Disputing Discipline

Disputing Discipline takes us inside Zanzibar’s classrooms and madrasas to examine how efforts to eliminate corporal punishment are reshaping what it means to protect, discipline, and raise children. Anthropologist Franziska Fay brings us the voices of Zanzibari children and adults as they navigate tensions between local customs, Islamic values, and international child rights norms.

Through children’s drawings, poetry, stories, and photography, paired with 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this powerful book explores how children themselves experience punishment and protection, and how their moral and religious worlds are being reshaped in the name of child welfare. Fay reveals why well-meaning child protection policies sometimes falter, especially when they fail to recognize the realities of poverty, religion, and deeply rooted ideas of respect and responsibility.

Written in accessible language and rich with insight, Disputing Discipline is essential reading for educators, parents, policymakers, and anyone interested in African childhoods, rights, and the moral debates that shape growing up today.

About the Author
FRANZISKA FAY is Assistant Professor of Political Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK.