Historical Memory and Expanding Social Networks of Mennonite Mission School Women, Mara Region, Tanzania, 1938 to the Present

Abstract

Because of their structural position as boundary crossers in virilocal marriages, women in the Mara Region of Tanzania have used historical memory to construct social networks across ethnic boundaries for their own and their community's security. During the colonial era these networks were severely restricted, leading to increasingly difficult lives for women. One group of women who found creative ways to reconstruct these far-reaching networks was church women who went to mission boarding schools. Girls left their homes and made connections to a new family in the church that supported them as they moved into new interethnic communities. They began telling their own life histories in the form of the spiritual testimony, shaped by the practice of confession in the East African Revival beginning in 1942. These narratives of resistance to traditional practices like female circumcision inspired others and created a sense of individual agency. Although these stories seem to represent a rejection, even demonisation, of the past, they carry on work entrusted to these women by their grandmothers, of using storytelling, even within a new narrative genre and in a radically new context, to make connections and build community across ethnic boundaries.