrangements followed the introduction of colonial control and the codification of custom into law. Feminist research on colonial history, together with what historians have uncovered about the impact of colonial conquest on the economy and ecology of African societies, reveals a picture of how colonial government regulations affected women’s reproductive lives.
This chapter examines colonial government population policies in sub-Saharan Africa in the twentieth century, focusing on the interwar period. I try to avoid interpretations that are economically reductionist or instrumentalist without obscuring the reality of the pronatalist or antinatalist intention of colonial demographic policies. A discussion of gender relations, rather than of impacts on women alone, helps avoid determinist arguments. We know that white colonists appropriated the material bases of masculine identity among African men by regulating cattle, labor, and land; we know, too, that they also intervened in African men’s rights to control “their” women and children, “directly through laws governing marriage practices and family residences, and indirectly through the provision of alternatives to patriarchal control for young men and women.”7 Far from being passive victims of these machinations, women tried to use colonial intervention to their advantage to create more opportunities for themselves and to escape male control.
The chapter begins with some background and a general discussion of the demographic impact of changing gender relations in the colonial era. It then turns to the shifting public/private divide caused by the imposition of statutory law and the creation of customary law, in particular marriage laws. The next section deals centrally with direct intervention to control population growth by the use or denial of maternity services and birth control; it is followed by another section on disease dispersion and environmental disruption. The chapter ends with brief discussions of three areas of colonial policy that had far-reaching demographic consequences: education, famine relief, and taxation.
In any general discussion of the demographic impact of changing gender relations in the colonial era, issues of race and class emerge as central determinants of policy. Reproductive policies are about who has how many children. In African colonies, the fundamental policy issue was labor: the colonists’ demands always exceeded the number of African workers available to them. Natalist policies were designed to increase the next generation of workers. Authorities employed a number of measures to secure the labor force they wanted. They coerced adult men to work through systems of corvée, legally required unpaid labor; levied taxes in cash that forced them out of the subsistence sector; and introduced migratory work structured by the combined policies of supporting mining and agricultural enclaves in some regions, creating labor reserves in others, and depriving still others of any investment at all. The need for more African workers conflicted with concerns about population growth in the settler colonies where Europeans worried about land distribution. Population densities were always relevant to land availabilities (for farming and for grazing). In settler colonies, there was also an issue of racial ratios, which resulted in policies to discourage black reproduction and encourage white reproduction.8
In the category of unintended consequences, Elizabeth Schmidt emphasizes the results of an earlier colonial policy adopted during the occupation of Southern Rhodesia (contemporary Zimbabwe), which led people on the margins of African society to take advantage of the erosion of indigenous authority structures.9 Women challenged male control over their mobility, sexuality, and productive and reproductive capacities. Because European missionaries and the colonial state found customs such as forced marriage, polygyny, and child pledging, or the betrothal of young girls to older men, to be repugnant, they initially encouraged a degree of female emancipation. However, the resulting “crisis of authority in the rural areas foreshadowing the possibility of a total breakdown in law and order, forced state officials to reconsider. . . . By the 1920s, a backlash against female emancipation was well under way.”10
A recent analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of “missing women,” by age and disease, confirms that relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world, there are far fewer women than men in India and China. Moreover, the study has added the startling new observation that as a proportion of the total female population, the number of missing women is largest in sub-Saharan Africa. The absolute numbers are comparable to those for India and China: “For the year 2000, around 1.53 million women are missing in sub-Saharan Africa for that year alone, which is not that different from the Chinese and Indian estimates of 1.73m and 1.71m respectively.”11 Most analyses of India and China have emphasized a skewed sex ratio at birth, which may indicate sex-selective abortion or female infanticide. Although this may be true of China, it does not account for data from India or sub-Saharan Africa, where sex ratios at birth are, if anything, skewed to more girls and where missing women are spread over the entire age spectrum.
In sub-Saharan Africa, much of the female deficit is to be found at younger ages. Malaria is an important component, and so is maternal mortality: much more so than in India. But the dominant source of missing women is HIV/AIDS. We estimate that there are over 600,000 excess female deaths each year from this source alone. That said, it is still true that the percentage of missing women in sub-Saharan Africa is comparable to that in India or China even if HIV/AIDS is ignored.12
Are there historical roots to this demographic deviation, and are they to be found in colonial policies? For all their worry about declining population and failure to meet labor needs, colonial authorities did not seriously investigate demographic issues. In regard to French Equatorial Africa, Rita Headrick notes the administration’s failure to organize studies of fertility or mortality. She also observes that demographic reasoning was “preposterous” and that establishing tax rolls was the only motive for counting heads.13 Although the “censuses” showed a rise in population, all the qualitative evidence pointed to depopulation, at least until the 1920s. In this volume, Raymond Gervais and Issiaka Mandé make a similar argument for French West Africa.
Policy seemed to flip from pronatalist to antinatalist in the interwar years, a period that Jean Allman describes as one of gender chaos.14 The critical decade of the 1930s opened with the Great Depression and closed with the declaration of World War II. This period highlights the extent to which colonial regimes subordinated social policy to labor policy. Frederick Cooper notes a sharp break in both British and French thinking about the relationship of wage labor to African society in the 1940s as World War II and “the weaknesses in imperial economies that it revealed underscored British and French need for their empires.”15 Although the French believed their colonies had less potential manpower than those of the British, it was the Belgians who pioneered elaborate social investments in the reproduction of the labor force and protecting the health and fertility of workers’ families; Nancy Hunt claims that such measures were anomalous in colonial Africa before 1945.16
The British began to rethink the labor question in the late 1930s. In the 1920s, the imperial myth that led Europeans to portray themselves as bringing a slave-ridden, barbarous continent under civilized and progressive rule had given way to another—and contradictory—vision of rural Africa as tradition bound but stable, living in the organic harmony of ancient social structures. Such perceptions led to praise for and the reinforcement of indirect rule. French officials also viewed Africa through a pastoral lens, which led to support for development through peasant production within traditional communities. Both the British and the French thought of urban workers as a detribalized, floating population, more an aberration or a pathology than a normal part of colonial society.17 Cooper believes that colonial officials eventually had to reconcile themselves to the limits of their own power to exploit African resources and labor systematically. They publicly lamented the mediocrity of imperial economic accomplishments; but subsequent calls for a new round of interventionist development in the 1920s and 1930s in both Britain and France came to little. All of this changed after World War II, which devastated the European economies and saw the rise of movements for self-determination.18
The perceived interrelationship of gender and work had also changed in French colonies. From a characterization of men as averse to steady and productive labor, sapped by slavery and the violence of savage life, and of women engaged in agricultural production, the prevalent images morphed to others of potentially productive African men and women who remained primitive cultivators and the bearers of backward culture. Both French and British colonial governments calculated the costs of social reproduction independently from the market wage and sought to separate industrial culture from African culture.19 The consequences of changed perceptions of gender and work played out in new population trends.
