Readings in Gender in Africa (Readings in African Studies) 9780253217400, 0852558716, 0253217407

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Notes on Contributors (page v)
Sources & Acknowledgments (page viii)
Introduction: Perspectives on Gender in Africa (ANDREA CORNWALL, page 1)
1. Contested Representations: 'Gender' in Africa
'Western Perceptions of African Women in the 19th & Early 20th Centuries', from Africana Research Bulletin (JOSEPHINE BEOKU‐BETTS, page 20)
'The "Status of Women" in Indigenous African Societies', from The Strength of Our Mothers: African & African American Women & Families. Essays & Speeches (NIARA SUDARKASA, page 25)
'Mapping African Feminisms', adapted version of "Introduction: Reading the Rainbow', from Sisterhood, Feminisms & Power: From Africa to the Diaspora (OBIOMA NNAEMEKA, page 31)
'Down to Fundamentals: Women‐Centred Hearth‐holds in Rural West Africa', from D. Bryceson (ed.)Women Wielding the Hoe (FELICIA EKEJIUBA, page 41)
'Male Lesbians & Other Queer Notions in Hausa', from S. Murray & W. Roscoe (eds) Boys Wives & Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities (RUDOLF P. GAUDIO, page 47)
2. Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities
'Noise Over Camouflaged Polygamy, Colonial Morality Taxation, & a Woman‐Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa', from Journal of African History (NANCY ROSE HUNT, page 53)
'"Fork Up & Smile": Marketing, Colonial Knowledge & the Female Subject in Zimbabwe', from Gender & History (TIMOTHY BURKE, page 64)
'Worries of the Heart: Widowed Mothers, Daughters & Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940‐60', from Journals of African History (KENDA MUTONGI, page 71)
'School Fees & the Marriage Process for Mende Girls in Sierra Leone', from P. Sanday & R. Goodenough (eds) Beyond the Second Sex (CAROLINE BLEDSOE, page 80)
'"No Romance Without Finance": Commodities, Masculinities & Relationships amongst Kampalan Students' (DAVID MILLS & RICHARD SSEWAKIRYANGA, page 90)
'"Dangerous" Love: Reflections on Violence among Xhosa Township Youth', from R. Morrell (ed.) Changing Men in Southern Africa (KATHERINE WOOD & RACHEL JEWKES, page 95)
3. Livelihoods & Lifeways
'Female Farming in Anthropology & African History', from M. di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (JANE I. GUYER, page 103)
'"Gone to their Second Husbands": Marital Metaphors & Conjugal Contracts in The Gambia's Female Garden Sector', from Canadian Journal of African Studies (RICHARD A. SCHROEDER, page 111)
'Which Family? Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic & Cultural Unit', from Journal of African History (MEGAN VAUGHAN, page 119)
'Women "Entrepreneurs" of Early Nairobi', from Canadian Journal of African Studies (JANET M. BUJRA, page 123)
'Baganda Women's Night Market Activities', from B. House Midamba & F. Ekechi (eds) African Market Women & Economic Power: The Role of Women in African Economic Development (NAKANYIKE B. MUSISI, page 132)
'Shunting Between Masculine Ideals: Nigerian Railwaymen in the Colonial Era' (LISA A. LINDSAY, page 141)
4. Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & 'Culture'
'Rebels or Status Seekers? Women as Spirit Mediums in East Africa', from N. Hafkin & E. Bay, (eds) Women in Africa: Studies in Social & Economic Change (IRIS BERGER, page 148)
'Reflections on Slavery, Seclusion & Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the 19th & 20th Centuries', from Journal of African History (BARBARA COOPER, page 156)
'Gender Culture & Capitalism: Women & the Remaking of Islamic "Tradition" in a Sudanese Village', from Comparative Studies in Society & History (VICTORIA BERNAL, page 164)
'Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women's Christianity in South Africa', from C. Walker (ed.) Women & Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (DEBORAH GAITSKELL, page 177)
'"Called to Work for the Kingdom of God": The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Colonial Ghana' (STEPHAN F. MIESCHER, page 187)
5. Gender & Governance
'The Iyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political System', from Alice Schlegel (ed.) Sexual Stratification: A Cross‐Cultural View (BOLANLE AWE, page 196)
'Rounding Up Spinsters: Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante', from Journal of African History (JEAN ALLMAN, page 201)
'Tanganyikan Nationalism as 'Women's Work': Life Histories, Collective Biography & Changing Historiography', from Journal of African History (SUSAN GEIGER, page 210)
'Gender & Decolonization: A Study of Three Women in West African Public Life', from J. F. Ade Ajayi & J. D. Y. Peel (eds) People & Empires in African History: Essays in Memory of Michael Crowder (LARAY DENZER, page 217)
'No Shortcuts to Power: Constraints on Women's Political Effectiveness in Uganda', from Journal of Modern African Studies (ANNE MARIE GOETZ, page 224)
'Women in Movement: Transformations in African Political Landscapes', from International Feminist Journal of Politics (AILI MARI TRIPP, page 234)
Index (page 244)

Citation preview

Edited by ANDREA CORNWALL |

Readings in a Gender in Africa -

The International | | | African Institute , in association with , INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

JAMES CURREY | | , | |

First published in the United Kingdom by

The International African Institute School of Oriental & African Studies Thornhaugh Street

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| © The International African Institute 2005 All rights reserved First published 2005

123 45 09 08 07 06 05

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: Institute |

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data | Readings in gender in Africa 1. Sex (Psychology) 2. Sex role - Africa I. Cornwall, Andrea, 1963- II. International African

305.3’096

| ISBN 0-85255-871-6 (James Currey paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request ISBN 0-253-21740-7 (Indiana paper) ISBN 0-253-34517-0 (Indiana casebound)

Typeset in 9.5/9.5 pt Bembo by Long House, Cumbria Printed and bound in Malaysia

SS __ TIMOTHY BURKE Co ntents “Fork Up & Smile”: Marketing, Colonial Knowledge

——_—— ——__ & the Female Subject in Zimbabwe’, from

Notes on Contributors Vv Gender & History 64 Sources & Acknowledgements vill KENDA MUTONGI “Worries of the Heart: Widowed Mothers, Daughters

ANDREA CORNWALL & Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940-60’, from

Introduction: Perspectives on Gender in Africa 1 Journal of African History 71 CAROLINE BLEDSOE

C—O School Fees & the Marriage Process for Mende Girls 1. Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa __ in Sierra Leone’, from a ooo P Sanday & R. Goodenough (eds) Beyond the Second Sex 80 JOSEPHINE BEOKU-BETTS

‘Western Perceptions of African Women DAVID MILLS & RICHARD SSEWAKIRYANGA

in the 19th & Early 20th Centuries’, from *“No Romance Without Finance”:

, Kampalan Students’ , ,90 NIARA SUDARKASA

Africana Research Bulletin 20 Commodities, Masculinities & Relationships amongst “The “Status of Women” in Indigenous African Societies’, KATHERINE WOOD & RACHEL JEWKES

from The Strength of Our Mothers: African & African American “Dangerous” Love: Reflections on Violence among

Women & Families. Essays & Speeches 25 Xhosa Township Youth’, from R. Morrell (ed.) Changing Men in Southern Africa 95 OBIOMA NNAEMEKA

‘Mapping African Feminisms’, adapted version of | ‘Introduction: Reading the Rainbow’, from oo Sisterhood, Feminisms & Power: From Africa to the Diaspora 31 3. Livelihoods & Lifeways

FELICIA I. EKEJIUBA JANE I. GUYER

‘Down to Fundamentals: Women-Centred Hearth-holds ‘Female Farming in Anthropology & African History’, from

in Rural West Africa’, from M. di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge 103

D. Bryceson (ed.) Women Wielding the Hoe 41 RICHARD A. SCHROEDER

RUDOLE P. GAUDIO ‘“Gone to their Second Husbands”: | ‘Male Lesbians & Other Queer Notions in Hausa’, from Marital Metaphors & Conjugal Contracts in The Gambia’s

S. Murray & W. Roscoe (eds) Boy Wives & Female Female Garden Sector’, from |

Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities 47 Canadian Journal of African Studies 111 MEGAN VAUGHAN

Which Family? Problems in the Reconstruction 2. Reconfiguring Identities: of the History of the Family as an Economic Femininities & Masculinities & Cultural Unit’, from

ggg ee TounaAl of African History 119 NANCY ROSE HUNT , ‘Noise Over Camouflaged Polygamy, Colonial Morality JANET M. BUJRA Taxation, & a Woman-Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa’, “Women “Entrepreneurs” of Early Nairobi’, from

from Journal of African History 93° Canadian Journal of African Studies 123

iv ¢ Contents

NAKANYIKE B. MUSISI Te ‘Baganda Women’s Night Market Activities’, from 5. Gender & Governance

B. House Midamba & F. Ekechi (eds) SS gqig‘gzggqng gg

African Market Women & Economic Power: BOLANLE AWE

The Role of Women in African Economic Development 132 “The lyalode in the Traditional

Yoruba Political System’, from Alice Schlegel (ed.) 196

LISA A. LINDSAY , Sexual Stratification: A Cross-Cultural View ‘Shunting Between Masculine Ideals:

Nigerian Railwaymen in the Colonial Era’ 141 JEAN ALLMAN ‘Rounding Up Spinsters: Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante’, from

inn gg nm Lournal of African History - , 201 4. Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’ SUSAN GEIGER

“Tanganyikan Nationalism as “Women’s Work”:

IRIS BERGER Life Histories, Collective Biography &

‘Rebels or Status Seekers? Women as Spirit Mediums Changing Historiography’, from in East Africa’, from Journal of African History 210 N. Hafkin & E. Bay (eds)

Women in Africa: Studies in Social & Economic Change 148 LARAY DENZER ; ‘Gender & Decolonization: A Study of Three Women

BARBARA COOPER in West African Public Life’, from , ‘Reflections on Slavery, Seclusion & Female Labor J.P. Ade Ajayi & J.D.Y Peel (eds) in the Maradi Region of Niger in the 19th People & Empires in African History: Essays in Memory of

& 20th Centuries’, from Journal of African History 156 Michael Crowder , 217

VICTORIA BERNAL ~ANNE MARIE GOETZ ‘Gender, Culture & Capitalism: Women & the Remaking of ‘No Shortcuts to Power: Constraints on Women’s

Islamic “Tradition” in a Sudanese Village’, Political Effectiveness in Uganda’, from

from Comparative Studies in Society & History 164 Journal of Modern African Studies 224

DEBORAH GAITSKELL | AILT MARI TRIPP ‘Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s ‘Women in Movement: Christianity in South Africa’, from C. Walker (ed.) Transformations in African Political Landscapes’, from

Women & Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 177. International Feminist Journal of Politics 234 STEPHAN F. MIESCHER ‘ “Called to Work for the Kingdom of God”:

TheColonial Challenges of Presbyterian TT in Ghana’ 187Masculinities Index 244

Notes on Contributors Jean Allman teaches African history and directs the Center for Anthropology Review. Her current research focuses on postcolonial African Studies at the University of Illinois. She is the author of The feminism, NGOs and global civil society. Quills of the Porcupine: Asante nationalism in an emergent Ghana (1993)

and, with Victoria Tashjian “I Will Not Eat Stone”: a women’s history Caroline Bledsoe (Ph.D. Stanford) is Professor of Anthropology of colonial Asante (2000). She recently co-edited and introduced and the Melville J. Herskovits Professor African Studies at NorthWomen in Colonial Histories (2002) with Susan Geiger and Nakan- western University. Her projects in West Africa have centred on yike Musisi. Her research on gender, colonialism and social change reproduction, whether social or biological: kinship and marriage; has appeared in the Journal of African History, Africa, Gender and social stratification; demography and public health; ancestral tradi-

History, and History Workshop Journal. tions; fertility; child fosterage; and the cultural reworkings of | Bolanle literacy, knowledge, medicine, and contraceptives. Awe (M.A. St Andrews, D.Phil Oxon) is Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria, and a Retired Professor of History Janet Bujra is an Honorary Reader in Sociology in the Departand former Director of the Institute of African Studies, University ment of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. Trained as a of Ibadan, Nigeria. She was the Founding Chairperson of its social anthropologist, she has spent many years living in Africa, Women’s Research and Documention Centre (WORDOC) and _ especially East Africa. She has published widely on topics as diverse the first chairperson of Nigeria’s National Commission for Women. as the politics of development and social welfare, gender and class She is a member of the Board of the African Gender Institute, Cape relations, prostitution, domestic service and HIV/AIDS. She is Town University, South Africa, and is on the Advisory Board of the author of Women United, Women Divided (with Pat Caplan, 1978); journal Gender and History. She has published extensively on the Serving Class: masculinity and the feminisation of domestic service in history of Ibadan and in the area of women’s studies in Nigeria, and Tanzania (2000); and AIDS, Sexuality and Gender in Africa: collective is the editor of Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective (1992). strategies and struggles in Tanzania and Zambia (with Carolyn Baylies, 2000).

Josephine Beoku-Betts is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies

and Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. She is Co-editor of Timothy Burke is Associate Professor History at Swarthmore Women and Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: power, opportunities and College. His major publications are Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: constraints (editors, M.Bloch, J.Beoku-Betts and R.Tabatchnick, Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness (1996) and Saturday 1998). Her research focuses on the educational and employment Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon culture (1999). His current experiences and perspectives of African and Caribbean women work-in-progress is a study of individual experience, chiefship and

scientists. She was formerly regional editor for Women’s Studies historical agency in Zimbabwe. He also actively maintains a International Forum, and co-Book Review Editor for Gender and weblog, Easily Distracted at http://www/swarthmore.edu/socsci/ Society. She has published in Gender and Society, National Women’s tburkel. Studies Association Journal, Journal of Asian and African Studies, and

Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. Barbara Cooper is an Associate Professor of History and African Studies at Rutgers University. She has published Marriage in Maradi:

Iris Berger, who received her Ph.D. from the University of gender and culture in a Hausa society in Niger 1900-1989 (1997) and Wisconsin-Madison, is Chair of the History Department and articles on gender, Islam, oral performance and space in journals Professor of History, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at such as Journal of African History, Signs, and Social Text. Her work in Albany, State University of New York. Her major publications progress entitled “Evangelical Christians in Muslim Sahel”, explores include the award-winning book, Religion and Resistance: East gender, agency, conversion, secularism, and development in the African Kingdoms in the Pre-colonial Period (1981); Women and Class in context of Christian efforts to evangelise Muslims in Niger. Africa (co-edited with Claire Robertson, 1986); Threads of Solidarity:

Women in South African industry, 1900-1980 (1992); and Women in Andrea Cornwall is a social anthropologist and is currently a Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History (with E. Frances Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of White, 1999). She served as President of the African Studies Sussex, where she works on the politics of participation and sexual

Association from 1995-6. and reproductive rights. Her publications include articles and book

, chapters on the construction and negotiation of gender identities in

Victoria Bernal is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Nigeria, Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (with University of California, Irvine. Her work has addressed issues of Nancy Lindisfarne, 1994) and Realizing Rights: Transforming gender, nationalism, trans-nationalism, development, and Islam. Approaches to Sexual and Reproductive Wellbeing (co-edited, with Alice She has conducted research in Eritrea, Tanzania and the Sudan. She Welbourn, 2002). is author of Cultivating Workers: Peasants, and Capitalism in a Sudanese

village (1991) and her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, LaRay Denzer 1s project coordinator at the Program of African American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Studies, Northwestern University. She has taught West African Cultural Anthropology, African Studies Review and Political and Legal history and women’s life history at various universities in the United

vi © Contributors

States and until recently, was senior lecturer in the department of Power: African women in politics and policy-making (2003); and cohistory at the University of Ibadan. She has published extensively author of: Reinventing Accountability: making democracy work for the on West African biography and socio-political history as well as on poor (2004).

diasporic networks in the twentieth century. She is the author of ,

Floayegbe Akintunde-Ighodalo: a public life (2001) and co-editor of Jane I. Guyer is Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins Money Struggles and City Life: devaluation in Ibadan and other urban University. Her research career has been devoted to economic centers in Southern Nigeria, 1986-1996 (with Jane I Guyer and transformations in West Africa, particularly the productive Adigun Agbaje, 2003) and Vision and Policy in Nigerian Economics: the economy, the division of labour and the management .of money.

legacy of Pius Okigbo (with Jane I Guyer, 2003). Her books include Money Struggles and City Life (with LaRay

Denzer and Adigun Agbaje, 2002), on currency devaluation and the Felicia I. Ekejiuba was Professor of Social Anthropology at the popular economy in 1990s Nigeria, Marginal Gains (2004), which University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) before starting up the re-examines the anthropological and historical record on monetary UNIFEM office for Anglophone West Africa, from which she went transactions in Atlantic Africa, and An African Niche Economy (1997),

on to be appointed as chief of UNIFEM’s Africa section. She was a which builds on articles on “wealth in people” and is the basis for a member of many professional and non-governmental organisations, forthcoming collection by historians and anthropologists on knowincluding the Association of African Women in Research and _ ledge, occupation, gender and commodities in African history. Development (AAWORD) of which she was a founding member,

and served on numerous committees and boards within and outside Nancy Rose Hunt teaches African and gender history at the Nigeria, including the National Committee on Women and University of Michigan. Her book A Colonial Lexicon: of birth ritual, Development. Her scholarship focused on Igbo history and society, medicalization, and mobility in the Congo (1999) received the and her publications include The Aro of South-eastern Nigeria, 1650— Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association in 2000. She 1980: a study of socio-economic formation and transformation in Nigeria is completing a book on colonial masculinities and an infertility

(with Kenneth Onwuka Dike, 1990). scare in the Belgian Congo.

Deborah Gaitskell grew up in Cape Town and completed her Rachel Jewkes is a public health physician who is Director of the Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), MRC Gender & Health Group in Pretoria, South Africa. She has London University. She taught history in various adult education spent the last decade researching gender-based violence in South settings and then at Birkbeck and Goldsmiths’ Colleges, as well as at Africa using methods drawn from anthropology, epidemiology and

SOAS. For many years she ran a seminar series on Gender in health systems research and has published prolifically on the topic. Empire and Commonwealth at the Institute of Commonwealth Most importantly she has been working to ensure that these Studies, and is currently an editor of the Journal of Southern African research findings are translated into interventions within the society

Studies. She has published several articles and book chapters on to improve the lives of women. women and the church in South Africa, and is completing a book

on women missionaries. ' Lisa A. Lindsay is an Associate Professor of African History at the

University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She is the author of Rudolf P. Gaudio is an Assistant Professor at Purchase College, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern

State University of New York, where he teaches courses in Nigeria (2003) and the co-editor (with Stephan Miescher) of Men anthropology, African studies, and media studies. In addition to his and Masculinities in Modern Africa (also 2003). While her interest in research on gender and sexual minorities in Nigerian Hausaland, he gender and social history in modern Nigeria continues, she has also has done US-based research on gay and straight men’s speech, the recently begun research involving the slave trade era links between

middle-class practice of ‘going out for coffee’, and the cultural West Africa and the United States.

politics of gay Africans’ asylum claims. ,

Stephan F. Miescher is Assistant Professor of History at the

Susan Geiger was Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is co-editor of African University of Minnesota. She was the author of TANU Women: Words, African Voices: critical practices in oral history (with Luise White gender and culture in the making of Tanganyikan nationalism, 1955-65 and David William Cohen, 2001) and of Men and Masculinities in (1997) and over a dozen articles on African women’s history andthe Modern Africa (with Lisa A. Lindsay, 2003). His monograph, Making uses of life history in historical research. She was co-editor, with Men in Ghana, will be published in 2005.

Jean Allman and Nakanyike Musisi, of Women in African Colonial } _ Histories (2002). David Mills is Anthropology Co-ordinator at the Centre for

| Learning and Teaching Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-

Anne Marie Goetz is a political scientist and Fellow of the SAP) at the University of Birmingham. He is co-editor of Teaching Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Her Rites and Wrongs (2004), on teaching experiences within univerwork focuses upon the politics of pro-poor, gender-equitable sities. His research interests include the cultures and politics of development. She has studied the constraints women politicians in higher education, in both Britain and East Africa. He is also developing countries face to advancing the gender-equity agenda. completing a book on the political history of social anthropology.

She currently works on poor people’s anti-corruption initiatives. | , She is the author of Women Development Workers (2001); co-author Nakanyike B. Musisi, who is on an extended leave of absence of: Contesting Global Governance (1999); editor of: Getting Institutions from the University of Toronto where she 1s an Associate Professor

Right for Women in Development (1997); co-editor of: No Shortcuts to of Women’s Studies and History, is currently the Executive

Contributors e vii

Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda. She is focusing on processes of power and knowledge production in polity author of “Women, elite polygyny and Buganda state formation’ in processes. He holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies and is a Signs (Vol.16(4), 1991); ‘Gender and the cultural construction of Doctoral Candidate at Makerere University, Uganda.

“Bad Women” in the development of Kampala-Kibuga, 1900—1962’ in Wicked Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa Niara Sudarkasa is noted for her pioneering study of Yoruba (eds. Dorothy Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy 2001) and co-editor women traders, undertaken in Nigeria in the early 1960s. A former with Jean Allman and Susan Geiger of Women and African Colonial professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, and

Histories (2002). former President of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, her

publications in African Studies include articles on African women, Kenda Mutongi is an Associate Professor at Williams College, and Yoruba traders in Ghana, and the African roots of African American

is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at family structure. She is the author of Where Women Work (1973), Princeton. She was born and raised in western Kenya where she The Strength of our Mothers (1996), and various co-edited and edited attended missionary schools. She is finishing a book on a history of works. Presently she is writing from her base as Scholar-in-Residence

family and community in western Kenya to be published by the in the African American Research Library in Fort Lauderdale, University of Chicago Press. She is also writing a historical ethnog- Florida.

raphy of Matatus in Nairobi. She currently lives in Williamstown,

Massachusetts with her husband and daughter. Aili Mari Tripp is Associate Dean of International Studies,

Director of Women’s Studies Research Center, and Professor of Obioma Nnaemeka is a former Director of the Women’s Studies Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of

Program and Professor of French, Women’s Studies and African/ Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Women and Politics in Uganda African Diaspora studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis. She is (2000) and Changing the Rules: the politics of liberalization and the urban the President of the Association of African Women Scholars and has informal economy in Tanzania (1997). She has also published numer-

taught in several institutions in Africa, Europe and North America. ous articles and book chapters on women and politics in Africa; In addition to her edited volumes, The Politics of (M)Othering: societal responses to economic reform; and the political impact of womanhood, identity, and resistance in African literature (1997) and transformations of associational life in Africa.

Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: from Africa to the diaspora (1998), she

has published extensively on literature, women’s studies, develop- Megan Vaughan is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at

ment, and African/African Diaspora studies. the University of Cambridge. She previously taught at the University of Oxford and at the University of Malawi. She has

Richard A. Schroeder is Graduate Director and Associate published on the social history of Malawi, on food supply and Professor of Geography at Rutgers University, where he also served famine, gender relations and the history of colonial medicine in as founding director of the Rutgers Center for African Studies. He Africa. Her more recent work is on slavery and social identities in is the author of Shady Practices: agroforestry and gender politics in The the Indian Ocean. Gambia (1999) and co-editor of Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa

(2000). He is currently conducting research on environmental Katherine Wood is a medical anthropologist currently working on justice concerns related to wildlife tourism in Tanzania and con- a variety of international sexual health projects at the Thomas straints on public access to non-timber forest products in national Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of

parks in the United States. London. Her doctoral research, completed in 2002 at the London

School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was an ethnographic

Richard Ssewakiryanga is a Senior Research Fellow at the study of violence and sexual health among young people in a

Centre for Basic Research in Uganda and the Team Leader for the township in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Her research interests Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Process. His research include anthropological perspectives on sexuality and gender, sexual interests include critical gender studies and post colonial theory. and reproductive health in developing countries, HIV/AIDS and Currently he is working on poverty and policy processes in Uganda project evaluation.

Sources & Acknowledgements I owe a huge debt to Karin Barber for inviting me to compile this African Women’s Christianity in South Africa’, in Cheryl reader and for her support at every step of the way. For all her help Walker (ed.) Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, with putting this book together, from tracking down publications London: James Currey. to checking references, I’m extremely grateful to Jenny Edwards, Gaudio, Rudolf P.(1998) ‘Male Lesbians and Other Queer Notions without whom I could not have finished it. For providing me with in Hausa’, in Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe (eds), Boy Wives a quiet space to read, think and work on this book at a time when I and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities, London: desperately needed it, grateful thanks go to Gita and Chiranjib Sen Macmillan. Reprinted with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. And for their Geiger, Susan (1986) ‘Tanganyikan Nationalism as “Women’s

help in selecting readings, comments on the introduction and Work”: Life Histories, Collective Biography and Changing encouragement, I’m especially grateful to Lisa Lindsay, Nuiara Historiography’, Journal of African History, 37(3): 465-78.

Sudarkasa, LaRay Denzer and Colette Solomon. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

The publishers and editor are grateful to the following authors Goetz, Anne Marie, (2002), ‘No Shortcuts to Power: Constraints

_ and publishers for permission to republish articles: on Women’s Political Effectiveness in Uganda’, Journal of Modern Allman, Jean (1996) ‘Rounding Up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and African Studies, 40(4): 549-575. Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante’, Journal of African Guyer, Jane I. (1991) ‘Female Farming in Anthropology & African History, 37(2): 195-214. Reprinted with the Permission of History’, in Micaela di Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of

Cambridge University Press. , Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press. ,

Awe, Bolanle (1977) “The Iyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Hunt, Nancy Rose (1991) ‘Noise over Camouflaged Polygamy, Political System’, in Alice Schlegel (ed.) Sexual Stratification: A Colonial Morality Taxation, and a Woman-Naming Crisis in Cross Cultural View, New York: Columbia University Press. Belgian Africa’, Journal of African History, 32 (3): 471-494. Beoku-Betts, Josephine (1976) “Western Perceptions of African Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Women in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Musisi, Nakanyike B. (1995) ‘Baganda Women’s Night Market

Africana Research Bulletin, V1(4):86-114. Activities’, in Bessie House Midamba and Felix Ekechi (eds)

Berger, Iris (1976) “Rebels or Status-Seekers?’, in Nancy J. Hafkin African Market Women and Economic Power: The Role of Women in

and Edna G. Bay (eds), Women in Africa: Studies in Social and African Economic Development, Westport: Greenwood Press. Economic Change, Stanford University Press, copyright © 1976 by Reproduced with the permission of Greenwood Publishing the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Group, Inc, Westport, CT. Bernal, Victoria (1994) “Gender, Culture and Capitalism: Women Mutongi, Kenda (1999), “Worries of the Heart: Widowed Mothers, and the Remaking of Islamic “Tradition” in a Sudanese Village’, Daughters and Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36 (1): 36-67. Reprinted 60’, Journal of African History, 40(1): 67-86. Reprinted with the

with the permission of Cambridge University Press. permission of Cambridge University Press. Bledsoe, Caroline (1990) “School Fees and the Marriage Process for Nnaemeka, Obioma, (1998) ‘Mapping African Feminisms’, adapted

Mende Girls in Sierra Leone’ in Peggy Sanday and Ruth version of ‘Introduction: Reading the Rainbow’, in Obioma Goodenough (eds), Beyond the Second Sex, University of Nnaemeka, ed. Sisterhood: Feminisms and Power, Trenton, NJ: Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Reprinted by permission of the Africa World Press.

University of Pennsylvania Press. Schroeder, Richard A. (1996) ‘“Gone to their Second Husbands”: Bujra, Janet M. (1975) ‘Women “Entrepreneurs” of Early Nairobi’, Marital Metaphors and Conjugal Contracts in The Gambia’s Canadian Journal of African Studies, 9 (2): 213-234. Gardening Sector’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 30(1): 69-87. Burke, Timothy, (1997) ‘“Fork Up and Smile”: Marketing, Sudarkasa, Niara (1986) ‘“The Status of Women” in Indigenous Colonial Knowledge and the Female Subject in Zimbabwe’, African Societies’, in Niara Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our

Gender and History, 8 (3): 393-415. Mothers: African and African American Women and Families: Essays

Cooper, Barbara (1994) “Reflections on Slavery, Seclusion and and Speeches, Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, [pp. 165-180] Female Labour in the Maradi Region of Niger in the Tripp, Aili Mari, (2003), “Women in Movement: Transformations Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Journal of African History, in African Political Landscapes’, International Feminist Journal of 35 (1): 61-78. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge Politics, 5(2): 233-55.

University Press. http://www.tandf.w.uk/journals/routledge/14616742.html

Denzer, LaRay (1992) ‘Gender and Decolonization: A Study of Vaughan, Megan (1983), “Which Family? Problems in the Recon-

Three Women in West African Public Life’, in J.F. Ade Ajayi struction of the History of the Family as an Economic and and J.D.Y. Peel (eds) People and Empires in African History: Essays Cultural Unit’, Journal of African History, 24 (2): 275-283.

in Memory of Michael Crowder, Longman, London. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Ekeyjiuba, Felicia I. (1995) ‘Down to Fundamentals: Women- Wood, Katherine and Rachel Jewkes (2001), ‘“Dangerous” Love:

centred Hearth-holds in Rural West Africa’, in Deborah Reflections on Violence among Xhosa Township Youth’, in Bryceson (ed.) Women Wielding the Hoe, Oxford: Berg. Robert Morrell (ed.) Changing Men in Southern Africa, London: Gaitskell, Deborah (1990) ‘Devout Domesticity? A Century of Zed Books. Reproduced by permission of Zed Books Ltd.

Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 1

: layer of complexity. Distinctive regional traces emerge. There is a

ANDREA CORNWALL wealth of work in Southern African studies on the gendered state,

‘ : on the gendered impact of colonial labour policies, and on violence,

ntroduction .

| ntrod uction: Pe rs pect Ives popular protest and resistance.’ The influence of Marxist scholarship

. . is perhaps most evident here. Scholarship in and on Central and East on C end erin Afri Ca Africa has produced considerable work on domesticity, marital and sexual relationships, livelihood options and popular involvement in

women’s associations, nationalist struggles and “development’.* This —

' . literature contains compelling oppression images of the subordination and of women, although instances of resistance and grassOnce writ small in the accounts of travellers, missionaries and roots activism offer glimmers of women’s agency.° The literature on colonial officials, sub-Saharan African women have become the West Africa tells, for the main, an entirely different story. Some of subjects of an extensive literature over the last thirty years. From the foundational images of women’s power and autonomy in Africa efforts to inscribe women into a canon marked by their relative derive from this region.® And it is West African research that has invisibility, to studies that sought African evidence to challenge given rise to the most potent critiques of Western assumptions, from assumptions about women’s political and economic capabilities, unitary models of the household to the tenets of Euro-American early writing on gender in Africa was largely about women and by feminist theory.’ women. As women’s studies came to embrace the study of the The choice of themes derives in part from attempts to capture construction of gender relations, attention turned to processes and broad threads that span the continent, but also seeks to reflect the

structures through which women’s and men’s identities and historicity of debates on gender in Africa. Much contemporary

relationships were mediated. work is concerned with defining and attributing ‘gender’ in Africa; In recent years, scholarship on gender in Africa has become ever and with the implications of reading African lives through Western more multi-disciplinary, encompassing an ever wider terrain. With gender-lenses. Accordingly, the first section explores issues of — this has come closer attention to the imbrication of gender identities representation through an eclectic set of readings with referents in with other dimensions of difference, and to men’s, as well as wider literatures. In the shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’, attention women’s, gendered experiences. Recent work situates ‘gender’ ona came to focus on the production of difference and on the broader canvas of translocal and transnational cultural currents negotiation of relational identities, themes reflected in the choice of (Grosz-Ngate and Kokole 1997; Hodgson 2002) and goes beyond a ___ readings in the second section. The remaining three sections work focus on ‘women’. A series of exciting edited collections trace the with enduring themes in the literature: livelihoods, religion and contours of the new landscape of gender studies in Africa, from the governance. As life histories of African women make so evident history and ethnography of masculinities, to gendered colonialisms (Smith 1954, Shostak 1981), these categories are an artefact of and the reconfiguration of gender in Africa (Lindsay and Miescher, scholarly interests: papers in each section offer insights that spill 2003; Hunt 1997; Allman, Geiger and Musisi 2002; Hodgson and __ beyond their borders. McCurdy 2001). This collection aims to serve both as a general introduction to Writing gender in Africa

the field and to signal some of the principal themes in the literature, . .

bringing together early feminist scholarship with new and un- Representations of women and men in the literature on gender in published work, spanning the continent and embracing some of the sub-Saharan Africa evoke . contradictory images. ‘T'wo discursive richness and diversity of scholarship on gender in sub-Saharan Africa. strands run through this literature, with trajectories that can be This introduction seeks to offer a backdrop against which the traced back to the colonial period. One, characterised in Mohanty’s texts in this collection can be read, setting them within wider (1988) critique of western feminist representations of “Third World’ literatures and weaving threads across thematic sections. Identifying women, tells an insistently negative tale of the voiceless victims of guiding themes in a literature as diffuse as it is vast is a daunting task. ever-deepening multiple oppressions, also exemplified in Cutrifelli’s Much of what was published in the 1970s and 1980s was confined (1984) now notorious Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression. This to special issues of journals, multidisciplinary anthologies or — often WoOman-as-victim narrative situates African women as powerless, ‘token’ — articles in collections on other themes.! Mainstream inviting intervention on their behalf. Within it, Qunta charges: journals now regularly feature gender-related themes, monographs The African woman of the rural areas is portrayed as little more

have multiplied, edited volumes increased in number. Wading 1 h bsilent Poway ar seeranerr merece an have a slave, who goes about her tasksthwith acceptance.

through this diverse and extensive literature, my own disciplinary She has no past and no future. civen the inherent backwardness familiarity and the linguistic a largely P >is 5always : ; qebias f herof society... She Anglophone never speaks forfocus herself>but spoken

; ~: ; about. (1987:11)

makes my choices of theme, focus and readings necessarily limiting b ones.” In organising the reader and selecting readings, I have chosen

section themes for their usefulness as entry points that reflect broad Another set of images portrays African women as feisty, assertive, currents within the African studies and gender literature: past, and _ self-reliant heroines. Cast within a countervailing narrative to male

present. Limiting this volume to Africa south of the Sahara, like anthropologists’ descriptions of threats they pose to normative many others before, I have sought to include work on as diverse a conjugal and family relations (for a classic example, see Nadel 1942),

selection of countries and contexts as possible. with powerful echoes of the anxieties suffusing creative writing by

Reading across the continent, the interplay between the African men (see Newell 1996), these women are the very stuff of particularities of different regions and the preoccupations of those feminist fables. With few exceptions, images of African men have

who studied gender within them (cf. Fardon 1990) adds another until recently been equally polarised. They appear either as

2 ¢ Andrea Cornwall/Introduction

powerful, dominant figures, colluding with colonial and post- imbued with evolutionist thought, with all its racist assumptions colonial institutions to deepen women’s subordination; fleetingly as about Africans as a backward and inferior ‘race’; they are also shot the objects of women’s successful resistance; or as rather useless through with essentialised images of women, borrowed from the

characters that women can do without. mores and cultural preoccupations of the age. These emerge most

That these images persist in a literature that is now so abundant clearly in the racialised images of African women’s bodies and and diverse attests to the power of the preoccupations that they sexualities, a lasting source of lurid fascination and tight-lipped serve to re-affirm. Their narratives reveal not only passing academic prurience for men whose accounts speak so vividly about their own fashions, but also the personal and political perspectives through sexual preoccupations.'? Evolutionism established the highest level which African lives are read and written. For, as Abena Busia _ of ‘civilisation’ as that attained by Europeans, legitimising efforts of contends, ‘the stories we tell have always served the dual purpose of missionaries and colonisers to ‘civilise’ African peoples. explaining an otherwise incomprehensible world and creating and This section opens with one of the first contributions by an sustaining the world in our own likeness’ (1990:93). Feminist fables African woman academic to the literature on the construction of and gender myths abound in writing on gender in Africa, justifying women in the early colonial era: Josephine Beoku-Betts’ (1976) acts of rescue and invoking powerful social imaginaries that capture account of images of women in traveller, missionary and colonial a longing equally rooted in Western feminist experience: the narratives. Her work draws attention to two stereotypes emergent possibilities of combining motherhood with career, autonomy with in this literature, both of which draw on evolutionist thought: the

connectedness. backward African and the inferior woman, giving rise to

Over the last decade, there has been growing critique of the representations of African women as ‘something of a demarcation assumptions that underlie these representations of African women line between being human and animal’ (this volume: 24). Written and men, highlighting the extent to which the particular, located, to affirm the ‘civilising’ mission of colonialism and to generate concerns of Western feminisms have been projected onto the figure sufficient hype to sustain missionary funding, women appear in of the African woman.? As Mohanty (1988) points out, much these accounts as oppressed beasts of burden, subject to drudgery Western feminist writing implicitly contrasts ‘liberated’, educated and degrading marriage practices. Beoku-Betts cites the example of Western women with subjugated African women, although, as a 1908 description of the Bundu bush schools in Sierra Leone and Sofola (1998) makes clear, this is not without its ironies. Rarely Liberia:

have Western feministsimagine turned their gaze onschool educated, middle-class ; . ;what ;. ; .;like Let no-one that the is anything like we women themselves. Everjoice Win notes that the story of the ; ws know by the name, true some crude cooking may be taught, but educated, middle-class, womanaistrace... missingthe not girls only from ; from i of other women’surbanised duties hardly emerge feminist research and male-authored fiction, but also from , ee discourses of development: their training with mouths like cesspools. (Thomas and Joyce,

P 1908, cited in Beoku-Betts this volume: 23) conform todevelopers? the stereotype enough? I African don’t present a potential ; . . oe 5 ;forthe of African women of colonial project the body I am too dangerous for the Cs preoccupations with For; me fact that women like me are foreverrepresentations missing in Lyof. ;Bagandan < ; >the aeand Musisi’s (2002) work on missionary narratives research says, ‘I am not exotic enough? I don’t er ; ; onto > : -, women highlights a further dimension: the superimposition

“5? , ; - -population and ‘purity’. : ; Given that the principal commentators of the age were men

male writer?’ The down side of all this some of us have seen in . oo

development. For example, it to is and veryregard difficult to raise resources _ ; ; 4: ; ;aimed : whose access for women was limited (Hammond for a project at own building leadership skills among this lot a! ~ ; , and Jablow 1970), it is unsurprising that little early ethnography

because; they are not We don’t read the well ; } of . devoted any‘grassroots’ attention at all to women, beyond domain the; on the desks in Copenhagen orenough. London. Maybe thetoo problem is. 4:

(pers. comm.). “oe . ;

- >, 1 domestic Deniseand Amaury 1915 Women’s that we do ;have a voiceandtofamilial. talk back say,Talbot, ‘no whose that ain’t it! , Mysteries of a Primitive People is one of the first ethnographies that

sought to redress this bias, has argued: ‘not one word of information ‘No, that ain’t it’ is exactly what African women scholars have [in the ethnographies of the time] essentially depicted the feminine been saying. On the one hand, this has given rise to the articulation point of view without some man interfering as inquirer or interof countervailing discourses on feminism in Africa (Nnaemeka preter’ (1915:3). Apart from exceptional figures like Mary Kingsley 1998, this volume 31—40). On the other, their critiques of conven- and Margery Perham, few European women contributed to the © tional gender thinking intersect with contemporary feminist theory colonial record.'!! Lord Lugard’s preface to Sylvia Leith-Ross’

as they have equally come to inform it (Imam 1997). African Women: A study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939) evokes the

The readings in the first section offer a diversity of entry points marginality of women’s scholarship in this era, introducing the for exploring representations of gender — and women — in Africa. In author as ‘the bride of an official of exceptional organising ability

what follows, I trace trajectories of representation from the early and initiative whose early death was a great loss to the country’ colonial era and the first wave of Western feminist research on (ibid.:5).” women in Africa through to debates about the politics of difference Within the emergent literature by women on women from the and the status of the category ‘gender’ that emerge in contemporary 1930s onwards, three points of departure might be identified. One writing on gender in Africa. In doing so, I seek to locate the is a focus on exceptional women in positions of leadership and selected readings within wider debates, highlighting issues, themes authority, a theme that was to recapture feminist attention many

and references for further exploration. decades later (see Kaplan 1997; Allman et al. 2002).'° The second is

the focus on women’s work burdens and the gender relations of

Images of women in colonial writing production and consumption in Audrey Richards’ (1939) work in

Writings on African women from the early colonial period are Northern Zambia, which was to become a major focus for feminist

: Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 3 work from the 1970s onwards." Lastly, the insistent particularity of 1972; Etienne and Leacock 1980; Okeyo 1980). While this work Leith-R.oss’ work stands out for its emphasis on going beyond crude _was significant for the attention it focused on the importance of generalisations about ‘the African woman’, contending that: women’s contributions, it also portrayed a predominantly negative

; ; ; eqi:.:. picture: one that was evoked in Hay’s description of ... ;there 1s no typical portrait onelater can draw and then say: “This is ¢the; ;shift | ; from queens to prostitutes, from heroines to victims’ (1988:431). an Ibo’. HowFeminist much lessinterest then caninone say, as is of so often done,incee 5: and 1980s ae Soisanor ‘the status women’ the: — 1970s This an African’ or ‘African women do this’ or “The women ; reer ; . re came with a public/private distinction superimposed from home-

of Africa think that’ (ibid.:20).

painted. are . er

erown concerns, telling a similarly sorry story. Niara Sudarkasa

The literature of subsequent decades was to give way to precisely _ reflects,

these kinds of generalisations, reworking a familiar set of themes on Women were depicted as ‘saddled’ with home and domesticity;

a :canvas on which this ‘typical portrait’ ofthe African women was Ls : in ; vathe men were portrayed as enjoying exhilaration of life

! . ; . . outside’ world. For me,late the pieces of period, the portrait did not ring Arising out of research in the colonial Denise ; : , Sas oo true. Not only was there an obvious distortion of Paulme’s ({1960]1963) reality Femmes- women d’Afrique Noir‘outside is one ofthe the home’ earliest as ; Ca ; the ; _ ethnographic were well as

anthologies on women by female anthropologists. ar | .about 2 ; ; Leith-Ross’ ; inofitwriting — butconcern there was also something inappropriate the Echoing with sweeping assumptions about : to each CALS _ ; notion that women and men were everywhere related African women’, it focuses on issues that African women scholars ; ; ; ;

, other in a hierarchical fashion. (1986: 91)

later took up with Western feminist analyses. Paulme contends that

Western observers have focused on women’s burden of labour, The public/private divide had achieved such axiomatic status in submissiveness to men and lack of intimacy in marriages to con- Western feminist thought that it was barely questionable: it underclude that women are oppressed. This image, she argues, “expresses pinned, after all, the very basis on which studies of ‘gender’ in a fondly entertained masculine ideal which does not tally with the Africa emerged from the 1970s. Radical feminists seized on realities of everyday life’ (1963:5). She spells out a counter- instances of women’s autonomy and rebellion; Marxist feminists narrative: that women have a wide arena in which to exercise sought evidence for women’s subordination in the penetration of authority, that their lack of participation in public life is as much capital and shifting modes of production and reproduction; and about absorption in their own tasks as anything else, and that liberal feminists looked at the deterioration in the participation of polygyny does not in itself lower women’s status as wives. women in public political and economic spheres. Virtually all took for granted a unitary category, ‘woman’, which left little scope for

From heroine to victim ambiguity, nor indeed for attempts to make sense of other

The victim narrative that Paulme argued so passionately against was dimensions of women’s lives and relationships. It also left men’s as ‘fondly entertained’ by feminists as by male anthropologists in the gender ‘roles’ and identities unquestioned and largely undescribed.

next two decades. As Hunt (1989) remarks, feminist historians Looking back, the ironies of Western feminist preoccupations studying Europe or America may have enthusiastically embraced are more than evident; at times the representations of African the theme of ‘great women’, but the attention of Africanist women in their work echo those of colonial administrators and historians was drawn to the downtrodden, subjugated, victim of missionaries, for whom women were indeed miserable victims in colonialism and male dominance. Annie Lebeuf’s (1963) celebrated need of their intervention. African women activists and academics

survey of women in positions of power, and those of Okonjo have increasingly questioned the utility and relevance of Euro(1976) and Awe (1977, this volume: 196-200) had inscribed African American feminist positions and perspectives. By posing a set of women in leadership and authority positions into an earlier litera- fundamental questions about the ways in which African women’s ture. It is some indication of the tone of the subsequent decade of and men’s identities and lives are interpreted, contemporary African writing that Flora Kaplan, in her introduction to a collection of women’s writing challenges some assumptions that have pervaded writing on elite African women, talks of the need ‘to correct an scholarship on gender in Africa and urges caution about the dangers ironic distortion’ (1997:xxix) brought about by Western feminist of reading African worlds through Western eyes. representations of African women as downtrodden. The topics of a string of conferences held in the late colonial era to consider the lot © Feminisms in Africa and African feminisms of women — ‘the status of women’, ‘the condition of women’ and _ The alternative conceptualisations of ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’ that women’s work (see Paulme 1963) — became the headline themes in emerge in writing by African women offer a starting point for studies of African women in the 1970s and 1980s. Their emphasis exploring some of the principal themes and problematics in the was On women’s marginalisation in politics and the economy. wider literature. Amina Mama charges that foreign scholars’ frames Hafkin and Bay’s (1976) collection Women in Africa broke new of reference ‘have often been at best irrelevant and at worst inimical ground, repositioning African women as economic agents and to African concerns and interests’ (1997:72).'° A range of African

reinscribing them into histories that had left them invisible. feminist perspectives have emerged to challenge the biases of Increasing interest in materialist feminisms meant greater attention Western feminism. For some, African feminism has a distinctive set was paid to the struggles of ‘ordinary women’. Convergence around of precepts. Mikell (1995), for example, writes of the ‘bread, butter the negative impact of colonialism on women, highlighted by and culture’ issues that distinguish African and Western feminisms. contributors to Paulme’s book, gained a new impetus from the Others posit a more radical epistemological and political break with work of Ester Boserup (1970), which was to influence an entire Western feminism (see Gaidzanwa 1982, Steady 1997). They argue field of study.’ Analyses highlighted women’s loss of political fora politics of complementarity and co-operation between women authority, their exclusion from agricultural and educational oppor- and men, against the individualism and emphasis on sexuality and tunities, and the erosion of their rights and entitlements (van Allen conflict with men identified with Western feminism. Obioma

4 ¢ Andrea Cornwall/Introduction

Nnaemeka’s incisive overview of African feminisms (this volume: All African women have multiple identities, evolving and accret-

31—41), captures the main lines of these debates. ing over time, enmeshed in one individual. Yet African women For a number of African feminist writers, the very concept of continue to be looked at and looked for in their coital and ‘feminism’ is misplaced in the African context. Ogundipe-Leslie conjugal sites which seem to be a preoccupation of many

argues for an alternative approach, ‘STITWAnism’ (Social Transfor- Western analysts and feminists. (1994: 251)

mation Including Women in Africa), which draws on ‘the tradition |

of the spaces and strategies provided in our indigenous cultures for _ Early feminist work sought precisely to locate women as actors the social being of women’ (1994:229). For Acholonu, ‘motherism’ 1 their own right, rather than simply the wards Or Wives of men becomes a replacement for a feminism that is cast as ‘anti-mother, (Moore 1988). Yet in the equation of ‘gender relations’ with anti-child, anti-nature and anti-culture’ (1995:82). For others, Alice Particular kinds of male-female relationships — those modelled on Walker’s (1983) ‘womanism’ describes a politics of commitment to heterosexual partnerships and assumed to be hierarchical and survival of women and men alike, rather than an adversarial separat- ©PPOsitional — ‘gender analysis’ has served to obscure other kinds of

ism. Yet others urge a more pragmatic and pluralist stance. Imam relationships, and other dimensions of ‘gender’ difference (Moore (1997) points out that resorting to versions of ‘traditional’ culture in 1994, Peters 1995). These include relations among women and defence of an ‘essential Africanity’ leaves African women without those marked less by conflict than by love and inter-dependence: the political resources to combat those very aspects of tradition that between mothers and sons, brothers and sisters — as well as some damage them as women. Reflecting on these debates, Nnaemeka usbands and wives. An insightful contribution to this debate is cautions that ‘unexamined exaggeration of gender complementarity made by Niara Sudarkasa (1986) (this volume: 25-31). By privilegmasks real and insidious gender inequalities and conflicts, particu- 1g Conjugality over consanguinity, Sudarkasa points out, important larly in racist and imperialist contexts’. After all, Nnaemeka argues: relationships of support as well as of power are almost completely

, . overlooked; thinking gender in Africa requires a different set of

‘Feminism’, as used to capture women’s engagement in demand- entry-points.

ing and creating an equitable society, 1S an English word that African women writers contend that with their focus on the speaks different languages worldwide. Tt women in different ‘sexual politics’ of heterosexual relationships, Western feminists societies have to name their struggle m. their own language, have undervalued motherhood and the significance of ‘maternal worranism will be as alien and inappropriate as feminism in an politics’ in Africa (see Amadiume 1987 and 1997; Acholonu 1995;

African village where English 1S not spoken. In my view, the Nnaemeka, this volume: 31-41). The importance of ‘maternal usage of feminism or womanism in the plural — feminisms OF politics’ emerges not only in forms of collective action, in which womanisms — points to ... both the necessity and expedience ofa Afiican women — white, as well as black (Vincent 2000) — have terminology that captures women’s engagement and at the same deployed discourses on motherhood as political strategies. It is also time recognises variations of the same theme. (this volume: 39, ,eflected in women’s lived experience of the micro-politics of

footnote 13) intra-household relations (Emecheta 1988). Focusing on women Reviewing the literature on gender in Africa, the imprint of as mothers displaces the heterosexual relationship from its central successive waves of Euro-American feminist theorising is more than locus in ‘gender studies’, and permits a closer focus on relations

evident. Yet there are distinctive differences in approach between between women or men and on the power effects of other Euro-American feminisms that cannot be subsumed under a singular configurations of difference within and between sites such as ‘the ‘Western feminism’. The relationship between ‘African’ and ‘Western’ household’. For its imaginative alternative to the household, the feminisms is altogether more complex than a simple opposition: ‘hearth-hold’, Ekejiuba’s (1995) work is included here (pp. 41-46). while it remains a site for political contest, there are significant points She provides a powerful example of the shift in perspective that is of convergence. With globalisation, as Desiree Lewis points out, it gained once ‘households’ are replaced by ‘hearth-holds’, mother-

becomes increasingly difficult to ‘cordon off distinct zones of child units between which men move and in which the heteroscholarly and intellectual inquiry’ arguing that the ‘globalised net- sexual relationship is one among other relationships, not necessarily works that shape intellectual production, the diasporic movements the most significant. of scholars, the rapid circulation of sources via the Internet and Perhaps the principal bone of contention, however, is the extent contemporary commercial publishing are all factors that make for to which reading African lives through the lens of ‘gender’ works to high degrees of cross-fertilisation across national and continental obscure more culturally salient axes of difference: particularly

boundaries’ (2003: 2). seniority and wealth, as Sudarkasa’s contribution argues. As Oyewumi (1997) contends, “woman’ as a unitary construct fails to ‘Gender’ in Africa , take account of women’s interests as members of generations, A growing body of work contends that Western feminists have families or economic groups. As economic actors in their own right,

profoundly misunderstood the nature of gender and gender women’s relationships with other women may in themselves be relations in Africa, striking a chord in its critique of the assumptions exploitative and hierarchical, as studies of women and slavery underpinning use of the category ‘gender’ with an influential strand illustrate (Robertson and Klein 1983; Cooper 1994, this volume: of contemporary “Western feminist’ theory (see Butler 1993, Moore 156-64). Focusing on other dimensions of difference and dynamics 1994). Challenging the polarities on which “gender analysis’ tends of oppression undermines both the myth of female solidarity and the to be based, this work highlights missing dimensions of conven- presumption of universal male domination inherited from earlier tional analyses of gender and power in Africa. Ogundipe-Leslie ‘gender studies’, themes that have remained largely unexplored (see (1994) charges, for example, that outsiders have failed to realise that Caplan and Bujra 1978 for an exception). Indeed, images of the relationships with men are peripheral to women’s self-perceptions, oppressed African woman may fundamentally misconstrue women’s and indeed to making sense of their lives and desires. She contends: agency. Acholonu, for example, argues:

! Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 5 — , ... those who present the notion that the African woman is_ accounts of ‘gender’ of the 1980s, which gave the impression that, suppressed and oppressed or is placed in an inferior position to once constructed, gender identities were fixed and that power men, have failed to realise that in many cases women are part resided in (sexed) individuals rather than in the discursive producand parcel of, if not the power behind, the scattered instances of tion of difference (Butler 1993; Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994;

yo ye ; sy ;

male dominance (1995: 28). Matory 1994).

Understanding these dynamics challenges a gender hierarchy F ae ast articte 0 this section, Rudolf Gaudio * account of ’y an that places women at a permanent disadvantage. It also opens up the “*4@% W210 SCiI entify as ‘men who act “like women”” in ‘bility of explorine the real stakes that women mav come to Northern Nigeria is included as an example of where this kind of

possubuaty Of EXP oe ; y h ht tak Gaudio describes how ’yan daudu ma hold in practices once attributed to ‘false consciousness’ (see Kandi- approach might take us. yar ¢ y

yoti 1998). _ simultaneously be the ‘wives’yetofhow men and the ‘husbands’ of women, — partnerships between them are cast as deviant and labelled Identities and differences ‘lesbian’. His account highlights the interplay of normative [fi Amadiume’s (1987) controversial study, Male Daughters, Female discourses of gender with different subject positions taken up by Husbands, poses the most direct challenge to the association of ’yan daudu. As ‘wives’, ’yan daudu subvert beliets about the biowomen with subordination. Cutting away at the already contingent logical basis of gender and sexual identity. But their relationships connection between men, masculinity and power, Amadiume’s with their ‘husbands’ — as with the women they marry — replicate analysis frees the subject position ‘husband’ from its association with normative hierarchies of power and control. While the ‘male men. Instances of woman-woman marriage from across the lesbian’ challenges this hierarchy, it attracts stigma, reinforcing continent equally dislocate ‘sex’ from ‘gender’ (see, for example, ‘traditional Hausa values that associate sexuality with relations of Carrier and Murray 1998). Just as other ‘masculine’ attributes - dominance and inequality’ (this volume: 47-52). Rather than strength, courage, fortitude — are revealed as applicable to taking gender for granted, Gaudio’s analysis offers a richer and more individuals by virtue of conduct and character rather than sex, nuanced perspective on identity, difference and power. ‘female husbands’ accrue authority and power as wealthy, senior ‘Male lesbians’ and ‘female husbands’ may present extreme individuals. Writers such as Oyewumi (1997) take this argument examples in the midst of what some would characterise as the very further to insist that ‘gender’ as it is understood in Western feminist “monotonous similarity’ of women’s oppression as women. But these discourse did not exist in Africa prior to the colonial imposition of a instances are important challenges to assumptions about the cate-

dichotomous model of sexual difference that rendered women gories “women’ and ‘men’ that pervade the literature. They enable subordinate, residual and inferior to men. What is most significant US to question and move beyond the gender myths that reduce the about this line of argumentation is less its problematic presentation diversity and complexity of relationships, identities and identificaof a harmonious pre-colonial idyll than the questions it raises about tions to polarised generalities.

the status of the concept of ‘gender’. ,

‘Gender’ emerged in early 1970s feminist work as a political Reconfiguring identities: femininities and masculinities in Africa category. Rubin’s evocation of ‘gender’ as the ‘endless variety and | Oo .

monotonous similarity, cross-culturally and through history’ (1975: | Whatever we make of the charge that hierarchical notions of gender

160) of the oppression of women captures its usefulness as a difference did not pre-exist it, the colonial encounter impinged concept. It served at once to highlight the social and historical profoundly on African women’s and men’s identities and identificaconstructedness of gender inequality, and with it possibilities of tions. Western feminists were not alone in their preoccupation with reconstructing a new and more equal social order, and at the same _ heterosexual relationships. It was through intervention in ‘coital and time to convey. the sheer extent of women’s subordination across conjugal’ sites that colonial social policy sought to reshape African space and time. Premised On 2a set of bounded oppositions, ‘gender’ gender identities (Pederson 1991, Jeater 1993). And it 1s in these became shorthand for hierarchical relations of power between sites that social and economic transformations set in train by the ‘women’ and ‘men’. In the process, it came to evoke women exploitation of Africa under and in the wake of colonial occupation battling against all odds on the wrong side of the power differential. have had the most dramatic impact. The readings in the second This, in effect, is what I understand Amadiume, Oyewumi and _ section of this book focus primarily on the production and deploy-

others to be arguing against. ment of discourses of gender difference and the effects as well as the While this argument tends to fall victim to circularity by use of these discourses In contemporary struggles over resources and

celebrating women who attain positions generally associated with responsibilities. , men, it is an extremely important one. Its significance lies in

alerting us to two central concerns. The first is a caution against Making ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ :

superimposing an artefact derived from a peculiarly Western way of A rich seam of writing in the 1980s explored the reconfiguration of making sense of difference onto other cultures (cf. Strathern 1988). gender identities during the colonial era. This work highlighted

And the second is the need to go beyond assumptions about contestation and negotiation in the encounter with colonial and women-in-general to explore women’s multiple social identities missionary attempts to reproduce Victorian models of monogamous and identifications — as mothers, as ‘husbands’, as sisters, as leaders, male breadwinners and subservient wives. Studies drew attention to as producers and as ‘part and parcel’ of apparent male dominance. _ legislative interventions into marriage across colonial Africa that Taking multiple identities and identifications as a starting point attempted to stamp out practices deemed morally abhorrent or for exploring ‘gender’ in Africa calls for an approach that is sensitive impediments to colonial economic expansion (Mbliniyi 1988; to the range of relational subject positions taken up by women and _ Pederson 1991; Musisi 2002). With its fractured reach into the lives men in the different domains of discourse that co-exist within any of the colonised, colonial policy reflected discursive shifts in which single cultural setting. It requires that we go beyond the static African women were alternately, and often simultaneously, framed

6 ¢ Andrea Cornwall/Introduction

as innocents in need of protection, ‘primitives’ in need of civilisa- 1983, Mandala 1982). Shifts in identity and power within and across tion and potential deviants in need of containment (Manicom 1992, the new landscapes of colonial Africa gave rise to new configura-

Jeater 1993). tions of masculinity, as ‘traditional’ male identities were contested Colonial ideals of monogamy, obedience and ‘devout domes- and reshaped (see Hodgson 1999; Lindsay and Miescher 2003; ticity’ were vigorously promoted by Christian missions (Gaitskell Obeng 2003). 1990, this volume: 177-86; Mann 1985). Amongst the predominantly Christian educated elite, monogamous marriage became Contradictions and Contestations associated with respectable modernity. Yet marital practices As these studies suggest, African women and men were not simply remained heterogeneous and marked with significant continuities. subjects created by colonial gender discourses, they were actively

As Mann (1994) documents for colonial Lagos, Harrell-Bond engaged in reconfiguring their own identities (cf. Hunt 1997; (1975) for post-Independence Sierra Leone and Obbo (1987) for Hodgson and McCurdy 2001; Allman et al. 2002). The contracontemporary Uganda, men were able to retain the privilege of dictions that emerged during the colonial era between the realities multiple partnerships while maintaining the respectability of of women’s contributions to household provisioning and the monogamous marriage. Other studies show the complex inability of most men to sustain dependent wives continue in postnegotiations that shaped the boundaries of discourses of marital roles colonial Africa. In many parts of the continent, normative disand responsibilities during the colonial era, highlighting the agency courses reinforced by religion and the state emphasise containment, of African women in contesting assumptions and asserting their obedience and chastity for women; men are still imagined in social prerogative, as illustrated in the work of Musisi (2001) and other and development policy in their identities as household heads, contributors to Hodgson and McCurdy’s (2001) volume ‘Wicked’ fathers and breadwinners. Yet the contradictions of modernities in Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa. These studies Africa have reconfigured older patterns and possibilities, giving rise suggest the complex interplay between modernities and ‘tradition’, to identities and interactions that contest the boundaries of and help destabilise the notion of ‘marriage’ itself, recasting it as ‘a normative gender discourses.

bundle of interactional possibilities’ (Burnham 1987: 50). A number of contemporary studies highlight the extent to which Distinctions between ‘respectable’ married woman and a non- women and men make use of the discursive resources that idealised married category of ‘prostitution’ and ‘immorality’ framed the images of the obedient wife and responsible husband can offer in construction of colonial subjectivities (Jeater 1993), circumscribing contests over resources and responsibilities. Rwandan women, in women’s agency in subject positions other than wife and mother. Jefremovas’ (1996) account, are shown to make use of idealised Yet interventions aimed at creating ‘modern’ women, saving them images of virtuous wife, good mother and virginal daughter to press from the clutches of elderly polygamists or the indignity of being claims over land and surpluses, distancing themselves from ‘loose exchanged as child-brides for a price, produced other kinds of women’ in the process. The third reading in this section (pp. 71-80) women whose assumed proclivities were to arouse alarm amongst is Kenda Mutongi’s intriguing study of widows in Kenya (1999), colonial officials and missionaries, so richly documented in Hodgson which shows how widows enact stereotypes of the helpless, and McCurdy’s (2001) book. The first article in this section, (pp. emotional female to solicit responses from men that turn the idealised 53-64) Nancy Rose Hunt’s (1991) account of the ‘woman-naming ‘manly’ provider to their advantage. Given the increasing importance crisis’ provoked by the taxation of single women in Belgian African of understanding widowed womens’ livelihood strategies in the wake

towns, highlights vividly the paradoxes invoked by colonial of HIV/AIDS, Mutongi’s piece provides valuable insights. constructions of women. It also illustrates the ways in which the ‘Informal’ economic and sexual arrangements were once inconsistencies of colonial policies gave rise to new identities and counter-posed to marriage, echoing discourses on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ identifications that could be used strategically by women themselves. women, ‘proper wives’ and ‘loose women’ (see contributors to The contradictions of colonial attempts to refashion African Parkin and Nyamwaya 1987; Hodgson and McCurdy 2001). Their gender identities become especially apparent in research on the contemporary re-emergence asserts the primacy of consanguinal promotion of domesticity for African women (Gaitskell 1983; over conjugal relations and signals significant changes in women’s Hansen 1992). Coupled with interventions to stem polygamy, options and opportunities (Schoepf and Engundu 1991; Guyer institutions such as the foyers socieaux that instilled domesticity into 1994). The fourth reading in this section, (pp. 80-9) Caroline married women in colonial Burundi described elsewhere by Hunt Bledsoe’s (1990) analysis of Sierra Leonian schoolgirls’ marital (1990), sought to shape ‘proper women’ as the monogamous wives _ strategies, demonstrates that material exchanges may be the basis for of the ‘new men’ produced in mission schools and colonial work- relationships that evolve into marriages, but that they are also sites places. A number of these studies show how, far from ‘disempower- for contest over the definition of options and identities. Her analysis ing’ women, colonial domesticity offered women resources with of struggles over the definition of school fee payments highlights which to pursue their own life projects. The second article in this the reflexivity of schoolgirls in assessing and shaping their own section, (pp. 64-71) Burke’s (1997) fascinating study of marketing opportunities, in a context in which the strategies of others and domesticity in colonial Rhodesia, shows how domesticity constrain their choices. discourses did not simply permeate colonial institutions, but were Since the 1970s, discourses of disapproval about women’s refracted through households. In these spaces, they served to sexualities have dwelt on the often uneasy relationship between enhance women’s agency by emphasising their role in managing love and money; from Dinan’s (1977) ‘gold diggers’ to the talk of household affairs and providing them with discursive resources to sugar daddies, acadas (female students), cash madams and the more

mock men’s dependency and lack of thrift. mundane everyday negotiation of love and money in 1990s Nigeria

Historians have drawn attention to contests that emerged as (Cornwall 2002). The AIDS epidemic has highlighted the extent young men pursued new labour opportunities in the colonial and cultural salience of sexual networking, drawing further attenperiod, undermining the grip of gerontocracy (Beinart 1982, Peel tion to the links between sex, commodities and gender identities

Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 7

(Bassett and Mhloyi 1991, Obbo 1993, Schoepf 1993). Reflecting and Rosaldo’s ground-breaking volume Women, Culture and Society on these connections, the fifth article in this section (pp. 90-5), by drew heavily on African material to argue that ‘sexual asymmetry Mills and Ssewakiryanga, argues that the inter-convertible nature of is... a cultural product amenable to change’ (1974:13), and to posit love and money provides a key to understanding the negotiation of women’s contributions and control over subsistence as a key variable masculinities in contemporary Uganda, and their implications for in accounting for variations in women’s status and power. Research HIV transmission. Drawing on the rich metaphorical language of on rural African women was drawn on to locate sexual inequalities Kampala’s university students, they highlight the shaping of in control over productive assets and resources (see, for example, masculinities in the ‘financial battlefields’ of intimate relationships. | Sacks 1974). While others were to argue that control over the Across the continent, economic impotence has provoked rising means of reproduction was more significant in defining women’s levels of gender-based victimisation and violence. Nowhere is this status than their productive contribution (Meillassoux 1981), the more so than in South Africa (see, for example, Bank 1994; Morrell centrality of women in African production raised further questions 2001). Katherine Wood and Rachel Jewkes’ contribution (pp. 95— about inequalities in access and control over assets and resources. 102) is the last in this section. Set in the context of township South The first contribution to this section, by Jane Guyer (pp.103-— Africa, their compelling study shows how, faced with the ever- 11), reflects on the complexities of feminist engagement with female present threat of other men tempting their girlfriends with com- farming, providing important insights into some of the blindspots that modities that are beyond their means, young men’s vulnerabilities continue to pervade contemporary policy discourses. Guyer argues:

tudies of the making and shaping of gender identities in Africa sare

are wranforme¢ through acts of violence into successful’ masculinity. For the 1970s feminists, Aftica’s female farmers seemed living

veal the d rs of - : nolithic versions of ‘cender proof — analogous to woman-the-gatherer — of women’s original i esiemneieaineiines 0 -rcisinas levis taarann Taian ranean ns re d massive contribution to the productive economy, of the

relations’ onto African realities. They illustrate the complexities of an bility of | ae child Pr hind 4 Ys k and intimate relationships and highlight the processes of contestation P th ha or hk oe ed 7 care wit mcep a ent Wor ‘eon

y Pp an app Se

that are so crucial in shaping contemporary gendered identities. oF the historically late and Cerivative nature OF women's relega They serve to underscore the importance of an approach to gender tion to the “domestic domain’. (p. 103) that permits the exploration of the ambiguities of gender identities, Guyer’s contribution picks up on some of the foundational identifications and relationships as imagined and performed in insights of perhaps the most enduring influence on studies of rural

different arenas. women’s productive activities: the work of Ester Boserup (1970).

Boserup’s argument linking the introduction of cash cropping with

Livelihoods and lifeways women’s loss of status and power in African agriculture gave rise to

studies of the ever-deepening marginalisation of women farmers

From the colonial creation of the male breadwinner to contem- (Wipper 1972; Moock 1986). Studies showed how women’s porary contests over love and money, the intersection of livelihoods — agricultural work was rendered virtually ‘invisible’ as a result of male

and lifeways forms a key thread through the literature on gender in bias in service provision and policy (Muntemba 1982; Staudt 1988). Africa. Women’s engagement in economic activities was one of the Feminist researchers described how colonial legislation entrenched principal foci for early feminist work in Africa. Through the 1980s discrimination against women, undermining their opportunities for and 1990s, this theme alone accounted for around half of what was own-account incomes (Okeyo 1980; Martin 1984), and docupublished on women in Africa.'® Within this vast literature, ‘gender’ mented the sublimation of women’s rights over their own income largely appears as analytic shorthand for women’s subordination and labour to the control of their husbands (Oboler 1985). Others within conjugal relationships; and it is in this arena that the ironies showed the leverage that women’s economic autonomy afforded

of the continuity of colonial discourses on women become them within marriages (Bledsoe 1980; Abu 1983). The pursuit of especially poignant. But other currents are also evident. Feminist female economic autonomy through interventions that gave women research on livelihoods and lifeways has destabilised the categories greater access to productive opportunities became the focus for ‘women’ and ‘men’, exploring transformations in identities over feminist activists in the sphere of international development. time and between different domains of association. It has problem- One of the instruments for ‘gender analysis’ that has been widely atised constructions of ‘community’, ‘family’ and ‘household’ — and influential in making women’s productive contributions more indeed of the location of women and men within productive visible is the ‘gender division of labour’. This commonly boils down systems — that (continue to) underpin development interventions to dividing up activities by the sex of those who carry them out. (Guyer 1981; Whitehead 1981 and 2000; Guyer and Peters 1987). Quite apart from their failure to pay attention to differences within And while it has provided fuel for some contemporary gender and the categories women and men, the kinds of task lists that emerge development myths (see Cornwall, Harrison and Whitehead, 2004), are, Guyer (1991) argues, too crude to capture the nuances of it has also questioned others. The readings chosen for this section change, or indeed the value or intensity of work (this volume:

signal some of its principal currents. 103-11). In a rich analysis of the gendered meanings that emerge

| once the focus is shifted from women farmers to the fields on which

Rural women: between farm and household they work, Guyer demonstrates an approach that ‘builds gender

Although, as Dwyer and Bruce (1988) make clear, the image of the into an analysis of production rather than making the position of African woman who could ‘have it all’ remained rosily romantic, women the central focus’ (p. 110). By so doing, the assumptions African woman farmers served as a source of inspiration for that underpin feminist accounts of female farming — as in broader Western feminists seeking to overturn the naturalised associations debates about women and the environment (see Leach 1994) —

of women with the sphere of the domestic, as well as providing a begin to unravel. ,

glimpse of a resolution to the dilemmas for public sphere participa- The very gender discourses that shaped colonial interventions tion posed by women’s engagement in child-rearing. Lamphere into conjugal relations were played out in the post-colonial era, in.

