The American Historical Review has asked Prof. Kenda Mutongi to write an appraisal of Luise White’s The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (University of Chicago Press, 1990). Prof. Mutongi intends for this review to be more or less an oral history of the reception of The Comforts of Home, and requests your help.
She is interested in the stuff that cannot be accessed from the “official” records such as books and articles that have been influenced by White’s book. She is taking this route because books have so many lives beyond those we see in footnotes and citations. These lives are often ignored, though she think they may help us better understand the impact of the book. She is interested in hearing your initial response to The Comforts of Home, for example. Were you persuaded by the book? If you have taught the book, could you please recount your students’ response to it? She welcomes any information you can offer about your experience with the book—even any hearsay, gossip or rumor about the book, anything you think Luise White might appreciate, given the importance of such ephemeral orality to her work.
Please share in the comments below! If you would rather communicate your thoughts privately, you may do so by email: kmutongi@mit.edu
Another experiment in scholarship brought to you by the AHR.
Alex Lichtenstein
Editor, American Historical Review
What a great project! Luise has always been a generous scholar with eclectic interests – very compatible with anthropologists. I met her as a grad student when I first returned from Tanzania, and she was a visitor at Northwestern. We became quite friendly- she was helpful to a LOT of grad students in Chicago.
I was struck right away when I read Comforts with how much it confirmed and also helped to interpret the practice I found in Kagera in the 80s. It was very clear that land values were subject to a lot of inflation, and that there was concern about the number of single women – malaya- who were buying mashamba to live independently, or to preside over households with younger children in it – nieces and nephews, or perhaps grandchildren. I really always wondered whether sex work could be as profitable as this seemed to require, or if stories of Haya sex workers were more about reputation than about practice; but, in fact, in my survey I found a high percentage of adult women – as high as 25% over 40 years of age- had worked in Kenya or Uganda. Of course this was at the same time as the HIV epidemic was nearing its peak in the late 80s, so there were probably many more who would not admit to this work. But almost every female headed household I knew of had been subsidized by sex work.
What was interesting to me in Comforts is the way that Haya women – or “Ziba”, a term that refers to the northern most kingdom in Kagera, closest to the northern border of TZ – upset the forms of domesticity that women from the coast and other parts of Kenya were creating to assure some measure of dignity, and security for themselves. Haya seemed to undercut prices and have no regard for domestic security – they wanted cash, and they wanted it quick. In Luise’s work, I think she interprets this in rather utilitarian terms – an open market with cheap labor costs was a way to increase volume and attract customers. I don’t think that’s wrong, but I don’t think it really explains much. What became more important when I compared this historical material to the practices I found in Kagera is that Haya women clearly saw Nairobi asa place to go, make a quick buck, and then leave – when they returned to Bukoba they could purchase land and THEN establish the forms of domestic security and propriety that they flouted in Nairobi. The point of their actions, then, was to make it clear that Nairobi was NOT their home, and they took no Comforts there- the only REAL home for them was back in Kagera, and, indeed, most women did return and have successful lives through the 70s at least.
In any event, this was an early reassurance to me that my ethnographic work made sense! And Luise, happily, became a big fan of my work, too. The very first class I ever taught was as a guest lecturer in a course on the Anthro of Gender, and I used Comforts as the text to talk about my own work. It seemed to go great, and I remember just loving that class (it got a lot harder, but at least it was a good start!).
Hi Kenda,
What a fascinating project you’re doing! Here are some of my thoughts:
I can’t remember the first time I read Comforts of Home (perhaps in undergrad when I took courses on gender with Stephan Miescher), but I always considered it a major contribution to gender history in offering insight into people’s experiences of sex work. I also thought it added new perspectives to some of the women’s and gender works in African history because, unlike other life histories of African women, White read sexuality as embedded in particular economic and political changes rather than as a reflection of cultural influences.
Looking back now I think of this book as an economic history work. White’s argument about how female domestic and sexual labor regenerates male migrant labor power really stuck with me. This was also a new way of looking at this history for my students. I have taught the book to undergraduate students in Africa history and gender history courses, but not in recent years. About ten years ago, when I assigned the book for my colonialism in Africa course, it became clear that many students had never thought of sex work outside of either the moralistic paradigm or tropes about poverty. To imagine sex work as a source of economic and social empowerment in the way that White explained was particularly eye-opening for students.
More recently, I’ve been thinking about the book in terms of my own research on sexuality. Mainly, I’m trying to suss out the ethics of doing research on sexuality that could – inadvertently – reinforce sexual stereotypes in racist discourses. This is a serious concern for me, and I’m working through how I can write about extremely difficult topics (like sexual abuse of children) that are important for understanding broader historical transformations (like how definitions of childhood have shifted), but which have the potential to cause harm if misrepresented or misunderstood. I’m not sure White’s work is a model for this as I think in many ways it’s a history of sexuality book that is not really about sexuality. But that may be putting too much responsibility on a work that was intended to do other things.
Random thoughts, I know. But maybe you find something useful here. Can’t wait to read the final product!
