‘Education is the key of life’: Language, schooling, and gender in Tanzanian beauty pageants

This paper discusses how education, and especially its key product English, shape Tanzanian beauty pageants both implicitly and explicitly. Discourses within these events extol education as the primary resource for social mobility and the most promising solution to society’s and individuals’ problems. Furthermore, contestants and observers plug into English-language, school-based models of speaking, listening, and manifesting knowledge, a process facilitated by the configuration of contestants as schoolgirls. Yet the data presented here demonstrate a mismatch between the social construction of education and the realities that it offers on and off stage. This article will thus outline the mobility of educational models of language use in urban Tanzania, and how, once mobile, they are subject to reinterpretation, revision, and hierarchical reorganization.