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A review by bahareads
The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi by Luise White
informative
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
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 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 outlines 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 challenged views and prevailing narratives of prostitution at the time of its publication. 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 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 outlines 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 challenged views and prevailing narratives of prostitution at the time of its publication. 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.