8 ¢ Andrea Cornwall/Introduction

the transposition of the Western model of the nuclear household peasant farmers, full of the dizzying dynamism of change. Evoked in replete with assumptions about a benevolent provider and dependent feminist recovery of women’s history and in male-authored spouse. Denying women bank accounts or own-account registration _ fiction, as in schoolgirls’ imaginations and parents’ worries (Bledsoe with marketing boards preserved the myth of the male patriarch, 1990, this volume: 80-9), city life and city ways have come to be even where male migration had left rural production almost entirely associated with heightened opportunities for women to shape their in the hands of women (Peters 1983). Muntemba’s work from the own destinies. Since the mid-colonial period, growing numbers of early 1980s describes the extent to which colonial gender discourses women have entered white-collar professions in African cities, permeated institutions of ‘modern’ agricultural extension in Zambia. despite barriers posed by differential access to educational oppor-

) 8 P re y te oppom ; ; P

She cites a frustrated woman: tunities. True to Mohanty’s (1988) charge, however, the careers of Men have always been going for training... What they taught us mde CASS educated urban he omen have P roven less ae ae cannot help us much. Our friends [men] were taught piggery. 97 eminist researchers. Rat er, attention ras tended to focus on

We were taught to make scones. How could that help us with POOF Urban women in more marginal areas of employment.

our farming? (1982:98) Replete with the stuff of feminist fables, representations of poor

African female £ ; aa th duct; urban women in the literature highlight their agency, ingenuity and hace | a 4 19706 fui Be In ‘1 P at Me elena. ability to rise above adverse circumstances to shape their own

may pa heix ex hae *e emunists. aa In debates a ‘Sa te 1974: lifeways, within or without conjugal relationships. Christine Obbo’s Mail ort 1081) Chew. FON? be trol over das victi ( oft licies (1980) book on women in Kampala is perhaps the most vivid

chat . docnen 4 eu eA sndin ns © E eye as ne 1 r 1 the example of this,research capturing the exploded complexities ofthe urban; women’s deepened their subordination. Feminist eight:lives , ec

myth of the female producer as subsistence farmer and ‘de endent with sympathy and insight; MacGatfey’s (1991) work on Zairols

y d hichlich P d the lot of biected ep ; women entrepreneurs richly conveys their successes, as well as their

Spo hen c. ee ignted the ° ° ct bein i su ee fo Sto er struggles. Yet another literature treats the same set of subjects with Ne Whit head 198 Lc tort sd W, ned 090: § to de 1 9 38 marked ambivalence. Decades of African-authored male fiction

aroun | rt ite 199 0 7 arney an 1 bn oe re t F convey a discourse that positions the ‘independent’ woman as

, itenea Ps ( 4 ) hier: ; on cotratt Ie eos 1G materna fc wayward, lascivious and troublesome (Little 1973; Hoch-Smith hese we OMere Px ‘bo ‘tir conceptual tools for making sense Of 1978: Newell 1996), one that endures in contemporary Africa, |

these processes OF subordination. , manifest in periodic state harassment of single women as suspected Development initiatives inspired by these findings have focused ‘prostitutes’

an P roviding SUPP Orit heres own-account Economic activites, One of the major currents in the ‘gender and colonialism’ through micro-credit schemes or income-generating Projects — Jiterature explores the working lives of African women in towns, WArdener and d B “these hoe vrowem auc 1 905. HL. ons on providing rich insights into the mutual shaping of colonial Crewe. a ta int 1993 Vote won DOW) 27799 TNATTISON. fica subjectivities and the colonial state. An important strand of this ih in 1, arTisOn bal ). . some Nave given qn toa oe icant Jiterature focuses on women in settler colonial economies and on f ; ne ors eal be wane’ Richard S, hro, te - (1996) to dy of the contours of female migration. Karen Jochelson captures a OTS OF CONJUZAN DargatnIyg » EAC MATE DEATOEESES ( ) study of narrative that feminist research in the late 1980s and early 1990s women’s gardens in The Gambia (this volume: 111-19), richly Gine to challenge:

evokes these contests. He describes the tactics to which men resort to regain a semblance of control where their economic leverage has First, the implication is that men migrate for money, and women been undermined by women’s independent incomes, along with because of broken hearts; men are wage-earners, while women women’s counter-tactics, from cash gifts to buy peace from are daughters and wives then prostitutes. Second, it assumes that

recalcitrant husbands to hiding business plans and profits. within a family women are protected, and their sexuality is Significant as studies of intra-household relations have been in constrained, while outside a family they are defenceless,

exploring contests over resources and expectations within conjugal uncontrolled and promiscuous. Third, it assumes a golden age of

relations, they have tended to neglect other relationships that morality in contrast to the degradation of the towns, presenting marriage gives women access to, such as with the kin, friends and the women as victims of the migrant labour system, and without clients of their husbands (O’Laughlin 1995). In focusing on the ambitions or life strategies. (1995:323)

| nded to displace from the ; . i, . ;

heterosexual partnership, they have also tended to disp ° While some feminist work is imbued with an analysis of frame antagonists allies withininthe household who may exert is . ; ascendant, ;-~ ad:and .. ‘patriarchy’ which the victim narrative others more of, 0. anLic influence on; challenge a woman’s livelihood prospects than and their ,; 5 ysthat would a reading of these women’s lives choices

husbands. Vaughan (1983) suggests (this volume: 119-22) that part ~ ; eee ; . f th blem lies in taking the household as a starting point for Stuate them as objects buffeted by ‘patriarchal’ control (White,

OF nae Prom 2 rarms P 1983, Bozzoli 1992, Jeater 1993). The stark dichotomy that emerges analysis and takes takinganwomen’s own self-representations forthegranted. bee, etween the ‘good’ rural woman and ‘wayward’ urbanite Instead, she approach that looks first at resources and ee, h a their val d only th h f crumbles further once closer attention is paid to continuities in changes in their value over time, and only then at the patterning Or women’s ‘life strategies’ in rural and urban areas. As Bledsoe’s

relationships that result. In doing so, she highlights the significance (1990) and Leach’s (1994) work on rural Sierra Leone suggests, rural

of relationships of friendship between women in rural Malawi that ansupport , ; women’s ‘covertof strategies’ to gain access to the means, and to would otherwise be obscured by models household analysis ;, , their households may be precisely through the very economic

by women’s own narratives. oer ; City ways (1996) work on the women left behind in the labour reserves of exchanges that are termed ‘prostitution’ in urban contexts. Maloka’s

Studies of women workers in urban areas have a markedly different early colonial Lesotho serves as a reminder that the very activities flavour to the timelessness of representations of African woman that have come to be so closely associated with urban life — beer

. Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 9 brewing and sex work — were as much part of rural women’s _ the gender politics of engaging with customers to transformations in

survival strategies. gender identities and relations.'®

The ‘immorality’ ascribed to urban women is deftly dissolved in Another site for urban employment that is permeated with studies that explore migration from female migrants’ own ambiguities is that of domestic service, on which a significant body perspectives. Bozzoli’s (1992) account shows how female urban of work began to emerge from the early 1980s onwards (see, for migrants protected themselves from unwanted male attention and example, Hansen 1984, 1992). As ‘boys’ in one context and ‘men’ became pillars of Christian communities; White (1983) describes in others, male domestic servants in the colonial era also traversed how those engaged in the provision of sexual services evolved their gender divides as they negotiated their identities between work and

own codes of conduct to police the boundaries of respectability. home. Other ‘new’ contexts for male employment came too to Many of the urban women who were classified as ‘prostitutes’ did involve such transitions, as demonstrated most vividly in Moodie’s no more than provide ‘wifely’ services for the temporary ‘husbands’ (1988) account of gender and sexualities on the South African who in turn provided them with material support (see White 1983; mines. Lindsay’s (2003) account of Nigerian railway workers in the Jeater 1993; Nelson 1987). And, as Sudarkasa (1977) points out, colonial era (this volume: 140-7), offers a particularly rich insight numbers of women migrants were doing no more than joining their into the ways in which men shaped dissonant discourses on gender

~ husbands in town in any case. as they negotiated expectations in different relational arenas.

In an early contribution to debates on sex worker agency (see Lindsay shows how men made use of colonial discourses on breadKempadoo and Doezema, 1998), Janet Bujra’s account (1975) of winners and providers as levers for negotiation, moving between ‘prostitutes’ in colonial Nairobi (this volume: 122—32), contends: discursive domains in which they ‘performed’ distinctively different

,Far , ; masculinities. Lindsay’s account makes an to from being degraded bydynamics the transformation of important sexual ; yeecontribution P or a understanding the of gender and wage labour. relations a the sale ofFrom services, they held theirretrenchment, own in they ‘respect| ;; : : into ; Over last two decades, public sector economic able are society’ with men. being passive sexual objects, |: ; _ ; . ; in liberalisation, changing agricultural andAnd macro-economic became a social drama ofuncertainty their own policies making. in a od: : oe . ; actors shocks have exacerbated and spurred livelihood very real senseerprostitution allowed themrural an independence and 9j.°These 7... : changes have diversification in both and urban Africa.

freedom from exploitation that would not have beenand possible = ;and3:options -: oe: impinged on women’s men’s identities in complex

had any the other socio-economic roles open and to . oy: , . ;they ways, new questions of livelihoods them — chosen asraising wives, orofas workersforinthe thestudy formal economy of . lifeways ; ip:.

; } | in Africa. Yet the traces that remain most apparent colonial Kenya. (this volume: 123)within ; ; :the.

literature, especially works focusing on development issues, lose this Bujra’s work picks up on the ambiguities of sex work for urban — sense of flux and ambiguity in their application of rigid schema for

women: indeed, recasting the assumed ‘promiscuity’ of indepen- making sense of gender difference. Historical and anthropological dent urban women as ‘sexual networking’ (Orubuloye et al. 1994) research has done more than challenge the invisibility of women. It better evokes the advantages that such liaisons offered. Gondola’s has contributed a richer understanding of the dynamics of social and (1997) analysis of popular Congolese music in the 1950s shows how economic change and the mutual impingement of working lives Kisangani women used music clubs as a cover for multiple partner- and gender identities.

ships, enhancing their social position and bringing them into : contact with nationalist politics. And as studies of Nigerian and Negotiated traditions: gender, religion and ‘culture’ Nigerien ‘courtesans’ suggest (Pittin 1983; Cooper 1995), the | .

ambiguities of positions as ‘non-married’ women provided oppor- Just as studies of women’s work sought initially to demonstrate the

tunities for interaction and influence that ‘respectable’ married contributions of women to the economic sphere, early feminist

women were often denied. , research on women and religion focused on women’s leadership in

A strikingly contrastive image of urban women emerges in work ‘traditional’ and contemporary religious settings (Berger 1976, this

on women traders, largely from West Africa. From Robertson’s volume: 148-55; Hoch-Smith and Spring 1978; Jules-Rosette (1984) study of Ga traders in Accra to Sudarkasa’s (1973) path- 1981). Women’s prominence in these arenas provided evidence breaking work on Yoruba market women, feminist research on both for accounts of their subsequent marginalisation as the world traders focused on their strategies for getting on and getting by, in religions gained hegemony, as well as instances of women’s spiritual which men are often barely relevant. Other West African work, power, prestige and authority. Seen as a source of solace, a bastion such as Handwerker’s (1973) work on Liberian traders and Gracia of female solidarity, and as spaces within which women could gain Clark’s rich Ghanaian study, Onions Are My Husband (1994), high- opportunities denied to them in other public institutions, the lights the complexities of women’s networks and everyday survival religious domain captured a cluster of feminist imaginaries. strategies. Studies in other areas of Africa explore the new ‘Traditional’ religion offered its own origin myths, in which female opportunities that trading opened up for women, as well as some of power was in the ascendant (see, for example, Gleason 1987). the gendered barriers to women’s participation in trade (House- —_—Yet, as studies of gender and religion in intervening decades Midamba and Ekechi eds. 1995; Turrittin 1988; Robertson 1997); were to show, matters were much more complex than a story of the Clark (2001) and Bastien (2002) show how deep ambivalence about celebration and subsequent erosion of women’s power would women’s entrepreneurship runs. Nakanyike Musisi’s (1995) account suggest. Just as the category ‘woman’ in earlier feminist work masked of cooked food vendors in Kampala’s night markets is included in the significance of differences of generation, race and class between this section for the contribution it makes to understanding new women, women’s active participation in the very institutions that economic opportunities under liberalisation (this volume: 132-40). served to imbue ‘gender-oppressive’ norms with spiritual authority Musisi explores the wider dimensions of Baganda women’s also brings the paradoxes of Western feminism into sharp relief. involvement in marketing in a time of structural adjustment, from Resonating with themes in the wider literature on gender in Africa,

10 ¢ Andrea Cornwall/Introduction

the writing on religion and ‘tradition’ is a particularly interesting site Muslim Africa have tended to evoke images of Islam that writers

in which to explore questions of power, identity and difference. like El Saadawi (1980) and Mernissi (1988) have passionately This section of the reader offers divergent readings on gender and criticised for their Eurocentrism. Boyd and Last (1985) argue that religion, each with its location within wider debates. the focus on cults like Zar and Bori has served a quest for instances of non-compliance with Islamic norms, eclipsing women’s

Marginality and power: spirit possession in Africa involvement in mainstream Islamic practices. They argue that

Possession trance cults have been of enduring interest to scholars of women’s professions of Islamic faith have been dismissed as religion in Africa. Feminist researchers have found them fascinating as tactical manoeuvres or as virtual submission to an ideology of sites in which women gain positions of authority and prestige, and for subordination. Boyd and Last’s analysis of learned Muslim women the dramatic reversals of everyday relations of subordination enacted as ‘agents religieux’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sokoto

in ritual performances. The first reading in this section is Iris Berger’s. presents an altogether different picture: of women actively study of the prominent role women played in spirit possession cults engaged in the promotion of Islam as thinkers, poets, performers in the inter-lacustrine region of East Africa (pp. 148-55). It serves as and activists. a characteristic example of 1970s feminist interest in situations in Focusing on Muslim women’s own strategies and perspectives

which women were able to ‘rise above their general status of lends a different view to polarised images of compliance and inferiority’ (1976:161). The reversals she describes are striking, from subservience (Strobel 1979, Pellow 1987, Callaway and Creevey women gaining access to ‘male’ prerogative by expressing the other- 1993). Two readings in this section pick up different dimensions of wise unspeakable and gaining status and respect, to men’s loss of women’s engagement with Islam. Barbara Cooper’s (1994) article authority in their submission to spirits that literally emasculate them. on slavery and seclusion in Maradi, Niger (this volume: 156-63), is

Ambiguities of gender and power highlighted in a number of reproduced for the important interventions in the debate about recent studies of transformative rituals and ‘traditional’ religious women and Islam in Africa, highlighting some of the gender myths practices (Moore et al. 1999; Behrend and Luig 1999) resound in that have come to be associated with seclusion, as well as their accounts of the ritual performances associated with spirit possession dangers for analysis of women’s relationships, options and life across the African continent. Forming as much part of some variants choices. From the other side of the continent, Victoria Bernal’s of Christian practice as of ‘traditional religion’, studies of possession (1994) contribution (this volume: 163-76), describes women’s trance provide a fascinating site for the exploration of disjunctions active participation in the remaking of Islamic ‘tradition’ in rural and continuities between ritual representations and everyday Sudan. Bernal highlights the fallacies of ‘Islamic determinism ... the institutions. In Yoruba ‘traditional’ ritual, to give one much-studied misapprehension of Islam ... [and] the failure to place Islamic example (see Drewal and Drewal 1983; Gleason 1987; Apter 1992; culture adequately within historical and material contexts’ (p. 174) Matory 1994), representations of women as mothers capture an Her account of women’s engagement with ritual and religious almost elemental female potency: benign and terrifying, nurturing practice highlights the malleability and fluidity of Islam as practice, and voracious, at once everywoman and powerfully ambivalent exploring new understandings of Islam expressed through women’s ‘witch’. Situated within shifting configurations of difference, the own redefinition of appropriate feminine behaviour. identities and identifications associated with women in this context are striking in their ambiguity (Barber 1991; Matory 1994; Rejnvention and recognition: African Christianities

Cornwall 2002). . Themes of marginality and empowerment, reinvention of religious _ Here and elsewhere, studies of female spirit mediums as healers practice through women’s participation and the centrality of

highlight the extent to which they assume yet other subject positions, women’s identities as mothers converge in studies of African Chrisoutside and beyond those associated with ‘ordinary women’ (see, for tianities. As one of the three ‘C’s of colonialism — Christianity,

an early example, Ngubane 1977). Yet a major current within the Civilisation and Commerce — the missionary endeavour attempted substantial literature on spirit possession identifies women with one 6 jnstil the ideals of appropriate female behaviour embedded in primary subject position: that of wife. Within this literature, other colonial cultural interventions. At the same time, the srowing principally from Muslim Africa, the focus is on women’s margin- popularity of Christianity amongst African women formed the basis ality and on transient ritualised performances as a source of power, for the reconfiguration of identities, and with it new forms of

expression or solace. Considerable debate has revolved around the Christian practice. ,

extent to which possession trance cults in Muslim Africa serve to Women’s participation in Christian churches evoked complex ‘empower’ women to overcome their subordination, by enabling intersections between ‘tradition’ and modernities (Hackett 1987; them to voice the unspeakable and make demands. Their _very Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Scarnecchia 1997). By affirming ambiguities have led to a range of competing explanations: as a ‘new traditions’ such as monogamy, conjugal intimacy and marital pressure valve for tensions (Lewis 1971) or a foil for cultural resistance fidelity, mainstream Christian churches also offered women a site to (Boddy 1995), as further entrenching women’s disadvantage (Alpers make and shape for themselves. Deborah Gaitskell’s (1990) work on

1984) or as serving to realign conjugal relationships with women’s women and Christianity in South Africa (this volume: 177-86), expectations (Lambek 1980). What is, however, evident is that their highlights the opportunities that Christianities offered women. secular dimensions hold considerable social and economic impor- From her work on Methodist manyano groups in South Africa, she tance for women (Constantinides 1978; March and Taqqu 1986; suggests: Boddy 1995). The emotional, participatory, expressive culture of the manyano

Beyond ‘compliance’: women and Islam was the choice and creation of the women themselves, as was its

Emphasising a rupture with everyday identities and relations use as a vehicle for female spiritual leadership... This was what dominated by Islamic mores, studies of possession trance cults in they wanted and valued in Christianity... African women helped

Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 11

shape the new faith; it did not simply force them into a contemporary parliamentarians — to accounts of women in resist-

stereotypical mould (this volume: 185). ance and rebellion, whether against localised patriarchal authority or

Yet, as Gaitskell shows, women’s engagement in mainstream in struggles for self-governance and self-determination, to studies of Christian communities refashioned women’s identities as mothers, the cultural and political forms through which women mobilised as

associating motherhood ever more closely with the role of the . dependent, domestic wife. In contrast, a number of indigenous “1: Christian movements such as the Apostolic churches described by Queens, militants and rebels ; ;

Bennetta Jules-Rosette (1981) appear to have offered women Echoing western feminist concerns about women’s exclusion from the ‘public sphere’, African evidence first provided succour and ~ greater recognition, such as for their ceremonial leadership and 4 P dismay as the exclusion from politic al life that Western mystical P owers. Cuestions a wiatioual spaces oltee include feminists challenged in their own countries became all too evident

vs ; ve in post-colonial Africa. Early feminist work on women’s leadership

rae P coments relaionshirs ie sther epasee ression, and implications highlighted the institutionalised positions of power women occupied Tension between idealised maternal and domestic identities and ™ me pre-colont al era, fone auc posto nle A that of the tyalode in

the realities of women’s lives; evokes potenta contradictions a en nd hy this hi nate ere be begins mae s 5906 500) ere ecome classic, and for with which section —200).

women. Little attention has been paid to the implications of these As Awe’s work makes clear. ruling women e no e LP P onsid fae c

contradictions for men’s identities. Stephan Miescher’s study of d th . Fs hej y d vositi

Ghanaian Presbyterian men, written for this collection (pp. 187— P re ack P eden che Soe on oe prenogayve a2 Positions,

95), reveals some of the complexities at stake. Through textured life ocuiynente din societies spa P nine the continent as a whole

histories, Miescher shows how both the ‘new traditions’ introduced Arisine directl oy 5 femini - ys in th

by Christianity, and the new roles men were expected to take up as HSINg CATEctly OUL OF Western, Temanist acuvist concerns Mm mac

ripomible providen. of dependent wives tnvaved complex 197%, Malor heme within he erate on vores poi negotiations between cultural obligations and the tenets of the new feminist underpinnings of women’s collective action (see, especially,

Te, a Log. Ardener 1973). Militancy, riots, rebellion and other instances of spacer oenten mee forged ane Pied linn eo beyond wa collective female ‘misbehaviour’ have been a particular focus for . a . ©. ; feminist attention (see for Allen 1972; O’Barr earlier focus on women’s leadership in example ‘marginal’van religious domains yy: ; ’1976; oe: ° cis ectlee been eign atl vestige the Jomon 182 Wipe 6); Baten 20) Ske of thee ambiguities of gender and power are clearest within the hetero- 1 y £ < collect; belli ; lonial poli 8 geneous terrain of religious practice. Churches, mosques, shrines oP where Nic aria. these Cates hove ancl ae che vebeion

_and cult gatherings are sites in which normative ideals are ever more ship be ween “women’s interests’ and ‘women’s gender interests’

deeply embedded, and arenas from which women can appropriate ;

—? . ; or :; exemplify the tendency to read African realities throu estern

moral, emotional and material resources to pursue their own lolyne nee noo fie some Ainican wan teali cholars, these debates projects. Seen alongside other women’s associations as sites for the exemplify es: | dentifyin instances of women’s ollective action as transformation of women’s identities and opportunities (Rosander inspired hd 4 feminist’ im ulse means that other interests and 1997), the intersections between religious arenas and the institutions mao rivstion, are overlooke Fi notably the significance of maternal

ot every hie only places i which women may true tock ; politics in Africa — captured in Ardener’s (1973) and Ifeka-Moller’s ae 1973) writings, and taken up in van Allen’s (2000) recent work. connections that carry over into other areas of their lives. They may Gee ) writings has been so a what eclipsed bee tent decades also serve as ‘heterotopian’ spaces (Foucault 1986), unusual places in by the quest for pro-feminist social eur ments 4 which women’s behaviour unsettles conventional categorisations — Yy S ae of che darin exploits of powerful women of the clout of

and from which leadership and assertiveness spill over into other ; ae P P he Sj P L Sande (MacC k

arenas. These ambiguities accentuate the importance of making 1975), and of an era in aS ch commen were trakers iViacvormace

sense of investments in the shaping of religious traditions through litics and the vol; h FF of feminist fables. Y. Pr h

closer attention to women’s and men’s own experiences, meanings Poducs ana’ the pouty ave the very SHUI OF Feminist fables. Fee, an Ene and projectsmundane intervening decades, the tales that were toand begovernance told were more PROJecls. and depressing as writing on gender came

to shift from women in positions of power to women’s tactics for

Gender and governance managing their disempowerment and marginalisation. Issues of power, empowerment and agency in studies of religion Of patriarchs and unruly women : converge with themes in writing on gender, politics and govern- While the taxation of women sparked rebellion across the colonies, ance in Africa. Perhaps more than in any other area of interest, the other interventions gave rise to forms of unruly behaviour that focus of the literature on politics and governance has been posed as much of a headache to senior African men as they did to emphatically on the category women; men’s gendered experiences the colonial authorities (Hodgson and McCurdy 2001). Consonant are as rare as analyses that do more than substitute ‘gender’ for an with the preoccupation of missionaries and colonial officials with interest in women. Discursive strands of women-as-victim or as ‘coital and conjugal sites’ (Ogundipe-Leslie 1994), some of the most bold heroine are again evident. The readings in this section cover a _ interventionist legislative measures to emerge during the colonial wide terrain, ranging from work on female political leadership in period sought to protect women from practices such as pledge different periods of African history — from pre-colonial Queens to marriage, polygamy and female circumcision. The ‘crisis in marriage’

12 ¢ Andrea Cornwall/Introduction

throughout the colonies, as women availed themselves of oppor- followers of a nation-builder; such narratives omit the central role tunities to escape unhappy matches, encouraged colonial authorities women played in these struggles as political actors whose identificato legitimise customary practices that affirmed male prerogative. tion with nationalist concerns form the basis for their engagement Following Chanock’s (1982) influential account of the selective (Staunton 1990, Scarneccia 1996). In a reading chosen for its invention of tradition in the codification of ‘customary law’, studies methodological significance as well as for what it reveals of focused on what Schmidt (1990) terms the ‘unholy alliance’ women’s political agency, Susan Geiger’s article (pp. 210-17) highbetween rural patriarchs and the colonial state. Situating women as_ lights how the very performance of nationalism, by highly mobilised buffeted between the ‘patriarchal’ control of the state and African women’s dance groups, built the basis for the Tanganyikan nationalmale elders or as ‘hostages’ of colonial rule (Schmidt 1990; Mbilinyi ist movement. Geiger underscores the significance of women 1988), many of these analyses resound with the victim narrative in activists’ role in shaping, rather than simply responding to, nationalist which women are ‘done to’ by ‘patriarchy’. As Bozzoli’s (1983) consciousness. work on colonial South Africa so powerfully demonstrates, a While Geiger focuses on women activists, LaRay Denzer’s (1994) singular notion of ‘patriarchy’ is inadequate to capture these com-_ study of three prominent West African women nationalist leaders, plexities. Highlighting the permeable, overlapping and fluctuating Mabel Dove, Aoua Keita and Wuraola Adepeju Esan, traces the ‘patchwork of patriarchies’ through which women and men’s lives entry of women into key political leadership positions (this volume: were mediated, Bozzoli’s insights are taken up in one of the most 217-24). Through a detailed account of their careers, and strategies significant contributions to debates about the gendered state in for entering politics, a rich picture emerges of what it was for a

Africa, Linsi Manicom’s (1992) analysis of gender as a ‘ruling woman to engage with politics in these settings, one that

relation’. Rather than focusing on what the state ‘does to? women, contributes to a broader literature on women’s participation in Manicom argues, examining how and why particular concerns get contemporary African politics (Tamale 1999; Tripp 2000; Goetz taken up in policy reveals the ways in which gender difference is and Hassim 2003).

produced in different state policies and practices. Many studies of women’s participation in liberation and

Jean Allman’s (1996) careful analysis of colonial court records in democracy movements attest to the paradox of women’s engagecolonial Asante (this volume: 201-10) provides a rich study of the ment in these struggles as (would-be) citizens and their subsequent contradictions of policy and legislation, shedding important light on marginalisation as women (Kanogo 1987; Mugambi 1994; Goetz and the considerable debate within the literature on customary law and Hassim 2003). In many African countries, politics continues to be women’s opportunities. Her reading suggests that a simple story of regarded as a domain in which women are out of place, subject to victim and oppressor in the collusion of men in the subordination of harassment: those who succeed may do so only by ‘behaving as women fails to capture the contradictions of colonial legislation, or men’. In recent years, however, this situation is beginning to indeed women’s agency in exploiting its opportunities, both issues change. Anne Marie Goetz’s (2002) work on women politicians in with wider salience in contemporary African debates about gender Uganda (this volume: 224-34), explores some of the successes, but

and rights. also challenges, of attempts to enhance women’s participation in

Studies of gender and governance in the post-colonial era high- formal political institutions. Goetz shows how the tactical pursuit of light continuities between the colonial disregard for women and the -success in politics by women may require that they distance subsequent institutionalisation of male bias in state bureaucracies themselves from a feminist agenda. Yet she suggests that there is no and policy formulation (Parpart and Staudt 1989, Staudt 1990).'"° In simple equation between representation by women and represen-

the analysis of women’s exclusion from state resources, much recent tation of women (Phillips 1991). The ‘women’s issues’ that women work continues to rely on an unproblematised notion of ‘patriarchy’ politicians may concern themselves with may, indeed, shore up and the mobilisation of the category ‘woman’ within a narrative rather than challenge normative constructions of appropriate female that positions them as victims of neglect and repression. Glimpses of behaviour. Evidence from Zambia and rural Uganda, for example, women’s agency continue to emerge, however, in accounts of suggests that women in politics may promote other “women’s issues’: resistance, evasion, and of women’s mobilisation through associa- enjoining women to obey their husbands and keep homes neat tions beyond the sphere of formal politics (Epprecht 1995, Robert- (Geisler 1995, Ottosson 1998).

son 1996, Bonnin 2000, and Tripp, this volume: 234-43). Idealised images of women can, however, also serve as discursive resources for women to widen spaces for political participation.

Representation and leadership: women in politics Cooper’s (1995) account of women’s political associations in conWhile continuities between colonial and post-colonial state policies temporary Niger highlights the ambiguities of the appropriation of suggest that the version of ‘gender’ that many African feminists have discourses of marital respectability as a political strategy to gain argued so passionately against remains much in evidence, work on access to public political space. In a rich description of struggles over

women in politics reveals further complexities. Studies of elite the definition of a residual category of ‘non-married’ women, women in precolonial governance (Musisi 1991; Kaplan 1997) variously portrayed as being ‘between marriages’, ‘courtesans’, document their political significance, although the extent to which ‘prostitutes’ and ‘modern’ independent women, Cooper draws these individuals represented ‘women’s interests’ remains unclear: attention to the instability of ‘women’ as a singular category, and to like ‘female husbands’ (Amadiume 1987), they upheld normative _ the significance of differences within for women’s political particiinstitutions, exercising considerable power over free and slave pation. Vincent’s (2000) study of women’s participation in Afriwomen. Yet the very existence of governance positions for women kaner nationalism in the colonial era offers another example of form a stark contrast to the consequences of the transposition of fissions provoked by class interests, describing how the iconic image colonial gender discourses onto the landscape of governance in of the volksmoeder (‘mother of the nation’) was actively reshaped by

Africa, a move that was to alter so much. white working class women to give them access to engagement Conventional narratives of nationalism position women as faithful beyond the home.

Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 13

The last reading in this section, Aili Mari Tripp’s (2003) men or configurations of male interests. Yet in the efforts of some of ‘Women in Movement’ (this volume: 234—43) is optimistic about these writers to reclaim a vision of Africa in which complementarity African women’s political efficacy and achievements in the domain rather than conflict marks relations between the sexes, other of politics and governance. In a narrative that spans the continent, continuities are lost. Imam (1997) and Nnaemeka (1998) both Tripp identifies new forms of political mobilisation, new spaces for caution against idealising an African past; they highlight practices women’s political agency and new opportunities for alliance that continue to limit and constrain opportunities for self-realisation building and influence. Situating African women’s political agency for men as well as women, and point to bases for alliance-building at the interface of older political institutions and the new political and activism across the continent. landscape that has included elements of the ‘network society’. These Other continuities still signal some of the ambivalence that are found in alliances that spill over national, regional or even surrounds the category ‘gender’. As research on women in contemcontinental boundaries, the use of new technologies such as the porary African agriculture and politics makes evident, a disregard mobile phone and internet; and the ever more complex interplay of for women’s contributions to agricultural production, provisioning tactics and strategies at different levels of engagement. In today’s and governance continues to characterise institutionalised male bias ‘women in movement’ lie seeds for transformation of the future of in development institutions as much as within African governments.

gender relations in Africa. For all the complexities of ‘gender’, women are still treated in many

African contexts as second class citizens, denied rights to land and

Conclusion inheritance, and subject to entitlements the preferential basis on which men’s are regarded by legislative, customary and statutory Spanning a rich and diverse terrain, the literature on gender in institutions. The descriptive and analytic utility of the category Africa has significance beyond an understanding of African ‘woman’ and a version of ‘gender relations’ that equates ‘gender’ women’s and men’s lives and identities. Engaging with mainstream with oppositional and unequal power relations within particular disciplinary debates in anthropology, history and political science, as__ kinds of relationships is clearly limited. Yet the political utility of this

well as with key areas of concern to feminist activists and develop- category, as of a version of ‘gender’ that accentuates inequalities ment practitioners, this important body of scholarship has both between ‘women’ and ‘men’, may remain salient in contemporary academic and real world implications. The international financial struggles over rights, citizenship and participation. institutions that have wrought such macro-economic havoc in It is in addressing the contested issue of the status of ‘gender’ for Africa are increasingly turning their attention to more direct Africa that existing and future research can make a wider theoretical intervention in social and political institutions, evidenced in an and political contribution. There is ample evidence of the transincreasing focus on ‘social capital’, “empowerment’ and ‘participa- mutability of gender identities in Africa and the range of relational tion’. With ‘and women’ or ‘including women’ as appended phrases subject positions taken up by women and men in everyday life

attached to development prescriptions in the name of ‘gender reveal a range of identities and identifications that undermine equality’, the importance of making sense of gender in Africa has attempts to limit their frames of reference. This leaves much of what

never seemed more important. passes for ‘gender analysis’ behind. For feminist politics, the

Highlighting the processes of contestation through which challenge is to hold together — rather than dispense with, or com-

subjectivities and the state are mutually shaped, historical work on _ pletely erase — a politics of difference that is premised on the contin-

gender in Africa helps to reposition African women and men not as_ gent identity claims that make an identification with ‘women’s objects, done-to by European intervention, but as reflexive agents issues’ possible. And for the analysis of ‘gender’, the challenge is to in pursuit of their own life projects. It works to situate colonial rule find starting points that avoid assuming these identifications or as partial, inconsistent and far from omnipotent. Perhaps most imposing identities on diverse and divergent subjects. significantly, it disrupts some of the assumptions that distance the The literature on gender in Africa offers enormously rich food liberal pursuit of ‘development’ from the dark history of colonial for thought. It also contributes tools for analysis and for the pursuit intervention. Rather, it provides the basis from which to sketch the of research, which have relevance beyond gender studies and the trajectories of contemporary development interventions in the borders of the continent. Many of the readings in this collection name of ‘gender’ and ‘empowerment’ directly back to the colonial illustrate the richness of intersections between history and anthroera, with its transformative projects of ‘civilisation’. From assumptions pology, whether by bringing the vibrancy of women’s and men’s of female solidarity, to the presumption of oppositional hierarchy own voices to the study of archival material or by painting contembetween the categories “women’ and ‘men’, from the ‘woman-as- porary experiences on a wider canvas of continuities and change. victim’ to the ‘men-as-the-problem’ discourse, the gender myths of From methodological innovations provoked by scant and partial

contemporary Gender and Development continue to sustain sources and unusual analytic entry-points, to the interrogation of interventions that seek to reshape African gender identities, just as conventional categories for analysis such as ‘the household’, ‘the

in colonial times. family’ and ‘the state’, the essays here are full of insights and inspira-

In challenging the equation of ‘gender’ with a monolithic tion. As such, it is hoped that this Reader will offer those concerned relation of inequality between men and women, African women’s with understanding the dynamics of identity and difference in scholarship poses more fundamental questions about the extent to contemporary Africa a wide and thought-provoking spectrum of which western feminist models in themselves create and obscure _ possibilities. differences, rather than offering the prospect of making a difference. The ire of African women writers at the ways in which their lives and interests have been represented is brought into sharp relief by Notes images of oppression and repression that leave out the ‘female ‘ Anthologies and edited collections cover a broad terrain, including some factor’, situating women-in-general as objects buffeted by powerful of the most influential work in the field. These include Hafkin and Bay

14 ¢ Andrea Cornwall/Introduction

(1976), Etienne and Leacock (1980), Nelson (1981), Hay and Wright Bibliography (1982), Bay (1982), Robertson and Klein (1983), Oppong (1983), Hay and Stichter (1984), Robertson and Berger (1986), Stichter and Parpart Abu, Katharine, 1983, The Separateness of Spouses: Conjugal Resources In

(1988), Terborg-Penn et al.(1992), (1987),Grosz-Negate Parpart and Staudt (1989)(1997), and “ifs, Londons AlAllen in Canstine Oppong (ed.) Female and Male in West ohnson-Odin and Strobel and Kokole nea, London. & Unwin Jonnson: (1998), odescn 72) MeCurdy (2001), Alea. et Ki Acholonu, Catherine Obianuju, 1995, Motherism: The Afrocentric Alternative

(2002), Lindsay and Miescher (2003). to Feminism, Owerni: Afa. ,

2 While I have included some pieces from Francophone countries, Afonja, Simi, 1981, “Changing Modes of Production and the Sexual Lusophone Africa remains a significant gap — although as Robertson Division of Labour among the Yoruba’, Nigerian Journal of Economic and

(1987) suggests, it also remains under-researched. __ Social Studies, 22 (1): 85-105 , |

3 See Walker 1982, Bozzoli 1983, Walker 1990, Schmidt 1992, Manicom Aidoo, Ama Ata, 1981, ‘Asante Queen Mothers in Government and

1992. Politics in the 19th Century’, in Filomena Chioma Steady (ed.), The

4 For example, see Bujra 1975, Nelson 1978, Obbo 1980, Hansen 1984 Black Woman Cross-Culturally, Cambridge: Schenkman.

White 1983 “Mbilinyi 1988 and Robertson 1996 * Allman, Jean, 1996, ‘Rounding up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried

5 See Obbo 1980 Presley 1988. Rob Women in Colonial Asante’, Journal of African History, 37: 195-214 : y » Rovertson 1996. Allman, Jean, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi (eds), 2002, Women in

see also Aidoo and Kaplan , | aw 4 De

(1998). _ ; ee ,

Fanly 5 Aide les AB) s anon i MU9OD. (1977) and Lebeuf (1963); African Colonial Histories Bloomington: Indiana University Press

"For example, see Afonja (1981), Whitehead (1981), Guyer (1981, “PEO ein" och Century Swahihy Women's Spire Possesion Cult, 1991), ape unda ( 87), an 4; ejiu at s n dio Tdi to 1994), International Journal of African Historical Studies, 17 (4):677—702. American feminisms, see Amadiume (1987) Pe ese (1994), Amadiume, Ifi, 1987, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, London: Zed

Acholonu (1995), Imam (1997), Oyewumi (1997) and Nnaemeka Books. , SUED, ’

8 White’s (1990) account of male Mau Mau freedom fighters’ auto- Amadiume, pe Boge menting Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture, biographies, and Shire’s (1994) of growing up in Rhodesia are notable Amaury Talbot, Denise, 1915, Woman’s Mysteries of a Primitive People: the

exceptions. Both depict men’s vulnerabilities that are all too often Ibibios of Southern Nigeria, London: Cassell eclipsed in narratives of the all-powerful African ‘patriarch’, as in Euro- Apter, Andrew, 1992, Black Critics and Kings: the Hermeneutics of Power in

pean constructions of men as rulers of the household. The edited Yoruba Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press collections on masculinities in Africa by Morrell (2001) and Lindsay and Ardener Shirley, 1973, ‘Sexual Insult and Female Militancy’, in Shirley

Miescher (2003) ofter a richness of empirical material to begin to make Ardener. ed. Perceiving Women, Oxford: Berg.

good i, ome Ot ne gender myths and absences associated with Ardener, Shirley and Sandra Burman, 1996, Money-go-rounds: the Importance

; See f InLtles ot t A ‘heme t 987 and 1 997. Moh 1988.N k of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations for Women, Oxford: Berg. 1998 OF exarnipie, /maciuime an » NLonanty » NnACINeKA ~~ Awe, Bolanle, 1977, ‘The Iyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political 10 Murray and Roscoe’s (1998) analysis of the moralising discourse with Oke Stembie Univerier eile ification: A Cross-Cultural View

, . . ; S ’, in A. Schlegel (ed. ! Stratification: A -Cultural View,

which same-sex sexualities were documented in the pre- and early Bank Teslie. 1994. ‘ Angry Men and Working Women: Gender. Violence colonial era is redolent with Christian preoccupations with hetero- and Economic Change in Qwaqwa in the 1980s’ African Studies. 53 (1):

normativity and an evolutionism that works to define these sexualities— = 9_443, and by implication, they suggest, the writers’ own same-sex preferences Barber, Karin, 1991, I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the — as ‘natural’. _. Past in a Yoruba Town, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the 4 Although as Callaway (1987) points out, they made contributions in International African Institute other spheres. , Bassett, Mary and Marvellous Mhloyi, 1991, ‘Women and AIDS in

,y

2 Read as the product of this generation, Leith-Ross’ work is markedly Zimbabwe: the Making of an Epidemic’, International Journal of Health more empathic than that of her male peers. It is peppered, however, by Services, 40 (1): 143-56. the colonial mindset — see, for example, her discussion of ‘primitive Bastien, Misty, 2002, ‘“Vultures of the Marketplace”: Southeastern

woman’ in which she offers her reflections on their ‘intelligence’ Nigerian Women and Discourse of the Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women’s (1939:111-13), or her account of Nguru women (see, especially, 1939: War) of 1929’, in Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi

175). (eds), Women in African Colonial Histories, Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

3 Studies include Kaberry’s (1939) Aboriginal Women: Sacred and Profane sity Press. and Krige and Krige’s (1943) The Realm of the Rain Queen. Bay, Edna G., 1982, Women and Work in Africa, Boulder: Westview '* See Moore and Vaughan’s (1994) superb account of Richards’ work and Behrend, Heike and Ute Luig (eds), 1999, Spirit Possession, Modernity and their study of gender, nutrition and agrarian change in this region. Power in Africa, Oxford: James Currey. '° Bryceson’s (1995) excellent edited collection contains a number of Beinart, William, 1982, The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860-1930, important pieces reflecting on the influence of Boserup, including the Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. work of Ekejiuba (this volume: 46). See especially contributions by Beoku-Betts, Josephine, 1976, “Western Perceptions of African Women in

Peters and O’Laughlin. the 19th and early 20th centuries’, Africana Research Bulletin, V1 (4):

‘6 Analysis of entries in the Africa bibliography suggests that the propor- 86-114.

tional representation of studies of women’s work has remained almost Berger, Iris, 1976, ‘Rebels or Status-Seekers? Women as Spirit Mediums in

constant since the early 1980s, merging with the profusion of work on East Africa’, in NJ. Hafkin and E.G. Bay (eds) Women in Africa, ‘development’ which has been largely concerned with women’s Stanford: Stanford University Press.

economic activities. Bernal, Victoria, 1994, ‘Gender, Culture, and Capitalism: Women and the

7 Although for an early exception see Dinan (1977) Remaking of Islamic “Tradition” in a Sudanese Village’, Comparative

'8 See Thomas-Emeagwali (1995) for an early account of the negative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1): 36-67. impact of structural adjustment on women, although later work has Bledsoe, Caroline, 1980, Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society, Stanford:

shown its effects to be rather more ambiguous. Stanford University Press.

'° See Hirschmann (1990) for a particularly insightful example, from Bledsoe, Caroline, 1990, ‘ School Fees and the Marriage Process for Mende

Banda’s Malawi. Girls in Sierra Leone’ in Peggy Sanday and Ruth Goodenough (eds),

| Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 15 _ Beyond the Second Sex, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cornwall, Andrea and Nancy Lindisfarne, 1994, Dislocating Masculinity: Boddy, Janice, 1995, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zar Cult Comparative Ethnographies, London: Routledge.

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Robertson, Clare, 1987, ‘Developing Economic Awareness’, Feminist Haven: Yale University Press.

Studies, 13 (1): 97-135. Sudarkasa, Niara, 1973, Where Women Work: A Study of Yoruba Women in the

Robertson, Clare, 1996, ‘Grassroots in Kenya: Women, Genital Mutilation, Market Place and in the Home, Ann Arbor, Museum of Anthropology, and Collective Action, 1920-1990’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture University of Michigan.

and Society, 21 (3): 615-42. Sudarkasa, Niara, 1977, ‘Women and Migration in Contemporary West

Robertson, Clare, 1997, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in Africa’, in The Wellesley Editorial Committee (ed.), Women and National the Nairobi Area, 1890-1990, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Development: The Complexities of Change, Chicago: University of Chicago

Robertson Clare and Berger, Iris (eds), 1986, Women and Class in Africa, Press: 178-89. London: Africana Publishing Company. Sudarkasa, Niara, 1986, ‘““The Status of Women” in Indigenous African

Robertson Clare and Martin Klein (eds), 1983, Women and Slavery in Africa, Societies’, Feminist Studies, 12 (1): 91-103.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tamale, Sylvia, 1999, When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary

Rosander, Eva (ed.), 1997, Transforming Female Identities: Women’s Organisa- Politics in Uganda, Boulder: Westview.

tional Forms in West Africa, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Terborg-Penn, Rosalind, Sharon Harley and Andrea Benton Rushing, Rubin, Gayle, 1975, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political 1987, Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, Washington: Howard Economy” of Sex’, in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of University Press.

Women, New York: Monthly Review Press. Thomas, Northcote and Athol Joyce, 1908, Women of All Nations, London: Sacks, Karen, 1974, ‘Engels Revisited: Women, the Organisation of Cassell.

Production and Private Property’, in Rosaldo, M. and L. Lamphere Thomas-Emeagwali, Gloria, 1995, Women Pay the Price: Structural Adjust(eds), Women, Culture and Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ment in Africa and the Caribbean, ‘Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. Scarnecchia, Tim, 1996, ‘Poor Women and Nationalist Politics: Alliances Tripp, Aili Mari, 2000, Women and Politics in Uganda, Oxford: James Currey. and Fissures in the Formation of a Nationalist Political Movement in Tripp, Aili Mari, 2003, ‘Women in Movement: Transformations in African Salisbury, Rhodesia, 1950-6’, Journal of African History, 37 (2): 283-310. political landscapes’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5 (2): 233-

Scarnecchia, Tim, 1997, ‘Mai Chaza’s Guta re Jehova (City of God): 55.

Andrea Cornwall/Introduction ¢ 19

Turrittin, Jane S., 1988, ‘Men, Women and Market Trade in Mali, West Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 22: 583-604. White, Luise, 1990, ‘Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of

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von Biilow, Dorthe, 1995, ‘Power, Prestige and Respectability: Women’s Wipper, Audrey, 1972, “The Roles of African Women: Past, Present and Groups in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania’, Working Paper No. 11, Copen- Future’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 6 (2):143-6.

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20 © Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

° public, but they were also directly instrumental in reinforcing these

Contested Rep resentati ons: existing African and Islamic attitudes and in shaping later colonial

e e , policies which were retrogressive in their effect on African women. ‘G ende yr’ in Afric a , The first half of the nineteenth century marked a period of much

familiarity with the African continent on the part of British and other European powers. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807

J O S E P IH | N E B FE O K L) - B E TT S had provided a new impetus to explore other commercial

. . alternatives in the African interior. A number of government-

Western Pe r ceptions of Afric an sponsored expeditions were sent out, some with explicit instruc-

tions to map out the hinterland areas, some to report on the military

Women | ‘a the 1 Oth & F arly , capabilities of selected states and in general to establish close commercial relations with the ruling classes wherever possible. ‘To

2 Oth C e ntu r r ES some extent they were dependent on the hospitality and knowledge of the common people, but on the whole the masses tended to go

iReference bw Jargelysidered unnoticed since theyofasa the subject class were not conto be much vested interest.

Africana Research Bulletin, V1 (4), 1976: 86-114 In assessing the background and resulting character of these

emissaries, what is revealed is that unlike their learned predecessors who had travelled mainly to widen their existing knowledge, most African women have always presented a problem to western ethno- of these men had been selected because of their ability to encounter graphers. As a human group they form about half of any population, strenuous situations and still survive. Philip Curtin described many yet they receive less than their proportional share of attention. Even of them as tough practical men without a broad general education, when they are studied in any depth they are very often depicted as but well briefed in the existing state of geographical knowledge to an uninteresting or irrelevant category, or that in relation to men know precisely what information was needed to fill out the picture.? they generally lack recognised and culturally valued authority. A Apart from these types there were many evangelising missionaries, a significant remark made by Sue Ellen Jacobs in her cross cultural number of reputable travellers from Europe like Gustav Nachtigal, bibliographical guide on women is pertinent in this context; she Heinrich Barth, Thomas Winterbottom, and a sprinkling of adven-

states: turous fiction writers such as the English author Winwoode Reade, If one used more, or only members of a given sex to obtain data, whose p ubiacations created quite a velic mercial Allen a the;

and relegates information obtained from a few members of the 5 Need ¥ t Th, yh wed Sore i le ang MEMee hn in t ic

opposite sex to a lower category as uninformative or uninterest- 02S 8EOUNCS. cy Showed very little interest in ethnographic ; ; : then research and when they undertake any there was very little ing oneof is onlydid ofcheck thethedata to present f ™time ; of lete picture thegathering problem in question. orhalf them to truth needed of their impressions. The constraints

a colpicre P “© Pro 4 bad ther, lack of transport, disease and the hot tropical climate ad weather, lack of transport, diseas ot tropical c

This paper constitutes a somewhat tentative attempt to explore must have contributed to this shortcoming, but apart from these the source from which certain western images of African women factors the insularity of their middle-class backgrounds may have acquired their distinctive character. Data will be drawn from a_ caused them to neglect certain areas of ethnographic research. Their selection of ethnographic publications on West Africa in the nine- rare encounters with narrow attitudes towards African women were teenth and early twentieth Centuries. The writers are mainly British, an inevitable consequence of this insularity. Life among the ruling

and to a lesser extent German and North American explorers, classes was considerably constrained in Europe during the travellers, missionaries, administrators and amateur anthropologists. nineteenth century. Women were confined to domestic duties in In this paper a number of fundamental questions which could the home since they were classed as the weaker and less intelligent possibly provide a valuable insight into the problem of African sex. Men on the other hand performed the role of breadwinners women will be raised. Firstly, what were the political objectives of and they were expected to be physically and intellectually sound, the European imperial powers in exploring the African interior in aggressive and authoritative. Those men who were sent to Africa

the nineteenth century? Secondly, to what extent did the accepted this way of life as the only valid one. Thus, they tended to background and resulting character of those men who endeavoured neglect women as an area of ethnographic study since they were so to travel to the area influence the type of image they formed of the characteristically uninformative and uninteresting. people? Thirdly, what role did certain popular ‘scientific’ theories Finally, the influence of certain popular ‘scientific’ theories in play in moulding the western image of Africa? An examination of moulding the western image of Africa must be considered. I refer to these questions would suggest the nature of attitudes and percep- the theory of evolution and social determinism. Evolution accordtions of European society, particularly ‘Victorian’ Britain, towards ing to its exponents is a dynamic process which can develop from Africa and, in a more particular sense towards women. The neglect simple to more complex forms. The process of evolution can apply of African women in the literature of this period can best be seenin to the origin, transformation or differentiation of phenomena, the context of prevailing ideas influencing European society in whether they be the universe, the earth or life itself. This process

general, and observers of Africa more specifically. does not necessarily correspond to any single worldwide pattern. Although recognising that Islamic and traditional African cultural The persistence of certain distinctive characteristics which may give

influences are also germane to the problem in question, yet western the appearance of differentiation in these phenomena are only attitudes and perceptions are more central for the following reasons, representations of their different stages of development. Thus, the the publications of the west not only reached a wider reading worldwide patterns of cultural heterogeneity with which we are

Josephine Beoku-Betts/Western Perceptions of African Women in the 19th & Early 20th Centuries ¢ 21

familiar, represent only the varying degrees of adaptation to culture ... [ never beheld a man in this country without some sort of

which is in itself only a stage in the process of evolution. | covering however scanty, but I have actually in some few Among the noted advocates of cultural evolution in the nine- instances seen great overgrown women, mothers of families as teenth century were Lewis Henry Morgan? in the United States of naked as when born and quite unconscious of the disgust which America and Edward B. Tylor* in Britain, who were particularly their appearance excited.’

interested in applying this theory empirically. Their particular oo concern was to discover whether the civilisations of what they Some perceptive writers also remarked on the class distinction

viewed as the contemporary ‘backward’ races were similar to those 2™M0ong women in their dress and ornamentation. Thomas of the earlier primitive types from which man was said to have Winterbottom, an English doctor who had travelled fairly widely, evolved. In a statement which best seems to explain this viewpoint, Commented on this social distinction which he observed w a

Morgan said: particularly visible in highly Islamized areas Northern Nigeria. | In these areas, Muslim women of thelike ruling class though in

Since mankind were one in origin, their career has been essen- _ seclusion, could be identified on those rare occasions when seen by _ tially one, running in different but uniform channels upon all their expensive finery. Peasants and non-Muslims on the other hand continents, and very similarly in all the tribes and nations of appeared to be very simply clad, if clad at all. mankind down to the same status of advancement. It follows Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of women’s lives which that the history and experience of the American Indian tribes came to the attention of almost every traveller to West Africa in the represent more or less nearly, the history and experience of our nineteenth century was their drudgery and physical endurance. own remote ancestors when in corresponding conditions.” They were almost exclusively responsible for fetching and carrying Thus we could surmise that most Europeans or Americans who Water and fuel, rearing children as well as performing a variety of visited Africa in the nineteenth century were already considerably productive activities such as farming, petty trading, long distance influenced by this intellectual climate. Even before their arrival in ‘@ding, porterage and specialist crafts like house-building, wall Africa they had formed a view that the caucasian race to which they plastering, hair dressing and surgery." As Winterbottom succinctly belonged, had by their own efforts achieved a more advanced level Commented:

of development than the negroid race to which the Africans _.. upon women devolves all the drudgery of the family, they belonged. Consequently, the tendency was for many of them to . not only cook, wash and beat rice and clean it from the husk, but measure physical and cultural differences between themselves and they cut down the underwood, assist in hoeing the ground and Africans as high or low depending on the degree of divergence from carry the produce to market.'2 the caucasian race.

To what extent did these western preconceptions mould the In Nigeria, Clapperton!’ who was part of an expedition to the popular negative image of African women? In this regard we must interior, commented on the work of some Yoruba and Bornu explore some of the ethnographic literature on West Africa to elicit women brokers who attended several regional markets buying and the underlying themes. Much of the early descriptions of women - selling their wares at various points between Boussa and Kano. He portrayed their contrasting physical and social characteristics in terms observed that even when these women had some spare time they of beauty, facial markings, hair styles, clothing etc. The German were seen to be engaged in the spinning of cotton for sale. traveller Heinrich Barth, to take one such example, depicted the According to some travellers to the Niger area, there were even women of Kukawa in Northern Nigeria as uglier than the women wives of kings who engaged in local and long distance trading on

of Kano. The former he felt had: , their husband’s behalf. In this regard Winterbottom mentioned 1: that it was not uncommon to see these women stationed in ... square, short figures, large heads and broad noses with immense diff f th ; husband nostrils, disfigured still by the enormity of a red bead or coral “™ lib ent parts 0 , € country as ane since most husbands were worn im the nostril.6 at liberty to employ their wives in the manner most advantageous , to them.'* Such women could be easily distinguished by the Similarly, A. G. Laing could not say much in favour of the beauty of peculiar type of cloth wrapped around their wares; this exempted Sulima women (Sierra Leone), , them from paying tribute and dues and entitled them to free

.. though their various decorations of beads and large gold entertainment and protection from the ruling houses wherever

earrings may be supposed to have shown them totoadvantage.’ t Vrth , , , comments ith regard agriculture, a number of interesting In the Senegambia area Winwoode Reade’, a popular English were made: about the various activities women participated in. fiction writer, described Fouta women as having very delicate However, the most significant observation that still holds great features and fine forms although they were noted to be as merce- relevance for many women agricultural workers today was that

nary as they were beautiful. , made by the Rev. Leighton-Wilson, an American missionary who

From these descriptions we can see that women of Fulani, Hausa was travelling around the Southern Guinea coast area. He and Senegambian origin, all Muslim areas were rated as more observed that in spite of the considerable amount of time spent by beautiful than other West African women. This is because of their women working on their family farms, they were constrained _ so called finer physical features which were believed to be hamitic from participating more effectively because of their lack of skills

in origin. — and necessary implements.!° It would seem that there has not been The type of clothing worn by women was a similarly well a remarkable change in the condition of women agricultural

worked theme. During A. G. Laing’s travels among the Temne in workers in Africa even to the present time. Women still have few Sierra Leone he remarked how appalled he was by the lack of opportunities to acquire the necessary skills to share in the benefits

clothing worn by women. He states: of modernisation; they are still given very little assistance in

22 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

learning new and better methods of cultivation and new types of They have no other purpose in life than to administer to the implements, and as such their farming activities continue to remain wants and to gratify the passions of the lords who are their

largely traditional. masters and owners rather thani husband.!® The impression formed by western observers of these women ; , at what they saw, and Press! y These missionaries were indeed shocked was rather negative because these observers were not accustomed to. ‘ae this dj a their publicat; 1, ; seeing their own women engaged in such strenuous and time i expressing this disgust in ¢ he pu ree t 7, WETE a ans

consuming activities. Indeed most of them generally believed that , rare aren 8 ane Justify ing ¢ ‘ ch tO SP - al the gospe ech in relation to other women elsewhere, the status and position of {1VUD* mese ln CTIOF Demngs, DUE they Wee also aware OF he African women was of an inferior nature. But how inferior were financial benefits to be gained from such sensational literature; the West African women really? To what extent did western observers more shocking it appeared to the readers, the more demand there

: - would be for such publications. Their publications were as a result

take time to understand the complexity of social relationships in Fall of eth tris that little t; - in trvine t

West African society? Firstly, their western middle-class ideas about SO TUM OF CAMO CENLTAST that very athe time was spent i trys f0

the dependence of women was never really applicable to West appreciate how the Africans themselves viewed these institutions. African women in particular. The women of this area have been Most west Ainican voredath were not so vunerable as to sho: ta long established in farming, specialist crafts, petty and long distance perpetual state of degredation in marriage. In polygamous house-

; 1 OE a. ; holds, each wife wasthese entitled to a house on thehave compound, was trading, and participation activities in the each . and ;their 1: entitled to a smallingarden, to a share ofmust crops and livestock a

past given them considerable pride in themselves, as well as a sed and fe. Either individuall

measure of economic independence which they certainly must wore erated rn ed th status of brinei e. Either in bea ua y oF

have used to their own advantage. For example, when Gustav corporatety they had their ways Of bringing pressure to bear on their Nachtigal a German explorer visited Wadai in Northern Nigeria husbands to obtain certain rights. Some observers detected a few of he me one d that the women did not permit any infringem of these factors. Basden, a British administrator, although writing in

their recognised rights and obligations.'° When the crops were tt, cited Pe act of withdrawing food as one of the oe harvested in this farming community, each farmer was obliged to vite ons held by women in West African society. He remarked

. . ° . . 1 i 19

give his wife a specific quantity of corn as her own portion of the harvest, and in a situation where that farmer had harvested less ... a crossed woman will torment her husband in a galling crops than he had anticipated, he was still obliged to sell some of manner by refusing to prepare food for him. He may resent the his other property to discharge his obligation. According to treatment by becoming furiously angry and by vigorous corporal

Nachtigal: punishment, but neither satisfies his appetite and he feels keenly Subservient as a wife is in general to her husband, she permits no the insult of having to return to bed supperless. infringement of her nights, complains without hesitation and if — ‘In this regard, most husbands were evidently aware of the

necessary returns to her relatives. '’ advantages of using persuasion rather than force on their wives and

A number of comments were also made about the apparent very rarely cig they “) wiew ther oe facto rights. € brid Ith ,

wealth of some Yoruba, Nupe and to a lesser extent Igbo women More , ance fed it ot © to se hic © d 5 Ede

_ ; ; Smith and Andrew Dale. In their study of the Ba-Ila people of certain constraints on the actions of their husbands who may not ; ; ar have been as wealthy Northern Rhodesia, and this could apply to other African societies traders; such positions must have enabled these women to place payments 1s also portrayed in a later ethnographic study Dy Rawin

The publications of various missionary organisations provides which practice sunt eth Ss aney describe quite adeptly the Ba-

another interesting dimension to the problem in question. By and a perception OF bridewealth. ‘ney state:

large although most missionaries worked towards the destruction of The goods given by or on behalf of the bridegroom to the the slave trade, the ideology of slavery which looked upon the clansmen and parents of the bride are called the Chiko ... to us African as savage or as a simple child was still ingrained in their it may seem to be a matter of buying and selling, but the Ba-Ila perception. In this regard they gave sanction to western religious would repudiate any such ideal ... The woman is not bought, practices and rejected alternatively valid systems as uncivilised. The her husband does not acquire propriety rights over her ... The customary practices of bridewealth and polygyny were particularly Chiko is more properly regarded as a compensation to the girl’s frowned upon in this respect. Many missionaries proclaimed that clan, a return to parents and guardians for the expense they have women were being sold against their will to husbands who treated incurred in her rearing, the seal of a contract by which she is to them as no more than slaves or chattel. Even widows they argued become the mother of the man’s children, and a guarantee of were made to endure this same degredation since they were obliged good treatment ... a woman among the Ba-Ila has a certain to remain under the control of the new male head of their deceased pride in the amount of Chiko given by her husband, because it 1s husband’s family. Many argued vehemently against the degrading an indication of her worth in his eyes. The Chiko is an acknowconsequences of polygyny. Women engaged in such marriage ledgement that the marriage is an honourable one.”°

practices were believed to have little opportunity to rebel or improve _ ; a. their condition. This feeling was clearly expressed by the Rev. Bridewealth and polygamy were in fact no more uncivilised than

Leighton-Wilson in the following passage: other European practices such as the dowry system, whereby a

father in order to marry his daughter off suitably had to endow her The highest aspiration to which an African ever rises is to have a. with a considerable amount of money and property. In the working

large number of wives. His happiness, his reputation, his classes, many women were forced to supplement their family earninfluence, his position in society, all depend upon this. The ings by engaging in prostitution, another means of exchange and consequence is that so called wives are a little better than slaves. transfer of wealth.

Josephine Beoku-Betts/Western Perceptions of African Women in the 19th & Early 20th Centuries ¢ 23

The sexuality of African women is another recurrent theme in essentially a male centred one; in turn, those who sought the the literature. This can be partly accounted for by the social distance information from them saw no need to challenge what they were

maintained between Europeans particularly British, and Africans told because they already had their own ideas about what the and partly by the strict control of female sexuality in European relationship between the sexes ought to be. society, particularly in ‘Victorian’ Britain. Female sexuality was Among the many ethnographical studies carried out in West rather frowned upon by the European ruling classes for a number of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were viable economic and social reasons. Respectable women were not a number which deserve acclaim in view of the efforts they made to encouraged to express any sexual feelings for to succumb to this was discuss the position of women. Northcote Thomas and Athol to yield to their baser instincts. In this regard they tended to Joyce’s Women of all Nations, is one such pioneering work.” In the perform sexual relations with their husbands only as a marital true evolutionist tradition they made a survey of a large sample of

obligation, and as a means to attain the status of motherhood. world cultures, their objective being to estimate the level of A similar relationship was maintained between the British civilisation in these societies according to the position of their colonial administration and Africans. British administrators were not women. In this regard the following themes recur in their observaencouraged to marry, befriend or employ African women; this tions: physical characteristics, mode of dress, marriage and religious meant that their only basis for any relationship at all lay in the casual customs, economic activities and level of technology. sexual affairs they had with the local women. Thus, these innate and The value of this type of compendium cannot be underestimated

somewhat conventional constraints led many writers to dwell particularly when we consider that at this time any study at all on

unduly on the sexuality of African women. African women was a rare occurrence. Nevertheless, when the

The end of the nineteenth century did not bring any significant book is examined in some depth much of the information appears change to the western image of African women. By and large they to be rather cursory, highly inaccurate and even misleading in some

still continued to be a subject of limited interest to western areas. In one of their descriptions of the Bundu bush schools in observers. This period however marked a climax in the scramble for Sierra Leone and Liberia the authors make the following remark: African territories. After having partitioned most of the continent _.. let no one imagine that the school is anything like what we

among themselves, many European powers tosome establish k 5 :may ; be taught, but he biected nationsOy by means of military pacification now by thebegan name, true crude cooking Se ee NaS eas ry P f other women’s duties hardly a trace, ... according to well

and by building an effective administrative infrastructure. OF o ; y . ns ; Amone th rsonnel wh red into West Africa in this informed observers the girls emerge from their training with

personnel poure 33 ; :g| the mouths likewho cesspools.

period, there were many amateur anthropologists who were

sufficiently interested in ethnography to note their observations on In this passage the authors appear to have either ignored or else paper. In the British colonies, the administration encouraged these misunderstood the significance of the Sande/Bundu Women’s ventures to some extent as an effort to record for posterity the last Society. Some later anthropological studies portray a more balanced vestiges of ‘primitive’ Africa; much more significantly, they gave view of their role. Kenneth Little** and Carol Hoffer”? in their their support because they had begun to recognise an increasing studies of women’s societies in the Mende and Sherbro area of need to collect accurate information which was then lacking about Sierra Leone claim that Bush schools have long exercised considerthe political and economic, organisation of African societies. Their able power and authority not only among women but also among ultimate objective was of course to enforce law and order efficiently the powerful male Poro society. Their functions have always gone

and to maintain some element of stability. beyond merely educating and preparing young girls for marriage Much of the ethnographic literature of this period centred and womanhood. Speaking of Madam Yoko, a Kpa Mende woman attention on political organisation, technology, material produc- chief in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, Hoffer states:

tivity, and to some extent religion. Most of these were exhaustingly ; h h Sand lusivel ly institution th

descriptive and lacked much explanatory power. Women were Main yoke ance na CXOUBSIVE'Y erful it y whine voli ‘ referred to in so far as they were involved in any of these activities, ili am kis was perhaps ae masterful in ma ns politica but since this sphere of life was generally considered to be a male them on taking ee as vile ° rar eae wives and then giving

domain, the focus was primarily male oriented. Armed with certain them out 1n a second stage alluance. western preconceptions about the position of women, most western Through her leadership and membership of the Sande society observers were inclined to view African women as being confined she was able to further her political career. We may even suggest to the domestic sphere of life and without any influence in the that the very existence of exclusively women’s societies in West formal authority structure of their societies. Some administrators Africa put them in a better bargaining position than women who and anthropologists were aware of this shortcoming and they were not as well organised elsewhere. Instead of playing the role of

attributed its existence to the fact that: subordinates in the male societies, the creation of their own meant

In the early period of the administration women were often that they could hold equally important offices in their own right timid of the white man and hid themselves in their huts or "4 they could set their own legal religious and economic codes of

peeped whenever possible.2! conduct. In sum,ensured their very existence as a separate organisation their recognition as an influential and powerful pressure There were some who also argued that African men were far group. more accessible as informants since they were more mobile and Denise Amaury Talbot’s Woman’s Mysteries of a Primitive People, could act as guides, interpreters and servants. In the case of the was probably the most outstanding work on African women during British, we also must not forget the strict social distance maintained this period.?” In this book she attempted to portray though in a

between themselves and African women. rather descriptive manner, the life-cycle, life style and personalities | The view of African society as portrayed by these informants was of a group of Ibibio women in Nigeria by close observation,

24 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa , , discussion, folktales, legends and court cases about and with them. consolidating their territorial power in Africa. Most of the personHer book is unique because at this time she was probably the first nel who were sent out were men who had specific objectives to among those western writers who endeavoured to probe beyond fulfil within a limited period. Their informants in turn were men, the facade of the world and ways of African women. As she and the view they gave of African society was essentially a male one.

explained, I suggest therefore that the problem of understanding the neglect me Primitive ; of Africanwoman women was until still recently cannot be considered 1n isolation; ... the unknown save through the ; . of or ; .; a necessary exploration has to be made of the western view both medium of masculine influence; ... not one word of information ; ; ; _ ; ; Africa as a whole and of women generally in the nineteenth essentially depicted the feminine point of view without some century man interfering as inquirer interpreter.”® ; - ; century was 8 d ° Pr The western image or of Africa in the nineteenth

, Even women anthropologists were no different from their male greatly influenced by the current theories of evolution. Africa was counterparts in this respect. The practice of approaching male elders categorised as low in its level of civilisation and its people were classed at the beginning of fieldwork was still followed by them; although as one of the relatively backward races. Africans were characterised as

they were women they were still treated as ‘honorary’ men since unintelligent and instinctual creatures and they were also thought to they were not acting in the way expected of women. Consequently, possess a great deal of physical and sexual prowess.

they never penetrated beyond the image of African society as Western attitudes towards women were similarly negative in portrayed by men to the image of African society as experienced by nature. Stereotyped as the weaker sex, women were viewed as women, and so their preconceptions about the world and ways of _ passive, unintelligent, limited in interests and understanding, and as African women still continued to remain negative. For example, it such they were seen fit only for the subservient domestic roles of was generally believed among male and female anthropologists that | wives and mothers. women were more prone than men to religion, spirit possession and The convergence of these two stereotypes reveals an interesting witchcraft. Tremearne in a study entitled The Tailed Head Hunters of conclusion. On the one hand we have the concept of women as the Nigeria, found that the women were more prone to religion because subordinates of men and on the other Africans as the inferiors of

it sought to explain the good and bad fortunes which they Europeans. If we were to draw a rough scale of civilisation and experienced and could not articulate.2? Denise Talbot also explained arrange the various races of mankind according to their culture and

the high incidence of witchcraft accusations among women, then according to their sex, an obvious presumption that we would particularly the barren, aged and physically handicapped, as the only make would be that African women would be positioned at the way they could get even with their more fortunate counterparts.*° —_ base of the scale, since they hold the most subordinate position in Why did this prevailing belief persist? First of all in most societies both respects. This notion was in fact clearly conveyed by a dominant male ethos pervades the world of women to such an Winwoode Reade in the following passage: extent that their ideas about life, nature or the supernatural are It has been frequently said that one may estimate the civilisation

x their 1 if ; ; Loe

assumed to. be same men. Inofthis regard postulates Edwin Ardener in £;a; :; ;eeall of the a and country bywomen the position of its ...his putting essay on “Belief theas Problem Women’ that inferior because . ;op): exceptions aside, the of Africa arewomen very beings, of1:this dominant male virtues ethos, women may be at a affection disadvantage when ; ta:industry ;;— . 34 their very vis [sic] their and their

wishing to express matters of peculiar concern to them.*! They may those of well trained domestic animals.22

have different ideas or models about the world around them but

are

because they cannot articulate their perceptions in a form acceptable In sum, African women represented to western observers in the to men or to women who follow this male idiom, they will not be nineteenth century something of a demarcation line between being

encouraged to project their feelings verbally. Ethnographers human and animal. , |

brought up in the male idiom tend to be biased towards the kinds of

models provided by men rather than the kinds that women will Notes

provide. Therefore because women cannot externalise themselves

verbally, their ideas about the world around them tend to find —! Sue Ellen Jacobs, Women in Perspective: A Guide for Cross Cultural Studies,

expression in other symbolic forms like art, myth, ritual, etc. ; Chicago, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1974, p.viit. Because of this problem we find in most societies that women vas oon one Image of Arica British jeeas and Action, 1780who have the capacity to articulate their ideas verbally are classed as, » WNIVETSILY OF Wisconsin tress, 170% P. .

d | deviants. M re labelled ‘tch nd Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts vechiraft or evel as GeV i atry are ld “AT as dis CnES, A d Harvard University Press, (1877) 1964; for some discussions of the

witchcrait accusations as We Know, are IMpoOssibie to disprove, an concept of evolution, see Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, can have very serious implications for those individuals concerned. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, (1859) 1964; Witchcraft accusations may act as a way of expressing hostility or J.D.Y Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist, London, ageression when there is no other socially approved outlet. Heinemann, 1971; David R. Sills (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 5, Macmillan and Free Press, 1968, pp. 202-38. |

...6°.....=

Conctusion lusi 4 E.B.>Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols,p.London, Morgan, Ancient Society, 6-7. 1870.

