Engendered Encounters: Men of the Church and the “Church of Women” in Maasailand, Tanzania, 1950–1993

Abstract

A significant paradox of the missionary endeavor in many parts of Africa, as elsewhere, is the preponderance of female adherents to Christianity, despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men. 2 "Again and again in a mission history," notes Adrian Hastings, "the early significant baptisms were mostly of women" (Hastings 1993:112). 3 Certainly this has been the case among Maasai in Tanzania, even though Catholic missionaries from the Congregation of the Holy Ghost have spent over forty years trying to evangelize Maasai men. In vain they tried to convert men first through schools, then in their homesteads, and finally in individual instruction classes. Maasai women were restricted from attending school, tolerated but not encouraged to attend homestead instruction and services, and dissuaded from holding formal leadership positions in the church. Despite these gender-based 758 0010-4175/99/4647-0321 $9.50

Participation: Structural and relational power and Maasai women’s political subjectivity in Tanzania

“…For example, incorporation of Maasai men into the British state system in the early 1900s extended the authority of Maasai men over a newly emerging “political” domain, thereby expanding their bases for political power and introducing new forms of property relations (Hodgson, 1999b). In particular, development projects of the 1920s and 1930s established an important and enduring precedent that Maasai men, not women, were the target of intervention, disenfranchising women from their formerly overlapping rights (Hodgson, 1999c). Together the processes of political representation and property ownership shifted gendered power relations, with Maasai men taking advantage of the British neglect of women’s rights to strengthen their political authority, resulting in the devaluation of Maasai women (Hodgson, 1999b).…”

“…As processes of autonomy and interdependence previously enjoyed by Maasai men and women in the late 1800s were replaced by unequal relationships of economic dependence and political control, men began to think about Maasai women as “property” (Hodgson, 1999a, 1999b). The deterioration of women’s rights has progressed into a phenomenon whereby Maasai women are not only viewed and referred to as children by men, but required to show respect to men by acting and speaking as if they were children when addressing men of their own age or older (Hodgson, 1999c). In addition to these processes relegating women to domestic concerns in the home, their supposed child-like qualities also have been used by men to justify the sociopolitical exclusion of women by curtailing their ability to operate in the political world (Hodgson, 1999a).…”

Christianity, Islam, and ‘The Religion of Pouring’: Non-linear Conversion in a Gambia/Casamance Borderland

“…More extended studies have examined such linear conversion processes as composed of multiple phases or steps that may include elements of 'reconversion' and more complex dialogue ('long conversations', in the Comaroffs' terms) between two religious traditions (Baum 1990;Comaroff 1985;Comaroff andComaroff 1991, 1997;Hodgson 1999;Landau 1995;McKittrick 2002;Smythe 2006;Masquelier 2001). With the exceptions of Gausset (1999), Klein (1968), and Searing (2006), few studies have considered non-linear cases where, within a relatively tightly bound historical period and within a defined population, there has been conversion from a localized practice both to Islam and to Christianity or other divergent trends.…”

The meaning, experience and ecology of African Christian marriages and familial relationships: a phenomenological study at Makumira University College, Tanzania

“…A variety of authors (Hodgson, 1999a;Howard & Miller, 1997;Swantz, 1985) argue that colonization had the effect of reinforcing and intensifying male's traditional authority. Hodgson (1999b) contends that women's economic autonomy and responsibility for trading for food and household supplies (among the Maasai) was supplanted by cash transactions which were controlled by men. Whereas, in pre-colonial society, men's and women's interactions were complementary and interdependent, through the influence of the colonial administration, the traditional male domain of the public and political became more antagonistic to the female domains of the private and domestic.…”