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The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi
"This history is . . . the first fully-fleshed story of African Nairobi in all of its complexity which foregrounds African experiences. Given the overwhelming white dominance in the written sources, it is a remarkable achievement."—Claire Robertson, International Journal of African Historical Studies
"White's book . . . takes a unique approach to a largely unexplored aspect of African History. It enhances our understanding of African social history, political economy, and gender studies. It is a book that deserves to be widely read."—Elizabeth Schmidt, American Historical Review
"White's book . . . takes a unique approach to a largely unexplored aspect of African History. It enhances our understanding of African social history, political economy, and gender studies. It is a book that deserves to be widely read."—Elizabeth Schmidt, American Historical Review
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 26, 2015
In this book, Luise White examines the history of prostitution in colonial Nairobi from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Over the trajectory of sixty years, White investigates the changing patterns of prostitution practices and the impacts of a transformed political economy on these practices with regards to redefined social, economic, and gender relations under the colonial government. In so doing, White makes highly valuable contribution to the field of African gender and sexuality and global sex work by laying out four major shifting analytical lenses.
First, White shows that prostitution was a constructed social taxonomy that reflected the contradictory sexual politics of colonial governance. By operating on reversal logic, the colonial government engaged in discursive practices to categorize women who had practiced sex with men either as a form of wage labor or earned income. This strategy was realized by the criminalization of prostitution practices and forced registration in the name of sanitary regulation and racial segregation. Housing policy was an intermediary to reconfigure African’s social lives that, in turn, aided class formation and construction of gender identity and relations.
Second, White’s analysis also cuts deeply across the presumption of most studies on prostitutes and sex work that “streetwalkers” was a subpar form of prostituting that inherently possessed no potentials for respectability. In fact, White demonstrates throughout that watembezi was fundamentally a more fluid, mobile form of sex work that was highly situational as well as contextual. Watembezi and Malaya were forms of female socialization whose existential conditions rely heavily on kin that was developed out of a sense of community and collective struggle. For example, in the case of Malaya prostitutes, in a neighborhood where many of them resided and practiced sex work, the fact that a man knocked on a woman’s door to solicit service did not necessarily invoke competitions from the neighboring women who obviously heard this man’s voice. In other cases, specifically in the neighborhood of Danguroni, in time of economic crisis, two women share a room and also clients without any difficulties as long as they got remunerated for their services from the same man. These examples are illustrations of what Luise White called an established “norm of community behaviors” that flourished as an organic development of business venture.
Third, White successfully argues that prostitution “was essential to the smooth running of a migrant labor economy on the scale Nairobi required in the 1920s.” With the exponential increase in the number of migrant labors, prostitution was able to exercise various strategies to accumulate capitals, whether by gaining access to the housing market or collaborative ventures with other prostitutes to maximize profits. In this aspect, prostitution was essential for maintaining the sustainability of the predominantly male migrant labor economy because in the 1920s a combination of factors including cheapening wage labor and overcrowding living space posed a challenge to the survivals of this exploitative market. In addition, this is not to say that women who prostituted undertook the role of female migrant labor and that the worsening domestic economy forced women to participate in this market as merely wage labor. In contrary, White shows from her oral interviews that most women viewed prostitution as way to increase earned income, not as a strategy of subsistence. In addition, many of these women practiced domestic labor by performing the roles of wives in accompanying different men. The “wage labor theory” thus failed to capture the complexity of female prostitutes in relations to capital accumulation and social relations.
Lastly, the bizarre conceptual scheme of prostitution as a repercussion of a weakening family tie and social degradation, which understandably derived from the Western notion of oppressive female figure able to prostitute herself because of her “detachment” from fragmented family institution, did not apply to the case of women in colonial Nairobi. Many of these women, especially those who had a background in cash crop production, prostituted to earn enough money for their family, not themselves. Sometimes, prostitution is a mean to save family tie when daughters became prostitutes to recuperate her fathers from debts and exorbitant bride wealth—a way of saving masculine respectability. Instead of viewing prostitution as a demoralizing force that shattered family institution, prostitutes in colonial Nairobi were helping to tighten it and save it from falling apart. Prostitution also provided an intermediate relief for the declining housing market facing the colonial regime when migrant male wage labors were unable to find accommodation and fulfill their domestic needs. In a way, prostitution helped revitalizes the labor economy and kept it from disaggregating—ironically one of the reasons why the colonial government intentionally deregulated the economy of prostitutes at this time of the labor market bubble.
