A rich scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa covers a broad range of the political, social, economic, and cultural effects of colonialism on African women. However, little has been said about African girls, who were seldom mentioned in colonial reports. Making Modern Girls, while acknowledging this problem of scanty archival sources, also offers a rich critical examination of the impact of colonialism on girls. By profiling the experiences of working-class girls—namely girl hawkers and “those who set out to save them in nineteenth-century colonial Lagos” (6)—Abosede A. George emphasizes children as colonial subjects and discusses how an examination of their interactions with the colonial state adds a new perspective to our understanding of European rule, citizenship building, and knowledge production in Africa. The most pressing intellectual argument of the study concerns African children as powerful social actors. Criticizing what might be called a biased history, George places children in the center of both her analysis and the history of colonialism. “Before the trade unionist, the wageworker, or the nationalist politician,” she asserts, “the child was the first category of native to emerge as a universal subject in Africa . . .” (6).
By focusing on hawking—the selling of petty goods on the streets—the author is able to examine the dynamics of girlhood and the multiple issues associated with the practice. Both colonial social workers and elite women in colonial Lagos took a paternalistic approach to saving girls from work that was associated with “ideas of immorality” (53) and challenged the model of good modern citizenship. This construction of the girl hawker linked hawking to prostitution and was grounded in the European movement of “save the child” and the rhetoric of “moral danger.” But despite their common interests, colonial social workers and Lagosian women reformers held somewhat contradictory visions on how to “save” working-class girls. For elite women, she writes, “the transformation of girlhood was conceptualized as an indigenous modernization effort for the preservation and popularization of ‘modern womanhood’ in the nation” (7). For colonial officials, “the transformation of girlhood was conceptualized as a social development scheme that was vital for the salvation of Yoruba girls while being potentially redemptive for a crumbling colonial enterprise” (8). George indicates that these opposing salvationist views, a reflection of two overlapping projects of social reform and development work, produced contested ideas of girlhood in colonial Lagos. The girl hawker was constructed as both a poor girl from the countryside who was at risk of falling into delinquency and a “universal child who would respond to the same principles and methods of juvenile reforms that were applied to children in Europe” (101).
In this way, George’s discussion of the intervention of colonial welfare workers into the lives of girl hawkers in Lagos also has a great deal to say about the production of power and the social construction of knowledge. While the field of social work was “enlisted to construct and correct the maladjusted child in Lagos” (97), women reformers interfered in the colonial state’s development project and consequently “challenged the power–knowledge hierarchies that underlay the colonial social order” (11). While a rich scholarship has explored the alliance between Europeans and African men to control and contain African women, Making Modern Girls shows how interactions between educated women and colonial social workers affected the nature of colonial rule in colonial Lagos. She stresses that women reformers, “the daughters of the Black Victorians[,] sought fulfillment and recognition as public social actors” with a marked goal of uplifting endangered working-class girls into “urban and modern girls” (60). In the process they were also concerned with the “transformation of mainstream girlhood, African womanhood, and Lagosian society” (50), although in this sense their efforts may have been counterproductive or fallen short. Through their activism, the author shows, and their emphasis on hawking as a key element in the socialization of girls, women reformers in many ways created and reinforced gender ideologies that limited the voices and options of the very children they were trying to assist. George argues that girl hawkers, just like boy hawkers, “exercised certain form of agency” (56), and this should have been respected.
Fittingly, Making Modern Girls is a useful archival source in its own right and in many ways contributes to a retrospective remedying of this historical slight. The variety of sources that the author cites gives working-class girls a prominent place in the gendered histories of colonialism in Africa. Drawing on oral histories, she recovers the voices of girl hawkers through the testimonies of women traders who provided vivid accounts of hawking as part of the social fabric in Lagos. George also does a good job situating the history of girlhood within a wider context of the history of sexuality, gender, race, and class relations in colonial Africa. When women reformers and working-class girls met, class easily entered the equation. The salvationist discourse on girl hawking, in her view, became a discourse on cultural sexual practices and “the place of girls within them” (142). The making modern of girls in colonial Lagos was at the crossroads of labor, modernity, urbanity, and sexuality, and “rather than being incidental to ideas of African modernity and urbanity, . . . [girls] were one of the platforms on which the ambivalent condition of being a modern subject in twentieth-century colonial Lagos was achieved and expressed” (232).
George’s book also provides an interesting analysis of the ways in which the resources and services provided by juvenile institutions in colonial Lagos harmed the girls they were attempting to “save” much more than they helped them. While the labor legislation banning hawking interfered with the normative socialization of girl hawkers and their initiation into womanhood, the rhetoric of moral danger drew large numbers of girls into the juvenile justice system. At the same time, the construction of girlhood in colonial Lagos blurred the line between hawking, sexual depravity, and delinquency. The connection George makes between the history of girlhood and the implementation of juvenile institutions is particularly interesting in the way that it deconstructs the idea of the African juvenile delinquent as always male. The author also argues that the collision between working-class girls, women reformers, and welfare authorities in the colonial city escalated the salvation of girl hawkers from a rescue mission to an issue of “urban planning and sanitation problems” (129) and to the “rank of a serious colonial policy concern” (166). George leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that the Social Welfare Service in colonial Lagos was a tool of social control of African children in a context of changing social values, concerns over sexuality, urbanity, and the formation of modern citizenship.
Making Modern Girls has something to offer to all readers. This book adds to the scholarship on gender and colonialism and to the new literature on African children, and it presents an intriguing view of the problems of modernity in Africa. George’s account of the lives of working-class girls is compelling, although the focus on Yoruba working-class girls is a bit disappointing. More attention to hawking within other ethnic groups would have added to her analysis of girlhood in colonial Lagos. Nevertheless, this work offers a deep perspective on the contours of modernity in colonial Africa, while presenting new insights into the links among gender, labor, and sexuality in colonial Africa.