Kenda, I remember vividly my first reading of the book. In fact, I was so blown away by Comforts of Home that I wrote a review of it (to capture my own reaction to it and as a form of exercise, more than anything. No one asked me to do a review and it was not published anywhere). I don’t think I did this for any other book. When C of H came out, I was writing my dissertation. One of the things that struck me was the focus on the urban. In my experience, most ethnographic work on women was done in rural areas (I am not talking about historical work. For me, gender studies in East Africa was something like Mirza and Strobel’s Three Swahili Women, which I had taken to the field with me). I also had never thought about real estate as something I would want to read about. But Luise made it part of a compelling narrative about gender, agency, and future-making. It was such a forcefully argued book. The introduction stood for me as a model of how to argue that an entire body of literature on sex work was just plain WRONG and that we should stop moralizing women’s activities (I was really interested about that since in my own work on spirit possession, I also delved into sex work, and all of my best women friends in the field were sex workers). The testimonies Luise collected were so incredibly rich and evocative. My only frustration with the book was that Luise opted not to analyze in great detail some of what the women were actually saying. But she was looking at the big picture. I have taught the book to undergraduates, some of whom who told me reading Comforts of Home was a pivotal moment for them. If I had the book here (it’s in my campus office), I could probably take a look at the notes I wrote in the margins to reminisce about these days. Luise has been an incredibly good friend. I wrote my second book because of a conversation I had with her. I had taken her to the zoo in New Orleans to see the white alligator (her idea) and while we were sitting in a restaurant, recovering from the ordeal, I told her I needed her advice. I wanted to apply for grants so I could write a book. What should my book be about? She immediately shot down my first idea (about funerals) and told me: write a book about women and Islam! And I did. Good luck with the project! I look forward to reading your review.
Kenda, I love this idea! Comforts of Home and Matatu are two of my favorite books, so I’m so excited you’re the person writing this.
In case its useful to know: Carina Ray organized a panel for the Berkshire’s Women’s History conference in 2017 about the legacy of this book. Panelists were Carina Ray, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Iris Berger and me. Since Carina Ray was the one who organized the panel, I wonder if she might have some things to say about what this book means to her. I also remember Rachel Jean-Baptiste’s presentation (about teaching the book) being really fantastic. Iris Berger’s presentation gave great perspective from a more senior feminist scholar.
THANKS, Emily. Matatu was modeled on COH. And, yes, I have been in touch with Iris Berger, Carina, and Jean.
THANKS, Corrie, Brad, and Adeline. I have to admit when I read COH my first year in graduate school, I was terrified. I was studying with the late Joseph Miller—who, I believe, did not approve of not asking leading questions to informants. But here was Luise admitting that when she asked certain questions, people corrected her by saying things like, ‘you don’t understand, Luise’. Luise argued with her informants and, as she wrote in COH, her informants often took the time to defend their positions. She ended up concluding that there is no single truth but, rather, many truths, many competing truths. I liked Luise’s take on the idea of ‘truths’, but at the time, I don’t think Joseph Miller was quite sold on this idea, at least from what I could gather during our discussions. I had to approach the matter delicately. In the end, I took LW’s idea and often asked asked a “good old-fashioned leading question”—much like Luise. These questions have often generated some of the best, most informative discussions I can remember. As Luise writes: “Put simply, we took a continent where speech was a high and complex art, in which indirection, innuendo, and metaphor and meaning and poetry were honed in daily interaction before contentious audiences-we took this and turned it into the most simplistic of mandates, stripping African orality to a skeleton on which we, foreign scholars, could build. We turned African oral arts, and all the rich contradictions within and between oral forms, into linear
forms of evidence, and we never looked back. We may have made greater demands on oral material than any kind of historical source could bear. When Africans spoke, it was to our needs of evidence, rather than to any other audiences within Africa….” (“Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History” History and Theory, Dec. 2000
I am a bit biased as I have known (liked and admired) Luise since the mid 1970s. I was thrilled by Comforts…because it so very firmly rejected a simple victim explanation of sex-work and by doing so she turned up the volume of the voices of the women she worked with. While doing this she made a humanistic contribution to our better understanding not just of sex-work as a social relationship but also to the now much more readily understood processes of the construction of gender. This was published 30 years ago and what are today commonplace approaches were only just being forged by pioneers like Luise White Consequently it’s hard to exaggerate the radicalism and originality of the book- and the years of research that fed into the eventual publication. Some of my students all those years ago were a little rattled by the subject matter; after all political or economic history kept its clothes on and the early 1990s weren’t all that enlightened. But all (I think) shared my appreciation of Luise White’s capacity to marry hard-edged empiricism and analysis with the significant work of giving those people alive or dead who we study their innate dignity. I thought and still think that it’s an important book and for reasons set out earlier in this thread a book that has been found its way into the work of scholars working on related themes beyond Africa.
Have folks read Saidiya Hartman’s new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments? https://www.amazon.com/Wayward-Lives-Beautiful-Experiments-Histories/dp/0393285677. I just finished reading it, and I felt like I was sort of reading a “modern” version of COH. The sections on the friendships among black women in the northern cities reminded me of the friendships among east African women that LW describes in COH. And the prose too, a bit.
this is interesting, because while I like both of those books very much, I see them as very different. One of the things I have always really appreciated about COH is the empirical detail, the careful tracing of prices (for sex, but also for real estate) etc. The sensibility strikes me as very different from Hartman’s reading into fragments, which seems to come out of the English/lit world. In some ways Speaking with Vampires highlights the different sensibilities even more, given White’s real insistence on *not* reading into stories, even when the stories almost seem to be begging for that. There’s certainly a shared concern with the texture of everyday life and alternative moral worlds, but the underlying feel of the books is so different to me.
This Vansina student agrees. There was a Vansina-Miller consensus in favor of listening in on performances, as told, rather than soliciting new forms of telling, and becoming part of knowledge, so to speak. (As if one could avoid …) A bias against groups (which would harmonize divergent traditions) and attendence to the purpose of speech. Also a dislike of questonnaires. This all was however no guide to how to get to know men & women and get them to speak about their own urban experiences. Three varieties of what is misnamed prostitution! Participatory speech-circuits, systems — Gadamer and Talal Asad say we must leave our system at least slightly & enter another in order to comprehend, so. Great book, returned to often. I thought, how liberatory! And a little: how dangerous! And taught the book, and now simply admire it. Maa speaking city women entrepreneur sex workers — as part of a larger, longer conversation Luise has been having about the constitution of citizenries and their sophisticated pop-understandings of their colonial and postcolonial conditions.