In terms of methodology, Luise White relied in part on oral interviews of around 70 women of different age ranges who were prostitutes in the time span of 60 years and colonial archives. By constantly reading these archives against the grain to tease out the colonial fantasies of African sexualities and corroborating her analyses with oral history evidences, she did a good job negotiating Nairobi women’s voice with the dominant colonial narrative trying to construct its subject’s identities through descriptive statistics. Most significantly, she situates Nairobi female prostitutes at the center of discourse, reflecting a major paradigm shift in the historical studies of prostitution and sex work that identified prostitutes as agents of changes and decisive actors in a so-called colonial economy that sought to disempower them. In this study, one can see with concrete proofs that prostitute’s practices fluctuated along with shifting colonial strategies and at times remained autonomous from the colonial power regime. Despite structural constraints, women had the agency to determine the forms of services, price levels, and clientele that best served their purposes
First, White shows that prostitution was a constructed social taxonomy that reflected the contradictory sexual politics of colonial governance. By operating on reversal logic, the colonial government engaged in discursive practices to categorize women who had practiced sex with men either as a form of wage labor or earned income. This strategy was realized by the criminalization of prostitution practices and forced registration in the name of sanitary regulation and racial segregation. Housing policy was an intermediary to reconfigure African’s social lives that, in turn, aided class formation and construction of gender identity and relations.
Second, White’s analysis also cuts deeply across the presumption of most studies on prostitutes and sex work that “streetwalkers” was a subpar form of prostituting that inherently possessed no potentials for respectability. In fact, White demonstrates throughout that watembezi was fundamentally a more fluid, mobile form of sex work that was highly situational as well as contextual. Watembezi and Malaya were forms of female socialization whose existential conditions rely heavily on kin that was developed out of a sense of community and collective struggle. For example, in the case of Malaya prostitutes, in a neighborhood where many of them resided and practiced sex work, the fact that a man knocked on a woman’s door to solicit service did not necessarily invoke competitions from the neighboring women who obviously heard this man’s voice. In other cases, specifically in the neighborhood of Danguroni, in time of economic crisis, two women share a room and also clients without any difficulties as long as they got remunerated for their services from the same man. These examples are illustrations of what Luise White called an established “norm of community behaviors” that flourished as an organic development of business venture.
Third, White successfully argues that prostitution “was essential to the smooth running of a migrant labor economy on the scale Nairobi required in the 1920s.” With the exponential increase in the number of migrant labors, prostitution was able to exercise various strategies to accumulate capitals, whether by gaining access to the housing market or collaborative ventures with other prostitutes to maximize profits. In this aspect, prostitution was essential for maintaining the sustainability of the predominantly male migrant labor economy because in the 1920s a combination of factors including cheapening wage labor and overcrowding living space posed a challenge to the survivals of this exploitative market. In addition, this is not to say that women who prostituted undertook the role of female migrant labor and that the worsening domestic economy forced women to participate in this market as merely wage labor. In contrary, White shows from her oral interviews that most women viewed prostitution as way to increase earned income, not as a strategy of subsistence. In addition, many of these women practiced domestic labor by performing the roles of wives in accompanying different men. The “wage labor theory” thus failed to capture the complexity of female prostitutes in relations to capital accumulation and social relations.
Lastly, the bizarre conceptual scheme of prostitution as a repercussion of a weakening family tie and social degradation, which understandably derived from the Western notion of oppressive female figure able to prostitute herself because of her “detachment” from fragmented family institution, did not apply to the case of women in colonial Nairobi. Many of these women, especially those who had a background in cash crop production, prostituted to earn enough money for their family, not themselves. Sometimes, prostitution is a mean to save family tie when daughters became prostitutes to recuperate her fathers from debts and exorbitant bride wealth—a way of saving masculine respectability. Instead of viewing prostitution as a demoralizing force that shattered family institution, prostitutes in colonial Nairobi were helping to tighten it and save it from falling apart. Prostitution also provided an intermediate relief for the declining housing market facing the colonial regime when migrant male wage labors were unable to find accommodation and fulfill their domestic needs. In a way, prostitution helped revitalizes the labor economy and kept it from disaggregating—ironically one of the reasons why the colonial government intentionally deregulated the economy of prostitutes at this time of the labor market bubble.
