Muriel Pelham-Johnson in Tanganyikan Territory (1939–1959): Imperial Networks and Local Rooting in the Shaping of Girls’ Schooling Policies

This chapter investigates the personal papers of a British female administrator who was responsible for expanding girls’ schooling in Tanganyika Territory during the late colonial period. The richness of the correspondences and of the photographic albums she gave to the Rhodes House Library (Oxford) allows us to understand how social relationships, emotions and representations participated in shaping a colonial policy. Through an intersectional approach, I analyse how this female administrator positioned herself within the colonial society and how she devised a policy for girls’ schooling that was rooted in her representations of race, gender and age. I also question the links she forged with various colonial spaces: the metropolis that sent policy guidelines, other British colonies where she searched for examples and ideas, and the Tanganyika Territory where she built a strong network of female teachers. Thus, I demonstrate how the policies she devised had a neat local rooting. I also highlight the contradictory effects of race and gender. The female schooling system she worked in was fraught with racial barriers. Nonetheless, European colonisers and missionaries exchanged ideas, knowledge and emotions with their African pupils and colleagues to an extent which knows no equivalent in the male schooling system.