As AHR Editor, I am so glad Kenda suggested this experiment, and pleased that we were able to shift it quickly from facebook to this platform. Come one and all and share your memories of this book. And please encourage others to chime in as well.
This is such a wonderful project. I first read this as a graduate student at Michigan. It blew me away. It was one of the first books I read that took African women seriously as workers, and which also respected women’s work in colonial contexts where options were few. Its focus on vibrant urban life also resonated. I was particularly taken with Luise’s use of Gigikuyu terms such as malaya and wazi-wazi for the varieties of prostitution. By so doing, White threw a wrench in eurocentric practices of scholarship, and immediately gave agency to the women whose lives she rendered so well. I later taught the course to undergraduates at Kenyon College, and they were enthralled. The book generated debates about the nature of prositution, on the nature of choice, on comparative women’s history across both the British Empire and globally. In short, The Comforts of Home is a book for the ages. Respect!
When you first posed this question, Kenda, my initial memory of reading COH was in my first year of graduate school. But, now that Pam says she assigned it at Kenyon, I wonder if that is where I actually read it first?! I wish my memory of that was better … There were several things that struck me about COH on that first (or second?) reading and that have stuck with me. The first is the agency that she reveals of her subjects. That was so important to the way that I would go on to think about my own work and shaped the way that I teach. Also, as others have said, breaking down sex work into distinct categories and rendering them in Gikuyu terms and with such empirical detail was so compelling. The empiricism and rich narrative helped distance Kenyan women’s sex work from moral judgement and made it deeply consequential. I used to teach COH in a class called “Sex and Love in Africa,” and the students (all Honors students) found it challenging and compelling. As is often the case with history, I was able to use it in tandem with something contemporary–in this case an article in the student paper about a site for the uptick in the number of college-age female escorts registered on a local “Sugar Daddy” site. When put in conversation with COH and several other readings the students had really sophisticated discussions about this. In some ways I think that this pairing is now outdated (10 years later), as so many of our students are coming to us having thought about sex, gender, sexuality, and morality in really complicated and sophisticated ways. But, I’d like to continue using COH in courses … maybe in the new oral history class I’m planning. Thanks for this, Kenda. I’ve loved reading others’ responses.
Let me take my turn as a provocateur. I have heard a rumor that “Kenyans in Kenya did not like The Comforts of Home.” I don’t know who the Kenyans are but does anyone have any insights into this rumor?
This rumor is not true, so I hear at least.
I am told (and this is just another rumor) that American critics of the COH “deployed” “Kenyans” as a shorthand critique. I am also told that this was a way in which non-African scholars, historians in this case, ventriloquized their critiques by conjuring up the so-called discomforts of “OTHERS“—whom they called “Kenyans.” By claiming “Kenyans don’t like it” – they could offer a critique of the book without having to take on its substantive arguments, it’s feminist theorizing about prostitution and family, for instance. This is why it is important that we pay attention to the politics of knowledge production.
Kenda, You ask about the lack of a JAH review of Comforts of Home. Andrew Roberts was ‘managing editor’ from the early-1980s until 1990, and so he handled the book reviews (until handing this over to me in January 1991, when he stood down as editor). Comforts of Home was published in 1990, and the journal usually received review copies only slightly after the date of publication, so this must have been amongst the last batch of books that Andrew assigned. The details of the book was certainly amongst the records I took over from Andrew, as I can recall the card-record in the box-file (in Andrew’s unmistakable hand), and I also recall chasing up on the review at least once in 1991. Those records were in my day passed on to each in-coming reviews editor (I handed over to Louis Brenner), but one tended to clear out the back-log every so often, so I very much doubt that any trace of the Comforts of Home request would survive. At that time, around 10 percent (maybe a little more) of our reviews never delivered – and so Luise was by no means the only prominent author to be apparently ‘ignored’ by the JAH.
The period from 1988 to 1990 was tumultuous for JAH. I joined the editorial team in 1988, and shortly afterwards (in early August 1988) my co-editor Michael Crowder died while on a visit to the USA. This threw us into some confusion, as it took a while to sort out which manuscripts Michael had been dealing with. Moreover, there was something of a crisis in terms of submissions and accepted manuscripts. We were struggling to find sufficient copy to fill the pages, so even missing reviews were very vigorously pursued over this period and into 1990. At the start of 1990, Joe Miller and Dave Robinson joined as editors, and Michael Brett stepped down, and the journal was in some senses ‘relaunched’ (with its new cover that David Robinson had commissioned). Andrew Roberts then stepped down at the end of 1990, to be replaced by Robin Law, and at the same time I took over the books reviews from Andrew (being the only editor then based in London).
I first read The Comforts of Home as a graduate student. At that time, the book was an example of a historical study of “everyday life” in an African city. Luise’s commitment to oral history, her deep and careful listening and insistent questioning, and keen observations produced a book that was colorful and lively but still extremely scholarly. I particularly admired the way that she took on an entire body of scholarship by highlighting the fundamental assumptions they made by failing to take into account African perspectives. I also admired the way that she balanced theoretical rigor and narrative in the text – these Nairobi women and their experiences remained the central focus of her writing even as she made major interventions in scholarly conversations. When I was preparing for comprehensive exams and read the book reviews, I was struck by the wide ranging responses to the book. That it now holds such a prominent place in the canon of historical scholarship on Africa is a testament to its revolutionary approach – perhaps something that not everyone at the time was prepared for – which changed the field in significant ways. Importantly, however, COH has also stood the test of time. I continue to look to it today as an example of what it might mean to historicize economic systems and social lives that were not only often undocumented but also explicitly criminalized in various ways. It is, among other things, a history of work at a time when “labor history” meant a particular form of industrial labor and Marxist analysis into which these women’s stories did not neatly fit. The scholarly literature on the history of labor and work is, arguably, only now catching up. It challenges us to question the assumptions we bring to research – the moralistic judgements and expectations about normative behavior – and, as she continued to do in her later work, it challenges us to think about what “truth” is and how we, as researchers, balance fidelity to the experiences and perspectives of research subjects with a search for “truth” and the existence of other, often contradictory, evidence. As I often tell my students when we read Luise’s work, everything tells us something; we just have to figure out what, exactly.
