Missionaries set up mission houses and schools. They persuaded Africans to become Christians and the government to create laws that encouraged Christian ideals, such as monogamous marriages. This led to some tensions inherent in many African marriages today. As colonialism introduced new economic and religious systems, they also introduced instability to the existing marriage structure all across Africa.
Historians Iris Berger and E. Frances White claim that colonialism offered women a way of escape from their lineage duties, even if that way of escape meant prostitution or petty trading (Berger and White, 99). The political and economic situation created by colonialism meant that men often had to leave home to find work in order to pay taxes (Schmidt). These long absences created opportunities for prostitutes, who sometimes played the role of wife away from home.
In the book The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi, historian Luise White examines the Kenyan colonial economic system that gave rise to a particular form of prostitution called the malaya. The malaya were prostitutes who sold domestic comforts to men who had left wives behind in the rural villages or who were unable to afford brideprice on the wages they were paid in the city.
Men simply could not afford to keep a family in Nairobi. In addition, British housing policies were constructed to undermine any sense of "place, community and continuity" (White, 127). Building a home life in Nairobi was nearly impossible. And so, the malaya prostitute played a version of the wife. She did not sit out on the porch to solicit business, nor did she walk the streets. The men found her in her home. Malaya prostitutes built their entire business by providing domestic comforts - a meal, a bath, clean sheets. In effect, they provided what a wife might normally provide, only they were paid for it. This arrangement became very profitable for many women, who were able to buy property with their money.
Women sometimes entered prostitution out of financial desperation. They may have felt they had no other option, as the government made laws that restricted their ability to cultivate land or to trade profitably. White quotes one prostitute as saying, "Women need money too, so what else can she do besides prostitution if she can't find employment and she has got children to support? And maybe a woman never had a capable husband, so probably she will turn to prostitution so as to make a living for herself and her children" (White, 198). White also writes that prostitutes entered into a number of semi-permanent "marriages" with men, living arrangements that were possible largely due to the changing structures of society during the colonial period.
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