As a subject of research, African women have always presented a Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1849

. . 1855, vol. 2, London, Frank Cass and Co. Ltd.,were (1857) not 1965,given; p. 569. problem tob western observers. recently, they h £ ‘on d hem h ch ; q A. G. Laing, TravelsUntil and Timannee, Kooranko and Soolima Countries, t e type ol attention due to u em because they were either viewe London, John Murray, 1825, p. 21.

as inaccessible or else categorised as an irrelevant and uninteresting 8 Winwoode Reade, Savage Africa, New York, Harper and Bros., 1864,

category. This bias appears to have distinct origins in the nineteenth p. 356. century, the period when Britain and other European nations were 9 Laing, Travels, p. 81.

Niara Sudarkasa/The ‘Status of Women’ in Indigenous African Societies ¢ 25

'0 Thomas Winterbottom, Sierra Leone: An Account of the Native Africans, ~~ OOOO London, J. Hatchard and J. Mawman, 1803, p. 99. . See for Sample A. G. Caine: Travels, p. 52. ’ NIARA SU DA RKASA

Winterbottom, Sierra Leone, p. 44. °

‘SH. Clapperton, Journal of a second expedition into the interior of Africa, from The ‘Statu S of Wome a In

7‘SJ. ve Bigit of Benin interbottom, Sierra Leone, p.to . Soccatoo, rondon, John Murray, 1829, p. 137. d . A f . . . eo Leighton-Wilson (Rev), Western Africa: Its History, Condition and In IBENOuUs rican societies ,

Prospects, London, Sampson Lawson and Co., 1856, p. 272. Oe

‘6 Gustav Nachtigal, Sahara and Sudan, vol. 4, A. G. B. Fisher and H. J. Reference |

Fisher (eds), London, C. Hurst and Co., (1870) 1971. Niara Sudarkasa, 1986, The Strength of Our Mothers: African

e1gphnton- W1ison, estern rica,-p. . . 1 —

. Nachtigal, aaa ane ea Ve. oO & African American Women & Families. Essays & Speeches

Co., 1921. |

OG. T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria London, Seeley, Service and Trenton NJ; Africa World Press, pp. 165-80 20 Edwin Smith and Andrew Dale, The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern

Rhodesia, 2 volumes, London, Macmillan, 1920, pp. 48-9. Introduction

71 Partridge, Cross River Natives, London, Hutchinson and Co., 1905, p. 3. 22 Northcote Thomas and Athol Joyce, Women of all Nations, London, Long before the women’s movement ushered in an era of renewed Cassell, 1908. concern with the ‘status of women’ in various societies and cultures, 23 Thomas and Joyce, Women of all Nations, p.43. a number of writers had addressed the question of the ‘status of

** Kenneth Pte he Mende of Sierra Leone, London, Routledge and women’ in various African societies (Perlman and Moal 1963).

Kegan Paul, 1951. Oo 7 _ Some writers characterized women in African societies as ‘jural Journal of African Studies, VI, 2, 1972, pp. 151-64. heir fath d th heir husbands. Oth d th ‘Madam Yoko: Ruler of the Kpa Mende Confederacy’, in Rosaldo, M. their fathers and then their Ausbands. Uther writers stressed the

© Carol Hoffer, “Mende and Sherbro Women in High Office’, Canadian inors’ for most of their lives, falling under the guardianship Giist of

Z., and Lamphere, L. (eds), Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford, independence of African women, noting their control over their

Stanford University Press, 1974, pp. 173-87. own lives and resources.

26 Hoffer, ‘Madam Yoko’, p.187. From my own readings on Africa and my research among the 27 Denise Amaury Talbot, Woman’s Mysteries of a Primitive People, London, Yoruba in Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, it appears that

0 Cassell and Co. Ltd., 1915. except in the highly Islamized areas, women in Sub-Saharan Africa,

59 aa oman s Mystenes, pp. 2~3. — more than in any other part of the world, were conspicuous in high Je . Tremearne, The Tailed Head Hunters of Nigeria, London, Seeley, places in the precolonial era. They were queen-mothers, queen-

Co., Ltd., 1912, p.pp. 198. tan wen female chief dfemale holders of other offices in mos most 30Service Talbot,and Woman’s Mysteries, 162-7. sisters, princesses, chiefs, an TS O » in 31 Edwin Ardener, ‘Belief and the Problem of Women’, in Shirley Ardener, towns and villages. There were the occasional female warriors; and (ed.), Perceiving Women, London, Malaby Press, 1975, pp. 1-15, also see 1 ON well known Case, that of the Lovedu, the supreme monarch

other papers in the same book. was a woman. Almost invariably, African women were also con-

32 Winwoode Reade, Savage Africa, p. 426. spicuous in the economic life of their societies, being involved in

, farming, trade, craftinproduction. | | | The purviews of male andor female African societies were often described as separate and complementary (Paulme 1963:116) . Yet,

| whenever most writers compared the lot of women and men in

, Africa, they ascribed to men a better situation, a higher status. Women were depicted as saddled with home and domesticity; men : were portrayed as enjoying the exhilaration of life in the outside world. For me, the pieces of the portrait did not ring true. Not only

, | was there an obvious distortion of the ethnographic reality - for,

indeed, women were outside the home as well as in it - but there

| women. .

was also something inappropriate about the notion that women and

men were everywhere related to each other in a hierarchical fashion, as was implied in the most common usage of the concept of status of

, , The status of women is, conceptual often used simultaneously in the two meanings that it has in social science. On the one hand, the term is used in Ralph Linton’s sense to mean the collection of

| rights and duties that attach to, and define, particular positions. According to this usage, status, which refers to a particular position

| , itself, contrasts with role, which refers to the behavior appropriate to | a given status (Linton 1936:113-31). On the other hand, the con, cept of the status of women is also used to refer to the placement of females relative to males in a dual-level hierarchy. In this sense, the

| | . term status connotes stratification and invites comparison with other systems of stratification. It was this notion of gender stratification

26 © Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

that seemed inappropriate for describing the relationships between _ status of women. It also suggests that Karen Sacks’ reformulation of females and males in most of the African societies I had studied. Engels (which, in any case, rests on a controversial interpretation of Martin K. Whyte concludes his cross-cultural survey, The Status the African data) also misses the mark by arguing that the critical, or of Women in Preindustrial Societies, with a similar observation. After key, variable in the subordination of women in class societies was discussing the status of women in the hierarchical sense used above, their confinement to production within the domestic sphere and Whyte’s first major finding is that there is a general absence of co- their exclusion from ‘social production for exchange’ (Sacks variation among the different indicators of status in this hierarchical 1974:207—22). I am suggesting here that various conditions, includusage. He notes that one cannot assume ‘that a favorable position ing most probably the development of private property and the for women in any particular area of social life will be related to market or exchange economy, created conditions where female and favorable positions in other areas.’ Similarly, there is no ‘best male became increasingly defined as unitary statuses that were indicator’ or ‘key variable’ that will yield an overall assessment of hierarchically related to one another. Such conditions appear to

the status of women relative to men (Whyte 1978:170). have been absent in various precolonial African societies,! and

More to the point of the present argument is Whyte’s observa- possibly in other parts of the world as well. tion that this lack of co-variation in the indicators of the status of In recent years, the postulation of separate, non-hierarchically women signals a difference between this area and other areas where _ related — and, therefore, complementary — domains for women and stratification is a known feature of the social structure. “This lack of men has been disputed by anthropologists who argued that women

association between different measures of the role and status of occupied the ‘domestic domain’ and men the ‘public domain’ and women relative to men still constitutes something of a puzzle... In that, because power and authority were vested in the public the study of stratification we ordinarily expect indicators of status at domain, women had de facto lower status than men (Rosaldo and

the individual level to be positively, although not perfectly, Lamphere 1974). It always seemed to me that in many African associated with one another.’ Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s societies a more appropriate conception (and by that I mean one distinction between the position of women and that of oppressed that makes sense of more of the realities of those societies) was to national or racial groups, Whyte concludes that ‘powerful factors’in recognize two domains, one occupied by men and another by all preindustrial societies lead to the perception by females and males women — both of which were internally ordered in a hierarchial : that women’s statuses differ from those of men but in a manner that fashion and both of which provided personnel for domestic and | does not imply the hierarchical relationship characteristic of those extradomestic (or public) activities (Marshall 1964. 1970). It also linking occupational and ethnic groups. Going further, Whyte states seemed that there was considerable overlap between the domestic that ‘the lack of association between different aspects of the role and and public domains in precolonial African societies (Sudarkasa

status of women relative to men is due largely to the fact that 1976a). |

women as a group (in preindustrial societies) are fundamentally In the remainder of this paper, I will examine the roles of women different from status groups and classes’ (Whyte 1978:176, 179-80). in families and descent groups, in the economy, and in the political This observation by Whyte seems to make sense of the data from process in West Africa. Potentially non-hierarchical models of most African societies. Although his cross-cultural study dispels a_ relationships between females and males are indicated and connumber of treasured notions about ‘the status of women,’ it points trasted with ones that are hierarchical. The data are used from stateto a critical research problem that should be pursued, namely, the _ less societies, such as the Igbo and Tallensi, and from preindustrial problem of determining the conditions under which women’s _ states, such as the Asante (Ashanti), the Nupe, and the Yoruba. relationship to men does take on the characteristics of a hierarchical Before turning to these data, it should be noted that there is no relationship. I should hasten to point out that, conceptually, this isa disputing the presence of gender stratification in contemporary Africa.

different problem from that which seeks to ascertain when an egali- Ester Boserup is the best known exponent of the view that the tarian relationship between the sexes gives way to a subordinate— forces of modernization and development have denied African superordinate relationship. The very concept of an egalitarian women equal access to formal education and undermined their relationship between women and men implies that female and male contribution to the political and economic arenas of their countries are unitary statuses that are measured, or ‘sized-up,’ one against the (Boserup 1970). Annie M.D. LeBeuf (1963) was one of the first

other in the societies described. writers to make this point and was the one who demonstrated it

Here, I will attempt to show that there are societies for which most conclusively for the political sphere. Other scholars have taken such a conceptualization does not accurately reflect the social and up and elaborated the same theme (see Mbilinyi 1972; Van Allen

ideological reality of the peoples concerned. The data gathered 1974; Smock 1977; Sudarkasa 1976b, 1982). In the ensuing from some African societies suggest a reason for this. As I will discussion, it should be borne in mind that gender stratification does attempt to demonstrate, in parts of Africa, female and male are not so exist in present-day Africa, and that many of our inferences about much unitary statuses, in Linton’s sense, as they are clusters of statuses, for precolonial Africa have had to be based on ethnographic studies which gender is only one of the defining characteristics. Women and men _ carried out after the onset of the colonial period.

might be hierarchically related to each other in one or more of their

reciprocal statuses, but not in others. Because contradiction, a8 Women in African kin groups

much as congruence, characterized the status-clusters termed female

and male, many African societies did not or could not consistently In West Africa, as in most parts of the continent, the three basic kin. stratify the categories one against the other, but, rather, codified the groups to which females and males belong are: (1) corporate uni-

ambiguities. | lineal descent groups, which we term lineages; (2) domiciled

The argument put forth in this article suggests that Engels anda extended families made up of groups of lineage members and their number of his adherents may have missed the mark in arguing that spouses and dependent children; and (3) conjugally-based family private property and production for exchange served to lower the units that are subdivisions of the extended family and within which

Niara Sudarkasa/The ‘Status of Women’ in Indigenous African Societies ¢ 27

procreation and primary responsibilities for socialization rest African families through the prism of the nuclear family has been (Rattray 1929; Portes & Evans-Pritchard 1940; Nadel 1942; Busia the insistence on breaking down polygynous families into ‘constit1951; Marshall 1964). Within their lineages, African women have — uent nuclear families,’ with a resulting distortion of the statuses and rights and responsibilities toward their kinsmen and kinswomen_ roles of women as mothers, wives and co-wives (Sudarkasa 1980, that are independent of men. As far as their responsibilities are con- 1981).

cerned, female members of the lineage are expected to meet certain By focusing on the roles of women as wives, scholars have obligations in the same way that males are. For example, women characterized women as having ‘low’ status because of their offer material assistance to their sisters and brothers and other kin; obligations and deference to their husbands. Women as wives do in they also do their part (that is, they make the appropriate financial fact exhibit overt signals of deference to their husbands in both or material outlay) at the time of important rites of passage such as _ patrilineal and matrilineal societies. Yet, in their other kinship roles, naming-ceremonies, marriages, and funerals. Within patrilineages, especially those of mother, grandmother or senior kinswoman (such

women, as father’s sisters, sisters, and daughters, generally do not as elder sister, or mother’s or father’s sister), women are the hold formal leadership positions. However, they do take part in recipients of deference from men as well as women, and they have most discussions of lineage affairs and the more advanced in age considerable power and authority over subordinate kin, both male they are, the more influence they wield. In matrilineages, some and female. women hold leadership positions as mothers, sisters and daughters, Western students of African societies have not only focused

and exercise authority equivalent to that of men. unduly on the husband-wife relationship in describing African

In both partilineages and matrilineages, interpersonal relations kinship, they have also sought to define that conjugal relationship in on a daily basis tend to be regulated by seniority as determined by terms of parameters found in Western societies. This has led to a order of birth rather than gender. Hence, senior sisters outrank misrepresentation of the essence and implications of what is generally junior brothers. Where males prostrate before their elders, they do called ‘woman-to-woman’ marriage. This complex institution

so for females as well as males. cannot be described at length here, but I would make the following

In the extended family, women occupy roles defined by consan- two observations. First, the institution of ‘woman-to-woman guinity, as well as conjugality. They are mothers and daughters, as marriage’ signifies most of all that male gender is not the sole basis well as wives and co-wives. The position of ‘wife’ refers not only to for recruitment to the ‘husband’ role in Africa; hence, the authority the conjugal relationship to a husband, but also to the affinal (or in- that attaches to the husband role is not gender-specific. Second, law) relationship to all members — female as well as male — of the ‘woman-to-woman marriage’ must be understood in the context of husband’s compound and lineage. Among the Yoruba, for example, the meaning of the concepts of ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ in African female members of a lineage refer to their brothers’ wives as their societies, not in Western societies. In African societies, the term own ‘wives,’ a formulation which signals that certain reciprocal wife has two basic referents: (1) a female married to a given male (or responsibilities and behavior associated with the ‘spousal’ relation- female), and (2) a female married into a given compound or lineage.

ship are observed by the women in dealing with each other. Thus, for example, among the Yoruba, a husband refers to his If there is one thing that is conspicuous in Western scholarship spouse as ‘wife’, and each of his wives refers to her co-wife as ‘wife’ on ‘the status of women’ in Africa (and elsewhere in the world), it or ‘mate’. As noted earlier, female as well as male members of the is the tendency to assess that status only in relation to the conjugal lineage refer to the in-marrying spouses as their ‘wives’. The term roles of wife or co-wife. Interestingly, in Whyte’s cross-cultural husband refers specifically to a woman’s spouse, but also generally to study of the status of women in ninety-three societies, of the the males (and females) in her husband’s lineage. Again, among the twenty-seven indicators of status as related to gender and the family, Yoruba, a woman refers to her own spouse and (in certain contexts) twenty (74 per cent) of the variables had to do specifically with to his lineage members — including her own children — by the term behavior or rights within or related to the conjugal (i.e. marital) ‘husband’.

relationship. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the focus on Given these usages, it is clear that the terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ women’s conjugal roles to the near exclusion of analyses of their connote certain clusters of conjugal and broader affinal (i.e. in-law) consanguineal roles derives from the obsession of Western scholars relations. In ‘woman-to-woman marriage’ there are certain jural with analyzing all types of family organization from the perspective _ relations and obligations between the women. As other writers have of the nuclear family and its conjugally-based core (Sudarkasa 1980, noted, there is no sexual dimension to the relationship between the

1981). women, as there would be in the case of heterosexual conjugal In other words, the emphasis on women as wives derives from unions (Agbasegbe 1975; O’Brien 1977).

an attempt to analyze kinship in Africa and elsewhere from the If the conceptions of conjugal relations in Africa were not perspective of Western kinship, using paradigms appropriate to circumscribed by concepts common in the West, it would be Western kin groups. Extended families, which were the normal co- appreciated that the unifying factor in the various forms of womanresidential form of the family in indigenous African societies, were to-woman marriage is that everywhere it serves a procreative

(and are) built around lineages that are based on consanguineal function, either on behalf of the female ‘husband’ herself or on kinship. By contrast, nuclear families, which are built around behalf of her male spouse or male kinsman. Woman-to-woman conjugal pairs (i.e. married couples), were the normal (or at least the marriage is intended to produce children who belong to the female ideal) co-residential family in Western societies. In Africa, conjugally- husband, to her male spouse, or to another male in her family or based families were (and are) sub-groups within extended families, lineage. Because marriage is the institution and the idiom through not the primary groups around which extended families were built. which procreation is legitimated in Africa, it must be entered into

Failure to recognize this difference between Western nuclear by women (just as by men) who want to acquire rights and families and African conjugal families has led to misrepresentations authority over a woman’s childbearing capacity (see also LeBeuf of many aspects of African kinship. One consequence of analyzing 1963). The existence of woman-to-woman marriage in Africa is

28 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa 7 consistent with a general de-emphasis on gender and an emphasis making in patrilineages. Their participation in the affairs of their on seniority and personal standing (usually but not always deter- affinal compounds, where married women in patrilineal societies mined by wealth) in recruitment to positions of authority. _ lived most of their adult lives, was channeled through an organizaThis brief discussion of African families and kin groups indicates tional structure in which women were ranked by seniority, that male gender predictably calls forth deferential behavior only according to the order of their marriage into the group. within the conjugal relationship. The case of woman-to-woman To answer the question of whether women’s participation in the marriage demonstrates, however, that male gender does not _ political process should be conceptualized as subordinate to that of

exclusively determine entry into the husband role, which is the men, I would propose that one examine the kind of political more authoritative of the two conjugal roles. Even though patterns decisions and activities in which women were involved and ask of deference underscore the subordination of the wife’s role, as will from what kind they were excluded. Throughout most of West be noted during the discussion of women’s economic roles, the Africa, women controlled their own worlds. For example, they had | ‘decision-making process and control over resources within the trade and craft guilds, and they spoke on matters of taxation and on conjugal relationship in many West African societies (including the maintenance of public facilities (such as markets, roads, wells, those of the Yoruba, Igbo, Ashanti, and Nupe) reveal parallel and and streams). They also testified on their own behalf in any court or complementary control by husbands and wives. In Africa’s consan- hearing. Thus, in internal political affairs, women were generally suineal kin groups, of which lineages are the most important, as I consulted and had channels through which they were represented. have indicated, seniority and personal attributes (especially accumu- External affairs were largely in the hands of men, but in any crisis, lated resources) rather than gender, serve as the primary indicators such as war, women were always involved - minimally as suppliers

of status in the hierarchical sense. of rations for troops but in some instances as leaders of armies and as

financiers of campaigns (Paulme 1963; Uchendu 1965; Awe 1977;

Women in the political process in indigenous African societies Aidoo 1981). . . The question then arises: from what political processes were Any investigation of women in the political process in precolonial women excluded? They could not participate in the male secret Africa should begin with the excellent article by Annie Lebeuf in societies that were important in the political process in some Denise Paulme’s Women of Tropical Africa (1963). Here I only want Western African States. They were also excluded from certain to highlight certain facts that might aid in addressing the question of councils of chiefs, although this was rare. Much more common was whether or not the relationship of females and males within the representation on the council by one or more of the women who political domain is most appropriately conceptualized as a hierar- headed the hierarchy of women chiefs. In all cases, however, it

chical one. , seems that women were consulted on most governmental affairs.

Africa is noted for the presence of women in very high positions Their participation through their spokespersons paralleled the in the formal governmental structure (Lebeuf 1963; Rosaldo 1974; participation of males through theirs. And of course in cases in Awe 1977, Aidoo 1981). Africa is also noted for having parallel which the chief rulers were female and male (for example, the chieftaincies, one line made up of males, the other of females. One queen-mother and monarch-son), the complementarity of the way of interpreting these facts has been to dismiss the female relationship between the sexes was symbolized and codified in the

chieftaincies as simply women controlling women. (After all, if highest offices of the land (Aidoo 1981). women are subordinate anyway, of what significance 1s it that they |

have chieftaincies or sodalities among themselves?) Likewise, the The involvement of women in production and distribution in

presence of women at the highest levels of indigenous government African societies | a

has been dismissed as an instance of women distinguishing them- , | |

selves individually by entering the ‘public world of men’ (Rosaldo It 1s well known that African women were farmers, traders, and 1974). I would suggest that a formulation which makes an a priori crafts producers in different parts of the continent. It is equally well judgement that any participation of women in the public sphere documented that their economic roles were at once public and represents entry into the world of men simply begs the question. For private. Women worked outside the home in order to meet the in West Africa, the ‘public domain’ was not conceptualized as ‘the responsibilities placed upon them in their roles as mothers, wives, world of men.’ Rather, the public domain was one in which both - sisters, daughters, members of guilds, chiefs, or citizens (Sudarkasa sexes were recognized as having important roles to play (Sudarkasa 1976a). In the economic sphere, more than in any other, it is easy to

1976a). show that women’s activities were complementary to those of men

Indeed, the positing of distinct public and domestic domains and that women producers. and traders were not subordinate to | does not hold true for precolonial West Africa The distinction is men. In most African societies, as elsewhere, the division of labor also not very useful for analyzing the rest of the continent. As many along gender lines promoted a reciprocity of effort. If men were writers on African political structure have shown, even in indige- farmers, women were food processors and traders. Where women nous States in which monarchs were elevated to statuses ‘removed and men were engaged in the same productive activity (such as from their kin groups,’ the lineage (and the compound) remained farming or weaving), they produced different items. Among the important aspects of political organization in all localities where Igbo, females and males grew different crops; among the Yoruba, they existed (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940). Compounds were the female and male weavers produced different types. of cloth on generally the courts of first resort and the bases for mobilizing different types of looms. Where both females and males traded, they people for public works and public services; lineages were the units usually handled different commodity lines. Normally, too, men through which the land was allocated and were the repository of predominated in long-distance trade, and women were predomititles to offices in many African societies.* Women held formal nant in local markets. I have never heard of an indigenous African leadership roles in matrilineages and were influential in decision- society in which differential value was attached to the labor of

: Niara Sudarkasa/The ‘Status of Women’ in Indigenous African Societies ¢ 29 women and men working in the same line or in which women and This effort to recast the study of the statuses and roles of women men were differentially compensated or rewarded for the products in indigenous precolonial African societies has important implica-

of their labor. tions for the study of the roles that the descendants of African

In the management and disposal of their incomes, the activities women came to play in the American context. Over the past two of African women and men also were separate but coordinated. decades, most historians of Blacks in America have come to accept Within the conjugal family unit, women and men had different the premises that in order to understand that history, one must responsibilities that were met from the proceeds of their separate understand the implications of saying it was ‘enslaved Africans,’ economic pursuits. For example, a husband might be primarily rather than ‘slaves,’ who came to these shores in chains. The former responsible for the construction and upkeep of the home and the implies that these Africans brought with them many of the nonprovision of staple foods, while each wife assumed responsibility for material aspects of their cultures — 1.e., their beliefs and values; nonstaple foods and the daily needs of her children (Sudarkasa varying degrees of knowledge of their political, economic, techno-

1973). logical, religious, artistic, recreational, and familial organization; and

The separate management of parts of what Westerners might codes governing interpersonal behavior between such societal consider a ‘common family purse’ definitely appeared to be a_ groupings as chiefs and citizenry, old and young, and female and response to a situation in which the members of conjugal units had male. independent obligations to relatives and others outside these groups. In order to understand fully the roles that Black women came to However, it was also a way of minimizing the risks involved in play in America, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the tradiexpending resources by disbursing them among potentially bene- tion of female independence and responsibility within the family ficial investment options, as perceived from the vantage point of the and wider kin groups in Africa. It is also necessary to understand the

different persons concerned (Marshall 1964, Sudarkasa 1973, tradition of female productivity and leadership outside the home, in

1976a). , the public domain in African societies. It is understood, of course, that the context of slavery did not permit the exact replication of

Implications for future research on African and pincan Patterns, but the forms of behavior that did emerge had

African-American women A brief reference to Black American women’s roles in three I have tried to show that a ‘neutral’ complementarity rather than spheres will suffice to indicate the direction which research into the subordination and superordination more accurately describes the linkage with Africa might take. I refer to women’s activities as relationship between certain female and male roles in various leaders on the plantations during slavery and in their communities precolonial African societies. In the process, I have argued that the in later periods; as workers helping to provide economic support for preconceived notion of a unitary status for female and male, their families; and as key figures in the intergenerational kinship respectively, is probably what led many students of African societies units that formed (and still form) the core of many Black families.

to paint such misleading pictures of the status of African women. Much has been written about the heroism of women such as The data presented in this brief discussion are only an indication Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Precisely because of their of those that must be considered in any serious research into the extraordinary deeds, they are portrayed as being unique among issues raised here. I have always been intrigued by what appear to be Black women. It would seem, however, that these are but the most linguistic clues into the ‘neutrality’ of gender in many African famous of the Black female leaders whose assumption of their roles societies. The absence of gender in the pronouns of many African came out of a tradition in which women were always among the languages and the interchangeability of first names among females leaders in a community. A reassessment of the roles of the so-called and males strike me as possibly related to a societal de-emphasis on Mammies in the Big House; of the elderly women who looked after gender as a designation for behavior. Many other areas of traditional children on the plantation while younger people worked in the culture, including personal dress and adornment, religious cere- fields; of women who planned escapes and insurrections; and of monials, and intra-gender patterns of comportment, suggest that female religious leaders should reveal that there was a compleAfricans often de-emphasize gender as compared with seniority and mentarity and parallelism between the historical roles of African-

other indicators of status. American male and female leaders that bore a clear relationship to

Only brief mention can be made of the fact that in contem- what had always existed in Africa. porary Africa, the relationship between women and men has moved The roles of African-American women in the economic sphere decidedly in the direction of a hierarchical one. In understanding have long been remarked upon, but most of the analyses have the change in the nature of these relationships from the precolonial, presumed that these women worked outside the home because of preindustrial context to the present, it is important that we not economic necessity, rather than because of choice or tradition. In presume that the change was from an egalitarian relationship to a_ other words, the presumption of the literature seems to be that nonegalitarian one. Rather, it has been suggested that the domains where possible, Black women, like their white counterparts before of women and men in many indigenous African societies should not the era of ‘women’s liberation,’ would have chosen the role of be conceptualized in terms of ranking at all (which is implied in the housewife and mother over that of working wife and mother. concept of egalitarianism because each concept entails its opposite). The present analysis suggests that we should take another look at It is suggested that the changes that occurred with the onset of the phenomenon of Black women in the world of work. We need colonialism (and capitalism, its economic correlate) were ones that to examine the continuities that this represents with African tradicreated hierarchical as opposed to complementary relations between tions where women were farmers, craftswomen, and entrepreneurs

the sexes. It is therefore appropriate in the modern context to par excellence. It is noteworthy that in Africa, unlike Europe, investigate causes and characteristics of the status of women in women of privileged statuses (such as the kings’ or chiefs’ wives,

Africa. | daughters, sisters, and mothers) were not removed from the world

30 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

of work. On the contrary, their rank in society often conferred Terborg-Penn, ef al., eds. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, special access to certain economic activities. For example, among 1987 and in the 2nd ed. 1996. It is reprinted here, with permission, the Yoruba, the kings’ wives were the premier long-distance female from N. Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our Mothers. Trenton, NJ: Africa

traders, as was remarked upon by some of the first European visitors oe, ress, 1996. lonial’ ref b od before the mid-to-I

; _ . nineteenth century from which European colonization is conventionally

to Yoruba kingdoms in the nineteenth century (see Marshall 1964). ere the term. “precolonia’ rerers fo the penod perore Ene merous Given these traditions, one might exp ect that middle- or upper- dated. Some information concerning African social life in precolonial class status would not necessarily incline Black women to prefer a times is gleaned from contemporaneous written sources, but most life of relative leisure to that of the workday world. In other words, information comes from anthropological re-constructions of ‘traditional these women would not necessarily choose the relative confine- life,’ using oral history and ethnographic techniques. Due allowance ment of the domestic domain over the public world of work. What must be made for possible distortions in these ethnographies, but for the we know about Black women entrepreneurs and professionals in most part they are all we have to rely on for descriptions of Africa's

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that regardless _, sociocultural past. _ . _

of socioeconomic status, African-American women were :more rneOrganization of the main points thisAfrica’ author makes in “Female Employment amily in West (Sudarkasa 1976a, reprinted and in likely to be employed outside the home than were their Euro- Steady 1981) is that there was considerable overlap between the ‘public’

American counterparts. a and ‘domestic’ domains in Africa and elsewhere in the precolonial Finally, I would suggest that a re-examination of the statuses and period. It is argued that the growth of the nation-state and the associated roles of women and men in African kin groups can help to unravel __ spread of the ‘market economy,’ eroded much of the traditional overlap

the antecedents of a number of patterns of African-American between the domestic and public spheres in the political and economic kinship that emerged in the context of slavery and evolved into the —_—_ arenas. (See Sudarkasa, reprinted in Steady, 1981, especially pp. 51-55).

forms of family organization we see today. For example, the importance of age and seniority in conferring authority on African Ref females, as well as males, helps to explain the authoritative roles of ererences elderly women, as well as elderly men in African-American families. Agbasegbe, Bamidele [Bamidele Demerson], ‘Is There Marriage between

The African emphasis on consanguinity, as opposed to conjugality, Women in Africa?’ in J. S. Williams, et al. (eds), Sociological Research helps to explain much of Black American kinship, including, for Symposium, V. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University

example, the formation of households around two — or three — __ Department of Sociology, 1975. -

generational clusters of ‘blood relatives’ (such as a woman and her Aidoo, Agnes Akosua, “Asante Queen Mothers in Government and Politics

; : ; in the Nineteenth Century’, in Filomina Steady (ed.), The Black Woman

;;.:V;,

adult daughters and their children). The consanguineal focus also Cross-Culturally. Cambridge. MA: Schenkman Publishine Co. Inc

helps to explain the importance of the trans-residential extended 1981. y o 5 Oe family networks that characterized Black family organization in the Awe, Bolanle, “The Iyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political System’, in past and still remain in some areas today. The special obligations of Alice Schlegel (ed.), Sexual Stratification: A Cross Cultural View. New mutual assistance and support that exist between sisters, regardless of York: Columbia University Press, 1977. their marital statuses; as well as the tendency, until recently, for Boserup, Ester, Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: Allen &

~ unmarried Black women with children to reside with their ‘blood’ . Unwin, 1970. a. oe

relatives rather than on their own, are patterns that have their roots Busia, ie et orion of the. sony Pres Modern Political System of the 8h family structures and preferred behavior (Sudarkasa 1980, Fortes, Meyer and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political Systems.