Colonial authorities never simply imposed Victorian ideology, and they invented “traditions” in both metropolitan and colonial contexts. Debates in the postcolonial period shifted away from the impact of colonialism to issues of the construction of gender, male and female, by both colonizers and the colonized.20
Schmidt has examined critiques of “androcentric functionalism,” an interpretation of colonial labor policy that held that mining and agricultural interests, driven by the need for male labor, dictated the fundamental characteristic of the migratory labor system. That system channeled only men to the mines, forcing women and children not just to fend for themselves in rural areas but also to subsidize the male workers who were paid subsistence wages as single men—even though they sent a portion of those wages back to their women.21 Schmidt argues that in the case of Southern Rhodesia, this policy grew out of gender struggles among Africans as well as struggles between labor, capital, and the state. Of special interest is her observation that senior African chiefs and headmen colluded with colonial authorities to confine women to the rural areas:
For it was women who solidified kinship alliances through their marriages. The bridewealth received for daughters procured wives for the sons, and daughters-in-law produced children for the patrilineage. The labor of women generated food crops and guaranteed continued access to lineage land, for any unused land was returned to the common domain. Because husbands frequently sent a portion of their wages home to their wives, the retention of wives in the rural areas gave senior men some access to those wages, cash income that would otherwise be unavailable to them. For all these reasons, older men struggled to maintain control over women—over their labor, cash, children, and other resources; over their mobility; and over their marriages.22
Jane Parpart has found much the same sort of collusion between British colonial authorities and rural African authorities in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). Both parties recognized the connection between the control of women’s sexual behavior and the authority of those who controlled society—women’s freedom was a threat to chiefly authority and therefore to the system of indirect rule.23
Schmidt also argues that control of women’s behavior was essential to the maintenance of colonial rule: “The refusal of women to marry their appointed partners, their persistence in entering into adulterous liaisons, and their flight to missions, mines, farms, and urban areas posed a serious threat to African male authority, and, consequently, to the entire system of indirect rule.”24
According to Hunt, women most often appeared in the colonial record when moral panic surfaced, settled, and festered. Prostitution, polygyny, adultery, concubinage, and infertility were the loci of such angst throughout the historical record of Belgian African colonial regimes.25 Megan Vaughan, who has done considerable research on the British colonies of Nyasaland (today’s Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia), says that “the problem of women” was colonial shorthand for issues related to changes in property rights, rights in labor, and generational relations.26 Dramatic economic changes lay beneath these problems and placed enormous strains on relations between genders and generations, which colonial authorities chose to describe in terms of degeneration, uncontrolled sexuality, and disease.
British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese officials dictated colonial policy, no doubt in response to the interests of mining, commercial agriculture, missionaries, settlers, and their metropoles. However, they did not always succeed in either imposing or implementing the policies they wanted, in part because African women and men resisted or rejected them. The examination of official discourses in the form of commission reports, parliamentary debates, and the texts of laws brings to light the categories the state used to rule its subjects. Such categories established the boundaries of behavior. In South Africa, gender histories reveal that different policy discourses and legislation referred to African women in a variety of ways “as mothers, as wives, as blacks, as workers—steeping those constructs in racial, sexual and class ideologies.”27 In so doing, state policy and practices also constructed women as objects of rule, “reproducing or restructuring normative gender meanings and subordinate social and political identities through the same process.”28 Struggles among Africans and between Africans and colonial authorities surfaced in the use of law to institutionalize changed gender relations.
In British colonial Africa, indirect rule had very specific implications for mediating gender conflict, shaping gendered boundaries, and reformulating the mechanisms of gender subordination.29 Such shifts affected fertility rates. Indirect rule facilitated the colonization of the domestic sphere through marriage, divorce, adultery, childbirth, death, and inheritance. It enabled Europeans to enter the private world of African families, “the world where children were born, the sick were healed, meals were cooked, babies were bathed, marriages were negotiated, and deaths were mourned.”30 The missions were often handmaidens of the state, inculcating values such as hard work and discipline that both parties agreed upon and even implementing state policies—especially where the state was shorthanded, as in education and medical work.
Law works as a mechanism of power, contributing to the creation of the categories of persons and rights fundamental to the workings of any society.31 Definitions of the terms husband and wife, laws about marriage in customary and common law, the very fact of marriages being recorded and contestable in court, assumptions about domestic arrangements that inform labor regulation, and the definition and regulation of “normal” sexuality are all fundamental to the material and moral constructions of gender integral to state formation.32 The imposition of two bodies of law—statutory and customary—as well as the ability to create customary law as a brace for colonial rule gave European regimes exceptional control over the interwoven factors of land and labor and the fruits of both.
The development of customary law focused first on the law of persons and then on the law of property.33 Customary laws, governing marriage and inheritance, opened inroads to labor discipline, which “was achieved through a systematic assault on the access of African cultivators to the land.”34 Martin Chanock confirms that customary law “must be understood . . . as a product of the struggle for control of labour in the changing conditions of the rural economy.”35 After the end of slavery, family producers could not respond to the market through their former practice of intensifying the exploitation of their slaves. Yet squeezing household labor was a more convenient strategy than finding labor outside of the household, which made the labor of wives vital and emphasized the marital bonds that tied wives to their work. It also led ambitious commercial farmers to struggle to maintain control over the labor of their children, aggravating conflict within marriage over rights to children and the products of their labor.
However, a major consequence of the transformation of labor power into a commodity was the erosion of the basis of customary kinship. As rural households became increasingly dependent on commodity relations, they were caught up in a struggle for control of labor power between generations. Custom became a weapon in the battle against the economic independence of dependants.36 African chiefs and headmen had a shared interest with colonial authorities in making customary law and inventing traditions. As Schmidt notes, all shared the fear of losing the labor of both sexes, as well as money and control of the agricultural economy.37 Such concerns produced the neotraditional reaction that was solidified in customary law. But these struggles were also usually couched in other terms—morality, rights and wrongs, duty, propriety, correct marriages, and the moral health of the community.
In village life, there really was no clear-cut distinction between the realms of public and private. Customary practice was not rule bound. But Western law is, so colonial judges picked among customs and chose the ones that suited their purposes. According to Chanock, Northern Rhodesian colonial authorities favored a public model of law.38 When it came to interpreting African testimony, they chose versions that supported their positions. Then they presented their rulings as an improvement on custom. This invention marked an unwillingness to consider the real position of women in customary legal systems. Colonial authorities invested chiefs with new judicial powers, and chiefs and headmen had an interest in exaggerating their “traditional” powers. In reality, the political economy of colonial capitalism created what were thereafter labeled as customary legal systems.
Marriage was a central arena in which labor and land conflicts played out. Marriage laws were all-important in regulating sexuality, procreation, labor, and property rights. Because these laws created links between traditional social organization and state authority, colonial administrators hoped they would ultimately preserve the stability of the colonial regimes. But as Barbara Cooper has shown for the French colony of Niger, marriage was not a static arrangement; it underwent tremendous change in the twentieth century, shaped and reshaped by the rapidly changing political economy.39 The French attempted to legislate matters relating to women and marriage as the basis of marriages shifted to become more remote and further from women’s control.
British colonial authorities required African couples to register their marriages (including those performed under customary rites), purportedly to keep tax records current. Similarly, the registration of divorces freed husbands from paying taxes for their wives.40 African men saw marriage as an important labor strategy, and they wanted more wives for labor, especially as cash cropping opened up new avenues for revenue.41 In systems in which land could not be bought or leased, men also saw polygyny as a way of acquiring more land.42 An accentuated and narrower version of custom became a new weapon in the hands of married men, one with which to control the labor power of their immediate dependents.
Schmidt maintains that the colonial state in Southern Rhodesia created customary law in an effort to coerce women into staying with their husbands.43 The state feared the consequences of female emancipation and sought to legitimate customs that would justify continued female subordination. So-called customary laws were established when the concerns of the informants, who were mainly male chiefs and elders with vested interests in controlling women, coincided with the moral predilections and administrative purposes of colonial officials.44 But picking and choosing led to contradictions: Europeans deemed some patriarchal customs repugnant and outlawed them even though they reinforced others.