I have always counted on Louise to go where most Anglos feared to tread – at least, in Africanist scholarship. She has often done this at some personal risk, but always to the great benefit of the more timid among her colleagues and students. While her choice of topics has often been risque, her methods have tended to be meticulous. What is more, her analysis can be counted on – like those of Africanist anthropologists with whom she has shared a good deal – to turn issues that seem alien into reasonable forms of social action. At times her accounts, while highly imaginative, are a tad too rationalizing for some. Where, my students occasionally asked, was the sex, desire, and subversion in her account of sex work as labor. Yet these same students invariably loved reading The Comforts of Home, just as much as I have loved teaching it. It features frequently in my classes on colonialism and anti-colonialism, and on the making of modernity in Africa. This brilliant account of a particular historical phenomenon on the continent opens our eyes to issues of global salience. By situating prostitution in the larger context of kinship and political economy, work and migration, sex and the city, Louise’s analysis cast new light not merely our ways of seeing the ordinary fabrication of the African colonial world. It compelled us to rethink our understanding of prostitution, work, and the suppressed economies of intimacy that continue to underlie modern world-making, everywhere.
I had the great good fortune to be Luise’s research supervisor for the Cambridge PhD that became Comforts of Home, after a lot more hard work and thought on Luise’s part, unassisted by me. I’m sure she would agree with me that we had what might euphemistically be called an ‘interesting’ relationship or, in other words, a good deal of rather nervous incomprehension on my part, at least to begin with.
I am writing while locked down at home without access to my student files in my Trinity College office (and all our dealings are there on PAPER) and my memory has become even less reliable over the years. But I believe that what I have to say is more or less true. Luise can be relied up to correct me!
Luise came to Cambridge and to me as an academic asylum-seeker after her London University supervisor had found it difficult to sympathise with Luise’s field of interest. And her formal relations with Cambridge were not easy. There were residence requirements that I had to fudge a bit; the local (expatriate) supervisor we appointed (as was then a requirement) out in Nairobi thought it too risky, because of Luise’s topic, to take any responsibility for her of have any contact during her fieldwork–much to the alarm of the History Faculty here at Cambridge; and I think I remember money difficulties. Fortunately, the Faculty’s degree committee had become reconciled to the idea of oral sources a year or two before Luise submitted her PhD–when I had forwarded Richard Waller’s dissertation to them, largely based as it was on Maasai reminiscence, recorded on tape. The then Faculty chairman, the very conservative Geoffrey Elton, would have none of it, on the grounds that the researcher could well have invented his sources. I was too junior to be on the degree committee myself but fortunately Walter Ullmann, the very distinguished medievalist (and another academic exile) with whom I was close, asked what the problem was. He thought there must surely be emerging rules for assessing the validity of oral sources, just as there were well-established tests for his medieval charters, most of which he declared to be forgeries! So Richard Waller, unwittingly, pioneered the case for African oral sources at Cambridge and I was glad that that was one less battle to fight on Luise’s behalf.
The research and thinking behind Comforts were all very much Luise’s own. I was far too conventional in my then belief that political economy was the only history worth doing. Gender, let alone sex-work, seemed altogether too trivial and evanescent, not to say embarrassing for a male supervisor with a female student. So, as often happens, the student taught the supervisor more than vice versa. Even so, I think I continued to take the line that how sex-workers survived and indeed prospered in Nairobi was of a secondary interest to what that said about the changing political economy of colonial Kenya. But even research supervisors may be allowed to learn. And I still count Luise among my more valuable critics. Thanks Luise!
Thanks for opening this conversation, Kenda — one of the most interesting uses of FB I’ve seen! And I must say I feel a little jealous when I read someone say that they will reply to you privately on email, because I want to read what everyone says too! So in an attempt to keep this conversation going in a more public way, I’ll reply here: COH came out just as I started graduate school, so I feel like it has always been with me in my academic life. What seemed so utterly natural then, and I realize now was such a radical intervention, was treating sex work as labor history. When LW wrote about the three different types of prostitution in Nairobi in terms of their patterns of material investments, work rhythms, and income potential, it seemed to me no different than when Fred Cooper wrote about casual vs stabilized labor on the Mombasa docks or van Onselen wrote about mine labor in South Africa. That was her point, of course: that this was labor, with a materialist history. LW could later come under criticism for taking some of the sexuality or affect out of sex work, but to treat women’s labor as labor was to unpack both how households stayed afloat (and some managed to do even better than that) and how the wage economy–generally thought of up to that point as largely masculine–functioned in its entirety. Even though my own diss was on men in Nigeria, her influence on my thinking was enormous: it seemed impossible to study wage labor and the people who did it without asking about the social and material reproduction of their households. Sure, we could also credit Marx and Engels on that; but for African history, I think it’s Luise White.
I met Luise, through Cambridge connections, when she was still doing her PhD. I was immediately intrigued by her and by her research on prostitution when we met, and we became friends at that time and have remained so ever since. At the time, I had read enough British social history to appreciate the importance of what she was saying about the relationship between a state and people it defined as an underclass. A piece of hers that developed some of the core arguments of her book was published in a book I edited in 1983, Struggle for the City. Her work came at a time when innovative work, both empirical and theoretical, was being done on urban history, gender, the state, and class. One of Luise’s achievements was to bring this kind of work down to earth, to point out the interconnection of these domains, and to bring all this it to an African city. For all her engagement with the scholarship of the day, her biggest breakthrough came from using the categories of her African informants alongside those of the scholars. Her use of the three categories with which Nairobi prostitutes described the different forms of sex work was an important contribution to African studies in the 1980s and 1990s. It helped her to focus on prostitution in terms of political economy and social reproduction, not as a moral issue. Moreover, she brought the African categories into European history in an article she published in Criminal Justice History in 1985, a stimulating reversal of the usual direction of category movement.