Much work remains to be done before we can confidently traceepeur, 7 oxo Oxtord 1 ress Politicalrganization Oreanizati oO £ fannie, University e ole O omen in a. theheFolitica the multifaceted connections between African and African- African Societies’, in Denise Paulme (ed.), [H.M. Waeht. trans.], American behavioral patterns, including those associated with the Women of Tropical Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. roles and statuses of women in their families and communities. The Linton, Ralph, The Study of Man. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. intention of this brief review of some of the possible linkages is to Marshall, Gloria A. [Niara Sudarkasa], Women, Trade and the Yoruba Family.

point to areas where research might be fruitfully pursued. I have (Ph.D. Dissertation) New York: Columbia University, Department of

suggested that many of the activities and attributes that have been pnthrop epee 64. - Field Work in a Yoruba C vin P

; ; _ olde (ed.), Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences. Chicago:

taken to be characteristic of Black women in America have their =~ Cok onic of Women: Picid WV Ork in a yoruba —ommiunity’, 1p © essy roots 1n Africa. These characteristics 7” leadership in the community, Aldine Press, 1970. 2nd edn, Berkeley: University of California Press,

as well as in the home; prominence in the world of work; 1986. Also in N. Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our Mothers. Trenton, NJ: independence and pride in womanhood — are usually pointed to as Africa World Press, 1996. evidence of the strength of Black American women. What I have Mbilinyi, Marjorie, ‘The ‘New Woman’ and Traditional Norms in tried to show in this paper is that this strength had its roots in Tanzania’, Journal of Modern African Studies 10, 1 (1972): 57-72. African societies where women were literally expected to ‘shoulder Nadel, S.F., A Black Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the

their own burdens’ and where, in many contexts, respect and International African Institute, 1942. oy. ,

re sponsibility as well as right 5 and privileges were accorded O’Brien, Denise, ‘Female Husbands in Southern Bantu Societies’, in Alice

° olumbDla Universi ress, .

without reference to gender , sche (ee): Sexual Stratification: A Cross Cultural View. New York: Paulme, Denise (ed) (HM. Wright, trans.| Women of Tropical Africa.

Notes Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Perlman, M., and M. P. Moal, ‘Analytical Bibliography’, in Denise Paulme * “The “Status of Women” in Indigenous African Societies’ was first (ed.) [H.M. Wright, trans.], Women of Tropical Africa. Berkeley: published in Feminist Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 1986. An expanded University of California Press, 1963. version was published in Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, R. Rattray, R. S., Ashanti Law and Constitution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929.

Obioma Nnaemeka/Mapping African Feminisms ¢ 31

Rosaldo, Michelle, ‘Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Over] OT view’, in M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture, and Society. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University cong 1974. O B | O M A N N A E M E K A

Rosaldo, Michelle and Louise Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society. ° ° * es

Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974. Mappl N 2 Afr ICan Fem INISMs

Sacks, Karen, ‘Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, §=____>_SSSSsSSsSSsSSeee and Private Property’, in: Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere p eference

(eds), Women, Culture, and Society. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford ; ; ; ; 5 in Press, 1974. Adapted version of ‘Introduction: ReadingUniversity the Rainbow’,

Smock, Audrey, ‘The Impact of Modernization on Women’s Position in Obioma Nnaemeka (ed.) (1998), Sisterhood, Feminisms & Power: the Family in Ghana’, in Alice Schlegel (ed.), Sexual Stratification: A From Africa to the Diaspora, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Cross-Cultural View. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Steady, Filomina Chioma (ed.), The Black Women Cross-Culturally. Cam-_ | :

bridge, Mass., Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1981. ;

Sudarkasa, Niara, Where Women Work: A Stiedy “of Yoruba Women in the Ro enna Women of the diab World wore stop to listen.

Marketplace and in the Home. Anthropological Papers, No. 53. Ann , , Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1973. ; ; ; — ‘Female Employment and. Family Oroanization in West Africa.’ In In Guinea-Bissau we say that women have to fight against two Dorothy McGuigan (ed.), New Research on Women and Sex Roles. Ann colonialisms. One of the Portuguese, the other of men.

Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Continuing Education of — Carmen Pereira in Stephanie Urdang, A Revolution within a Women, 1976a. Reprinted in Filomina Steady (ed.), The Black Woman Revolution, 1973

rica World Press, ; : ; -_

Cross-Culturally. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., Inc.,

we and n » Sadana The Strength of Our Mothers.Trenton, NJ: I believe that a full-fledged feminism can emerge in Africa only — ‘The Effects of 20th Century Social Change, Especially Migration, on when th ere 1S a erect between activism and the academy. Women of West Africa,’ in P. Paylore and R. Harvey (eds), West Africa — Olabisi Aina in Obioma Nnaemeka (ed.), Sisterhood, Feminisms, 1976 Conference Proceedings. Tucson: University of Arizona. 1976. Also and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, 1998 in N. Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our Mothers.

— ‘African and African American Family Structure.’ The Black Scholar 12, African women’s lives are a balancing act indeed. Fighting on all

2, November/December 1980. Reprinted in Johnnetta B. Cole (ed.) fronts to contend with external and internal forces, bridge the Anthropology for the Eighties. New York: The Free Press, 1982, and fissures between public and private, link home and abroad and Anthropology for the Nineties. New York: The Free Press, 1991. Alsoin jyaintain sanity through it all requires great strength and imagina-

Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our Mothers. ; ; ; tion. with American Carmen PereiraFamily that African —~Organization’, ‘Interpreting the African Heritage inI concur African , ; women ; ae are in Harriette P. McAdoo (ed.), Black Families, Beverly [fighting] against two colonialisms’ — that IS, internally induced Hills, CA: Sage Publishing, Co., 1981 and 1988 [2nd edn]. Also in N. patriarchal structures and externally engineered imperialistic con-

Sudarkasa, The Strength of Our Mothers. texts. In this day and age of globalization with massive population

— ‘Sex Roles, Education, and Development in Africa.’ Anthropology and and cultural flows that are increasingly blurring the line between the Education Quarterly XIII, 3, George Bond (ed.), Fall 1982. Revised as inside and the outside, African women do not have the luxury of ‘Gender Roles, Education and Development in Africa’, in N Sudarkasa, contending with a distinct outside and grappling with a clear-cut

The Strength of Our Mothers. a inside. The internal and the external are ever evolving, always

, Uchendv, wictor, The ie of South-Eastern Nigeria. New York: Holt, Rine- contaminated and contested, mutually creating and recreating each Van Allen, Judith, ‘Women in Africa: Modernization Means More Depen- other. The complex NEXUS of transformations and shifts makes the

dency.’ Center Magazine [Santa Barbara, CA] 1974. balancing act more difficult and precarious. -

Whyte, Martin K., The Status of Women in Preindustrial Societies. Princeton, This essay, based on an engagement with Sisterhood, Feminisms,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, will address three broad areas:

(1) feminist/womanist debates, (2) research/documentation questions, and (3) Africa/African Diaspora relationships. Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power engages. the conflicts in feminism, among other issues. It focuses less on the transcending of difference and | more on the challenges of living with contradictions; less on the obliteration of difference (an impossible task, I might add) and more

on allowing difference to be and in its being create the power that energizes becoming. To speak of feminism in Africa is to speak of

| feminisms in the plural within Africa and between Africa and other , continents in recognition of the multiplicity of perspectives. As my ancestors observed: adiro akwu ofu ebe enene nmanwu (one does not , , stand in one spot to watch a masquerade, masquerade). Like the dancing vantage points shift and one must shift with them to

maximize benefits. Exploring the relationship among sisterhood, feminisms, and power, 1s to argue for the power of sisterhood that is

anchored in recognizing and respecting pluralism. Such a perspec-

tive underscores the power of African women to work with

| patriarchal/cultural structures that are liberating and ennobling

32 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa’

while challenging those that are limiting and debilitating. It focuses disagreement and resistance — radical feminism, motherhood, on what African women are doing with/to patriarchal/cultural language, sexuality, priorities, (gender) separatism, and universalism structures but keeps in view the ever-pervasive litany (particularly — that I now turn. in Women’s Studies) of what patriarchy is doing to African women. First, resistance is raised against radical feminism — African Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power evokes the power and agency, not feminism is not radical feminism. Second, resistance is directed the paralysis, of African women; it accounts for their triumphs toward radical feminism’s stridency against motherhood — African

amidst obstacles without underestimating the gravity of the feminism neither demotes/abandons motherhood nor dismisses impediments or failing to advocate vigorously for their removal. maternal politics as non-feminist or unfeminist politics. Third, the To acknowledge diverse positions on feminism is to raise a language of feminist engagement in Africa (collaborate, negotiate,

crucial question: Can one be a feminist in isolation? African compromise) runs counter to the language of Western feminist women’s claims about feminism call into question the theory/praxis scholarship and engagement (challenge, disrupt, deconstruct, blow dichotomy in feminist engagement. They interrogate the essential- apart, etc.). African feminism challenges through negotiation and ism of home politics, the exclusions of standpoint intransigence, and compromise. Fourth, there is resistance to Western feminism’s the potential (or real) chaos of postmodernist indeterminacy; they inordinate and unrelenting emphasis on sexuality that determines, shatter the comfort of home politics to allow the unfolding of a true for example, the nature, tone, spectacle, and overall modus operandi political gesture — an engagement in the Sartrean sense of the word. It of Western feminist insurgency against female circumcision in seems to me that for African women, to be or think feminist is to act Africa and the Arab world.°

feminist. Fifth, there are disagreements between African feminism and The feminist spirit that pervades the African continent is so Western feminism over priorities. The much bandied about complex and diffused that it is intractable. Not too long ago, a intersection of class, race, sexual orientation, and so forth, in

colleague asked me to provide a framework for African feminism as Western feminist discourse does not ring with the same urgency for articulated by African feminists. My off-the-cuff response was: ‘the most African women for whom other basic issues of everyday life majority of African women are not hung up on “articulating their are intersecting in most oppressive ways. This is not to say that feminism”; they just do it.”! In my view, it is what they do and how issues of race and class are not important to African women in the they do it that provide the ‘framework’; the ‘framework’ is not continent (not in the face of racial conflicts from Algeria and Kenya carried to the theater of action as a definitional tool. The dynamism to Zimbabwe [ex-Rhodesia] and South Africa). Rather, I argue that of the theater of action with its shifting patterns makes the feminist African women see and address such issues as they configure in spirit/engagement effervescent and exciting but also intractable and and relate to their own lives and immediate surroundings. To go

difficult to name. Attempts to mold ‘African feminism’ into an to a remote village in Africa and round up women who have no easily digestible ball of pounded yam not only raise definitional clean water to drink, no food to eat, and have never seen a questions but also create difficulties for drawing organizational different race of humans, and theorize/preach to them the feminist

parameters and unpacking complex modes of engagement. framework of intersection of race, class, etc., is nothing but

In this regard, it will be more accurate to argue not in terms ofa feminism in futility. Such an intervention can have meaning only -monolith (African feminism) but rather in the context of a pluralism when the women are convinced that they lack food and clean (African feminisms) that captures the fluidity and dynamism of the water because they belong to a particular category of humans.‘ different cultural imperatives, historical forces, and localized realities Sixth, African feminism resists the exclusion of men from women’s

conditioning women’s activism/movements in Africa — from the issues; on the contrary, it invites men as partners in problem

indigenous variants to the state-sponsored configurations in the | solving and social change.°

postcolonial era.? The inscription of feminisms in the title of this Finally, there is resistance to the universalization of Western essay underscores the heterogeneity of African feminist thinking and notions and concepts. One occurrence in Africa that has captured engagement as manifested in strategies and approaches that are the Western feminist imagination is the 1929 Igbo Women’s War.

sometimes complementary and supportive, and sometimes com- The different interpretations of the war are instructive. Some | peting and adversarial. The differences and conflicts among African feminist scholars who claim human rights as a feminist issue dismiss feminists notwithstanding, there exist common features and shared the Igbo Women’s War as a non-feminist uprising because, accord-

beliefs that undergird their work. It is in recognition of this ing to them, it was motivated not by the demand for gender commonality and for convenience that I will, in this instance, use equality but by economic considerations. However, it is important the term in the singular — African feminism. It is also for conve- to recall that when the Igbo woman who started the uprising was nience that an English word — feminism — is used to capture the asked the number of people and livestock in her compound by the intractable spirit of an engagement that speaks literally thousands of colonial agent who came to her home, she shouted back at him to different languages across the African continent. The argument for go and count his own people — and the rest is history. Such a the pluralism of African feminism is equally applicable to Western question in an environment where the counting of human beings 1s feminism although one can glean common features in Western taboo constitutes a human rights violation (the woman felt that her

feminisms against which African feminisms argue. humanity was violated). That this culturally unacceptable Feminist attempts to tame and name the feminist spirit in Africa interrogation may not qualify for a Western notion of human rights

fail to define African feminism on its own terms; instead, they violation does not make it less so for this woman. If the war has define it in the context of Western feminism. Such a contextualiza- elements of resistance to human rights violation as well as tion of African feminism argues in effect that African feminism is affirmation of cultural nationalism in the eyes of the people who

what Western feminism is not. In other words, that African fought it, then we have to rethink not only the contours and — feminism establishes its identity through its resistance — it is because naming of human rights, in general, but also the feminist/nonit resists. It is to the most recurrent and contentious areas of feminist debate about the Igbo Women’s War.°®

| Obioma Nnaemeka/Mapping African Feminisms ¢ 33

Such resistances and disagreements contribute to defining and Aina (1998) to claim that feminism in Africa is still in its infancy.

explaining African feminism. However, what is crucial is how the Others interrogate the relationship between feminism and definitions and explanations are contextualized. To meaningfully Africa/African women through subversive readings that unpack explain African feminism, it is not to Western feminism but rather dichotomies (urban/rural, male/female, powerful/powerless, and so to the African environment that one must refer. African feminism is forth) and emphasize affinities and border crossings. For example,

not reactive; it is proactive. It has a life of its own that is rooted in Sofola (1998) brings up for scrutiny the powerful/powerless the African environment. Its uniqueness emanates from the cultural paradigm that authorizes the masculinization of power in Western and philosophical specificity of its provenance. African feminism’s feminist discourse. Using what she terms ‘dewomanization,’ Sofola valorization of motherhood and respect for maternal politics should attempts to account for the more marginalized and less relevant

not be pitted against the demotion of motherhood/maternal politics position of the so-called modern African woman. So, while by radical feminism in the West, rather they should be investigated Western feminist discourse articulates disempowerment in the in the context of their place and importance in the African environ- context of ‘emasculation,’ Sofola responds to the same process with ment. The same argument goes for the language issue raised above. a terminology, “dewomanization,’ that locates power and agency in The language of African feminism is less a response to the language womanhood: ‘[O]ne is terribly disturbed by what has become of the of Western feminism and more a manifestation of the characteristics African women of today, particularly those whose psyche has been

(balance, connectedness, reciprocity, compromise, etc.) of the severely damaged in the process of acquiring Western education African worldview as demonstrated in the encoding in many African with its philosophy of gender bias. The first level of damage was languages of gender-neutral third person pronouns as well as words done when the African female lines of authority and socio-political whose etymologies are mindful of gender neutrality and balance: power were destroyed and completely eliminated by the foreign

; ; Europeanisand Arab male-centered systems of authority The female as ani,appendage evident inwas thethe English language. P = yand ‘yand , ; : governance. That first blow to our psyche The very words ‘woman’ and ‘female’ deriveoffrom masculine -(1998: aethe ;, _ beginning of the de-womanization African womanhood’ nouns — female, woman. And when it61).isEqually necessary to specify her ;reading , ; of the revealing is Sofola’s subversive at all, the terms; man and human are dichotomy, used to referparticularly to both genders. - gy: ;of: female tradition/modernity the location On the contrary, in African languages, to use Igbo and paradigm: Yoruba ; oe 8, ; power in the languages as examples, a common denominator is used in the

constitution of words that represent male and female. For In light of the relevance, power and effectiveness of the illiterate, example, in Igbo, the word for child, nwa, is used as a root word ‘traditional’ African women, one wonders why the Western — nwa-oke, male; nwa-anyi, female. In Yoruba, it is rin — okunrin educated African women of the new order are ineffective, (the type that is male), obirin (the type that is female). And to always timidly and indecisively stepping behind the men and _ refer to both genders inclusively (human), it is madu (Igbo) and periodically making weak scratches at issues of importance, enia (Yoruba). There is here no hint of the male chauvinism that while their non-literate counterparts would always march out in is enshrined in the English language. The African perception of full force and achieve unbelievable successes...Quite often, when the gender question is thus more healthy and positiv abusive and impotent. She later became a ‘female husband’

42 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa , (Amadiume 1987) by ‘marrying’ her own wife who increased the, human labour or the individual is assured through the con‘hearth-hold’ by producing four more children for her. As a trained sumption of a collective fund of material goods’. Stauth’s (1984) midwife, she established and operated a very successful, privately definition of the household as a ‘capitalist institution that secures owned maternity home. This enabled her to support and provide and guarantees the reproduction of commodified labour, capitalist

shelter for members of her ‘hearth-hold’. reproduction being characterized by shared income’ projects

One of the main problems I had as a graduate student of anthro- middle-class, western capitalist gender relations on pre-capitalist pology at Harvard in the 1970s was reconciling my childhood and non-western emerging capitalist systems. Indeed, as Goody experiences of women as initiators of development and active (1976) and Guyer (1984) have demonstrated, the assumptions of a participants of social and economic processes in their communities simple household model do not fit African residence, production, with their image in much of the existing literature as ‘marginalized’, decision-making and consumption patterns, particularly as the ‘downtrodden’ and ‘exploited’ by patriarchy and motherhood. The household model was imported from the West and East Asian literature emphasized an attitudinal discrepancy between rural social contexts where ‘millennia of religious, legal and _ fiscal women and educated, urban-based women and men of my _ measures have given the household a corporate character’. mother’s generation. Fortunately, studies by Green (1947), van The continuing debate on the household clearly indicates that Allen (1972), Ardener (1975), Pala (1979), Mba (1980), Sudarkasa many of the basic assumptions have become obsolete and unreal(1987) and Amadiume (1987) provided welcome alternative istic, even for advanced capitalist societies (Smith et al. 1984; Guyer perspectives to that of Little (1973) and others, convincing me that and Peters 1984). The concept is even less accurately applied to my earlier perceptions of rural West Africa were neither biased nor those societies which are based on an entirely different gender

localized. ideology, where the capitalist mode of production is only just

One of my intellectual goals as a graduate student, as a field beginning to converge with the non-capitalist societies. The debate researcher in rural West Africa, and as a professor of anthropology, has focussed mainly on the definition, boundaries, authority, — was to attain a greater degree of fit between anthropological resource allocation and pattern of decision-making within the concepts and the realities of West African societies. This motivated household. The view that the household consists of a father, me to join other African women scholars in forming the Association mother(s) and children with the man as the head and sole provider of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) to has been universalized and has informed government policies address the problems of conceptualization and prioritization in the _ pertaining to rural areas. For example, wage and tax policies have study of African women. AAWORD eventually gained a consulta- allowed the male ‘head of household’ to collect allowances for the tive status at the United Nations and its studies, as well as those by wife and children. This perspective has also informed the design of its members, have influenced, to a great extent, the direction of project intervention (Guyer 1984; Elwert 1984; Guyer and Peters

subsequent research on African women. 1987).

My dissatisfaction with the adequacy of the household concept Attempts to re-conceptualize the household, making it more relative to my perception of West African rural society underpins theoretically relevant should include examining the historical this chapter. The following revisits the ongoing debate on the processes which have transformed African gender ideology. The usefulness and limitation of the household as a unit of data genera- gradual transformation of gender ideology has driven a material tion and analysis. Based on the realities of rural West African wedge between men and women, a process of gender stratification societies, the paper argues for a woman-centred unit of social is under way, characterized by differential access to production analysis, which focusses on women’s activities and organizations and __ resources, notably education, technology, credit, land, capital and perceives their responsibilities and roles as both catalysts and full sources of income.The concept of the household, as it is currently

beneficiaries of development. applied, is itself part of the subtle ideological transformation which has facilitated the assertion of colonial power nationally and male

Poor-fit category: ‘households’ in rural West Africa power domestically. The concept clouds the true pattern of gender

interaction and power relations, portraying the impression of men Recent literature from development and feminist studies as well as as sole providers and of female dependence and passivity, as opposed

from participatory, action-oriented field experiences all suggest that to their active participation in socio-economic processes. The women’s voices should be heard and that gender-disaggregated negotiated relationships that result in interdependence and relative statistics and data should be generated to facilitate the main- autonomy between the sexes are conveniently swept aside for want streaming of gender issues. The search for means of increasing the of suitable analytical constructs. visibility and audibility of rural African women demands, among Colonial policy displaced women from their place in the social other things, a rethinking of the concept of the household hitherto structure. The colonial denial of women’s active participation in used as the basic unit of data collection and analysis of gender. The socio-economic and political processes prevailed, despite the reality a priori definition of the household and the assumption that women of women’s active economic production in agriculture, and their are passive or secondary production and procurement agents are _ role in processing and distributing products through trade. In some largely responsible for women’s silence as perceived in western places, women challenged the colonial policies of exclusion, development literature (Guyer and Peters 1987). We need to revisit organizing a series of cooperative credit and/or work groups aimed the longstanding debates on the limitations of the household as a at increasing performance in the face of externally imposed socio-economic unit for data collection and analysis and the nature constraints (Okonjo 1976; Afonja 1985). They were behind a series

of allocational behaviour of the household. of social movements in various parts of Nigeria which resisted the Smith, Wallerstein and Evers (1984) have described the house- impositions (Afigbo 1977; Mba 1980).

hold as an ‘income-pooling, co-residential and joint unit of In the post-colonial period, the myth of women’s invisibility and production and consumption’ within which the ‘reproduction of inaudibility continues to be perpetuated through ‘household’ data

: Felicia 1. Ekejiuba/Women-centred Hearth-holds in Rural West Africa © 43 collection and through development theory and planning exercises. ability to meet her various obligations both to her hearth-hold and The gap between reality and theory has had disastrous consequences to her kin and community networks. for women’s livelihood, national well-being and food security since The male head of the household acts on his own account, and women have hardly been targeted as beneficiaries of mainstream has his own barn, land, labour, etc. He contributes to, but is never

development, nor have they been involved in different stages of solely responsible for, the total expenditure of the component planning and follow-up implementation. Thus, the theoretical hearth-hold(s). When the household spans several hearth-holds, as debate on the usefulness of the household as a unit of analysis is common in a polygamous marriage situation, he is entitled to parallels practical attempts by African women to press for adequate periodic but assured access to food, labour and sexual services from recognition and accounting of their contribution to national wealth the hearth-hold heads. His primary responsibility to each of the

and family well-being. hearth-holds is to provide a dwelling unit and some access to : resources such as land, cattle, and fruit trees that support hearthHearth-hold defined , hold productive activities. He also supplements school fees and

hospital bills of hearth-hold members and is expected to provide The search for a more gender-sensitive analytical framework leads some meat for each of the hearth-holds. quite naturally to a recognition of the importance of female-directed In recent times, high commodity prices, low, stagnant incomes, |

social units, what I term hearth-holds (Ekejiuba 1984). Hearth- unemployment, forced retirement and retrenchment of workers holds can either have an independent existence of their own or can and repeated devaluation of currencies, all induced by structural be the most intimate, clearly discernible subset nestled in the adjustment programmes, have dramatically reduced or even household. In other words, hearth-holds are an extension of the eliminated the household head’s contributions to the hearth-holds mother-child bond. The unit is centred on the hearth, or stove (in and added greater pressure on, the earnings of the hearth-hold Igbo, ekwu, mkpuke) and is a concept that men and women them- heads. Correspondingly, the demands on the time and labour of selves employ in their daily lives. The unit is demographically made women have increased as they search for additional sources of up of a woman and all her dependents whose food security she is income so as to ensure the survival of their hearth-holds. either fully or partially responsible for. The dependants include all Trading, crafts, such as cloth or mat weaving, hair plaiting, her children, her co-resident relatives and non-relatives who, in one formal sector jobs and other kinds of off-farm enterprises afford way or another, assist her in provisioning, caring for and nurturing women opportunities to acquire cash and maintain a more indepen-

members of her hearth-hold who share in the food cooked on her dent position. Indeed, most women try to combine different hearth for a significant part of their lives. The male spouse can be sources of income and are constantly exploring ways of diversifying

either a full member of the hearth-hold, but in most cases he these sources. The harsher the economic situation, the less likely oscillates between several hearth-holds, that of his wives, mother they are to get the statutory contribution from their husbands and

and mistresses. the more they strive to combine many informal sector activities. The hearth-hold is primarily a unit of consumption and also a_ The increased incomes guarantee women an independent means of unit of production. Its function as a reproductive and socializing physical reproduction. They are able to buy foodstuffs if their unit usually depends in part on transfers from other hearth-holds or husbands do not produce or provide enough. They can also households. It is not necessarily a co-residential unit since members accumulate money for hard times so as to pay school and hospital may temporarily reside in places other than that occupied by other fees.

hearth-hold members. Some women are able to transform cash into prestige, as men

The woman (mother) and the hearth are physical symbols of do, by taking titles and becoming members of illustrious or secret the unit. The mother-child bond structures the relationship. societies. The additional income also enables women to extend Even when there is only one hearth-hold in the household, there their personal influence in the family and community by particiis an observable pattern of interaction and reciprocal exchanges pating in political activities, paying fees, making voluntary donabetween the head of the household (male) and the head of the tions to community development projects, and buying imported hearth-hold (female). Each has a different set of dependents and luxury goods and real estate property for themselves. The resulting clearly defined responsibilities, which in turn gives rise to gender- independence and power increases women’s chances of competing specific patterns of production, investment and incentive responses. for and holding public offices, or initiating divorce or separation Recognition of these patterns is essential to understanding the from abusive, impotent or lazy husbands. Many are known to have complex interplay of autonomy and dependence of household invested part of their wealth in paying bridewealth which entitles

members. , them to wives through whom the strength of their hearth-holds is There are different ways the hearth-hold is linked to other social increased (Amadiume 1987; Ekejiuba 1992). units, namely other households, their component hearth-holds or Nonetheless, these women are the exception to the general rule. the community at large. Such links are necessary for the hearth- It has been shown that hearth-hold heads tend to invest more on hold’s access to labour - through informal work groups or hiring of basic needs in the form of food, health, and schooling, while men labour — and other resources. Awareness of these links is relevant to tend to spend more on capital-intensive and prestige commodities an understanding of rural production strategies and the gender- such as bicycles, building materials, meat, as well as extra-household

differentiated impact of planned intervention. expenses to secure status in their communities. It is 1ronic that while

The hearth-hold head may be a farmer, a trader, a craftswoman, the demands of basic needs provisioning have increased as a result of

a wage earner or a professional in the formal sector, or any com- commoditization and most recently, structural adjustment, a bination of these. A multiple production base and the search for woman’s access to the resources that had in the past enabled her to additional sources of income, including urban and international produce goods and earn income to meet her hearth-hold’s welfare migration, are part of a woman’s strategies for maximizing her needs, have diminished.

44 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

Nested hearth-holds in household and lineage matrices enhance his prestige. Gender-differentiated responses to incentives

ee means that hearth-hold heads are eager to exploit new opportunities

In Nigeria, amongst rural dwellers, educated and uneducated alike, for earning additional income by trading instead of, or in addition a number of circumstances give rise to a multiplicity of female- to, farming. A hearth-hold head may combine wage work with directed hearth-holds nested in a household. These include: first, trading and/or farming, migrating to the city or across national and polygyny or multiple spouse marriage systems as are prevalent jnternational boundaries. Such migration can be undertaken either among Moslems and farmers practising shifting cultivation; second, with the entire hearth-hold or by making arrangements for their leviratic unions, in which a man takes over the social responsibility care in situ, using kin, friendship or other network ties until it of protection and care of his deceased brother’s wife (or wives) in becomes possible for the unit to be co-resident once more. addition to his own wife; woman-to-woman marriage (Amadiume In summary, intra-household relationships may be, and often 1987); third, three or more generational ‘households’ of parents aye, made invisible by a singular focus on the household or on (male and/or females) and their married children (as in the Hausa individual adult males and females in the household. Household/ gandu); and fourth, joint family households of brothers in a hearth-hold interaction largely determines responses to externally patrilineal system, sisters in a matrilineal system, or brothers and injected incentives, such as new technology, capital, credit additheir unwed/divorced sister(s) in a patrilineal system. In all these tional avenues for income generation. Hearth-hold/household instances, several hearthholds can form subsets which are nested in jnteraction involves some pooling of the means of subsistence, some the larger household usually, but not always, headed by a male autonomy of constituent units, and some conflict over allocation of (Guyer 1986). On the other hand, the divorce, migration or death- resources and consumption goods. In Wong’s (1984) words: ‘The induced absence of males may result in the unity of the household — extensional character of network ties is as crucial to the reproduc-

and the female-headed hearth-hold. tion of the individual as the exclusion principle of a bounded unit.’

The household has common resources — land, cattle, fish ponds, Both the hearth-hold and the household depend on resource fruit trees — which are controlled and managed by the household transfers from similarly constituted, but semi-autonomous, family head. Some portion of these resources are subdivided among the units for their reproduction. It can be argued, however, that the hearth-hold heads as a means of income-earning to enable them to hearth-hold creates a more internally coherent, tightly bound entity provision their dependents. A hearth-hold is generally co-resident, with more clearly defined and hence less contestable social relations. occupying and controlling its own space, i.e. a house, room, etc. It Thus, it is more socially, economically and emotionally stable over has its own water storage facilities, cooking utensils, cooking fuel, time.The incidence of divorce, separation, and vertical or horiyam or grain storage facilities, traction or farm animals, and land, zontal multiple marriages makes the household a more volatile unit. held independently of other hearth-holds.

