Abstract: This dissertation traces the establishment, expansion, and experience of government girls' education in Zanzibar from the late 1920s to the mid 1950s. Using archival and oral research, I explore shifting perspectives on the purpose of educating girls in government schools. The establishment of the first of these, the Arab Girls' School, in 1927 rested on meeting the parents' demands for maintaining the heshima ('respectability') of their Muslim daughters. While influenced by Islamic modernist ideas about the value of educating girls, parents would only send their girls to school under certain conditions. These included specifications for the school's location and design as well as its curriculum, beginning with a thorough grounding in Arabic and Islamic studies. After 1930, when the school opened its doors to 'African' girls, officials drew up plans for the expansion of girls' education into the rural areas with an emphasis on domestic science. Instruction in hygiene, nutrition, and child welfare, they argued, would combat such economic problems as poor health, malnutrition, and infant mortality. These proposals prefigured the 'development' agenda that emerged after WWII. Interviews with Zanzibari women who attended government schools in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, however, reveal that they most valued the academic subjects, and especially literacy and languages, which they say 'opened their mind' to new ideas. Parental and government investments in girls' education were thus always connected to the social, political, and economic connotations of heshima , in the first instance, and 'development,' in the second. Meanwhile, the outcome of these investments was the girls' exposure to a new set of ideas about girlhood, modernity, and the purpose of education.