Her book made a splash when it came out in 1990, and it remains one of the most sophisticated analyses of social reproduction that we have, one that bridges the abstractions of Marxist theory with the nitty-gritty of social history in Nairobi’s neighborhoods. While her framing of her study in terms of political economy and social reproduction is one major and durable contribution, another is what it says about the colonial state. Rather than see the state as acting in a single way, she shows that up to a certain point the colonial state in Kenya was indifferent to how Kenyans reproduced themselves, while later on, in the late 1930s, it started to care a great deal about whether Africans were reproducing the wrong kind of working class. It was at that point that the state intervened forcefully in the lives of prostitutes and the neighborhoods in which they lived and worked.
Comforts of Home was almost always on the syllabus when I taught a graduate course in African history, from the 1990s into the 2000s, and I probably, although I don’t remember for sure, used it in undergrad classes too. Her writing had as much influence as anybody’s on my graduate students, and some of them developed close relationships with her. She was very supportive of several of them, providing advice, letters of recommendation, and most imortant giving them conveying a sense of the importance of their work. Her book encouraged students working on different projects in different parts of Africa to think seriously about the relationship between the specificity of human relationships and conflicts in each specific instance and big questions in the history of capitalism and colonialism.
COH is a book I have read multiple times at different stages of my career, and each time I read it, it feels like I have learnt something entirely new. When I first read the book in graduate school, I was floored by the way in which she was able to distance her subject matter – sex-work – from questions of morality and victimhood by using labor as the main framework of analysis. I went back to COH when I was finishing up my dissertation, this time to think about Nairobi and urban geographies. I returned to COH when I was completing my book manuscript and another layer was peeled – I saw the ways in which the cosmopolitanism of Nairobi was evident in the most intimate and mundane moments of everyday life that Luise and the women she interviewed talked about. I was particularly struck by the empathy with which various relationships were analyzed, even as the stories revealed deep anxieties of gender, class, ethnicity, and respectability. These were the relationships of the women who sought work in the city and their rivalries, the loneliness of the men who sought comfort, and of the networks of support that were built between older and younger women. The invocation of home in the book title and Luise’s framing of how sex-work worked makes this much more than labor history to me – she not only gave agency to the women she wrote about by giving them a voice, but made place for emotions and feelings. How refreshing for historians to talk about social history in the fuzzy language of emotions and feelings instead of categories of racial/ethnic/class-based identities!!
Luise also talks about Asian landlords in Eastleigh and how the women were beginning to accumulate enough wealth to buy property there, and although she doesn’t do much more than allude to this, I think there is some rich material on race and intimacy in this context for the South Asian diaspora and marital endogamy vs everyday life.
I teach COH (and a few articles and book chapters she published) regularly and the students have two reactions to this work. For some it is an “aha” moment of feminist historiography. For others a lingering question of morality and victimhood leads them to whataboutisms (“but no one grows up wanting the be a prostitute”).
I continue to go back to COH as I am thinking through my new work on Rangoon, a similar colonial city that was simultaneously parochial and cosmopolitan, full of warts and all, where the relationships between Burmese/Buddhist women and Muslim migrants from India became the focus of an anti-immigrant nationalist movement around the issue of the loss of property.
Two new layers have been peeled back for me as I have returned to this book as a student.
First, although the work the women did can certainly be understood as “labor”, the wealth the women accumulated, especially property, complicates our understanding of labor as historians. Second, I am struck by the gendered experience of migration, labor, and the accumulation of wealth in colonial cities and the difference between laboring men who sought the comforts of home, and the laboring women who made homes for work.
I feel like a bit of an interloper in this fascinating conversation, because I found Luise White’s Comforts of Home not as someone interested in or at all familiar with Kenyan or African history, but as part of my global survey of histories of prostitution and sexual labour during my PhD on commercial sex in London. Still, I wanted to contribute to this discussion because the book had a very significant impact on my work, and the work of many other historians of sexual labour across period and geography.
Early historians of prostitution (Walkowitz, Rosen, Butler, et al) all mostly agreed that prostitution was a form of labour for women, even if by the mid-1980s debates about prostitution within feminism writ large had begun to lose sight of this. But no historian wrote women’s casual labour and sexual labour together as well as Luise White did. Her analysis of the way that domestic labour, other casual labour, and sexual labour blurred together in the lives and experiences of (often migrant) women in Nairobi remains a model for historians of prostitution today, and certainly deeply affected the way I analysed my own archival (rather than oral history) sources about women selling sex in London. I’ve returned to it often, particularly now that my work has moved on to examine transnational sexual labour, ‘trafficking’, and migration. Even thirty years on, White’s book is one of the best examples of the way that women’s intimate labour (intimate in scale and in practise) underwrites national, colonial, and global economies.
THANKS Julia. This is so useful…and… no you are not an interloper.