Each hearth-hold head is primarily responsible for providing . - oe :

members of her hearth-hold ith food, clothing, school fees and Predicament of virilocal hearth-holds caring for children, the elderly and sick. Women have provisioning Although a great number of African societies are patrilineal, patriagendas separate from men.Their material resources, time and _lineality is not as much at issue as virilocality, i.e. when women labour are not always subsumed under that of the male spouse. -physically move to the location of their husband’s patrilineage at Often, but not always, there is a partial pooling of resources. Many marriage. In so doing, women are isolated from their natal support studies have demonstrated different patterns of expenditure for systems (Elwert 1984). Before Christianity and western middle-class husbands and wives. Separate ownership of property, dwelling space ideology changed gender relations, a woman was not expected to and labour, the basis of a woman’s autonomy and independence, is change her family name when she got married. In spite of marriage, enshrined in the ideology and structure of the hearth-hold. In women were still considered members of the patrilineage of their addition to her contributions and the obligatory contributions from birth, even after their death. In matrilineal societies, women the male spouse, transfers from other hearth-holds and households, remained in their lineage of origin while the husband moved out of mostly from members of a woman’s natal hearth-hold or patri- his lineage of birth into that of the wife. lineage, enable women to cope with the demands of ensuring her _In patrilineal societies, unmarried women, i.e. never married,

hearth-hold’s well-being. separated, divorced and widowed, often lived in their birthplace The relationship between hearth-hold heads — wives, co-wives, together with their peer group based on the long established ties

mothers-in-law — and household heads is marked by solidarity and _ they had to their patrilineage of birth. In all these cases, the woman

conflict. Competition between a wife and mother-in-law often received as much respect and resources as men within the patrioccurs over weaning the male spouse from his membership in the lineage. She was respected for her age; age being an important mother’s hearth-hold so that he becomes fully identified with the criteria for establishing one’s position in the social hierarchy. She wife’s hearth-hold. Conflict between co-wives arises over the male was also respected as a patrilineal mother, aunt, and sister by her spouse’s obligatory contributions of labour and resources to the brother’s children, and patrilineal cousins, all of whom were component hearth-holds, and can be greatly exacerbated by conflict considered her children. On the other hand, her own biological between siblings from different co-wife mothers. Conflict between children by her husband belonged to her husband’s lineage. spouses centres mainly on material factors, namely resource alloca- Traditionally, within her household and the patrilineage of

tion, support to relations, etc. marriage, a woman was considered.to be a stranger, particularly at

In spite of hearth-hold heads’ well-known need for sufficient the time of the death of her husband, and especially if she was land for food production, the household head can and sometimes childless. She was not expected to inherit his property. His brothers does sell or pawn land to raise the capital to marry more wives, or and adult offspring had the first claim to these. Thus, within her engage in conspicuous consumption, such as buying a radio, marital home, a woman had to strive to accumulate and keep her betting, building a house or taking a chieftaincy or other titles to own property, namely that which she brought into a marriage and

Felicia 1. Ekejiuba/Women-centred Hearth-holds in Rural West Africa ¢ 45

that which she acquired during the marriage through agricultural relationship between the household and the hearth-holds. This production, marketing and other enterprises (Elwert 1984). would include a consideration of: first, the ways in which hearthEconomic and cultural links with her lineage of origin were impor- hold heads take turns to include the household head as a consumer

tant to her and were maintained through her periodic visits and within their unit; second, inter-hearth-hold competition for the financial contributions to relatives’ funerals, weddings, etc. household’s expected contributions to the hearth-hold; and third, Both the man and woman had obligations within their lineages how households strive to protect their autonomy and financial of origin: the married woman to her brothers, sisters and kinsmen, independence and yet cooperate to ensure access to production the man to his. They also had obligations to each other. The man factors and the survival of the total unit. was obliged to provide a hearth-centred living space, some cattle More information is needed on the complex interplay of and/or a plot of land for the wife’s gardening and agricultural cooperation and conflict. For example, to what extent is labour production on her own account. The size of the plot was deter- pooled across household and hearth-hold boundaries for childcare, mined mainly by the land available to the lineage, as well as the for production, and for processing and distribution of agricultural

time, energy and labour she could mobilize. products? Such data could enrich farming systems research projects

Among many Nigerian groups such as the Urhobo of southern and other participatory, action-oriented programmes aimed at Nigeria a woman could ‘retire’ after completing her marital improving the living standards of women and children, e.g. water assignment of reproducing and socializing her children and _ projects, food security programmes, land reforms, incomethereafter only periodically visited her husband’s patrilineage at her generating activities, measures to improve health and modernize children’s invitation (Onoge 1992). In most other areas, even when agriculture. she did not statutorily retire, a woman’s corpse was normally taken The distinction between the hearth-hold and household proves back to her natal village to be buried among her kinsmen and particularly useful when carrying out socio-economic surveys and women, symbolizing her continued membership in this group, community sensitization. I can illustrate this with reference to a

which neither marriage nor death severed. water project in 77 rural Nigerian villages that I was involved in. At

In recent times, especially under the influence of Christianity the pre-project stage, the priority that villagers attached to having and its insistence that ‘a man and a woman are joined in holy _ safe, piped water relative to other needs such as electrification was matrimony until death do they part’, women have become more assessed. Furthermore, the willingness and ability of villagers to strongly identified with the ‘household’ as their husband’s spouse. contribute to the operational maintenance of the water scheme, as Their position within their patrilineage of birth as well as their well as the organizational form of such maintenance was assessed. patrilineage of marriage has become more ambiguous, often Many of the goals of the project made a focus on the hearth-hold as operating to the detriment of women’s status in both cases. The a unit of data collection imperative. cultural stipulations about ‘retirement’ and burial are sometimes Women and children had responsibility for fetching water, often negotiated and waived or modified, based on the nature of the over long distances ranging from 2 to 9 kilometres. Women’s need relationship between the conjugal pair. Negotiations are often for water — for cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, bathing mediated by the intervention of adult offspring of the woman themselves and their children and drinking — differed from that of

(Uzoka 1992). men who needed water primarily for bathing and drinking. Each

In other areas, traditional cultural practices are still strictly hearth-hold owned its own small containers for storing water and adhered to as a strong statement about women’s social status. only the more affluent in the communities could purchase larger Whether old or new practices are followed, it is primarily virilocality water storage containers, of 500-1000 gallon capacity, through

rather than patrilineality which isolates a woman from unambiguous either collective or individual expenditure of the hearth-hold and resource rights and a firm support base. Christianity, colonial policy, household heads. Women were responsible for ensuring that water modern bureaucratic systems, and development praxis, promoting was clean and safe, by boiling or adding alum. Women’s actions the notion of male household headship and life-long virilocality, were critical to the prevention of water-borne diseases. have contributed immensely to women’s loss of material security The survey collected data on the basis of female hearth-hold and

from her kin. household units. Income, education and water use of the household head was distinguished from that of the hearth-hold heads. The

Hearth-hold concept’s utility to development work findingswater. revealed significant differences in the priority placed on Women listed water and health centres as a number one A focus on the hearth-hold as an independent unit of analysis, or as_ priority in contrast to men who mentioned roads, community a subset of the household in which it is nested, enables us to under- banks and electricity. The responses indicated that more women stand the significance of male and female adults as independent than men were prepared to contribute money and labour to keep agents of development and change.The shifting boundaries and size the surroundings of the water tap clean. Some were prepared to of households and the complex pattern of inter- and intra- serve on the village water committee and a few were prepared to household relationships vis-d-vis goods and service transfers, time undergo the training necessary to maintain the water pumps to allocation, and mobility can be better understood by focussing on prevent the breakdown of the amenity.

female-directed hearth-holds. The gender-specific division of The hearth-hold/household distinction was also relevant in responsibilities within domestic units, gender-differentiated needs, implementing income-generating activities in the rural comresource access and factor allocation and their implications for munities. A pilot project was geared to organizing rural women into

effective development programming will become evident. a development-oriented cooperative through which informal Efforts to generate gender-sensitive data that will facilitate education and income-generating activities could be pursued. The macro-planning and mainstreaming of women’s issues so as to arrest project stressed members’ participation in needs identification, their declining quality of life should focus on the dynamics of the project planning, implementation and project monitoring. During

46 © Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

the first two months such basic issues as who qualified to be a —— ‘Omu Okwei, the Merchant Queen of Osomari’, in B. Awe (ed.), member of the cooperative, what the least cost of each share was, Nigerian Women in Historical Perspectives, Lagos, 1992. and the minimum and maximum number of shares to be bought by Elwert, G., Conflicts Inside and Outside the Household: A West Africa an individual, were discussed and agreed upon. The definition of Case Study’, in J. Smith, I. Wallerstein and H.-D. Evers (eds),

Households and the World Economy, Beverly Hills, 1984. those ;qualified to beJ.D., members basedResearch, on hearth-hold rather . oe: . Geerhart, ‘Farmingwas Systems Productivity and than Equity’, in

household headship . Any woman who had set up a hearth indepen- J.L. Moock (ed.), Understanding Africa’s Rural Households and Farming dent of her mother-in-law or any co-wife was considered qualified Systems, Boulder, Westview Press, 1986. to be a member. She was expected to buy the specified minimum Goody, J., Production and Reproduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University number of shares, contribute labour, water and sand for the building Press, 1976. either through her own labour or that of a representative from her Green, M. M., bo Village Affairs, New York, Praeger Press, 1947.

hearth-hold. Guyer, J., Family and Farm in Southern Cameroon, Boston, African Studies Overall, the women appreciated that their opinions were being Centre, 1984.

sought and their participation solicited as revealed in one woman’s. Intra~household Processes and Farming Systems Research: Persp ion

; : ; ; tives from Anthropology’. in J.L. Moock (ed.), Understanding Africa’s

particular observation: ‘People [in previous development projects] Rural Households. 1986. :

in the past treated us as if we did not exist, as if our Opinions were Guyer, J. and P. Peters, ‘Introduction, Conceptualizing the Household; not seen as necessary. So we ignored the team and later there was Issues of Theory and Policy in Africa’, Special Issue, Development and

nobody to keep the piped water clean, that is, if there was any drop Change, vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 197-214.

of water left in the tap.’ —— (eds), “‘Conceptualizing the Household: Issues of Theory, Method and In this water project, the ‘hearth-hold’ proved to be both Application’, Workshop Proceedings, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard conceptually useful and organizationally practical for project imple- University, November 1984. 0

7;.-&

mentation. Focussing on the hearth-hold enhanced our compre- Jones, C.W.,’Intra-household Bargaining in Response to the Introduction hension of the village economy with its gender- and age-based Understanding Africa’s Rural Households, 1986

: 1: of New Crops: A Case Study from N. Cameroons’, in J.L. Moock (ed.),

distribution of labour and resources. The villagers’ livelihood system yitte K. “African Women in Towns. London Cambridge University Press

consisted of a mix of hearth-hold and household survival strategies 1973. |

developed over time. The respective heads of the two units Mba, N., Nigerian Women Mobilized, California, 1980. mobilized available resources and exploited opportunities for the Moock, J.L. (ed.), Understanding Africa’s Rural Households and Farming

benefit of their respective units, a pivotal fact often ignored in Systems, Boulder, Westview Press, 1996.

development planning and policy-making. Okonjo, K., “Rural Women’s Credit Systems: A Nigerian Example’, in . S. Zeidstein (ed.), “Learning About Rural Women’, Studies in Family

; Planning, Nov./Dec., vol. 10, no. 11, 1992. 1976. Conclusion Onoge, O., personal communication, ae 4: , Pala, A., “Women in Household Economy: Managing Multiple Roles’,

The hearth-hold/ household distinction can facilitate more effective Learning about Rural Women, New York, The Population Council, 1979. analysis of gender and intra~household relations. It enables us to see Peters, P., ‘Household Management in Botswana: Cattle, Crops and Wage

women not as appendages to the household, but as active, often Labor’, in J.L. Moock (ed.), Understanding Africa’s Rural Households,

independent actors who shoulder responsibilities and take risks, 1986.

make different contingency plans, and strive to maximize their Rogers, B., The Domestication of Women, New York, Tavistock Publications,

livelihood options and the positive impact of their efforts on their 1980. dependants. Smith, J., I. Wallerstein and H.-D. Evers (eds), Households and the World The interaction between hearth-holds and households is too Economy , Beverly Hills, Sage, 1984. ; 5

; Stauth, G., ‘Households, Modes of Living and Production Systems’, in J.

important to be relegated to footnotes and caveats. Using the Smith et al. (eds), Households and the World Economy, 1984. | hearth-hold, a female-centred unit of analysis, for sampling, data Sudarkasa, N., ‘The Status of Women in Indigenous African Societies’, in collection, analysis, development planning and project implemen- R. Terborg-Penn (ed.), Women in Africa and the Africa Diaspora, tation, could prove to be a more direct way of reaching women. It Washington D.C., Howard University Press, 1987. could help prevent the off-target project outcomes that are all too Uzoka, F.A., personal communication, 1992. frequent in the field of women and development. In so doing, there Van Allan, J., ‘Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Lost Institutions of the

is a better chance of making women and their dependants true eee Acie , Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1972, pp. benef ciaries of educational, technological and economic develop- Wong, D., ‘The Limits of Using the Household as a Unit of Analysis’, in

References !

" J. Smith et al. (eds), Households and the World Economy, 1984.

Afigbo, A., ‘Revolution and Reaction in East Nigeria 1900-1920’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, vol. 111, no. 3, 1977, pp. 539-57.

Afonja, S., “Changing Modes of Production and the Sexual Division of Labour among the Yoruba’, Nigerian Journal of Economic and Social Studies, vol. 22, no.1, 1985, pp. 85-105.

Amadiume, I, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, London, Zed Books, 1987. | Ardener, S., Perceiving Women, New York, Bent and Halsted, 1975.

Ekejiuba, F., “Contemporary Households and Major Socio-Economic Transitions in E. Nigeria’, in J. Guyer and P. Peters (eds), Workshop on Conceptualising the Household, Cambridge (Mass.). 1984.

Rudolf P. Gaudio/Male Lesbians & Other Queer Notions in Hausa ¢ 47

identify as men who act ‘like women’ (kamar mata), constitutes a

RUDOLF P. GAUDIO matrix for what can arguably be called a homosexual community in Hausa society, though this differs in important ways from gay M a | e les b | ans & , communities in the West. One apparent similarity, however, is that, as drag queens and ‘fairies’ did for straight-acting gays in mid-

Other Queer Notions in H qausa twentieth-century New York (see Chauncey 1994), ‘yan daudu’s

visibility and social proximity to female karuwai (courtesans, Drawing on my

late 1980s and early 1990s, my initial encounters with Hausa own ethnographically informed understanding of the meanings of Muslim culture — those mediated by teachers and texts in the these terms and the ways they are used in everyday conversations, I United States and those I had in the field — were dominated by consider the extent to which these men’s sexual and linguistic stark, foreboding images of veiled women, conservative imams, and practices can be said to constitute a challenge to dominant cultural a rigid segregation of the sexes in daily life. Hausaland was not a_ discourses about gender and sexuality. My analysis of this sexual place in which I expected to encounter gay people, much less a lexicon — some elements of which derive from heterosexual Hausa community even remotely resembling the gay communities Iam _ discourses, while others are unique to the gay Hausa subculture — affiliated with in the West. Not long after I began my doctoral reveals a dialectical pattern of adherence to and subversion of Hausa fieldwork, however, I became aware of a considerable degree of Muslim cultural norms, which makes it difficult to judge particular ambiguity and contradiction in Hausa Muslim discourses about forms or practices definitively as subversive, resistant, or conformist. gender and sexuality, and I was especially surprised to find out that In order to make this discussion understandable to an EnglishHausa society has a reputation in Nigeria for homosexual activity. speaking North American audience, my analysis points to apparent Many southern Nigerians, for example, who scoff at the suggestion convergences and divergences between the discourses of gay that there might be men or women in their region who engage in speakers of Hausa and those of American English. Without claiming homosexual behavior, claim it’s only ‘those Muslims’ up north (as a definitive perspective on gay Hausa culture, I pay critical attention | well as decadent Westerners and Arabs) who do that sort of thing to the claims various academics have made regarding homosexuality For their part, Hausa people are less inclined to deny the existence and transgenderism in Hausaland, and describe how the cultural of homosexuality in their society than they are to gossip about it, practices of gay and “womanlike’ Hausa men are more diverse and usually in disparaging terms. Living in Kano, the largest city in more complicated than scholars have acknowledged. Hausaland, I heard rumors about the homosexual proclivities of Despite the lack of significant communicative contacts between prominent local men, read sensationalistic newspaper stories about Hausa and North American gay communities, certain similarities in homosexual scandals in boarding schools, and heard reports of the discourses of both groups are sufficient to justify my use here of police raids on bars and nightclubs frequented by homosexuals. Yet ‘gay’ and related terms to refer to Hausa men who have sex with I knew of no acknowledged homosexual individuals, or institutions. men. If ‘gay’ is seen to refer only to the overt, politicized gay —

I had, however, seen tantalizing references in the ethnographic and communities that have emerged in the West in the past one sociological literature on Hausa society to ’yan daudu, a term that hundred years, it surely does not apply to the Hausa men I met in was usually translated as ‘homosexuals’ or ‘transvestites’. Nigeria, most of whom have little if any knowledge of Western gay In the earliest stages of my research, when all I knew about ’yan life. If, however, ‘gay’ is understood to refer to men who are daudu was what other people had written or said about them, it was conscious of themselves as men who have sex with men, and who hopeful intuition that made me think that I, as a gay man, might be consider themselves to be socially (if not temperamentally) distinct able to become involved in their largely hidden social world in a from men who do not have this kind of sex, then these Hausa men way that I suspected previous academics and my (presumably) are undoubtedly ‘gay’, and it is in this sense that I use it. This is not heterosexual Nigerian acquaintances had not. I was intrigued, to say that Hausa gay men understand their sexuality as do North therefore, the first few times that I saw ’yan daudu dancing and American gay men.* For example, Hausa people generally refer to

sashaying at nightclubs and outdoor festivities, chattering and homosexuality as an act rather than a psychological drive or laughing in grand, seductive ways; and I could not help but predisposition, and homosexual men are more often described as compare these images to my recollections of gay life at home. men who do homosexuality than as men who want other men Although subsequent events forced me to reconsider — but not to sexually. The most common in-group term for men who have sex reject outright — the naive idea that ’yan daudu were men with with men is masu harka, ‘those who do the business’, often whom I could communicate on the basis of a shared sexuality, my abbreviated to masu yi, ‘those who do [it]’.2 Moreover, homointeractions with them introduced me to a thriving social world of sexuality is not seen to be incompatible with heterosexuality, Hausa men who acknowledged and acted upon their sexual marriage, or parenthood, which constitute strong normative values attraction to other men. In Hausa communities throughout Nigeria, in Hausa Muslim society. At some point in their lives most of the the elaborate social-occupational network of ’yan daudu, who self- men I am calling ‘gay’ — including those who identify as

48 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

‘womanlike’ — marry women and have children, even as they expect from these men some sort of payment or ‘help’ (taimako) in maintain their more covert identity as men who have sex with men. return. This explains ’yan daudu’s widespread reputation as prostiI have chosen not to use the term bisexual to refer to married gay tutes’ agents or ‘pimps’ (kawalai). The crowds attending these

Hausa men because I understand bisexuality to refer to an nightclubs and outdoor festivities typically also include gay men individual’s acknowledged capacity to be sexually attracted to both who come to socialize with each other and to took for potential sex women and men and to the assertion of one’s prerogative to act on _ partners, especially, but not exclusively, among the ’yan daudu. The such attraction; this implies a degree of choice regarding sexual presence of female karuwai and their male patrons allows these men matters that is not recognized in Hausa society. Specifically, most -— whom ’yan daudu call fararen-hula (civilians), ’yan aras,? or simply Hausa people do not see marriage as a choice but rather as a moral maza (men, husbands) — to rendezvous without revealing their and social obligation. My own refusal to marry based on my lack of sexuality to outsiders. For its part, heterosexual Hausa society sexual desire for women typically did not follow the cultural logic usually turns a blind eye to apparent or suspected connections

of my gay Hausa acquaintances, who did not see a necessary between ’yan daudu’s cross-gender behavior and their homoconnection between marriage and heterosexual desire. Common sexuality. (One gay in-group term for a straight man is in fact usage of both the mainstream and in-group Hausa terms referring to makaho, blind man.) Nevertheless, gay Hausa men generally fear male homosexuality (see note 5) usually presumes that gay men being exposed as homosexual; even ’yan daudu, who are unabashedly

have sex with women at least in order to father children and not open in their adoption of womanlike behaviors, remain highly necessarily for sexual pleasure. Although many men do acknow- discreet when it comes to their sexual involvements with other ledge enjoying sex with both women and men, these men do not men. constitute a distinct subgrouping in gay Hausa communities, since Despite the paucity of ethnographic evidence offered in most men who do not desire women sexually are unlikely to admit this academic works referring to ’yan daudu, their alleged status as except to their closest friends.° ‘Bisexuality’ can thus be seen as ‘transvestites’ and ‘homosexuals’ has attracted the attention of normative for all Hausa men who have sex with men, whether or Western scholars writing on comparative constructions of homonot they actually desire or enjoy sex with women. sexuality. In particular, academic references to ’yan daudu have been Though virtually all Hausa people are aware of the presence of cited by scholars in discussions of male homosexual relationships in |

yan daudu in cities, towns, and villages throughout Hausaland, few various cultures in which sexual partners assume distinctly students of Hausa society have addressed the subject, and fewer still masculine and feminine roles, for example, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. have offered more than popular stereotypes regarding ’yan daudu’s David Greenberg calls this phenomenon ‘transgenderal homosexuality. Various scholars allude briefly to ’yan daudu’s presence as_ sexuality’ and cites the feminine behavior of ‘Hausa male ‘homosexuals’, ‘pimps’, or ‘transvestites’ in the contexts of female prostitutes’ as one example (1988: 60-61). Murray’s discussion of prostitution (karuwanci) and spirit-possession (bori), but they present — the spiritual implications of ‘gender-defined’ homosexuality in Latin little ethnographic evidence to explain their use of these terms (for America (particularly Haiti) refers to Hausa ‘homosexual transexample, Mary Smith [1954] 1981: 63; Yusuf 1974: 209; Pittin vestites’ in the bori spirit-possession cult to support his assertion of 1983: 296-98; and Besmer 1983: 18). Only Gerald Kleis and Salisu possible cultural continuities between West Africa and diasporic Abdullahi, drawing on Abdullahi’s original field research, make ’yan African communities in the Americas (1987: 94). The characterizadaudu the central focus of their discussion, yet they too skirt around tion of homosexuality in Hausa society as ‘transgenderal’ and the issue of sexuality (Kleis and Abdullahi 1983, based on Abdullahi ‘gender-defined’ accurately reflects the fact that the most commonly 1984). Abdullahi notes that the English terms commonly used to acknowledged sexual relationships among Hausa men have much in describe ’yan daudu — ‘homosexual’, ‘transvestite’, ‘pimp’ — have common with the customs of the dominant heterosexual society. connotations that do not apply in the Hausa context, but neither he Extreme gender segregation stands out as a major organizing nor any other scholar details just how these terms do and do not principle — both socially and spatially — of most Hausa-speaking

pertain to ’yan daudu (Abdullahi 1984: 32). — cities and towns. Married Hausa women of all but the poorest and

The short shrift given to ’yan daudu’s homosexuality owes a great wealthiest classes are usually veiled and secluded according to deal to Hausa and Western scholars’ discomfort in addressing the orthodox interpretations of Islamic law, and they are supposed to be

issue, but it also reflects the fact that, although ’yan daudu do dependent on their husbands for their sexual and material needs. commonly (though discreetly) engage in sexual relations with other Adult women who defy these expectations — by remaining men, the practice of daudu is culturally understood in terms of unmarried, for example, or by going out of the house without a veil gender rather than sexuality.’ Through their everyday use of stereo- -—run the risk of being labeled a karuwa.

typically feminine speech and gestures and their performance of This strict delineation of the male and female realms is partially women’s work, such as cooking and selling food, ’yan daudu present reproduced among masu harka. ’Yan daudu, who often refer to each themselves as ‘womanlike’ without sacrificing an essentially male other using feminine linguistic forms (such as women’s names, and

sex identity. feminine pronouns and adjectives), typically cast themselves in the

Because they usually do not adopt women’s clothing or hair role of ‘wife’ (mata) or haruwa in discussing their relationships with styles and are most frequently addressed as men by others, they are their male sexual partners, whom they call miji, husband, or saurayi, not, properly speaking, ‘transvestites’. Most ’yan daudu earn money young man/boyfriend. By employing heterosexual concepts to by cooking and selling food and/or through their association with characterize their own sexual roles, ’yan daudu and their masculinekaruwai.8 At nightclubs and celebrations where traditional-style identified partners reproduce some dominant ideologies of gender Hausa music is played, ’yan daudu and karuwai often dance in front and power relations while challenging others. For, whereas the idea of large crowds of male patrons and onlookers; such dancing is also of a man who has a ‘husband’ and calls himself a ‘wife’ disrupts. a stereotypically feminine activity. Yan daudu are usually available in mainstream Hausa beliefs about gender and sexual identity as such venues to assist men who want to meet karuwai, and they biologically based, the sexual, economic, and other expectations

Rudolf P. Gaudio/Male Lesbians & Other Queer Notions in Hausa ¢ 49

that ’yan daudu and their boyfriends/husbands bring to their relationships occur between partners who see themselves as social relationships follow mainstream norms governing how women and and economic equals (Greenberg 1988: 26, 66). Homosexual men should behave in heterosexual relationships. For example, the relationships in Hausaland, like heterosexual ones, are frequently of ‘civilian’ or masculine-identified partner is expected to assume the the ‘transgenerational’ type, although the age differential between insertive role during sexual intercourse and to give his ’yan daudu partners need not span an entire generation. Typically, an older ‘wife’ presents on a regular basis, such as money, clothing, or travel. masculine-identified man will seek the sexual companionship of a The ways in which ’yan daudu exploit the gendered grammatical younger man or boy and will make material gifts to the younger and semantic structure of the Hausa language to assume subject man in return. In this case, the older, wealthier man is called k’wazo positions as ‘wives’ and ‘girlfriends’ reveal their awareness of what (which in standard usage means ‘diligence, hard work’), while the

postmodernists call the role of discourse in the construction of younger man, who may be a masculine-identified ‘civilian’ or a gender identity. This awareness, however, typically coexists with a feminine-identified ’dan daudu, is known as the older man’s haja commitment to local religious and cultural ideologies that view (goods, merchandise). The sexual expectations attached to such a gender as naturally and divinely determined; in fact, many if not relationship — the k’wazo normatively takes the insertive role in anal most ’yan daudu marry women and have children, fulfilling Hausa intercourse, while the haja is receptive — parallel the gendered Muslim ideals regarding respectable adult male behavior. A number grammatical distinction between the two terms: k’wazo is a of scholars make the erroneous assumption that married ’yan daudu— masculine noun; haja is feminine. Thus, even when both partners are distinct from ‘homosexual’ ’yan daudu (e.g., Abdullahi 1984: 34, have conventionally masculine gender identities, the grammatical and Pittin 1983: 298). The sexual experiences of many ’yan daudu gender of the nouns used to refer to them reinforces dominant, and other gay Hausa men, however, indicate that heterosexual heterosexual understandings of the gendered nature of power in marriage and homosexual behavior are in no way mutually — sexual (and other) contexts. exclusive in Hausaland. Like other Hausa men (gay and straight), Just as heterosexual norms are not always adhered to by heteromarried ’yan daudu take seriously their responsibilities as husbands _ sexuals, however, so in the gay community norms related to status, and fathers, and expect their wives, children and other dependent wealth, and gender are sometimes subverted. Indeed, it is in the

kinfolk to show them due respect. context of relationships that conform less strictly to heterosexual

In contrast, ’yan daudu typically downplay their ‘feminine’ models that gay Hausa men seem more likely to defy the economic practices, including dancing, joking, and having sex with men, by and political expectations traditionally attached to sex. In some describing them in terms connoting frivolity or irresponsibility, cases, conventional power relations are partially inverted such that such as wasa (play) or iskanci (craziness, vice), and therefore not real the ‘female’ partner exercises some degree of dominance over the or serious. ’Yan daudu’s use of the term ‘play’ in some ways parallels ‘male’ by virtue of ‘her’ age or wealth. Thus, an older ’dan daudu

Western scholars’ depictions of drag and other gender-bending might offer cash and other material gifts to a younger ‘civilian’ in practices as forms of cultural parody. For example, Judith Butler’s exchange for the latter’s sexual companionship; gay and straight (1990) celebration of the emancipatory implications of drag finds Hausa men also report that similar relationships occur between qualified support in ’yan daudu’s use of “womanlike’ ways of older female haruwai and younger men. Such relationships conspeaking, which reveal an awareness of the instability and mutability found normative expectations about sex and power to such an of language and gender identity. For some segments of Hausa _ extent that no conventional discourse seems adequate to describe it. society, this awareness seems dangerous and subversive. In The masculine saurayi (boyfriend) or miji (husband) is also a haja, the particular, conservative religious and political leaders periodically feminine property of a mata (wife) who has assumed the powerful condemn ’yan daudu as purveyors of sexual immorality, and actively masculine role of k’wazo. The successful pursuit of a younger man

or tacitly encourage the abusive treatment, including arrest, by a ’dan daudu demonstrates that, contrary to the dominant belief extortion, and physical violence, that ’yan daudu often face at the that only ‘masculine’ males have the prerogative to act on their hands of police and young hooligans. Female karuwai, whose sexual sexual urges, feminine-identified individuals are also capable of and economic independence also threatens patriarchal norms, are accumulating the kind of socioeconomic capital that allows them to

likewise subject to such denunciations and abuse, while the assert their own sexual desire. Of course, this logic in many ways masculine-identified male patrons of both ’yan daudu and karuwai preserves the conventional patriarchal view of sexuality as an are only rarely accused, much less prosecuted. Yet the fact that ’yan exercise of power. Moreover, to the extent that this sort of coupling

daudu outwardly discount the seriousness of their ‘feminine’ reproduces the traditional sexual roles of an insertive masculine activities, and that they continue to enjoy a number of patriarchal partner and a receptive feminine one, the socio-economically privileges as husbands, fathers, and patrons, complicates any attempt powerful *dan daudu will still be seen in many circles to have

gender binarism. passive.!!

to cast them as agents of a postmodernist strategy for undermining degraded himself by affirming his ‘feminine’ desire to be sexually

Although gender differences do appear to be a highly salient A potentially greater challenge to patriarchal power arrange-

factor characterizing homosexuality in Hausa society, ’yan daudu ments is posed by gay Hausa relationships between partners who see and other gay Hausa men also engage in sexual relationships in each other as equals — Greenberg’s ‘egalitarian’ type. As feminine which other social factors, such as age and wealth, play an important identified men, ’yan daudu often call each other k’awaye (girlfriends), role. These relationships conform in some ways to two ideal types referring to a special, supposedly nonsexual friendship traditionally

of homosexuality that sociologist David Greenberg offers as developed between Hausa women or girls. Although sex between alternatives to the ‘transgenderal’ model, namely ‘transgenerational’ ‘girlfriends’ is largely frowned upon, it nevertheless does occur;

and ‘egalitarian’ homosexuality.'? “Transgenerational’ relationships when ’yan daudu have sex with each other, they call it kif are said to entail an unequal distribution of power between sexual (lesbianism).'* Although some male ‘lesbians’ (yan kifi) establish partners by virtue of age and, usually, wealth, while ‘egalitarian’ relationships with one another that conform to the k’wazo/haja

50 ¢ Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

model, ’yan daudu and other gay Hausa men usually use ‘lesbianism’ or political grounds but make no effort to conceal or change their to refer to sex between men who are social equals. I have even male anatomies (a practice she refers to as ‘genderfuck’), Zita rejects heard it used half-jokingly to apply to sex between two masculine- _ the idea that any biological male can ever become a ‘real’ woman or identified ‘civilians’ of similar age and socioeconomic status. The lesbian. She locates ‘real’ gender identity not simply in the material notion of ‘lesbian’ sex in a male context typically connotes that body but in what she calls the ‘historical gravity of the sexed body’ _ neither party insists on a particular sexual role; for example, partners — the history of cultural discourses that construct the body as are said to yi canji ‘do an exchange,’ that is, alternate between intrinsically sexed — which informs her pessimism regarding human insertive and receptive roles. Sexual reciprocity is but one mani-__ beings’ capacity ever to transcend these discourses. In particular, she festation of a more general understanding of ‘lesbianism’ among gay asserts that no man can ever deny the patriarchal privileges with Hausa men as a relationship in which neither partner seeks to which all males are born and raised, regardless of his social position exercise a kind of unilateral power over the other by virtue of relative to other men or his effort to reject or disown those privileges:

gender, ral or wealth. ; ; What agency wevariety have inof this culture to move e linguistic difficulties posed by the ways in which :; ; beyond these assigned categories, to become ‘unstuck’ from our constructed gay Hausa menecho enact and challenge both dominant and subcultural bod, journeys fl f vend d ality the problems faced by femini odies, to travel transgendering and transsexing of norms of gender and sexuality echo the problems faced by st

: ° “oe ygender left uncomfortably unanswered in my thoughts. Perhaps all theadbasis for identity. As scholars have documented the ons ie’ y y S Ps a which feminini d lini ructed is ‘drag’ made up of cells, soma and style marked redundantly in theorists who, in recent years, have debated the status of the body as relocation, or to deconstruct sex binarism altogether are ques-

; ae ; memory and public readings. (125-26)

myriad ways in which femininity and masculinity are constru

and practiced in societies around the world, it has become

increasingly unclear to what extent such basic analytical concepts as Whereas Butler focuses on the subversive and potentially ‘woman’ and ‘man’ adequately represent the diversity of people’s liberating implications of drag, envisioning a discursive regime in experiences of gender in different cultures. In North America, the which ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’ might signify a male body ‘as easily stability of these categories has been challenged by queer and as’ a female one, Zita remains doubtful. She insists that, for all its transgender activists, who refuse to see gender identity as fixed or contingency, the sexedness of the body is hardly as ‘lightweight and natural; this cultural resistance is manifested in such cultural detachable’ as some postmodernists suggest. practices as cross-dressing, butch/femme roleplaying, and trans- Although Butler and Zita have very different perspectives on the sexualism, which writers such as Butler have described as harbingers subject of gender mutability, they have much in common when it of the end of the binary sex/gender system. Others, however, treat comes to the cultural evidence that they focus on in order to bolster such claims of cultural resistance and subversion with skepticism: their arguments, and that which they choose to ignore. For the assumption by some men of a ‘feminine’ status might equally example, despite their professed interest in cultural practices that reflect the greater power men have to employ dominant discourses challenge gender norms, both Butler and Zita pay remarkably little of sex/gender in pursuit of their own interests, without implying attention to transsexualism, focusing, instead on performative any progressive change in the ability of women to do the same. practices such as drag and ‘genderfuck,’ which do not generally Butler makes particular rhetorical use of drag and other forms of entail physiological or anatomical transformations of the body. The gender parody practiced in the Western world in order to support reasons for this oversight undoubtedly stem from the theoretical her claim about the possibility of radical reconfigurations of gender complications that surgically mediated transsexualism raises for both and sexuality. Focusing on the way gender and sexuality distinctions _ historical-materialist and postmodernist theories of the body and

are produced in discourse, she identifies and advocates these parodic gender identity. As the phrase ‘gender-reassignment surgery’ practices as forms of discursive resistance to dominant cultural implies, transsexualism perpetuates the dominant ideology that norms that could lead to an unfettered proliferation of cultural prescribes congruence between gender and anatomical sex, and is configurations of sex and gender: “When the constructed status of therefore antithetical to Butler’s goal of celebrating discursive gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself resistance to that ideology. At the same time, the permanent becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and consequences of surgical transsexualism and the extreme social masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and stigma attached to it challenges Zita’s assertion that the only ‘real’ woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one’ (1990: 6). gender/sex identity is that which is based on the bodies we are born

_ For Butler, drag and other types of gender-bending practices exploit with. The failure to examine the philosophical and _ political and expose the constructedness of ‘natural’ gender categories, implications of this phenomenon suggests an unwillingness on the opening the way for the ultimate rejection of such categories part of both Zita and Butler to consider evidence that contradicts altogether (136ff.). The prevalence of such practices in gay and their basic arguments. lesbian communities reflects the particular gender and sexual Another oversight common to Butler and Zita is particularly repression gay men and lesbians experience under the binary relevant to the subject matter of this essay: their almost exclusive

gender/sex regime. reliance on cultural evidence from the Euro-Western world. Both _ .

