Zeinah (Regina) Mwinyipembe wrote to a colonial magazine’s column, comparing dowry (mahari) practices among Tanganyika’s Black community to chattel slavery, and asking why a mister of many wives was normal but not a mistress of many husbands.
In her article, Umama wa Ustaarabu ([to be] the mother of civilisation), published in Mambo Leo in 1926, she enters the column to call out a man who frequently contributed, so it seems, by defaming women. She flat-out told him that he simply wrote because he knew how to write, not because he intended to.
The responses to her article were so unbelievably inappropriate for mass consumption that the editors—of this one column dedicated to African readers conversing through letter-articles—declined to publish them, calling them ‘dini tupu’ (‘purely religious’). This was their way of nicely saying: men lost their heads!
What strikes me in Zeinah’s work is not what she critiques. When she argues that a wife being the designated handler of the household’s slaves’ matters did not mean the privilege of handling her husband’s wealth, as some men argued, she sees it instead as an act of treating the wife as a slave too.
Or when she complains about how a man had the freedom to go wherever he wanted and come back home whenever, then use food as something to hurt his wife with. Nor was it when she called out the physical beatings of wives by their husbands, which, in her words, were more severe than the beatings a donkey received daily.
None of those words shocks me, living in present-day Tanzania, where rampant domestic violence has made even the right to stay alive something women must bargain for, amid an online culture that thrives on attacking victims of violence. Even food itself is still a tool against women within marriages.
And although we ‘no longer have slaves’ in our houses to delegate their matters to the wife, the matters that used to be slaves’ ‘responsibilities’ have remained delegated to the wife. Perhaps Zeinah was also trying to articulate how emotional labour, too, was entirely on the wife, or simply that the wife’s position was the same as the slave’s, or both. Bottom line is, all of that still happens, so her critique did not shock me.
Words unwritten
What captivated me was reading the unwritten behind Zeinah’s words. For example, in responding to a man who used the phrase ‘the goods of the tip, and the goods of the stem’ to describe how Black women wanted too much, Zeinah said: ‘by using the logic of “of the tip and of the stem”, he has made himself the leaves’.
Knowing that, for a plant, the leaves fall and wither fast, then get replaced quickly, unlike the stem and the tip, which are what’s most important, Zeinah’s response is deceptively simple. She did not resort to defending Black women or educating the poor, clueless man. She, instead, gave him homework: to either reflect or reveal what more resided in his head.
Zeinah does not stop there. In responding to the same man’s phrase calling Black women ‘sweet outward, bitter inward’, Zeinah stated that, unsurprisingly to her, on matters of ‘sweet and bitter’, there were so many men like him who had refused to be men but instead obsessed over wanting all the ways women ought to be treated.
Did she call him ‘princess’—a man obsessed with having the princess treatment that women deserve done for him? Or did she simply take a swing at him by ‘nicely’ calling him something he despised: a woman! I am not sure.
She went on to mock his words, saying they revealed his jealousy because he knew that, if Black women got access to education, he would not be able to compete for professional jobs.
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Zeinah finished by telling this man that she wrote back specifically to let him know that his words added zero value to her previous arguments, because they were the same words of a swine that husbands use every day! The amount of air that man punched will forever stay unknown.
The subtle ways in which Zeinah said a lot by not writing much floored me. To me, her art shone through her choice of words. I could feel her restraint: her ability to stop herself.
And it made me wonder how many drafts she wrote, how many words she scratched out, how many breaks she took to think and think, looking for ‘nicer’ words for the male editors and the majority of Mambo Leo’s readers.
Is her published work all that she ever sent to the magazine, or perhaps she did go ‘crazy’ and get silenced? What I know for sure is that her words, among many other reasons, live as the one door leading us to the source—her anger!
Anger’s lineage
In her words, Zeinah was not only talking about the plight of women; she was specifically clear that she was crying for and with Black women within multiracial British colonial Tanganyika, where race meant class and status, hence privileges and the lack of them.
Because, after all, Black slaves of Zanzibar and Tanganyika were declared ‘free’, Black women immediately went on to begin negotiating their freedom within the ‘free’ Black community.
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Like the story of Msichoke, a slave girl from Pemba Island, whose master declared her his mistress, so she could not leave slavery, and it became her problem to solve instead of the state’s matter.
Zeinah’s writing came years after Msichoke, but her anger was built upon this long lineage of angry Black women, for whom marriage and dowry practices became the new problems. Coming from the poorest group within the lowest class of colonial Tanganyika, Zeinah used her most precious possession—her anger!—to exercise her most expensive need: autonomy.
Her choice of words, therefore, reveals not just a woman determined to speak her mind, but also an angry Black woman documenting her anger. Yes, because intelligence alone, without the ability to display it, means nothing if you are not angry enough. When fear is all you know, anger is what you need to do something despite it.
Zeinah understood this with as much restraint as an angry Black woman can. And the responses to her carried the same obliviousness the rest of the world has today when addressing an angry Black woman: fine, but why so angry?
Mambo Leo was produced by the British colonial Education Department to inform African readers on matters the colonial administration willed, at a time when the priority was to send boys to school so they would be able to assist in the colonial government. Zeinah wrote at a time when the colonial state spoke to men it had empowered to make conclusions about the entire Black community.
Zeinah wrote against the general assumption that girls did not need reading and writing more than handwork skills to keep men happy and children well cared for. Today, there can only be speculation about who Zeinah was and where she was from. Even the names Mwinyipembe and Sekiyaga are not clear as to whether they belonged to her father or her husband.
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Are Zeinah and Regina her names or her pen names? How old was she when she was writing ‘young people like me’? Which school did she go to?
And, besides her anger, where else was she getting her confidence from?
“… I beg of you [my fellow] women, use your minds, and [look] at how much you lose your time [and energy in exchange] for such poor rewards. I have so much to speak with you, nevertheless, this is enough to let you know of my wishes and my love for you.” — Bi Zeinah (Regina) Mwinyipembe, Sekiyaga, 1926, Mambo Leo, edition no. 42, in the translation reproduced here.
Perhaps not all of Zeinah’s criticisms resonate with everyone. I have known those who argue that mahari (dowry) practices have the potential to create and strengthen love and unity among people who are different. This take is as valid as Zeinah’s, as she wrote from within the context she witnessed, which to date is still valid.
My takeaway is not simply the validity of everything she argued, but the feelings her writing evokes. I have so much to be angry about today. Zeinah’s anger was valid then, and so is the anger of every single Black woman I know, including those whose anger is still dormant or suppressed enough to feel absent.
Zeinah puts it very clearly for me that I need neither defend nor explain why I am angry. Instead, I should embrace and wear my anger proudly.
So, for all women out there: what are you angry about?
Halima Geuya is a Tanzanian creative writer and researcher. She is available at halimageuya@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
