Vision and revision: Demography, maternal and child health development, and the representation of Native women in colonial Tanzania

• Main Author: Colwell, Anne Stacie Canning
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2001
• Subjects: African history; Children & youth; Colonialism; Cultural anthropology; Demographics; Demography; Native peoples; Public health; Womens studies; Tanzania
• ISBN: 9780493044965; 0493044965

Fertility, maternal mortality, and child survival—biomedical and demographic subjects—remain the most studied aspects of African women's lives. This dissertation investigates the production, evolution, and function of the biomedical and demographic representations of women in colonial Tanzania, 1880s–1950s. I trace those representations by tracking the colonial gaze: asking what the gaze saw (colonial perceptions), why it saw what it saw (colonial desires), and how it pursued those visions (colonial policies and programs). I determine that the German colonizers saw a collective body of Others while subsequent British administrations discerned distinct tribal units, then identified migrants, minors, and mothers as regular tribal constituents, and finally perceived a uniform and population of interchangeable colonial dependents. Three themes recur in this history of maternal and child health development in colonial Tanzania. First is the role of biomedicine and demography in amplifying the differences between and erasing those within the categories White and Native. Second are the contradictory constructions of native culture in colonial biomedicine and demography: one, cultures-as-cause, ascribes native misery to supposedly common cultural practices reformulating colonization as rescue; another, culture-as-cure, elaborates appropriate native practices justifying both colonial interference (to restore culture) and colonial inaction (to preserve it). Third is the elaboration in colonial biomedicine and demography of the trope of the timid tribeswoman, the notion that native women were particularly fearful of European ways. That trope exculpated the lack of colonial services for native women, suggesting that they would have eschewed any hospital beds or school benches provided. The colonial biomedical and demographic texts interwove these constructions and stereotypes, increasing their veracity and naturalizing the emphasis on less costly preventive rather than curative biomedical services. Finally, in addition to tracing the representations of native women in colonial texts and at the colony level (Tanganyika), I interrogate the colonial numbers, the official and extra-governmental demographic indices, and analyze the texts and numbers produced about local-level Kilimanjaro. In reanalyzing early colony-level demographic data and analyzing a new database from Kilimanjaro parish registers, I question the tempo of demographic change and the assumed relationship between population growth and biomedicine development in East Africa.