ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits Luise White’s groundbreaking study on prostitution in colonial Nairobi which brought feminist scholarship to bear on development studies. This study of East African history is used to explore care labour, its performance and recognition. It asks how might using historical material as a source and the going back to look for care, cast light on thinking about care giving and care compensation? Specifically, what are the connections between care labour and property as a form of compensation? This study is used to explore the operation of a particular care-property nexus. We argue that a particular form of prostitution enabled women to accumulate independent property, which they used to establish their own female ‘pseudo-kin’ to whom they left their property. They sometimes would make use of a customary practice known as ‘woman to woman’ marriage to achieve this. The chapter moves on to explore the way in which this practice continues to be used as a means to enable older women, who are socially vulnerable through being childless but who have access to bequeathable assets, to secure their position by acquiring a ‘wife’ with children to care for them. In turn the ‘wife’ secures her position through compensation for her caring labour. Through this study, we show how, the property-care nexus has been used by women to resist gender power relationships and to tackle inequality.