For example, colonial child custody laws, which threatened to deprive women of their children and which were contrary to the more flexible arrangements of African custom, show how the state pressured women to remain with abusive or disaffected husbands, a policy that had perhaps unintended pronatalist consequences. Yet child marriage and forced marriage, which also had pronatalist consequences, were considered repugnant to the European sense of morality. The Southern Rhodesian Native Marriages Ordinance of 1901 outlawed child pledging and required that a woman’s consent be obtained before a marriage could take place. The age of first marriage was set at twelve for girls.45
Two issues arose in connection with marriage and divorce laws. The first was adultery, which was cast as a problem of declining control over women that clearly warranted legal reform. Africans testified that the offender usually resolved adulterous liaisons privately by paying compensation for the affair. But colonial authorities invented “traditional penalties” for adultery—death, mutilation, or enslavement. They then criminalized adultery and made the punishment payment of fines or imprisonment. This strategy made their treatment seem far more lenient than their caricature of African tradition. Whereas custom did not hold women responsible for adultery, chiefs colluded with colonial authorities to punish female indiscipline by fining adulterous women.46 The criminalization of adultery was a response to demands of male migrant laborers who worried that their women would be unfaithful while they were away, and the courts provided a mechanism for securing their control. It would seem that fining adultery was more about the recruitment of labor than about African sensibilities.
In Southern Rhodesia, European officials frowned on the custom of African husbands allowing wives who had left them to return and instead encouraged African men to divorce unfaithful wives and reclaim the bridewealth. This pressure led African families to push their daughters to remain with their husbands even in situations that were life threatening.47 Was punishing adultery a population policy? Did keeping women from committing adultery through threats of court proceedings and fines force them to remain in marriages where the exposure to pregnancy was higher?
The second issue is polygyny, a common practice in both animist and Muslim areas. Missionaries vigorously opposed polygyny, and European powers aligned with the Catholic Church condemned the practice. Some African women, perceiving monogamy and the right of the wife to her husband’s property as advantageous, ran away to missions, angering their men. According to Hunt, polygyny came to signify depopulation for Belgian authorities, “the moral risk of the African ‘race’ being unable to reproduce itself (and the economic risk of an insufficient labour supply).”48 The Belgians also opposed postpartum abstinence and prolonged breast-feeding because they thought these practices supported polygyny (and curbed the birthrate). The actual demographic implications of polygyny are less important here than colonial perceptions.49
It was not only the law that shifted the public/private divide: direct intervention in pregnancy and childbirth did so as well. Colonial authorities presented their rationales for intervention quite transparently, asserting that depopulation through disease or high rates of infant mortality was a threat to the labor force.50 Although they could not link diseases such as trypanosomiasis to women’s behavior, they certainly could and did link epidemics of venereal disease (today referred to as sexually transmitted infections) to women.
Wars, which set in train famines, exoduses, and spikes in death and disability, are primary determinants of population patterns. Yet the dynamics of population in war zones and in the aftermath of war are poorly studied aspects of demography; even today, few assessments go beyond the enumeration of internally displaced persons and refugees. In wartime, census bureaus usually do not collect health and population data, and conflicting estimates of mortality and morbidity are part of the propaganda of warring sides. War-related mortality is sex- and age-selective and specific, with higher deaths rates in three groups—adult men and young boys who are fighting, the elderly (usually disproportionately women), and children.51 The higher mortality among adult men produces more widows and more female-headed households in war-torn societies. Yet war creates a pronatalist environment, putting pressure on women to bear more children, which affects their reproductive choices and results in phenomena such as the baby boom after World War II. Demographers have done almost no research on this phenomenon in the aftermath of other wars, although scattered observations suggest it might be widespread.
One historical question is how changes in breast-feeding practices and postpartum abstinence contributed to the decline in birth-spacing intervals and to population growth and the deterioration of maternal and infant health in twentieth-century Africa. In the early 1920s, Belgian Congo authorities tried to alter infant feeding practices and to distribute milk to mothers and infants, initiatives linked to a discourse that viewed African birth-spacing customs as insidious.52 The purpose of the programs was to reduce infant mortality by teaching African women about child rearing, cleanliness, and hygiene; by improving diet with weaning foods; by suppressing the practice of prolonged postpartum lactation; and by ending the ban on postpartum sexual relations. Behind the moralizing was the colonists’ concern about the impact of population loss, infertility, and low birthrates on growing industrial labor requirements. In the Belgian Congo, according to Hunt, such concerns led to pronatalist policies, including family allowances; expansion of medical services; laws to repress abortion, prostitution, and polygyny; maternity gifts; and tax exemptions for monogamously married men with more than four children.53
The Belgians, who were responsible for an estimated 10 million deaths in the Congo in the nineteenth century, expressed concern for the health of the Congolese in the colonial era. They melded patriotism, greed, and labor demands in their new pronatalist policies.54 Hunt quotes one of the European women leading the new health project as saying in 1926: “Without black labor, our colony would never be able to send to Europe the wealth buried in its soil. Help us by all means in our ability to protect, to care for the child while educating indigenous mothers, it is a duty. We need black labor. . . . To protect the child in the Congo is a duty, not only of altruism, but of patriotism.”55 The British were little better in the Gold Coast, according to Allman, where authorities regularly exposed the contradictions in their policies and perceptions, as well as the bankruptcy of their social welfare policies.56
In view of this broad range of factors, the narrow focus of population studies—and research in the applied field of population control—on fertility, almost always on women and today usually on chemical and surgical birth control, seems curious.
European powers imposed their religious, racial, class, and gender prejudices on their colonies—in the legislation they adopted to govern their subjects and in their parochial attitudes toward women and childbearing. Moreover, labor force requirements drove their decisions. The British conflated sexuality and reproduction even as they pursued what were, in fact, antinatalist policies, yet they maintained bans on abortion and contraception long after the British women’s movement achieved change at home in the 1930s. For the French, Belgian, and Portuguese administrations, these bans were consonant with their pronatalist policies. The Belgian law against abortion dates from 1867; it was repealed in Belgium in 1990. The French laws of 1810 (article 317) and 1939 (article 87) were the basis of laws in colonial Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Comores, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo (Kinshasa), Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, colonial Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, and Togo. In 1923, the French confirmed the 1920 ban on abortion, extended it to cover attempted abortion, and increased the punishment for abortion providers; for the woman seeking an abortion, the crime was classified as a civil liability.57 As Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries liberated themselves from colonial rule in the decades after World War II, few new governments repealed those laws. Most still retain the ban on abortion.58
Writing in 1985 about Cameroon, Gwan Achu has noted that pronatalist government policy had its roots in culture and in French colonial legislation “against contraception and abortion, discriminatory taxation in favor of married persons, family allowances and other travel, leave, transfer, retirement, housing and educational benefits and concessions for persons with large families as well as an elaborate network of mother and child health care centers.”59 Although the ban on sales of contraceptives, adopted in 1920, was rescinded in France in the late 1960s, it remained in force in Cameroon until 1980. Cameroon’s current abortion law, also adopted in 1980, continues the prohibition on dissemination of information about abortion, bans abortifacients, and permits abortion only for therapeutic reasons or for pregnancy due to rape.60
An obvious and effective way to regulate population growth is to control maternal mortality by providing maternity services. Even today, fertility control drives the safe motherhood initiatives of the World Health Organization (WHO).61 Maternal mortality was and remains exceedingly high in sub-Saharan Africa. The failure of colonial public health services to persuade African women to use hospitals for birth and to let obstetricians assist them is evidence, to my mind, of antinatalist policies. Colonial health services likewise failed to appreciate traditional midwives or to assist them with training and acquiring a minimum of material. Because pregnancy and childbirth entail considerable health risks and because abortion rates are nearly constant, independent of the legal status of abortion, prohibitions on abortion and contraception correlate with high maternal and infant mortality.62 In colonial Ghana in the 1930s, the British admitted that they did not have great confidence in the science of obstetrics, that there was an insufficient number of biomedically trained midwives, that there was no hospital to cope with high-risk deliveries, and that they had few facilities to deliver babies.63
