Female Celibates, Race, and the Development of Nationalism in Tanganyika

In 1926 the first Tanganyikan woman made a profession to the Community of the Sacred Passion (CSP), an Anglican religious order under the British Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA).  The CSP was one of many organizations throughout colonial East Africa that prided itself on its efforts to work across racial lines for women’s emancipation, and for the general advancement of women and children.  Ironically, this first African postulant ultimately left the order, and her experience led the Mission to declare that future African celibates would “have their own ménage, entirely on African lines” and “no attempt [would be] made to incorporate them into CSP”.  Indeed, when the first African postulants were finally clothed as Novices in 1939 it was in a separate order, the Chama cha Mariamu Mtakatifu (CMM).  Especially in the late colonial period, the Church was criticized by both adherents and outsiders alike for the decades of “colour discrimination” in that this social organization seemed to “militate against the unity of the church and of Christian life in Christ”.   Conversely, this paper argues that the CMM’s Sisters did work from within these racialized communities that was vital to the development of a cohesive African ‘nation’ of Christ.  In fact, it was in these segregated spaces that the Sisters of CMM cultivated the characteristics that made them the ideal African Christian women, embodying and performing for adherents and inquirers the values of Christian domesticity, modernity, civilization and supra-tribal unity.  In this the CMM’s Sisters became political innovators their own right, spreading the same values of Christian cultural nationalism that would come to constitute a powerful strand of Tanzanian anti-colonial nationalist thought.  This paper thus foregrounds gender and women’s quotidian work, done outside formal institutions and the state, in the development of political nationalism in East Africa.