In terms of methodology, Luise White relied in part on oral interviews of around 70 women of different age ranges who were prostitutes in the time span of 60 years and colonial archives. By constantly reading these archives against the grain to tease out the colonial fantasies of African sexualities and corroborating her analyses with oral history evidences, she did a good job negotiating Nairobi women’s voice with the dominant colonial narrative trying to construct its subject’s identities through descriptive statistics. Most significantly, she situates Nairobi female prostitutes at the center of discourse, reflecting a major paradigm shift in the historical studies of prostitution and sex work that identified prostitutes as agents of changes and decisive actors in a so-called colonial economy that sought to disempower them. In this study, one can see with concrete proofs that prostitute’s practices fluctuated along with shifting colonial strategies and at times remained autonomous from the colonial power regime. Despite structural constraints, women had the agency to determine the forms of services, price levels, and clientele that best served their purposes
November 21, 2017
The world's oldest profession helped Nairobi during its nascent years maintain labor force by providing companionship to the burgeoning bachelor migrant labour. In doing so, they accumulated wealth and became the first African landlords in colonial Nairobi. The African neighborhoods (estates) in Nairobi were largely shaped by prostitute activities - Pangani, Kilileshwa, Pumwani and Shauri Moyo were setup to accommodate the demands of landlord prostitutes who were providing services that reproduced labor for the colonial government.
Over the years, different forms of prostitution emerged to accommodate changing landscape, economics and population of the young city. The most successful of the prostitutes became a lady in her forties living in Eastleigh who bought a secondhand Mercedes-Benz in 1960.
Over the years, different forms of prostitution emerged to accommodate changing landscape, economics and population of the young city. The most successful of the prostitutes became a lady in her forties living in Eastleigh who bought a secondhand Mercedes-Benz in 1960.
June 2, 2015
Historian White explores how prostitutes in colonial Nairobi accumulated wealth and became landladies in African Nairobi thus disrupting imaginations of prostitutes as women with loose morals, criminals and disease prone. She not only traces the history of prostitution in Europe and the US she also briefly highlights pre-colonial Kenyan history. In order to understand the lived experiences of her participants she puts them in three categories: malaya, watembezi and waziwazi. This category or model that she uses works well in helping her to study the prostitutes and their clients as well as discuss the identities of the various prostitutes. I argue that these categories should be read as fluid. She engages us in race and ethnic relations, political economy, Kenyan and Swahili identity formation, Islam in Kenya, Colonial urban housing and British colonial law. Should be read together with “Coming to Birth” by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye and Kenya Mutongi Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya. As a Kenyan woman I learned a lot from this book but was also left very disturbed after my reading and discussion session.
September 6, 2024
The Comforts of Home is a history of prostitution in British colonial Africa, and Luise White writes a study of political economy focused on women’s words. Hense White is mainly concerned with sex and money. She investigates the labour processes of prostitution that uncover the ‘two sides of prostitution,’ which focuses on what prostitutes did with their customers and what they did with their earnings.
The book challenges the conventional notions of prostitution as merely a symbol of degradation and instead presents it as a complex interplay of labour, gender, and colonial dynamics. The interactions between class and kin, family and farm, and migrants and housing are laid out by White as concerns that any historian of 20th-century Kenya should be investigating. Her analysis spans the early 20th century to the post-World War II period, revealing how prostitution intertwined in the socio-economic processes in colonial Nairobi.
White challenges the traditional framework of feminist scholarship about prostitution that emphasises hierarchy and deviance. By de-centering the state and men’s domination over women who engaged in prostitution White moves away from showing women as passive subjects. Instead, she shows the active roles and agency of these women.
White shows that prostitution must be looked at on a spectrum. There are different forms of prostitution in the world, and in colonial Kenya there were three forms; ‘watembezi’ (streetwalking), ‘malaya’ (proper prostitutes), and ‘wazi-wazi’ (women who 'entice' men outside their rooms). The book argues there was a complex spectrum of experiences rather than the binary that the current literature offers. White challenges romanticised notions of prostitution, showing that the approval of Malaya women by their community is more complex. There were pitfalls and benefits to all of the three forms of prostitution performed in Nairobi.
