Well-Behaved Women: Hospitality as an Identity Marker

This presentation examines gendered identities through practices and ideas rooted in hosting outsiders, providing generosity towards strangers, and accumulating honor through acts of beneficence, in Bantu speaking communities.  The commitment to hosting strangers, generosity, honor, and beneficence, are interconnected social expectations that shaped both male and female identities.  Through an examination of specific language, sayings, oral traditions, and social behaviors as well as institutions this discussion analyzes the importance of hospitality not only in personal encounters, but also in shaping identity.  Indeed, many aspects of what it meant to be a woman in Eastern Africa were challenged both through eighteenth and nineteenth century caravan slave trade and the colonial era, yet important remnants persisted.  A comparative examination of precolonial and colonial ideas of respectable behavior in Southwestern Tanzania sheds light on both male and female identity, but also provides a lens for reanalysis of women in Africa and the Diaspora. Using language data and colonial records, I explore the cultural and historical distinctions in how communities across southwestern Tanzania differently defined, demonstrated, and at times questioned the position of women.  This paper provides one of example of the ways in which Bantu gender history can inform our analysis of Afro-Diasporan culture in places where people of Bantu ancestry and language landed.