This is a truly fascinating experiment revealing many facets of history-writing and African research, as well as their undercurrents. As a PhD student at Cambridge coming a few years after Luise graduated, I encountered the ugly ripples of some of the discomforts John Lonsdale has mentioned here. I learned that opposition to parts of her oral research made Luise even more determined and she would not give an inch. I had the great pleasure and stimulation of reading her PhD dissertation with appendices from some of the interviews that apparently horrified the Cambridge professors and their proteges. But I benefitted directly because the inclusion of transcripts of oral interviews was now accepted at Cambridge and I was able to use this mechanism to include the voices of my Namibian interlocutors talking about South African colonisation from the Angola border area for my own PhD thesis. I saw Luise as a genuine path-breaker who paved the way for others and I was often dismayed at the ongoing trivialisation of C of H in the growing field of African urban studies, especially in the anglophone world of African Studies outside the continent. Luise’s PhD research was the ground on which the C of H built and I taught parts of the book to South African undergraduate students when I began lecturing at University of the Western Cape from the mid-1990s. It was clearly so important that we developed over time a longstanding and popular module on Gender & African History with parts devoted to ‘women in the city’ that intrigued and at times electrified our students and also attracted many others from various departments. That module still thrives and C of H was one of its early building blocks. When Speaking with Vampires came out it also offered a set of new tools and ideas in relation to oral interchanges and the variants of speaking – which has proved so important for methodological discussion at postgraduate level, increasing all our vocabularies and energising students.
THANKS to all of you for these rich and informative posts. As I read them (especially John Lonsdale’s gripping piece), I am shocked at how folks in my generation took it for granted that we could employ gender and feminist analyses in our work. This knowledge is sobering, indeed. Along these same lines, Luise was only the 4th woman with a single-authored book to win a Herskovits (and she shared it with Johannes Fabian). The other 22 awards since 1965 had gone to men.
I went back to my notes from COH and it was fun – I remembered why it was important to me when I read it. It was my second year of graduate school (2014) and I felt conflicted, intellectually, between two styles of history that I was seeing in the discussions with my cohort. On the one hand, it seemed that everyone was a cultural historian, that everything “old” (the state, political economy) was out and if you weren’t working on some kind of urban trend sub-group you were passé. On the other, if you did in passing seem to care about what used to be called materialist analysis—that old fashioned way of analyzing power from the left—you were getting uncomfortably close to these staid, mechanistic ways of thinking that were too wrapped up with over-confident male egos. I felt caught between poles that I didn’t believe in, but seemed to be presented as such. And so what Luise White did for me when I read the Comforts of Home, was that she gave me the liberty to discard this polarization that paralyzed me. When she said she was doing “political economy written with women’s words” it was a revelation: prostitution was political economy, and prostitutes were agents of their own lives. You could have both, or, really, you could have it all. You just needed the temerity (and skill) of Luise White to create it for yourself. Comforts of the Home was emancipatory in this way; it helped me learn to disregard the poles.
I hope this is helpful as you work on your project. It’s a brilliant way to review COH and pay homage to the opus of Luise White!
Kenda and Alex, this is such a fabulous idea!
I think I first read COH as an undergraduate at Michigan. I say “think” because I wasn’t a particularly good student of history and very likely skimmed it and then avoided eye-contact with the TA during discussion. But the book did stick with me, enough that I brought it along in my suitcase to Oxford where I got to read it – for real this time – in a class I took with Megan Vaughan. It was only then that I really began to understand the significance of Luise’s work to our field and to my own project.
What I loved about the book then, and still do, was the way that Luise wove the lives and labors of sex workers through multiple historiographies. She did not simply settle for one, narrow historiographic intervention. Instead, she linked the lives of the women she had met to a host of scholarly debates: labor and accumulation, urbanization, gender and sexuality, criminality, and statecraft. It was a book that challenged its readers to go big with their own work or go home.
And it’s still the best history of Nairobi we have – or any African city for that matter. Back in the 1990s it was easy to fall into the trap of seeing cities as sites of aggravating colonial control and crippling poverty, which of course they were. Yet Luise also showed us that cities were places people enjoyed, thrilling spaces where they remade themselves and their ties to the countryside, experimented with cultural dissent, and tested radical political ideas.
COH was, and remains, an unapologetic call for historians to leave the dust of the archive and actually go speak to the people. It’s a methodological road map, like her joint project with Stephan and David on practicing oral histories, that everyone should read, and then re-read when we begin new projects. When I was just starting to think about methods, it was an empowering text. One of my favorite moments in COH comes when she asks: “how do we do research and stay on guard to ferret out the lies and distortions that are hurled at us in every interview?” I remember feeling a knot form in the pit of my stomach: well, how do I deal with memory-making, legacy-protecting falsehoods? Thankfully, Luise is never one to hold back a blunt opinion: “I suggest that it is not all that difficult, and possibly not all that necessary.” Whew…and who has the guts to say that in a first book? Luise, of course.
The beauty of Luise’s methods in COH is that those distortions are in of themselves necessary, pushing us to think more carefully about the questions we ask rather than the answers given, demanding we be more introspective and more aware of the worlds we step into as we settle in for an afternoon with an interviewee. She urges us to do as many interviews as possible until we see the variations in peoples’ memories and even the mistakes we’ve made along the way. As a graduate student all this brought relief and revelation. And for the past thirty years, her approach has become ingrained, guiding principles for historians and anthropologists working in Africa. As my Europeanist and Americanist colleagues always seem to remind me: you Africanists are so worried and upfront about methods. Well, we have Luise to thank for that.
Most of all, a toast to COH for the perverse pleasure I get assigning it to my students at Notre Dame and seeing the disappointment on their faces when they realize they’ve been tricked into reading a book about labor and livestock not sex work.
Thank you Kenda for starting this fascinating conversation! Like you, I am astonished to learn how younger generations took it for granted that we could employ gender and feminist analyses in our work. I am intrigued to read about the very different reception the book had over time, as well as how people enjoyed its different strengths. It is a classic on work, sex and migration in the context of kinship and political economy; on female labour; on social reproduction; and much more, yet I read it with my own preoccupations.
