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On Feminists, Functionalists, and Friends: Lobola and the Gender Politics of Imperial Trusteeship in Interwar Britain*

“Anthropologists,” proclaimed Nina Boyle, “are not good friends to women.” Boyle (1865–1943), a veteran suffragette, was the recurring face of an otherwise shifting campaign against what she claimed was the most pressing form of slavery in the twentieth century: the domestic bondage of African women under the customary marriage practice of lobola, or bridewealth—a practice that anthropologists defended as integral to the cohesion of traditional African communities in a world of creeping modernity where the older binding ties faced a constant threat of disintegration. In a 1932 article on the dangers of privileging tradition over women’s rights in the realm of colonial policy making, Boyle pointed to the academic bias that prevented professional anthropologists from acting as credible advisers: “anthropologists do not appear to me to have the qualifications necessary for advice on modern legislation,” because “they are not likely to wish for the abolition of customs they wish to study.” At the time Boyle published this polemic, the upcoming centenary of the 1833 British abolition of slavery was occasioning much national self-reflection about the legacy and meaning of “abolition.” Commemorative publications located the contemporary antislavery and antitrafficking work of the League of Nations and British watchdog organizations within a longer history of international human-rights campaigning to demonstrate that the British Empire’s subject populations could continue to be governed by the same beneficent hand that had triumphed over the evils of slavery. More broadly, Frederick Lugard’s umbrella