Benjamin M. O. Odhoji

Victorian Colonial Women's Travelogues: Early British Colonial Rule in East Africa Benjamin M. O. Odhoji

How did the earliest colonial women travelers view the British colonial policy? Did they collude in the exploitative structures of colonialism? How did they order and structure the strangeness of their new reality in order to construct a defined relationship with it? How did they re-construct, re-define, and re-present their identity in their self-referential travelogues? This book attempts to answer these questions. Odhoji argues that although the colonial enterprise and the prevailing dominant gender ideology subordinated women, as the "inferior sex" within the ?superior race," the women were instrumental in shaping the colonial cultural, political, and ideological subjugation of the indigenous peoples. Majority tended to write a variety of memoirs as narrative forms of personal histories in which they could be the subjects. Unlike their male counterparts therefore, they occupied a rather ambivalent cultural site. Since they were generally excluded from the official historicizing and the production of authoritative accounts of colonial life, many women, resorted to writing diaries, journals, letters, and a variety of self-referential texts.