I remember vividly when I read The Comforts of Home, in my graduate years, when I had returned from fieldwork in Nairobi at the turn of the century studying the young urban professionals in their wild twenties, being ambitious and restless. I read the book with a bias: I found recognition of a longer history of women in Nairobi breaching normative expectations and finding their own ways to make a living, of women seizing opportunities to become financially independent from their relatives, against the odds. White, for instance, describes the way how colonial administrators in the service of the imperial power had a number of different reasons for keeping women out of the city, as well as how cooperative agreements between the colonial administration and some rural chiefs were forged to keep women in the rural areas. If the elders lost control over young women’s labour, sexuality and progeny, they lost their ability to use the promise of marriage and the importance of children and inheritance to pull young men back home. I saw parallels with the young women I met in 2000: women who were called to family committees because they were seen as “disobedient”; single mothers who decided not to give in and make a career in spite of their families conclusion that they had already failed; women who decided to enjoy the pleasures of being single and “have a life”; and many more. These young adult women had foremothers whose footsteps they trod.
I also read the book with an eye to find other indications; hints of affection. At the turn of the century, the social landscape was scarred by the disastrous effects of the AIDS epidemic. The young adults were teenagers when AIDS really struck and grew up with tales of the horrors of sex. Likewise, the research invested in sex research was massive, led by epidemiology, eager to understand “patterns of infection”, and hence de-erotising sex to an act devoid of meaning. In contrast, of course, sex was a medium for a variety of feelings, emotions and needs; people had sex for fun, to fulfil a desire for intimacy, for a physical thrill, to procreate, to exert power, and much more. I decided to write about sexuality departing from love and affection but could not build on much studies. I read CoH inspired by its title; how women and men found comfort with each other. For instance, I found snippets about affection in CoH. Luise White has written, albeit intermittently, about the male clientele of prostitutes and men’s private lives. We know little of their sexual lives, except for the references in CoH about the frequency, duration and nature of their visits to women (White 1990a: 56, 84-85, 95-96,108-109, 200-201). These visits varied from unattached sexual encounters, visits lasting one night and including a bath and/or breakfast, to more enduring relations with women that were reciprocal in kind, for example when men were providing assistance to women in their struggle to remain illegally in Nairobi. White’s detailed approach is invaluable here. The snippets about bathing and having breakfast speak of comfort and the importance of being together. Maybe I have read too much in such paragraphs but for me they worked to remain critical of stereotypical ideas of the ways “transactional sex” became represented and to remain sensitive to how sex, affection and (financial) resources mutually reinforce another. Luise White’s approach to study prostitution as the comforts of home has been crucial to counter the research in relation to AIDS that instrumentalized sex as only for exchange, called “transactional sex” and opened new vistas to understand prostitution as involving much more. And it has been invaluable in the study of the history of sex and sexuality.
I have never had the pleasure to meet Luise White, and I deduce from the other contributions that I have missed an important experience, so this is my way so say thank you.
Congratulations to Alex and Kenda for this initiative. It’s been fascinating reading the multiple ways in which Comforts of Home has inspired research and teaching over the decades. For sure, this set of testimonies will change the way I teach COH next semester.
As many others have discussed already, COH is a seminal text for gender, labour and urban historians of Africa, and one that has had an enduring impact on methodology. For me, it is also one of the richest sources for teaching about the gendered, moralized history of ethnic competition in East Africa (students like discussing it alongside Derek Peterson’s Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival).
In terms of my own research I was most influenced by COH in the late 90s when I was working on Haya sexuality. One of my key questions – what happened when the wazi-wazi went home? – was shaped by COH. Haya sex workers were in a way the stars of the COH show, their motivations and practices embedded within the memories of their Kenyan contemporaries. What quickly became clear was that the energy and focus that characterized Haya women’s time in the city also defined them on their return to Buhaya’s countryside. The most successful did indeed clear their bridewealth-related debts, and then bought land, setting themselves up as independent householders, renowned for their urbane manners, domestic luxury, and taking younger lovers. Local rumour claimed that much of Buhaya’s postcolonial elite received their education through the industry and generosity of their aunts, though that says as much about how postcolonial bishops and ministers are understood as it does about the relative rehabilitation of the wazi-wazi. Other women were, unsurprisingly, less able to reacquire respectability – some continued sex work in the rural villages, though not in the wazi-wazi form; others came back from the city quickly, and impoverished, repelled by the work or disfigured by brutal clients. For some of these at least, brewing and bar-work saved them from the dependence of day laboring. Haya women’s post-urban experiences then diverged from the model adhered to in Nairobi, but often in ways which reflected their observation of the alternative ways of achieving agency, prospering, or surviving discussed so vividly in COH.
Thanks again for providing this opportunity to pay homage to one of the most thought-provoking and original historians of Africa, and to learn about the multiple afterlives of this remarkable book.
My reaction to Luise White’s proposal for COH, published in 1990, was to see it as in line with a number of books the University of Chicago Press had already published under my editorship on the resilience and resourcefulness of women globally. These included Sarah and Robert LeVine’s Mothers and Wives: Gusii Women of East Africa (1979), a book by organizational psychologist Rae Andre entitled Homemakers: The Forgotten Workers (1981), and anthropologist Nancy Levine’s Dynamics of Polyandry: Kinship, Domesticity, and Population on the Tibetan Border (1988). I felt that White’s argument analyzing prostitution as a form of labor was novel and important, and that her historical research shed light on a number of intrinsically fascinating aspects of colonialism in Africa (not least the unprecedented defeat of a European–Italian–colonizer and its ramifications for women and domestic labor). The fact that her research had an ethnographic as well as archival component convinced me that it could reach a wide audience in African Studies as well as History and Women’s Studies. All in all I found it to be a multi-faceted and well-written work that corroborated previous studies and laid the groundwork for other important work to come. In this respect I might mention Gracia Clark’s Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (1994) and of course more recent books like Kenda Mutongi’s Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya (2007) and Jennifer Cole’s Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar.
Hi Kenda:
This is an interesting discussion!
