Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890 - 1990

Robertson, Claire C. Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890- 1990 . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. 341 pp.

Women traders and farmers of the Central Province of Kenya were and are key actors in the development of the trading and market gardening system that feeds Nairobi, the capital city of the East African country. Their accomplishments represent an unheralded achievement that remains hidden partly because government persecution pursued some of their activities. Whereas women supported their families and took pride in their capabilities, their work was also essential to the transformation of the economy to fill the needs of the large Nairobi urban agglomeration to such effect that their lives - their relationship to their bodies, to relatives and children, and to other women involved in organizational attempts, were also transformed. Although their efforts belong to the economic, social and cultural history of Africa, this history has been either ignored and disclaimed or discounted as unimportant. This, despite the fact that their achievements where grand in sum, durable, transformational and intentional. In effect, Trouble Showed the Way chronicles those efforts, but also the ambivalent implications of some transformations for the women who furthered or instigated them.

The author of the book is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at The Ohio state University. Her research interests focus mainly on many facets of the history and lives of African women, especially those involved in trade.

In this book, the author argues that the increasingly convoluted world capitalist economy, race, class, ethnicity and gender all were imbricated in the processes that caused their problems. Nevertheless they used links welded most solidly out of gender - shaped experiences in efforts to overcome the trouble that showed them the way to Nairobi.

The author employs a variety of approaches to analyze and weave together this wide-ranging study. She provides an extensive case - study of historical transformations in gender, agriculture, residence and civil society. Based on archival documents, library sources (fiction and non fiction, primary and sec ondary materials), surveys and oral histories, participant observation and quantitative and qualitative analysis, Robertson breaks new ground by focusing on traders in one commodity, dried staples and comparing and contrasting the evolution of women's trade with men's trade. The study focuses first on the Kikuyu, the largest nationality in Kenya who dominate among Nairobi area traders, and second on Kamba women, for whom Nairobi trade is more recent but rapidly increasing.

The book is organised in eight chapters, and is in line with a multidisciplinary approach and nonlinear use of time. The organization of the book effects a compromise between thematic and chronological considerations, an unconventional solution that the author says grew conceptually and organically from the data.

Chapter one constitutes the introduction. - Chapter two is on control over women's labour and the reconstruction of gender. Its framing structure is the template formed by the processes undergone by certain beans. The chapter begins with an analysis of the symbolic means and material realities of beans in Kikuyu culture and then examines the history of beans and dried staples as an example of agricultural imperialism. The author observes that beans serve as multivalent symbol for women; the multivalent process of their material and symbolic marginalisation as a crop is an index for the peripheralization of women and their dried staples trade, with segregation and subordination as dominant motifs.

Chapters three through five provide an extended history of women's trade from the 189Os to the 1980s, carrying through the comparison not only of men's and women's trade as they evolved at a different pace, but also of maize and beans. Special attention is devoted to efforts at different levels to control that trade. This history mandates strong attention to the control efforts that did so much to shape the conditions of trade, efforts in which race, class and ethnicity as well as gender, are imbricated.

Chapters six and seven return to thematic organization while elaborating respectively a history of change in marital patterns and of women's collective organizing efforts connected to their changing role in trade.

In chapter eight the author concludes that the seams of the diverse topics contained in the book will be joined together into a Kenyan women's cloth that unites at once the material and the symbolic, the objective and the subjective, and creates a history dedicated to illuminating, respecting and transcending our and their differences.

Although this is a landmark study that has been meticulously executed and written, it does not adequately analyze the problems encountered by women in developing a food supply system to feed Nairobi. Efforts to reconstruct Kenya's economy and society from below were not that easy. These need to be addressed via further in-depth research by either the author herself or in collaboration with other historians.

Otherwise the book is very instructive in addressing questions facing the disciplines of history, anthropology, political science, development economics, women's and gender studies.

P. Godfrey Okoth Maseno University, Kenya

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