In colonial Kenya, pronatalist policies focused on how and when girls were circumcised, where women could give birth, and how premarital pregnancy was managed. Beginning in the 1920s, girls’ sexuality, fertility, and initiation practices were the subject of heated debate and intense gender, generational, and political negotiations.64 Native authorities, in conjunction with British colonial agents and the police, instituted the forced circumcision of girls in the name of preventing population decline.65
In Uganda, British concern over reproduction and population size intensified from 1907 through 1924. Colonial administrators developed institutions and ideologies to cope with an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, to promote the family as a unit of reproduction, and to reform motherhood. The British admitted that syphilis arrived through increased contact with Europeans and added that Christianity transformed it into an epidemic by setting women free from the bonds of polygynous marriages and abolishing dire punishments for adultery. The administration worked to instill shame and to change the sexual behavior of individuals. At the end of World War I, the administration’s medical service and its missionary allies promoted motherhood through the Maternity Training School (MTS) in an effort to make more women reproduce, make them better mothers, and lower infant mortality levels. In the 1920s, the administration and the missions attempted to shape African family structures and private life by employing MTS-trained midwives in health and education initiatives.66
Colonial authorities were also aware of infertility as a cause of population decline. Much has been written on the African infertility belt, and many have speculated on the causes—whether they are related to the end of slavery, the sterility panic that blurred the discussion of fertility with discourses on degeneration and trauma, or the spread of sexually transmitted infections.67 I will discuss the epidemic of venereal disease in greater detail, but here—under the rubric of birth control and contraception—it is startling to note two absences in colonial policy: the lack of gynecological facilities to diagnose and treat infertility and the failure to distribute condoms to combat this contagion.68
Policies that cause disease to spread and public health measures to arrest or contain contagion can affect population growth rates directly. During periods of epidemic disease and famine, slave raiding so weakened African populations that colonial conquest was facilitated. Jill R. Dias describes Portuguese conquest as following waves of malaria and sleeping sickness in northern Angola and sweeping plagues of rinderpest in the south; in addition, there was a major epidemic of smallpox, and an almost uninterrupted sequence of drought, flood, and locusts marked the 1900s and 1910s, culminating in the terrible famines of 1911 and 1916 in the south:
These disasters weakened African rulers at a moment when Portuguese military pressures were at their most intense. In some regions, excessive losses of manpower and cattle hastened the military defeat of chiefs through their inability to mobilize resistance on the scale of previous decades. This was most evident in the south of Angola, where the deaths of around a quarter of a million people from starvation between 1911 and 1916 undoubtedly facilitated Portuguese victory over the Kwanyama in 1915. In the north, the uninterrupted epidemic of sleeping sickness between the 1890s and 1910s also aided Portuguese conquest.69
Maryinez Lyons examined trypanosomiasis (human sleeping sickness) in the Congo, where the Belgian conquest created an extraordinary ecological crisis that affected all aspects of life, including food production, social relations, and individual existence; it also resulted in devastating epidemic disease, increased endemic disease, severe malnutrition, and lowered resistance to disease. The colonial administration was aware that a demographic crisis brought about by epidemic sleeping sickness could seriously affect the future exploitation of the northern Congo, for which a plentiful supply of labor would be vital.70 The control of population mobility—effected by the imposition of a cordon sanitaire, which entailed relocation and consolidation of villages as well as quarantine of sick Africans—was the principal feature of campaigns against sleeping sickness. The fallout from travel restrictions in terms of economic life, payment of taxes, and social relations was unprecedented.71
Carol Summers describes a similar situation in Uganda, where from 1900 to 1920 between 250,000 and 330,000 people died of trypanosomiasis in an epidemic that shocked the protectorate administration into action. The population continued to shrink, however, even after the epidemic waned, and the administration turned its attention to the low birthrate, which was attributed mainly to venereal disease, especially syphilis.72 Authorities estimated that 70 percent of pregnancies among the Baganda ended in miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death within the first week after birth, primarily the result of congenital syphilis. F. J. Lambkin, head of the commission Britain sent to investigate the epidemic, argued that “medical intervention against syphilis was necessary, feasible, and potentially cost-effective. Too many actively infectious cases in young, productive adults had caused substantial debility to an already depleted work force.”73
Colonial medical authorities discussing maternal and infant welfare in the 1920s and 1930s blamed social diseases (prostitution, adultery, and their concomitants, syphilis and gonorrhea); poverty; the poor hygienic practices of native midwives; the carelessness of African mothers who fed their children inappropriately; superstition; and, in a departure from victim-blaming rationales, the lack of sufficient medical aid. Barbara Cooper notes that even today, public health authorities still level such accusations, shifting responsibility from the state to mothers.74 In parts of the Gold Coast, infant mortality rates exceeded 70 percent, yet colonial authorities failed to tie them to economic exploitation—the effects of migrant and forced labor, cash cropping, and taxation—preferring to underscore their own supposed moral superiority by calling for better education for African mothers, whom they considered failures.75
Venereal disease causes pregnancy loss, neonatal mortality, and sterility. Unchecked, it acts as a control on population growth. Physicians in the past often confused syphilis with endemic yaws. Infertility is a classic symptom of gonorrhea but not of syphilis.76 In Tanganyika, the fear was that low fertility, caused by widespread venereal disease, would lead to the depopulation, if not the extinction, of the Haya from the Bukoba region 77 In Uganda, colonial administrators allowed missionaries to take the lead in the post–World War I campaign against syphilis and paid for the missionary-administered “social purity” campaign and maternal health programs.78 Southern Rhodesian colonial authorities were so concerned about venereal disease that they imposed medical examinations on single African women who traveled to urban and industrial areas.79 The focus on women and venereal disease in urban centers found an echo in South African colonial policy in the interwar years.80 Women who suffered from venereal disease were affected socially and economically more than men because husbands repudiated wives who did not bear children.81
From the colonial administrators’ viewpoint, widespread venereal disease posed several problems with implications for population control. First, colonists blamed women who were sterile or aborted spontaneously for aggravating the perceived shortage of labor. Second, they blamed women for spreading venereal disease to men rather than seeing them as victims of diseased partners, corroborating notions that women were immoral. Third, the prevalence of these diseases confirmed colonial suspicions that women who ran away to towns were prostitutes who spread infection,82 reinforcing ideas about the need to control women’s mobility. Taken together, these considerations fostered the belief that women should be under the control of fathers or husbands, a concept that underlay the general colonial policy of designating adult women as minors for life.
What is striking about colonial efforts to control rates of population growth is the disparate levels on which policy operated—at one extreme were microlevel attempts to change breast-feeding practices, for example, and at the other extreme were macrolevel policies such as taxation. The next section examines the impact of several broader social and economic policies on demographic trends. Education exposed Africans to European ideas of modernity and the ideals of Christian family life. Famine relief reduced mortality from starvation. And taxation profoundly affected gender norms and relations.
Nineteenth-century missionaries training for the priesthood from Great Britain, France, and later the United States, who were supported by the Phelps-Stokes Education Fund, laid the foundations for European education in Africa.83 European evangelical missions taught literacy and manual skills, whereas the Anglican and Catholic missions had a more academic focus. Taking most of the credit for the establishment of schools in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1900s, mission officials began to pressure their governments for more support of their efforts in education. After World War I, the governments of Great Britain and France acknowledged that education was an important aspect of colonial policy and increased grants to mission schools. The value of African agricultural exports increased in the postwar period and African territories were becoming more profitable, justifying investments in African education. As mass education began taking root in Europe the use of schools as centers for colonial activity also encouraged educational spending.
According to Bob White, France had a very tight grip on the development of educational systems in its colonies.84 In 1922, the French colonial administration restricted missionary activity in education. The establishment of a new school in the colonies required government permission, teachers had to be government certified and teach the government curriculum, and French had to be the exclusive language of instruction. It might be said, then, that France supported mission schools only insofar as they spread knowledge of French and cultivated loyalty to France. The education given in the state schools was entirely secular.
In addition to promulgating French, French colonial education in sub-Saharan Africa tailored enrollment to estimates of job availability for graduating students. The system had “European” and “African” tracks. The European schools were selective and aimed at educating an African elite to fill the lower ranks of the colonial civil service, whereas African schools delivered popular education. Primary schools fell into three categories: village, regional, and urban. The village schools were African, and the regional schools, much fewer in number, were transitional. Urban schools were almost entirely European, and they closely followed the structure and curriculum of schools in the métropole.85
Depending initially on missionary schools, British colonial administrations became involved in formal education in Africa later than the French. Their activities were also much less visible. At first, the British government encouraged missionary education by granting church establishments full administrative freedom and providing occasional grants-in-aid. Such a laissez-faire attitude relieved the colonial regime of responsibility for educational administration and policy formation. The French had embarked on such endeavors before 1900. Even after the British increased expenditures for education, the strong influence of missions in the British colonies eventually led to the creation of a dual system of education. Mission and state schools existed side by side. British colonial education policy did eventually establish priorities for education, emphasizing curricula and activities adapted to meet local needs and conditions. The British system also privileged the use of local languages in primary school instruction and directed greater attention to the education of girls.86 The influence of missionaries, who often held negative, demeaning, and racist views of African women, on the type and content of education offered to girls cannot be overstated.87 Although they justified their civilizing experiments as efforts to improve the status of women, missionaries tried to reduce African women to the position of nineteenth-century European housewives.88 They taught women to cook (often on electric stoves, never mind that there was no electricity in the villages), mend, and wash and iron clothes, as well as how to wean their infants and decorate their homes (with no regard to poverty). Some of these women were destined to work as maids in European households.89 Was there a pronatalist motive behind the state funding of missionary education? Was it part of the push in the early years of colonial power to control the population?
Gertrude Mianda, writing about the Belgian Congo, maintains that the colonial educational system distanced women from salaried work, even as it prepared men for it. Schools trained a minority of women for “feminine work” in nursing, elementary school teaching, and infant care, a focus that Mianda attributes to Christian education and colonial legislation that restricted wives’ freedom to work outside the home.90 Hunt remarks that if colonial administrators assumed that working wives would bear fewer children and that female schooling and formal sector employment would influence fertility rates, they would have met with disappointment and contradictions.91 Colonial pride in the introduction of formal education was unambiguous. Credit for reducing the death rate from famine was less clear because the relief measures so often ignored the policies that created famine conditions, as detailed in the next section.
The relation of famine to starvation and death, frequently stemming from crop failures due to drought, flood, and infestation, is well documented.92 Famine acts as a check on population growth, even when it is not responsible for outright population decline. And famines were recurring phenomena throughout the colonial era. Joseph C. Miller suggests that drought caused the reversal of an underlying tendency toward population growth in west-central Africa: “The overall level of population thus probably increased little from the moment when Bantu-speaking farmers and herders first exceeded densities that could survive extended periods of failed rains. Pulses of growth repeatedly gave way to shudders of partial collapse, to be succeeded once again by a new phase of expansion.”93 And as Amartya Sen has observed of the great Bengal famine of 1942, more people died of disease epidemics attendant on famine than from starvation. Miller confirms this pattern in west-central Africa:
Outbreaks of disease paralleled the chronology of drought in an epidemiological sequence familiar from many other regions. Africans weakened by malnutrition and exhausted by dispersal into the bush or by flight into lowlands became particularly vulnerable to endemic pathogens. Retreat from drier watersheds into moist river valleys or to the coast carried people into disease environments where they possessed few immunities. Eighteenth-century droughts commonly culminated in mounting mortality.94
Dias notes increased mortality rates from disease among the African population of Angola particularly following droughts:
Malarial fevers, diseases of the digestive tract, especially those described as “dysentery” or “diarrhoea,” and respiratory diseases, including bronchitis, pneumonia and tuberculosis, were the most common and widespread endemic diseases in Angola by the nineteenth century. Together they were responsible for approximately half the deaths reported annually in Luanda, excluding years of smallpox epidemics, from the 1850s. . . . Malnutrition also favoured the outbreak of epidemic diseases. The principal infectious/contagious diseases which recurred in epidemic form in Angola from the sixteenth century onwards were yellow fever, smallpox, measles, influenza, and possibly bubonic plague and trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness).95
Whole families emigrated during hunger crises, and Dias surmises that the recurrence of more prolonged drought crises resulted in a permanent drift of people toward more fertile, densely populated areas. “Such fugitives from hunger would also have provided chiefs in Kasanje or the Ovimbundu kingdoms with a ready supply of slaves to sell for shipment overseas.”96 What is interesting about this for the purposes of this chapter is that we know more men were sold into overseas slavery and more women were retained for domestic slavery. The question is whether this enslavement of women further depressed population growth, since we know that slave women had fewer children than free married women.97 Dias does not investigate the gender dimensions of famine in her essay.
Each year between 1911 and 1927, major famines visited some large area of Africa. Droughts were the chief cause, but new tax systems, crop exports, declining trans-Saharan commerce, and labor migration exacerbated their impact.98 Public famine relief in the British colonies was modeled on the Indian Famine Codes of the 1880s and consisted of policies designed to fend off starvation: a ban on the export of foods from affected areas and food-for-work programs, which usually employed men on road-building schemes, paying workers in grain. Even when authorities considered importing food—usually thought too costly and impractical—they distributed relief in the context of food-for-work programs, an approach still used today by the World Food Program. In some places, authorities restricted the use of grain to brew beer, required Africans to store food and seed for the following year, enforced the cultivation of drought-resistant root crops, and fixed price ceilings.99 The emphasis was on short-term relief and not on the development of agriculture, communications, and infrastructure; that is, the focus was never on preventing future famines.
When famine threatened, administrators regularly blamed food shortages on overpopulation as well as poor farming practices and improvidence, despite a general concern, especially in the early years of colonialism, that population growth was slow and insufficient to provide the necessary labor for the development of commercial agriculture and mining. In explaining overpopulation, colonists fell back on rationales that exonerated them from any blame; instead, they praised colonial conquest for putting an end to deadly tribal warfare and slave raids that depopulated areas even when they were not lethal.100 Yet colonial authorities extracted too much food from subsistence farms for administrative requirements and for sale in towns, and they collected taxes on a timetable that coincided with metropolitan fiscal years, not the vagaries of local weather patterns.101 Iliffe attributes the decline in famine mortality after 1927 to a combination of manioc cultivation; vaccination against smallpox; the substitution of motor vehicles for human porterage; and, more generally, “effective government, good transport, wider markets, and some increase in average wealth.”102 At the same time, he acknowledges that endemic poverty, undernutrition, and chronic malnutrition replaced periodic famine mortality as the chief problems of subsistence. “The decline of famine mortality during the later 1920s and 1930s removed one of tropical Africa’s chief constraints on population growth . . . a general demographic expansion now became apparent.”103
I have discussed elsewhere the demographic implications of famine relief: starvation killed the young and the old, but though it spared those in their reproductive years from death, it did depress their ability to reproduce. In famine years, population growth nearly halted, but with the next harvest, adults were able to recover. In sexual relations, men could once again hold erections and produce sperm, and women could again ovulate, menstruate, become pregnant, and bear children. Famine relief both lopped off the peaks in mortality and permitted couples to reproduce. Only child health suffered as chronic malnutrition set in. Famine relief was never of sufficient quantity or quality, and the main preventive measure—the planting of manioc—was of such low nutritional value as virtually to ensure chronic malnutrition.104
Marcia Wright points out another incidental demographic effect of famine: colonial economic units at the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika in Northern Rhodesia employed single men in significant concentrations in an atmosphere that undermined the authority of chiefs. “This was especially true in critical times of famine, which meant hard work and short rations,” she observes. Furthermore, chiefs were not easily able to maintain control of their many wives, “who tended to develop their own strategies for amelioration, seeking sexual and social relations outside the royal monopoly and rebelling and running away in groups.”105
Yet another way in which famine affected demography involves the aid it gave to the process of European displacement of Africans and expropriation of African farms, which triggered complex processes of impoverishment and threatened to make the effects of famine more severe. Dias describes the process by which African families lost control of land to foreigners during such crises in Angola:
Successive crop failures bankrupted hundreds of small African coffee and peanut producers, forcing them to sell or abandon their plots to local or incoming purchasers and creditors. . . . Expropriation of African farmland was further aided by mortality and flight during repeated smallpox epidemics. This process resulted in a major redistribution of property in Cazengo [Angola] in favour of European settlers and the replacement of a predominantly African, smallholding economy by large-scale plantations.106
The impact on women related to the commercial boom in commodities for which men required their labor, leading to the neglect of food production. Where rubber was extracted, expansion of the trade aggravated the situation because women, who normally cultivated food crops, were the ones who prepared rubber for trade. Emergency famine relief, with its contradictory effects on rates of population growth, was a response to hunger crises created largely by colonial policies; it never was intended to solve underlying problems such as the way that taxation policies contributed to food shortages and famines.