I think I must have read Comforts for the first time in the mid-1990s, when I did a graduate course at Minnesota with the late Susan Geiger. The thing that I remember about it was the confidence with which she asserted the validity of oral history: there’s a funny footnote on one of the tables in which the numbers are attributed to archives only, i.e. lacking the veracity that women’s memory could impart to the historical evidence. Reading John Lonsdale’s comments above–and thinking about my own time teaching in Cambridge, much later–I can now see this aspect of the book as a defensive reaction to the methodological conservativism against which she had to struggle.
Cambridge marked that book in another way: it was written at the same time that Lonsdale and Berman were putting together Unhappy Valley. I see those two books as being two ends of a conversation about gender and economic change: JML was writing about men whose anxieties about class formation caused them to worry about their manhood (and their wives and children); Luise, JML’s student, asserted women’s rationality and choice.
It’s notable that she did not do research in Tanzania as part of that book. As I understand it the reasons were both logistical and to do with her health. As it turns out, there is quite a lot of archival material in Bukoba that illuminates the anxieties and anger that Haya prostitutes occasioned among their male relative. Which makes Luise’s thesis–that wazi wazi prostitutes were working for their male relatives–all the more interesting.
To my mind Comforts is certainly one of the most consequential books in our field; and I’m very pleased to see the AHR honour it formally.
The Comforts of Home is of course now regarded as a “classic” – probably not a label that Luise would very much appreciate – in the global literature on sex work, in gender studies and in African urban history. But the obligatory citations that that kind of status engenders unfortunately tends to obscure its continuing subversive power and its expansive reach. As a number of the comments here have noted, her fieldwork was both courageous and pathbreaking. As someone who did research in Kenya at the same time as Luise, I found it inspirational. But what I remember most vividly about reading the book shortly after its publication was its phenomenal evocation and grasp—its humanizing—of the complex historical experiences of labor migration. The Comforts of Home is certainly among the best historical studies of Nairobi (together perhaps with Kenda Mutongi’s own, recent, Matatu), but for all the literature on East African political economy that had preceded it, The Comforts of Home evoked in theoretically sophisticate ways, intricate intertwining of the economic, political and cultural lives of both urban and rural communities.
What a great project! I take it it will be longer than your average review, an article, rather. It shouldn’t be called a review.
I assigned grad. seminar students bits of Comforts for years. It influenced me a lot to work in Nairobi, after working in Accra, among a similar group in some ways, although generally not as successful, and stretching much later in time, my study published as Trouble Showed the Way, Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890-1990 (Indiana University Press, 1998). In some ways the women I worked with were the obverse side of those she studied, since a few had practiced prostitution occasionally to get by, but most mainly depended on trade. I had already worked in Accra with women traders, and Comforts persuaded me that a study of Nairobi traders might be most enlightening, which it was. I was fascinated by the mobility of the trading population and its shifting composition, in contrast with the Accra people. A new city brought a new conformation, clearly, but I also discovered immediately that some women were trading back in the mid-19th century! Anyway, Luise’s work is always pathbreaking and fascinatingly eclectic. She demonstrated to the students that a subject seemingly opaque and unimportant, especially in African studies, could be both analytically and sympathetically presented, and thereby pushed both women’s studies and African studies forward several notches in interesting ways. We need more scholars with these capabilities! She also has worked in several locations, as well as on very diverse topics. What a model she is for us all!
What I have always found particularly striking (Matatu did the same for me, by the way) is the way that White and her informants suck the reader straight into colonial Nairobi. The sense of place that White conveys is pervasive throughout CoH. A lot of that comes from the testimony of White’s informants, but it’s also about how she uses the material.
White captures something of the spirit of Nairobi – it’s not celebratory, not condemnatory, she just writes about the city and the lives of its inhabitants as they were. You get a sense of the frustration, the creativity, the energy of city life – even in some of the most desperate of circumstances. White takes the place and the people as she finds them, and the book is all the richer for that. Given how few histories of Nairobi there are (and how little urban history on East Africa generally, with the notable exception of the great set of books on Dar over the past decade or so), CoH is invaluable for every historian of modern Kenya. But it is also so much more than that, as the other contributions to the forum have made clear.
I was a graduate student at the University of Zimbabwe when I read COH, doing field work on urban women’s history. It was a beacon. But my abiding memory is of being completely astonished that someone could be brave enough to ask old women about their experiences of prostitution. In my research, the deepest insult was to call an older African woman (or any woman) a prostitute; having the temerity to do oral history research on sex work – wow, I thought. We (friend and colleague Everjoice Win and I) had to tippy-toe around any such intimation! As younger women and me an outsider? I just couldn’t.
Overall, the way Luise joined oral history and economic history together so seamlessly was awe-inspiring – then and now. I also recall once describing her intellect as “restless” – thinking of the range of her work and its originality, each time. What gifts she has given us.
I was a PhD student when I first read Comforts of Home– this book profoundly shaped my research and continues to influence my research and teaching today. Not only the book itself, but also Luise’s 2004 article “True Confessions” in which she conducted critical analysis and unflinching reassessment of her oral research methodology, conceptual frameworks, and arguments in the book.
I assign either the book or this article in nearly all undergraduate and graduate courses that I teach, and both in graduate courses. I assign both to graduate students as models of ethical, deep, and innovative research, as well as critical self-assessment of how scholarly thinking and scholarly doing changes over time. What one writes and thinks can change, and Luise explored this in a published article open to all.
Comforts of Home continues to provide historiographical, methodological, and conceptual frameworks for research in African history and global gender and sexuality studies. Its conceptualization of sexual labor as central to the history of political economy and labor is a central argument that scholars have taken up and continue to debate. As well as the place of affect—pleasure, pain, desire, love, fear, and hate—in conceptualizing histories of sexuality.