The rise and fall of pimps in the literature is also discussed, and how the absence of pimps in Keyna allowed prostitutes to retain control over their earnings and form intimate relationships with their customers. She discusses how colonial policies such as the contagious diseases ordinances were designed to control sexually transmitted infections by making prostitutes do regular medical examinations. In turn, these policies granted a degree of legitimacy to the profession as registered prostitutes were seen as less of a public health risk. The regulation allows for records of prostitutes to appear in the archive but imposes a colonial gaze that historians have to navigate through.
The Comfort of Home was a well-researched study that challenges views and prevailing narratives of prostitution at large at the time of its publishment. Through her work, White highlights the agency of women in colonial Nairobi, their strategies for economic survival, and the complex interplay of gender, labour, and colonialism. Her work underscores the importance of incorporating the voices and experiences of marginalized women in historical scholarship, offering a more comprehensive and humanizing portrayal of their lives and labour.
The book challenges the conventional notions of prostitution as merely a symbol of degradation and instead presents it as a complex interplay of labour, gender, and colonial dynamics. The interactions between class and kin, family and farm, and migrants and housing are laid out by White as concerns that any historian of 20th-century Kenya should be investigating. Her analysis spans the early 20th century to the post-World War II period, revealing how prostitution intertwined in the socio-economic processes in colonial Nairobi.
White challenges the traditional framework of feminist scholarship about prostitution that emphasises hierarchy and deviance. By de-centering the state and men’s domination over women who engaged in prostitution White moves away from showing women as passive subjects. Instead, she shows the active roles and agency of these women.
White shows that prostitution must be looked at on a spectrum. There are different forms of prostitution in the world, and in colonial Kenya there were three forms; ‘watembezi’ (streetwalking), ‘malaya’ (proper prostitutes), and ‘wazi-wazi’ (women who 'entice' men outside their rooms). The book argues there was a complex spectrum of experiences rather than the binary that the current literature offers. White challenges romanticised notions of prostitution, showing that the approval of Malaya women by their community is more complex. There were pitfalls and benefits to all of the three forms of prostitution performed in Nairobi.
The rise and fall of pimps in the literature is also discussed, and how the absence of pimps in Keyna allowed prostitutes to retain control over their earnings and form intimate relationships with their customers. She discusses how colonial policies such as the contagious diseases ordinances were designed to control sexually transmitted infections by making prostitutes do regular medical examinations. In turn, these policies granted a degree of legitimacy to the profession as registered prostitutes were seen as less of a public health risk. The regulation allows for records of prostitutes to appear in the archive but imposes a colonial gaze that historians have to navigate through.
The Comfort of Home was a well-researched study that challenges views and prevailing narratives of prostitution at large at the time of its publishment. Through her work, White highlights the agency of women in colonial Nairobi, their strategies for economic survival, and the complex interplay of gender, labour, and colonialism. Her work underscores the importance of incorporating the voices and experiences of marginalized women in historical scholarship, offering a more comprehensive and humanizing portrayal of their lives and labour.
August 19, 2018
Fascinating content and a provocative take, but I lost interest about halfway through as it felt repetitive.
Want to read
August 30, 2024___________________________________
FROM BOOK: Vendere e comprare sesso (Giulia Garofalo Geymonat)
FROM BOOK: Vendere e comprare sesso (Giulia Garofalo Geymonat)
July 22, 2020
A pioneering study of three common forms of prostitution in Nairobi. Malaya prostitution was predicated on women’s ability to sell access to a room to male clients, wherein women performed domestic tasks for men, including sex. Watembezi or streetwalker prostitution was common among homeless women who did not have access to a residence. Wazi-Wazi referred to immigrant women from northwestern Tanzania and Uganda who came to Nairobi and made offers to men while sitting outside their rooms. Very much situated within Marxist theory, but rather than framing Nairobi prostitutes as a proletariat, White argued that these women constituted a self-employed, entrepreneurial petite bourgeoisie. Compelling argument, if somewhat reductive. Overall a trailblazing book. Remains seminal.
November 18, 2012
White's labor history of prostitution frees women's economic contributions from the moral/public health registers that had previously marginalized them as either a.) degenerates or b.) vectors of disease. In so doing, White liberates the contribution of women's labor and identifies as central to checking colonial ambitions of controlling the urban space. This was a really novel and fascinating approach to colonial history that is worth reading for anyone interested in the construction of an urban political economy.
May 16, 2016
Luise White is one of the historians I admire most. This, like her others, is insightful and meticulously researched. I would strongly recommend starting with her later book Speaking with Vampires.
Read
September 21, 2018It was a good book
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews