Abstract
This chapter analyzes an abortion scandal that occurred on an Anglican mission station on the East African archipelago of Zanzibar in the 1920s. In 1921, British missionaries accused several young African female congregants of taking dawa (Kiswahili: medicine) to abort unwanted pregnancies. Prichard argues that African congregants drew from inherited ideas about social and biological reproduction in seeking to deal with ill-timed pregnancies, ideas which contradicted British mission administrators’ firmly held beliefs against abortion. To avoid sanction and excommunication, congregants and their families hid young lovers’ romances, sexual dalliances, and pregnancies from mission officials. The analysis of this scandal sheds light on contrasting ideas about the best way to strategically compose communities, and on the competing definitions of Anglicanism that circulated in early twentieth-century Zanzibar.
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Notes
- 1.
27 November 1921, Mbweni Logbook CB1-8 (hereafter ML CB1-8), UMCA CB Series, Zanzibar National Archives.
- 2.
For the Akamba see Hobley 1910; for Ngulu see Beidelman 1967; among the Usambara, Upare, and neighbors see Dundas 1921; Dale 1896; for the Nyamwezi see Dundas 1921; Rockel 2000; Raum 1965; Decle 1898; Abrahams 1967; for examples from the southern regions see Angus 1898; for East Africa more generally see Thomas 2003, 2006.
- 3.
For more on this, see Cooper 1980; Feierman 1995; Glassman 1995.
- 4.
The relationship of patronage and dependency between formerly enslaved UMCA’s congregants and the Mbweni church administrators very closely resembled relationships with former masters. For more on the “slaves of the Christians,” see Glassman 1995.
- 5.
I have used pseudonyms throughout and changed immediately identifying details.
- 6.
30 July 1919, ML CB1-8.
- 7.
12 April 1919, ML CB1-8.
- 8.
4 August 1919, ML CB1-8. Scholars have observed that missionaries’ compulsive need to keep records was a method of gaining control over adherents’ conduct. While Africans often played into Europeans’ archetypes by signing their names to registers, confessing sins, and accepting reform, they also used the books to reframe arguments to their own advantage (Peterson 2006). At other times, they jettisoned this theater altogether in order to keep private affairs out of the hands of the church. Such moments appear in records as “cover-ups” or “complicity,” revealing by their very presence the distinction missionaries drew between epistemologies that “shock and scandalize” and those that do not (Peterson 2006; White 2000).
- 9.
23 November 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 10.
4 June 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 11.
13 June 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 12.
23 November 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 13.
24 November 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 14.
27 June 1919, ML CB1-8.
- 15.
25 November 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 16.
25 November 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 17.
25 November 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 18.
27 November 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 19.
Anonymous, “Conference at Likoma: The Bishop’s Address.” Central Africa (1899).
- 20.
6 December 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 21.
6 December 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 22.
6 December 1921, ML CB1-8.
- 23.
For the Yao and others from around Lake Nyasa, betrothals were protracted over a period of at least six months, if not longer. Among the Akamba around 1900, grooms paid bridewealth in installments, and the marriage was formally contracted at a point along the payment cycle. For the Sukuma see Cory 1953; for the Kware, Kargur, Zigua, and Luguru, see Beidelman 1967; for the Agoni and “Sutu” in Southern Tanzania, see Moser 1987.
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Prichard, A.C. (2017). A “Grievously Sinful Attempt to Destroy the Life Which God Has Given:” Abortion, Anglicanism, and Debates About Community Composition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar. In: Stettner, S., Ackerman, K., Burnett, K., Hay, T. (eds) Transcending Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48399-3_5
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