Taxes affected African women, although colonial states officially collected taxes from African men (in most cases), on the assumption that the family was patriarchal. The hut tax, for example, set a precedent for treating African women as legal minors, although the state took for granted that women were economically productive members and that agriculture was the major source of income. In South Africa, according to Sean Redding, “later taxes combined with the development of migrant labor and the declining availability of arable land in the reserves to restructure women’s roles dramatically.” Some whites hoped that the hut tax would lead to the decline, if not the extinction, of polygyny and that African women would concentrate on domestic duties, leaving their men to do the monetarily productive labor; based on Victorian ideals of English womanhood, they envisaged African women committed to monogamous marriages in which they were the junior, silent partners. Taxation was the basic context for colonial administrations’ interest in marriage laws, as discussed previously.107
The British tradition of a strong civil service and a local value-based tax stands in contrast to the French approach of centralization and area-based taxes. In Anglophone countries, the state generally administered property taxes locally, and the revenues supported local government. Most Francophone countries had a central government property tax. Francophone countries generally have detailed and codified tax systems with complex administrative structures. According to Riël C. D. Franzsen and Joan M. Youngman, in the absence of a tradition of a strong civil service, these systems are almost impossible to maintain and have contributed to the decline of ancillary revenue sources such as the property tax.108 In Lusophone colonies, the property tax was generally a national tax.
Belgian authorities introduced the single women’s tax in Usumbura in 1942; they required all urban women residents without husbands—whether divorced, widowed, or never married—to pay. Each woman had a special tax book in which authorities stapled a tax receipt for each year she paid, along with other tickets for payment of water, property, and road taxes. The penalty for not paying was imprisonment. What motivated this tax?109 Was it a morality tax, as Hunt argues, based on the assumption that all women living alone were prostitutes? Did it also have an indirect pronatalist demographic appeal, since single women were unlikely to bear as many children as married women?
The Cape Colony first imposed the hut tax on men in 1870: “Although it did little to change women’s social, cultural and economic status by itself,” Redding writes, “[it] did set a precedent for treating African women as legal minors.” Combined with the development of migrant labor and the declining availability of arable land in the reserves, taxes restructured women’s roles dramatically. “Taxes were by no means the only or the primary cause of this restructuring, but they were an integral part of the foundation.”110 The hut tax, which could not be paid in kind, assumed that women and unmarried men were legal minors and dependents, a status that was alterable for men through marriage but not for women. Reasons for the hut tax’s longevity include whites’ ideas about gender relations, the proper sexual division of labor, and opposition to polygyny. A tax on each wife acted as an (ineffectual) economic disincentive to having multiple wives.
Yet, as Redding points out, the hut tax by itself did not impose a high enough price either to deter polygyny or to propel men into wage labor. It did, though, lay the “legal groundwork for social, cultural and economic changes in African women’s roles, changes that would be catalyzed by additional taxation, the development of migrant labor, population growth, and the impact of legislation that severely restricted women’s choices.”111 Women had neither security of tenure nor legal right to property. The state effectively taxed women without according them the status of taxpayers or adults. As husbands and sons more commonly spent longer periods of time engaged in migrant labor, women had to take greater responsibility for the actual physical payment of taxes. Those who remained in the rural areas suffered the brunt of the consequences of nonpayment even though they were not in any legal sense liable. The punishments for nonpayment of taxes could be severe; the man could be tried and stood virtually no chance of being acquitted. After the trial, the police could seize the family’s livestock and other movable property; they could imprison him; or they could confiscate his usufruct title to the land, evicting his whole family in the process, and assign the land to someone else. Although the state rarely resorted to these punishments, women procured the money in several ways—by taking a lover who could be coaxed into providing the cash; by borrowing from white traders or wealthier and often male relatives; by engaging in commercial farming, selling produce, eggs, or wool; or by renting out their plots to other African farmers or allowing them to farm on the halves, a set of sharecropping arrangements that were illegal. Still others became migrant laborers themselves, leaving their extended families to occupy the land.112 Taxation (and other economic requirements) forced women out of family life in the rural areas, often pushing them into illegal occupations in the towns.
This chapter describes colonial administrators’ attempts to bend reproductive trends to their requirements for labor through a wide range of policies. Marriage, adultery, divorce, child custody, and inheritance laws were crucial arenas in which to reassert patriarchal control, leading to collusion between chiefs and headmen, on one side, and colonial officials, on the other. Colonial policies that controlled women’s behavior, including their reproduction, were not only directly about birth control but also about using the control of women to rule societies and ultimately to control men’s labor and the supply of male labor. Gender and generational relations directly organized social relations of production in precolonial African societies. Attempts by colonial administrations to reorganize productive relations meant disruption of, if not an assault on, familial and gender relations and powers; attempts to reorder gender precipitated shifts in economic power and in demographic patterns.113
Male representatives from African communities encountered the colonial legal system at a point of insecurity in which wage labor was eroding their control over the labor of women and young men. They represented African customary law to colonial rulers in ways that emphasized their control over women, interpretations that colonial legal procedures rendered even more rigid. African patriarchal gender values converged with the colonial administrators’ and judges’ own patriarchal views and their administrative interests in controlling African women and strengthening the capacity of chiefs to govern locally.114 By monopolizing criminal law and punishment, the colonial regimes introduced distortions into customary law. Chanock wonders, “In a situation of growing class differentiation, whose resource was custom?”115
Chanock has described the processes by which the British shaped customary law in Africa and also the ways in which public issues, such as labor power and land-ownership, and private issues, such as kinship relations, were inextricably linked:
With the development of migrant labour, both labour power and goods could be sold as commodities. Household heads obtained cash through the transformation of their dependants’ labour power into commodity form, and gradually rural production for cash sale also developed. Household heads therefore encouraged dependent men and women to labour in various ways for money. The production of commodities, which enabled dependants to have access to cash independently of elders, both accentuated the fragmentation of households and produced “custom” as an ideological response to this fragmentation.116
The attempts of colonial administrators to influence women’s reproductive lives were congruent with the moral values that Christian missionaries sought to instill in Africans and wanted to see reflected in the law. Although colonial administrators and missionaries held many religious values in common, particularly regarding the proper role of women in society, some missionary beliefs conflicted with the reproductive outcomes that the state desired. The two groups compromised because missionaries needed state subsidies and the state needed and used missionaries to implement regulations that were intended to control the population. African women and men resisted some of those policies and used others for their own purposes. Women and men also clashed with each other. And older men were at odds with younger men and women in their struggles for some semblance of independence, autonomy, and power vis-à-vis colonial authorities.
