Fostering Trust

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Fostering Trust explores West African practices of girl fostering within the kingdom and then the colony of Dahomey, the modern-day Republic of Bénin. It focusses specifically on the evolution, from the 1720s to the 1940s, of girl entrusting, a practice whereby Dahomean parents transferred their daughters at a young age into the guardianship of social mothers. Dahomeans valorized this process as a crucial component of being “well-raised.” This book argues that despite the endurance of this ideal into the twentieth century, the social, economic, and political changes successively wrought by the expansion of Dahomey in the eighteenth century, the shift to “legitimate” trade in agricultural products in the nineteenth, and the imposition of French colonialism in the twentieth all fundamentally altered the institution of girl entrustment. This study examines girlhood as a West African cultural construct that was dynamically reshaped by the kingdom and colony of Dahomey’s involvement in international and transnational phenomenon.

Fostering Trust utilizes a diverse range of sources from Benin, Senegal, France, and the United States. These sources include collective memory, oral tradition, European travelogues, historic images, colonial reports, juridical records, oral interviews, and ethnographies. This book contributes to a growing body of scholarship in the fields of women’s, gender, sexuality, and (post)colonial studies that confronts both archival distortions and gendered perceptions of distrust . It adds to this body of knowledge by employing two interrelated methodologies. Firstly, it seeks to understand the longer trajectory of gendered history that predated formal colonialism. By historicizing collective memories about the history of girlhood, guardianship, and motherhood, it challenges the frames imposed by colonial legal categories and thus sheds light on alternative ways to understand these documents. Secondly, rather than focusing on legal outcomes, it analyzes the moments in the investigative processes where girls and women had a greater ability to express themselves in ways that did not conform to judicial protocol.