In this chapter, I have tried to tease out the demographic consequences of colonial policies and to call attention to the motivations underlying some of them, whether to promote or to restrict population growth. I have not discussed the issue of population densities, although population distribution and migration clearly influenced mortality from disease. My primary focus is on gender—that is, on the impact of colonial policies on women and relations between genders and generations. Some of the central questions of this chapter raise issues for further research. For example, what were the demographic implications of the customs that colonial states codified in customary law, and what were the demographic consequences of the prohibition of some customs and the criminalization of others under statutory law?
This essay could not have been written without the generous assistance of many historians. Not trained as a historian myself, I relied heavily on their work. I particularly want to thank Elizabeth Schmidt, Barbara Cooper, Nancy Hunt, Elisha Renne, Dennis Cordell, Asma Abdel Halim, and José Curto. I thank them for their own work as well as for their responses to my requests for references. Special thanks are due to Dennis Cordell for so kindly reading the first draft and making useful comments.
1. These are not inflexible categories: the French and Belgians seemed more conscious of the pronatalist impact of benefits and allowances than the British, and they used them to increase the birthrate (read labor force, even as they gave other justifications for their policies). The British had no less need for labor but seemed haunted by Malthusian beliefs that welfare provisions such as “poor laws” constituted a “negative” check on population, enabling large families to survive. Catholic European powers—France, Belgium, Portugal—adhered to (pronatalist) church doctrine.
2. Prosecution for rape in colonial Africa focused on black male assaults on white women; the same concern did not extend to white or black assaults on black women.
3. Frederick Cooper, “From Free Labor to Family Allowances: Labor and African Society in Colonial Discourse,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 751.
4. Ann Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 634–60.
5. Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, “Introduction: Tensions of Empire—Colonial Control and Visions of Rule,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 614.
6. Dennis D. Cordell, Joel W. Gregory, and Victor Piché, “African Historical Demography: The Search for a Theoretical Framework,” in African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives, ed. Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 14–32.
7. Amy Kaler, Running after Pills: Politics, Gender, and Contraception in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 180–81.
8. Barbara Brown, “Facing the ‘Black Peril’: The Politics of Population Control in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 256–73.
9. Elizabeth Schmidt, “Negotiated Spaces and Contested Terrain: Men, Women, and the Law in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1990–1939,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no. 4 (1990): 622–26.
10. Ibid., 622.
11. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray, “Missing Women: Age and Disease,” Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming. Paper cited in Journal of Economic Literature Classification, nos. J11, J16, O53 (2009): 2.
12. Ibid.
13. Rita Headrick, Colonialism, Health and Illness in French Equatorial Africa, 1885–1935 (Atlanta, GA: African Studies Association, 1994), 96.
14. Jean Allman, “Making Mothers: Missionaries, Medical Officers, and Women’s Work in Colonial Asante, 1924–45,” History Workshop Journal 38, no. 1 (1994): 23–47.
15. Cooper, “From Free Labor,” 746.
16. Nancy Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
17. Cooper, “From Free Labor,” 751.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 755–56.
20. Nancy Hunt, “Placing African Women’s History and Locating Gender,” Social History 14, no. 3 (1989): 359–79.
21. E. Schmidt, “Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Colonial State in Zimbabwe,” Signs 16, no. 4 (1991): 732–56. This was also true for migration related to commercial (plantation) agriculture. See Dennis D. Cordell, Joel W. Gregory, and Victor Piché, Hoe and Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa (Boulder, CO: Harper and Row, 1996), esp. 231–86.
22. Schmidt, “Patriarchy,” 735.
23. Jane Parpart, “Sexuality and Power on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926–1964,” in Discovering the African Past: Essays in Honor of Daniel F. McCall, ed. Norman Bennett, Boston University Papers on Africa 8 (Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, 1987), 53–72.
24. Schmidt, “Patriarchy,” 741.
25. Nancy Hunt, “Noise over Camouflaged Polygamy, Colonial Morality Taxation, and a Woman-Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa,” Journal of African History 32, no. 3 (1991): 471–94.
26. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
27. Linzi Manicom, “Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History,” Journal of African History 33, no. 3 (1992): 456.
28. Ibid.
29. Allman, “Making Mothers,” 28.
30. Ibid., 29–30. One illustration of this intrusion was the annual staging of a “baby show,” which required mothers to register births, regularly attend the welfare clinic, and (for extra points) have their babies vaccinated.
31. Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
32. Manicom, “Ruling Relations,” 460.
33. Martin Chanock, “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 32, no. 1 (1985): 65–88.
34. Cooper, “From Free Labor,” 749.
35. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, 14.
36. Chanock, “Peculiar Sharpness,” 67.
37. Schmidt, “Negotiated Spaces.”
38. Martin Chanock, “Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia,” in African Women and the Law—Historical Perspectives, ed. M. J. Hay and M. Wright (Boston: Boston University Press, 1982), 60.
39. Barbara Cooper, “La rhétorique de la ‘mauvaise mère,’” in Niger 2005: Une catastrophe si naturelle, ed. Xavier Crombé and Jean-Hervé Jézéquel (Paris: Karthala, 2007), 199–226.
40. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, 172.
41. Judith Byfield, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1890–1940 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 65.
42. Chanock, “Peculiar Sharpness,” 73.
43. E. Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992), 106.
44. Chanock, quoted in ibid., 108.
45. Ibid., 111.
46. Margaret Strobel, “African Women,” Signs 8, no. 1 (1982): 109–31.
47. Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives, 116.
48. Hunt, “Noise over Camouflaged Polygamy,” 475.
49. As a group, polygynous marriages tend to produce more children than monogamous marriages because women marry young and remarry quickly after death or divorce; however, individual women in polygynous marriages appear to have fewer children because of (short-term) separations and the older age of husbands. See M. Gareene and E. van de Walle, “Polygyny and Fertility among the Sereer of Senegal,” Population Studies 43, no. 2 (1989): 267–83, and G. Pison, “La démographie de la polygamie,” Population 41, no. 1 (1986): 93–122. Fertility is also usually lower for women who have a number of marriages because more time is spent without regular sexual intercourse between liaisons and the incidence of venereal disease may be higher. See Claire Robertson, “Post-proclamation Slavery in Accra: A Female Affair?” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 220–45.
50. In their rudimentary attempts to enumerate the population, colonial officials were unable to determine which factors were responsible for population decline. Dennis D. Cordell, “Où sont tous les enfants? La faible fécondité en Centrafrique, 1890–1960,” Population, reproduction, sociétés: Perspectives et enjeux de démographie sociale, ed. Dennis D. Cordell, Danielle Gauvreau, Raymond R. Gervais, and Céline Le Bourdais (Montreal, Canada: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1993), 257–77.
51. See Meredeth Turshen, “Definition and Injuries of Violence,” in Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence, ed. E. A. Castelli and J. R. Jakobsen (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 29–35.
52. Nancy Hunt, “Le bébé en brousse: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 3 (1988): 401–32.
53. Ibid., 403–4.
54. According to Hunt, “Noise over Camouflaged Polygamy,” 473, once the Congo became a colony, Belgians felt guilty about King Leopold’s excesses and were eager “to bring in a new humanitarian era, introduce reforms and approach the civilizing task with earnestness and vigour.”
55. Hunt, “Le bébé,” 405.
56. Allman, “Making Mothers,” 31.
57. Bartha Maria Knoppers, Isabel Brault, and Elizabeth Sloss, “Abortion Law in Francophone Countries,” American Journal of Comparative Law 38, no. 4 (1990): 889–922.
58. Ibid. Colonial policies and the Catholic Church continue to dominate government regulation of birth control practice in sub-Saharan Africa. Since independence, the following countries have amended the law to allow abortion when the woman’s life is at serious risk: Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. In many of these countries, more than one physician must attest to the necessity of an abortion—this in countries where the ratio of physicians to population was on the order of 0.19 per 10,000 population even after independence!
59. Emmanuel Gwan Achu, “Origins and Elements of the Population Policies of Cameroon Republic,” Revue Science et Technique 3, nos. 1–2 (1985): 116–28.
60. Center for Reproductive Rights, “Les droits des femmes en matière de santé reproductive au Cameroun: Rapport alternatif,” available at http://reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/SRCameroon00fr.pdf, accessed 4 April 2010.
61. For example, the lead story in Safe Motherhood, the newsletter of the WHO initiative, speaks of women bearing the cost of high fertility in Nigeria and how men control the use of contraceptives and decisions about family size, whereas a report on a Safe Motherhood workshop in Asia emphasizes access to family planning (vol. 25, no. 1 [1998], available at https://apps.who.int/rht/pdf_files/25_safemotherhood.en.pdf, accessed 5 April 2010). See also the report of an October 2009 UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at which health ministers from around the world agreed that swift action had to be taken to reduce the number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth. The ministers seemed to agree that family planning was the most cost-effective way of tacking the problem; see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8327144.stm, accessed 5 April 2010.
62. Knoppers, Brault, and Sloss, “Abortion Law.”
63. Allman, “Making Mothers,” 32.
64. Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
65. For more on this and outstanding specific examples from among the Meru, see Anne-Marie Péatrik, La vie à pas contés: Génération, âge et société dans les hautes terres du Kenya (Meru-Tigania-Igembe) (Nanterre, France: Société d’Ethnologie, 1999), 429–506.
66. Carol Summers, “Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925,” Signs 16, no. 4 (1991): 787–807.
67. Cordell, “Où sont tous les enfants”; Nancy Hunt, “Fertility’s Fires and Empty Wombs in Recent Africanist Writing,” Africa 75, no. 3 (2005): 421–35; Anne Retel-Laurentin, “Influence de certaines maladies sur la fécondité: Un exemple africain,” Population 22, no. 5 (1967): 841–60.
68. Hunt, “Fertility’s Fires,” and Alan Jeeves, “Public Health in the Era of South Africa’s Syphilis Epidemic of the 1930s and 1940s,” South African Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2001): 79–102.
69. Jill R. Dias, “Famine and Disease in the History of Angola, c. 1830–1930,” Journal of African History 21, no. 3 (1981): 375. Not until the very end of the nineteenth century did Portugal develop systematic colonization policies for Africa, when officials promoted military campaigns against rebellious African rulers, encouraged white settlers to migrate to Africa, and put Africans under the control of the Portuguese state as either compliant assimilated Africans (assimilados) or natives (indigenas) subject to forced labor. Cristiana Basto, “Medical Hybridisms and Social Boundaries: Aspects of Portuguese Colonialism in Africa and India in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 767–82.
70. Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2–3.
71. Ibid., 199–233.
72. Summers, “Intimate Colonialism,” 789.
73. Quoted in ibid., 791. The British public saw syphilis as a disease imported by the colonial expansion, so there was a substantial British lobby for an antisyphilis campaign. For further examples, see Shane Doyle, Population and Environment in Western Uganda, 1860–1955: Crisis and Decline in Bunyoro (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), and Jan Kuhanen, Poverty, Health and Reproduction in Early Colonial Uganda (Joensuu, Finland: University of Joensuu Publications in the Humanities, 2005), 630–34.
74. Cooper, “La rhétorique de la ‘mauvaise mère.’”
75. Allman, “Making Mothers.”
76. Mead Over and Peter Piot, “HIV Infection and Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” in Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, ed. D. T. Jamison, W. H. Mosley, A. R. Measham, and J. L. Bobdilla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 455–527.
77. Birgitta Larsson, Conversion to Greater Freedom? Women, Church and Social Change in Northwestern Tanzania under Colonial Rule (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1991), 89.
78. Summers, “Intimate Colonialism,” 794.
79. Lynette Jackson, “When in the White Man’s Town: Zimbabwean Women Remember Chibeura,” in Women in African Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 191–215.
80. Karen Jochelson, The Colour of Disease: Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1880–1950 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
81. Larsson, Conversion, 88.
82. See Luise White, Comforts of Home (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), which is the history of women prostitutes in Nairobi during the interwar period.
83. Bob White, “Talk about School: Education and the Colonial Project in French and British Africa (1860–1960),” Comparative Education 32, no. 1 (1996): 9–25.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. Allman, “Making Mothers”; Hunt, “Noise over Camouflaged Polygamy”; and Schmidt, “Patriarchy.”
88. Nancy Hunt, “Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946–1960,” Signs 15, no. 3 (1990): 447–74; Nakanyike Musisi, “Colonial and Missionary Education: Women and Domesticity in Uganda: 1900–1945,” in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 172–94.
89. Jacklyn Cock, “Domestic Service and Education for Domesticity: The Incorporation of Xhosa Women into Colonial Society,” in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945: An Overview, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town: David Philip. 1990), 76–96.
90. Gertrude Mianda, “Colonialism, Education, and Gender Relations in the Belgian Congo: The Evolué Case,” in Women in African Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geieger, and Nakanyike Musisi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 157.
91. Hunt, “Fertility’s Fires,” 422–23.
92. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
93. Joseph C. Miller, “The Significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the Agriculturally Marginal Zones of West-Central Africa,” Journal of African History 23, no. 1 (1982): 22–23.
94. Ibid.
95. Jill R. Dias, “Famine and Disease,” 357–58.
96. Ibid., 356–57.
97. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein. “Women’s Importance in African Slave Systems,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 3–25.
98. John Iliffe, The African Poor: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 157.
99. Holger Weiss, “Crop Failures, Food Shortages and Colonial Famine Relief Policies in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast,” Ghana Studies 6 (2003): 5–58.
100. Ibid.
101. For examples from several parts of Africa, see various chapters in Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory, eds., African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), and Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory, “Labour Reservoirs and Population: French Colonial Strategies in Koudougou, Upper Volta, 1914 to 1939,” Journal of African History 23, no. 2 (1982): 205–24.
102. Iliffe, African Poor, 158.
103. Ibid., 160.
104. Meredeth Turshen, “Population Growth and the Deterioration of Health: Mainland Tanzania, 1920–1960,” in African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives, ed. Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 187–200.
105. Marcia Wright, “Justice, Women and the Social Order in Abercorn, Northeastern Rhodesia, 1897–1903,” in African Women and the Law—Historical Perspectives, ed. M. J. Hay and M. Wright (Boston: Boston University Press, 1982), 36.
106. Dias, “Famine and Disease,” 367.
107. Sean Redding, “Legal Minors and Social Children: Rural African Women and Taxation in the Transkei, South Africa,” African Studies Review 36, no. 3 (1993): 49.
108. Riël C. D. Franzsen and Joan M. Youngman, “Mapping Property Taxes in Africa,” Land Lines (July 2009), 8–13, available at www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/di/1648_863_Article2.pdf, accessed 4 April 2010.
109. The tax was also economically important, contributing as much as 20 percent of urban revenues in Stanleyville. Hunt, “Domesticity and Colonialism.”
110. Redding, “Legal Minors,” 49.
111. Ibid., 57–58.
112. Ibid., 58–66.
113. Manicom, “Ruling Relations,” 452.
114. Ibid., 451.
115. Chanock, “Peculiar Sharpness,” 65–88.
116. Ibid., 67.