Jacquelyn Zita (1992) accepts the argument that gender identity writers’ interest in such subaltern Western practices as drag and is discursively produced, but she questions whether gender is so genderfuck reflect a growing fascination among cultural. theorists easily transmutable. Focusing on ‘male lesbians,’ biological males with the political implications of performance and parody, especially who claim to be lesbians, Zita challenges the claim that individuals those types of performance that have themselves become have the capacity to use discourse to effect the kind of radical increasingly activist and politicized. This interplay between theory reconceptualization of the body and of gender identity that Butler and activism often creates a positive and powerful synergy, but it

describes. Grouping together lesbian-identified male-to-female also runs the risk of tying cultural criticism to the actions of transsexuals along with men who claim to be lesbians on behavioral particular social groups defined in terms of geographical location,

Rudolf P. Gaudio/Male Lesbians & Other Queer Notions in Hausa ¢ 51

ethnicity, nationality, class, language, education, and so forth. Notes

Gender theory, and the ultimate goal of widening the scope of | , —— Coa

human beings’ options for self-expression and survival, thus stands re the southern igen anthrop logis if Amadiume s indignant, to benefit from the consideration of practices that do not derive Ismussive, anc homophobic rejection OF the suggestion tat icsoranism . ; might characterize any Igbo woman-woman marriages (1987: 7).

from the same political or philosophical framework as the theories 2 All Hausa terms discussed in this paper are written according to standard

themselves; this applies equally to the practices of middle-class Hausa orthography, which, unlike academic-pedagogical usage, does transsexuals in Western societies and to other gender and sexual not indicate phonemic vowel length or tone. Because of technical

minorities around the world. limitations, the ‘hooked’ Hausa letters representing glottalized ’d and k’ The discursive practices of Hausa ‘male lesbians’ offer a and implosive ’b are rendered as shown, using apostrophes instead of the particularly instructive perspective on Western scholars’ theoretical standard ‘hooks’. The standard orthographic symbol ’y (as in "yan daudu) debates. The acknowledged existence of ‘egalitarian’ relationships represents a glottalized consonant distinct from the unglottalized semi-

; ; ; ; ess like their English counterparts, with the exception of the letter c,

between some gay Hausa men suggests the possibility of an vows y. Other letters in the Hausa alphabet are pronounced more or alternative Hausa cultural system in which sex is not always which is always pronounced like English ch.

associated with dominance. However, the fact that such r elation- 3. The fieldwork on which this essay is based was carried out over a period ships are construed in Hausa gay men’s discourses as ‘lesbian,’ and of eighteen months in northern Nigeria in 1992-94, with the support of

therefore ‘feminine,’ reveals the normative strength of the idea that a Fulbright Junior Research grant administered by the Institute of a valid sexual encounter involving a ‘real’ man must entail a distinct International Exchange. Earlier versions of this essay were published, power asymmetry. Many masu harka — including ’yan daudu — deride under the same title, in SALSA III: Proceedings of the Third Annual or condemn ‘lesbian’ sexual relations between ’yan daudu as absurd Symposium about Language and Society-Austin (Linguistics Department, or immoral. Yet no such complaints are made against masculine- University of Texas, Austin. 1995, m4 ~27); and cinder me fitle Unreal

; ; uslim Society,’ in Socialist Review 25(2) (1995): 121-36.

identified ‘civilians’ who have sex with each other, since sex Nise and the Men Who Love Them: Gay eNO OES In MNauisa between such men is typically assumed to take the form of the 4 Nor do all North American gay men think alike on this subject. The hierarchical k’wazo/haja relationship. The fact that ‘lesbianism’ is generalizations I offer here are meant to facilitate discussion about thus subject to particular disdain among masu harka reveals that differences and similarities between gay male communities in Hausaland sexist and heterosexist attitudes permeate the gay Hausa subculture and North America, not to obscure the diversity of perspectives on

as much as they do Hausa society in general. sexual identity that exists in those communities. .

Hausa gay and straight men alike tend to view women as > While standard Hausa has both formal/legal and colloquial terms for subordinate to men; ‘womanlike’ men are in turn subordinate to male homosexuality, most gay Hausa men avoid them, either because ‘real’ men. Although ‘lesbianism’ represents a challenge to male they carry an implicit negative moral judgment (e.g. lu’du, luwa’di, dom; ‘n the oav context the idea of a male ‘lesbian’ in man sodomy) or because they are too wordy (e.g., maza masu cin maza, men Onunance, 1 Bay , ; ny who fuck men; maza masu neman maza, men who seek men). ways reinforces traditional Hausa values that associate sexuality with 6 \fen who choose to pursue extramarital sexual relations with both relations of dominance and inequality. As long as gay Hausa men women and men are sometimes referred to as mai cin wake da shinkafa, accept this patriarchal equation of sex and power, sex between one who eats beans and rice. This term plays on the ambiguity of the equals is cast as something ‘feminine’ and is therefore seen as mere word ci, which can mean either ‘eat’ or ‘fuck’, as well as on the play, less real and less consequential than sex between people of grammatical gender of the collective nouns wake (beans), which is

different social status. !3 , masculine, and shinkafa (rice), which is feminine. .

That many ’yan daudu subvert conventional norms of gender and 7 P audu rm an abstract noun celerning ‘iy re P penomenon ade nai of sexuality in a way that both titillates and disturbs other men demon- dandu) refers to he men themselves, u (literally ‘son of daudu’; pl. ‘yan strates that the constructed nature of identity and power attords 8. Pittin calls karuwai ‘independent women’, a direct translation of the individuals some room to play (4 /a Butler) with and in discourse to phrase mata masu zaman kansu, which the women themselves tend to enhance their own power and pleasure.'* However, several factors prefer. She rejects the terms ‘prostitute’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘courtesan’ cast doubt on the empancipatory possibilities one might want to as Pittin’s findings in that although some karuwai do engage in commer-

attribute to such play. For example, the, fact that ’yan daudu’s cialized, Western-style prostitution, many have long-term affairs with gender ‘play’ draws from and refers to idealized norms of femininity men that resemble Western lover/mistress relationships. Still others are

and masculinity, and that it does not invalidate ’yan daudu’s male business-women who are deemed karuwai simply because they are social identities,op: which, Muslims, theyin-group see as part ofterm, God’s plan, —, unmarried (usually divorced) and living on their own. . ca as; ras 1s an essentially synonymous with harka, denoting

reflects their belief'in a fundamentally ‘real’ gender/sex identity that h ce of male h 1 human beings cannot and perhaps should not change.!> Indeed, the ATS EEE

HL: , 8 ' 7 p for, betnoALLS, ter’ and aves‘gender’ 10 Theand same distinctions with labels were made earlier by ausaa language makes distinction between ‘sex. Adam (1986) andslightly Murrav different (1984: 45-53).

The term jinsi refers to all the observable distinctions between 11 Seoual paseisity is vonveyed linguistically through the use of so-called women and men — biological, psychological, and cultural — and impersonal constructions such as ana yi masa (one does [it] to him, [it] is *yan daudu’s jinsi is universally understood to be male (namiji). done to him) and ana cinsa (one fucks him, he gets fucked), while the Though their performance of ‘womanlike’ practices undeniably insertive partner is described using syntactically active constructions such puts them in a subordinate and often vulnerable social position vis- as mat yt fone who does) and mai 6 (one who fucks). fe insulting a-vis other men, ’yan daudu’s continued insistence on claiming the connotation OF sexual passivity can De strengt ened by referring to the social P rivileges accorded in pHnelp le to all men i Hausa society, 12 Kifi, literally ‘turn one thing over onto another’, is an ingroup term used including the right to preside over patriarchal family units, in place of the standard Hausa ma’digo (lesbianism). My very limited demonstrates that discursive challenges to established orders are contact with ‘real’, self-identified Hausa lesbians (sing. ’yar kifi, lit. always subject to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of subjects’ ‘daughter of kif’, pl. ’yan kifi) allows me to say only that (1) they exist; transcending the boundaries of the discourses in which they live. (2) some Hausa lesbians are acquainted with the terms discussed in this

a , ae ; ; receptive partner as feminine, thus: ana cinta (she gets fucked).

52 © Contested Representations: ‘Gender’ in Africa

paper and make active use of at least some of them; and (3) many gay Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity.

Hausa men claim that lesbians engage in the same types of relationships New York: Routledge. as they themselves do, that is, involving the exchange of material gifts _——~ 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex.’ New York:

and the attribution of roles such as k’wazo and haja. Routledge.

'S Hausa men’s derogatory and dismissive attitudes towards lesbianism Chauncey, George, Jr. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, urban culture, and the resemble in some respects the ways lesbianism has been used as a making of the gay male world, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books.

signifier in the Western world (see Roof 1994). Greenberg, David F. 1988. The construction of homosexuality. Chicago:

‘4 Note that Butler’s celebration of the emancipatory and pleasurable University of Chicago Press.

effects of gender play 1s somewhat mitigated in her later discussion of the Kleis, Gerald W., and Salisu A. Abdullahi. 1983. ‘Masculine power and ‘ambivalence’ articulated in the gender performances of the poor Black gender ambiguity in urban Hausa society.’ African Urban Studies 16:

_ and Latino drag queens depicted in the movie Paris is Burning (1993: 39-53.

121-40). Murray, Stephen O. 1984. Social theory, homosexual realities. Gai Saber

'S Surgical transsexualism is not available in Nigeria and is unknown to Monograph, no. 3. New York: Gay Academic Union.

many ‘yan daudu, except perhaps as a phenomenon that exists in Western Murray, Stephen O. 1987. ‘A Note on Haitian (In?)Tolerance of Homocountries. I never heard any ’yan daudu discuss transsexualism as an sexuality.” In Male homosexuality in Central and South America, 92-100.

option they would like to have available to them, even when I made a New York: Gay Academic Union.

point of explaining the procedure to them. Pittin, Renee. 1983. ‘Houses of women: A focus on alternative life-styles in Katsina City.’ In Female and male in West Africa, ed. C. Oppong, 291302. London: Allen and Unwin.

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35 Sohier, ‘Evolution’, 185, 97. idealization of such rural zones as ‘countryside’, see M. Mbilinyi, °° A. Sohier, ‘Notes sur Pévolution du mariage des Congolais’, Institut “City” and “Countryside” in colonial Tanganyika’, Economic and

Royal Colonial Belge, Bulletin des Séances, xxi (1950), 857. Political Weekly, xxii (1985), 88-96.

37 Phillips, ‘Marriage laws’, 192. *2 Manono, ‘Quelques commentaires’, 31. °° L. P. Mair, ‘African marriage and social changes’, in Phillips (ed.), °° Ibid. 32.

Survey, 112. ** Van Wing, ‘La polygamie’, 96.

* C. Vanuytven, “Le mariage chrétien et la coutume indigéne’, Troisiéme * Van Wing, ‘Notes’, 186-7. Merlier also points out that chiefs were vital Conférence Pleniére des Ordinaires des Missions du Congo Belge et du Ruanda- to the coercion of the forced agricultural system. Polygamy increased

Urundi (Léopoldville, 1945), 83-110; and G. Haezaert, ‘Le mariage their harvest revenues, while they also received ‘abundant’ state propachrétien et la polygamie’, 115-30. How Catholic missionaries spoke up ganda and incentives in kind to help enhance women’s productivity: mattered. A special issue of Aequatoria, a Catholic, ‘Africanist’ journal, Merlier, Le Congo, 83, 150—1. It is here we especially need local studies. on polygamy was suppressed by the Church in 1945 due to an article by Van Wing, too, speaks indistinctly of several districts. For a pioneering

vicar apostolic Van Goethern that was interpreted as an apology for study of ‘cumulative polygyny’ in colonial Africa, see Jane Guyer, polygamy; see H. Vinck, “Le Centre Aequatoria de Bamanya: 50 ans de Family and Farm in Southern Cameroon (Boston, 1984). recherches africanistes’, Zaire—Afrique, xxvii (1987), 87-8. On E. Van © See M. Mbilinyi, ‘Runaway wives in colonial Tanganyika: forced labour

Goethem as an ‘indigenist’, see his bibliography by G. Hulstaert in and forced marriage in Rungwe District 1919-1961’, Int. J. Sociology of

62 ¢ Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities

Law, xvi (1988), 1-19. One wonders if the wives of monogamists would in her published summary in K.-N. Malira, ‘Les associations féminines not have been the ‘runaways’. This would concur with the colonial de Lubumbashi (1920—1950)’ (Mémoire en Histoire, Université Nationale consternation that so many women seemed to prefer polygamy; G. du Zaire, Campus de Lubumbashi, 1972), 27-8, 31-8, esp. 34. Hulstaert, Le mariage des Nkundo (Brussels, 1938), 366-7; Van Wing, ‘La *!_E. Capelle, La cité indigéne de Léopoldville (Léopoldville, 1947), 59; and J.

polygamie’, 96. La Fontaine, “The free women of Kinshasa: prostitution in a city in

méfaits’, 271. (New York, 1974), 89-113.

57 Negandu, ‘La polygamie et ses méfaits sociaux’, 808-14; Mujinga, ‘Les Zaire’, in J. Davies (ed.), Choice and Change: Essays in Honor of Lucy Mair 8 Wassa, ‘Liberté’, 72. Polygamist chiefs may also have been controlling ® B. Verhaegen, ‘Le centre extra-coutumier de Stanleyville (1940-—1945)’,

the labour of ‘wives’ they had working for them at a distance in urban Cahiers du CEDAF, vit (1981), 55~—7, 62.

prostitution; Merlier, Le Congo, 151. 83 The tax is mentioned in the 1942 territorial report for the first time. It is

5° FE. Ngandu and A. M. 1. Lodja, ‘La prostitution ronge le Congo’, La absent from the first such report of 1941. Fonds R/RU (138) 5, Voix, 1 (1945), 209-10; J.-E. Mupenda, ‘Prostitution et polygamie’, La Territoire d’Usumbura, Rapport annuel, 1942, pt. 2; and Fonds R/RU

Voix, in (1947), 821; Wassa, ‘Liberté’, 72. | (138) 4, Territoire d’Usumbura, Rapport annuel, 194 1, Archives 6° Neandu, ‘La polygamie et ses méfaits sociaux’. Africaines, Brussels. On Usumbura’s history, see C. Dickerman,

61 Manono, “Quelques commentaires’, 32-3; Ngandu, “La polygamie’. ‘Economic and social change in an African city: Bujumbura, Burundi’

6 Van Wing, ‘La polygamie’, 96-7. (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1984).

6 Neandu, “La polygamie était-elle la regle des mariages Africains?’, 291. 4 ‘La situation des femmes abandonnées et des femmes seules dans les 64 J.-P. Mutombo, ‘L’évoluant’, 31. These supplémentaires are called deuxiémes centres extra-coutumiers d’Usumbura’, Bulletin duo CEPSI, no. 32 © bureaux today (literally, second offices), and there is often a camouflaged (1956), 251. Widows and old women were exempted in Stanleyville; commercial element to the arrangements; see B. Verhaegen, Muamba Verhaegen, ‘Le centre’, 55.

Negalula and Kisangani Endanda, ‘La marginalité, le mariage et © In 1952, the tax amounted to 13.12 per cent of the revenues of the Pinstruction’, in B. Jewsiewicki (ed.), Etat Indépendant du Congo Belge, centres extra-coutumiers. It was 4.83 per cent in 1955, 15.21 per cent in

République Démocratique du Congo, République du Zaire? (Ste-Foy, 1957, 15.12 per cent in 1959, and 8.54 per cent in 1960. These

Quebec, 1984), 133-4. calculations are derived from Usumbura, Centres Extra-Coutumiers,

6 R.-P. Mujinga, ‘Indemnités familiales et ... polygamie camouflée’, La Rapports annuels, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1959 and 1960, Bureau de la Mairie, Voix, vi (1950), 152-4. The tendency for évolué discourse to resemble Bujumbura. [Hereafter, cited as CecRa.| the colonial discourse of Europeans, yet in harsher, starker terms, has °° The ordinance of 5 November 1913, which replaced that of 10 May

been noted elsewhere by G. Van Geertruyen in ‘Sous le joug du 1909, was applied to Ruanda-Urundi by a decree of 10 June 1929. See matriarcat”: une campagne d’“‘évolués” contre la matrilinéarité au Bas- O. Louwers and L. Grenade, Codes et lois du Congo Belge (Brussels,

Zaire’, Africana gandensia, vi (1989), 105-55. 1927), 1408-9; O. Louwers and G. Touchard, Recueil usuel de la

6 Muyjinga, ‘Les méfaits’, 271. législation du Congo Belge, vol. vi (Brussels, 1911), 687-8; and P. Leroy, 67 Manono, “Quelques commentaires’, 30. Législation du Ruanda-Urundi (Usumbura, 1949), 156.

6 See G. Bianga, “La politique démographique au Congo Belge’, Popula- *’ B. Cohn, “The anthropology of a colonial state and its forms of know-

tion, XXXII (1978), 189-94; and Van Wing, ‘La polygamie’, 98. ledge’ (paper presented to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro-

6° Muyjinga, ‘Indemnités’, 153. pological Research, Symposium no. 107, “Tensions of empire: colonial 70 Conseil Colonial (1950), 540. control and visions of rule’, Mijas, Spain, 5-13 November 1988).

71 J. Sumuwe, ‘Crise de mariage, concubinage perpétuel’, La Voix, vi * In the case remembered above, malaya were rounded up following an (1950), 282; Ngandu, ‘La polygamie était-elle la régle des mariages © incident when a European caught venereal disease. Only 25 women of

Africains?’, 289-91. Buyenzi and 97 of Belge were registered for regular medical exams after

7 Nigandu, ‘La polygamie était-elle la regle des mariages Africains?’, 291. the promulgation of hygiene requirements in Usumbura in 1949; 73 Mutombo, ‘Lévoluant’, 31. See also Nimi, ‘La polygamie’, 417; CecRa, 1949, 23. Nevertheless, the Commission pour la Protection des

Muyinga, “Les méfaits’, 272. Indigines objected in 1938 to the way the tax could join ‘notorious

™ A. Filip, ‘Pour la monogamie’, La Voix, m1 (1947), 908. prostitutes and honest women’ on one list so that both types of women

7 Sumuwe, ‘Crise’, 283-4. Emphasis added. were subject to regular hygiene exams: ‘Nothing is more odious to

76 Controversy in the early ’twenties over ‘Christian villages’, or as critics honest women.’ See Guebels, Relation complete, 602-3. Elisabethville called them, ‘anticustomary villages’, also concerned the need to define authorities created a dual tax system in 1937 with all single women better the legal differences and boundaries between what were then paying one amount, and those subject to the hygiene law for prostitutes called ‘recognized’ (e.g. customary) and ‘conventional’ (e.g. non- paying an additional tax; Malira, ‘Les associations’, 34. customary, including villages of former soldiers, state workers and *® Census Cards, c. 1947-57, Bureau de la Zone de Buyenzi. Over 1,200 Christians) chefferies. See the exchange of articles, “De la légalité des femmes seules and/or femmes libres were listed on 585 (or 55 per cent) of

villages chrétiens’, Congo, mt (1922), 1-7, 501-34, 612-14. the 1,056 cards (representing about 90 per cent of the 1,182 Buyenzi 7 J]. Magotte, Les centres extra-coutumiers: commentaire des décrets des 23 compounds in 1949); CecRa, 1949, 25. I was unable to locate the same novembre 1931, 6 et 22 juin 1934 coordonnés par 1’arrété royal du 6 juillet set of cards for Usumbura’s Belge. These registers by compound were

1934 (Dison-Vivriers, 1938), 52-79. first instituted in the Congo in 1935; see Sabakinu Kivilu, ‘Les sources

78 Similarly, a married Belgian woman’s rights, in the metropole and the de Vhistoire démographique du Zaire’, Etudes d’histoire africaine, v1

colony, were subject to her husband’s consent. See C. Debroux, ‘La (1974), 124. situation juridique de la femme européenne au Congo Belge de 19454 ™ For an example of the way in which this popular memory has come 1960’, Enquétes et documents d’histoire africaine, vii (1987), 14-23, esp. 16. under ‘the effects of dominant historical discourses’, see the ‘private 7 G. Baumer, Les centres indigenes extra-coutumiers au Congo Belge (Paris, history’ of Mama Sanura, whose story was closely linked to the rise of

1939), 117; Magotte, Les centres, 134-5. The extra-customary centres’ nationalist hero, Prince Rwagasore. I do not attempt to ‘unscramble’ taxation regulations were not published, nor have I been able to locate this here: see Popular History Group, ‘Popular memory: theory, politics,

them in archives in Bujumbura or Brussels. method’, in R. Johnston et al. (eds.), Making Histories: Studies in History 80 K.-N. Malira, “Regard sur la situation sociale de la citoyenne luchoise Writing and Politics (Minneapolis, 1982.), 211. d’avant 1950’, Likundoli, 11 (1974), 63-71. It was probably first intro- °! Tausi binti Sibaela, 8 March 1985. duced on the Copperbelt, where it began as a measure directed at white ™ Abiba K., 7 March 1985. women in 1918. It fell into disuse, until reintroduced as a tax on African ™ Mugeni binti Hemedi, 20 April 1985. women in 1932; see the important comparative material, largely excised Asha binti Shabani, 18 April 1985.

Nancy Rose Hunt/Camouflaged Polygamy, Colonial Morality Taxation & a Women-Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa ¢ 63

°° Mwajuma binti Lubagara, 17 April 1985. created to reduce it’, Grévisse, ‘ Le centre’, 80.

% bid. 128 Verhaegen, ‘Le centre’, 56; and Malira, “Les associations’, 37.

” Asha binti Kamangu, 17 April 1985; Fatuma binti Juma, 19 April 1985. '° Verhaegen, “Le centre’, 56. Grévisse’s figure of 55 per cent for Lubum-

°° Fatuma binti Juma, 19 April 1985. This comment is suggestive of how bashi combines single women taxes with other vice (beer) taxes; the tax may have forced women in Usumbura to increase their Grévisse, ‘Le centre’, 78-80. On Usumbura, see note 85 above. marketed surpluses; personal communication, J. Bujra, 21 April 1989.In ‘° The available evidence makes it difficult to sort out how when the tax Lubumbashi, the tax seemed to increase single women’s beer brewing was introduced in different cities and its relative importance as a revenue

and soliciting activities; Malira, “Les associations’, 37. generator were linked to the timing and sweep of stabilization policies.

»° Tausi binti Sibaela, 8 March 1985. Verhaegen argues that in Stanleyville the tax represented a ‘policy of

100 Zena binti Feruzi, 6 March 1985; Asha binti Kamangu, 17 April 1985; tolerance’ towards single women who helped reproduce the temporary

and Abiba K., 7 March 1985. I examined Abiba K.’s tax book. labour of single men; Verhaegen, “Le centre’, 56, 62. According to

01 Nyirakemegeri, 28 February 1985. Malira, a steep tax in Katanga was intended to keep single women in 2 Fonds R/RU (138) 6-9 and (139) 2-5, Territoire d’Usumbura, rural areas and protect stabilized urban households; Malira, ‘Les

Rapports annuels, 1943-52. associations’, 33, 37. Yet the two-tiered tax payment system that

3 Ngonogoro binti Mpangombu, 2 May 1985; Abiba K., 7 March 1985. evolved in Elisabethville, with prostitutes paying more than ‘honest’

104 Asha binti Kamangu, 17 April 1985. single women, would have adapted multiple intentions — to discourage 105 Mwajuma binti Lubagara, 17 April 1985. single women from migrating to the city, and to tolerate reluctantly 106 Fatuma binti Juma, 18 April 1985. those who came — to tiered social realities of categories of men and

07 Buyenzi people called themselves Swahili. They speak Swahili, practise women, simultaneously embracing sanitary agendas and a mixed Islam, and their community dates from the penetration of Zanzibari stabilization policy. For comparative evidence on tolerance, see (on ivory and slave traders into the Ujiji region in the nineteenth century. Nairobi) J. Bujra, ‘Postscript: prostitution, class and the state’, in C. Burundian women were integrated into the community during the Summer (ed.), Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment (London, 1982), 145— colonial period as were women from Rwanda and present-day Zaire. 61, esp. 158, and G. Chauncey, Jr.-“The locus of reproduction: women’s

108 Mugeni binti Hemedi 20 April 1985. : labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927-1953’, J. Southern Afr. Studies, | 109 “Programme deétaillé de la réception du Roi’, Temps nouveaux d’Afrique, vii (1981), 135-64. 29 May 1955, 4; ‘Réception colorée 4 Usumbura, le voyage du Roi’, ‘! Van der Kerken, ‘Les oeuvres’, 12. In official documents, prostitutes

Temps nouveaux d’Afrique, 5 May 1955, I. tended to be called filles publiques, as in the prostitution ordinance of 5

110 Mama Sanura, 22 April 1985. November 19 13; Louwers and Grenade, Codes, 1408-9.

M1 Tbid. | 132 J. Van Allen, ‘Memsahib, militante, femme libre: political and apolitical 12 CecRa, 1949, 27; CecRa, 1956, 117. styles of modern African women’, in J. Jacquette (ed.), Women in Politics "3 Ngonogoro binti Mpangombu, 2 May 1985. (New York, 1974), 318. Verhaegen states that the term femme libre

4 CecRa, 1956, 118; CecRa, 1955, 93. applied to all unmarried adult women in Stanleyville; who were

5 CecRa, 1956, 22. subdivided into taxed and exempted subcategories; Verhaegen, ‘Le

16 Minutes, Conseil de Buyenzi, 7 November 1956, and Minutes, Conseil centre’, 55. de Buyenzi, 7 November 1956, ‘CEC/Conseil’ file, Bureau de la‘ African naming would have contributed to (and been influenced by?)

Mairie, Bujumbura. this European naming process. Femme libre is synonymous with ndumba

"7 CecRa, 1957, 11. in contemporary Zaire, and neither term leaves much room for the

8 Minutes, Conseil de Buyenzi, 19 March 1957, ‘CEC/Conseil’ file. legalistic single woman definition: ndumbisme means prostitution; see 19 Minutes, Conseil de Buyenzi, 24 March 1957. Emphasis added. Equipe du Projet IFA, Inventaire des particularités lexicales du francais en 120 The decree of 4 April 1950 (whose principal articles became effective in Afrique noire, (C-F), (Paris, 1981), 121; and G-O (Paris, 1982), 170.

the Congo on 1 January 1951) became law in Ruanda-Urundi on 11 Dictionary evidence on the word ndumba is suggestive: delimited in December 1951 (and the respective articles became effective on 1 May 1923 (in some areas) to young, unmarried woman, it carried the con1952); see Piron and Devos, Codes, 196-7; and Bulletin officiel du notation prostitute by 1957 (in others); see L. Bittremieux, Mayombsch

Ruanda-Urundi (1951), 479-80. Idioticon, ii (Gent, 1923), 470; and G. Hulstaert, Lomongo Francais, K-Z

' F. Cooper and A. Stoler, ‘Tensions of empire: colonial control and (Tervuren, 1957), 1398. For a wonderful discussion of the proliferation visions of rule’, American Ethnologist, xvi (1989), 609-21. of sexual slang and how contemporary woman-naming is semantically 122 Mme Van der Kerken, ‘Les oeuvres sociales et humanitaires au Congo organized on a hierarchical scale ranging from femme libre to deuxiéme Belge’, Congrés Colonial National, Ve session, no. 15 (1940), 12; F. bureau, see S. Falik and C. Faik-Nzuji, ‘La néologie comme miroir d’une Grévisse, ‘Le centre extracoutumier d’Elisabethvillé’, Bulletin du CEPSI, société: le cas du Zaire’, Le francais moderne, XLVI (1979), 220-31.

no. 15 (1951), 78; and Capelle, La cité, 59. 84 The logic of the colonial tax system was that only women who were

123 “It is wonderful to see the local government ... find, in the debauchery monogamously married were effectively tax-free. Supplementary wives of whites, blacks and filles publiques, a source of revenue’: Van der and women ‘theoretically living alone’ cost a price, to somebody. There Kerken, ‘Les oeuvres’, 12. Mme Van der Kerken founded the Oeuvre was colonial murmuring that supplementary wives paid the tax for their pour la Protection de la Femme Indigéne in 1926; Fonds A.I. (1394) no. husbands, while it was implied that women ‘theoretically living alone’

2, Archives Africaines, Brussels. were kept women whose camouflaged ‘husbands’ paid their tax; see, for

'24 Despite its reservations, the Commission pour la Protection des example, Van Wing, ‘La polygamie’, 96.

Indigénes favoured the tax in 1938 because it was useful in ‘obviat[ing] °° Guebels, Relation complete, 602.

the harm which an afflux of single women in the centers would present? ‘° P. Landberg, “Widows and divorced women in Swahili society’, in B.

and agreed that ‘profligacy must be checked’. Potash (ed.), Widows in African Societies: Choices and Constraints (Stanford,

25 Guebels, Relation complete, 602. 1986), 107-30. ‘Swahili’? women of Buyenzi-cannot be equated with

26 As did John Whitehead of Wayika in his typically acerbic style in coastal Swahili women. The parallels and permutations need research. ‘Answers to questions recorded by Mr. Middlebrook’, 1946, 4 in John The Buyenzi census cards indicate an important parallel in the high level Whitehead Papers, Baptist Missionary Society Archives, Regent’s Park of divorce and the tendency of single women to concentrate in female

College, Oxford. centred households. Carol Dickerman’s fascinating discussion of court-

7 In analysing Elisabethville’s dependence on vice taxation, the assistant ordered matabishi (gift or tip) payments made to women upon leaving Commissaire de District in Katanga remarked: “To live and develop, the short-term living arrangements with men in colonial Bujumbura is centre must almost organize vice [malaise sociale] even though it was relevant here. It was the presumed inclusion of sex in their provision of

_ 64 ¢ Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities ,

domestic services that motivated the local European court administrator 7

to stop the award of these payments in 1953, ‘labelling such payments as

concubinage and prostitution’. C. Dickerman, ‘City women and the qT | M OT 2 Y B U K K E

colonial regime: Usumbura, 1939-1962’, African Urban Studies, xviii ° / | ‘37(1984), 38.” ” ‘Fork Up & Smile "The word malaya was a negative, insulting term hurled among Africans . | in Usumbura when quarrelling; and a malaya prostitute was distinct from Marketing ; Cc olonia l Knowled Ge

a woman entering an informal matabishi arrangement. Dickerman, ‘City . , , women’, the Female Subject in Zimbabwe | oo 88 Minutes39. of & Conseil meeting, 12 January 1955. re

W Ceca, 1987, 9. Reference

41 CecRa, 1955, 30. This was probably the year Mama Sanura was jailed in Gender & History, 1996, 8 (3): 393-415

the middle of the night. Administrative regulations forbid imprisoning | | women for non-payment of taxes: F. Gevaerts, Vade-Mécum a l’usage des . . _ fonctionnaires et agents territoriaux du Congo Belge (1953), 84. ° In 1959, Nimrod Mkele, a South African advertising agent

42 Minutes, Conseils de Belge et Buyenzi [joint meeting], 12 January employed by the firm of J. Walter Thompson, commented to his 1955, ‘CEC/ Conseil file’. Colonial commentators also thought Belge colleagues: “You will have noticed the highly significant role that men kept their clandestine women in Buyenzi: ‘there apparently existsa women are playing ... they are bringing in new tastes into African special quarter in Buyenzi maintained by the men of Belge’: ‘La homes. After all, it is they who determine what shall or shall not be

- N.. Hon des femmes abandonnées’, 250-1. | _ bought. The role of a hubby is to fork up and smile.’! Mkele’s Hunt, “Domesticity and colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s comment reflected a broad consensus among his professional

Foyer Social, 1946-1960’, Signs, xv (1990), 447-74. oot “Cc: - -

44 In the mid-fifties. 15 ver cent of women in Bel ere revistered contemporaries in identifying and imagining an allegedly untapped

; eS) ID Pet OF women in Dee W cesrers® SS market’, men argued that African theoretically living alone’, whereas in“African Buyenzi the these proportion was 28. ; >women as 3 were ,.

per cent. ‘ La situation des femmes abandonnées’, 250. See also J. Denis,. identical socially to ‘the’ consumer and that the project of making Le phénomene urbain en Afrique centrale (Brussels, 1959), 205, 212. Dicker- Africans into mass-market consumers in the postcolonial world

man’s court transcript evidence would probably be able to deepen the necessarily had to address itself to what advertisers saw as contrast I conjecture here: Dickerman, “City women’. distinctively female practices and female roles in indigenous African 45 "The name Belge is probably an example of how African name-calling (a culture.

place where people dress like whites, hence Belge) was co-opted and From the beginnings of industrial capitalism to the contemincorporated into official European name-giving; see Equipe du Projet porary era, a wide variety of discourses and institutions in Euro'46TFA, Inventaire, (A-B) (Paris, 1980), 101. in cam secheties have depicted or imasined th | Colonial film would have played an important role in constructing this merican societies have depicted or imagined the consumer an interchangeability. For the best historical analysis to date of évolué practices of consumption as characteristically female. As a leading culture in Belgian Africa, and one which attends to the semiotics of American advertising executive put it in 1970, ‘we in the advertisbicycles, sewing machines, typewriters and the like, see F. Ramirez and ing business instinctively think of the customer as a woman. C. Rolot, Histoire du cinéma colonial au Zaire, au Rwanda, et au Burundi Because, for the most part, she is. Men make money, women spend

(Tervuren, 1985). it.... In order to sell a woman anything, you have to appeal to her

‘7 Shirley Ardener’s treatment is the essential reference here, especially tastes... Step away from the world you’re in and get into her since Buyenzi women’s collective action, expressed in letter writing not shoes.”2 In this article, I will argue that efforts by capitalist skirt lifting, defies the pattern of ‘traditional African female militancy professionals to connect female subjects and consumer markets

presented there;422-40. see S. within Ardener, ‘Sexual insult and female militancy’, a ; oo. Man, vit (1973), modern southern Africa were predicated to a significant degree on colonial institutions and discourses about gender and race and, as a result, developed some of the characteristic contradictions

and crises endemic to colonial culture. I am primarily concerned with the ideological and discursive figuration of the consumer as female by transnational advertisers, marketers and manufacturers from the 1920s to the present in Zimbabwe and South Africa, thus speaking to the gendering of consumption in the ‘imaginary landscape’ of transnational capitalism. But what exactly is “gendering’ in , , this sense? Does it describe the internal discourse of capitalist manufacturing, the way that it imagined the construction of mass-

markets in underdeveloped societies? Or is gendering best used to describe the ideological presumptions about audiences and consumer psychology built into the actual text of advertisements in southern Africa? Perhaps we should speak of the gendering of consumption itself, the actual distribution of commodity purchase, ownership and use between men and women in a particular society. In some measure, all of these aspects of consumption can be described as gendered, and none of them can be easily disconnected from the others. The internally circulated perceptions of capitalist professionals have powerful effects both on the content of advertising and on the development of marketplaces; in turn, both the

Timothy Burke/Marketing, Colonial Knowledge & the Female Subject in Zimbabwe ¢ 65

content of advertising and the configuration of marketing strategies medicines, foodstufts, soaps, bicycles and gramophones. help to construct social practice among consumers themselves. At The characteristically modern capitalist enterprises that moved to the same time, these varying experiences pose separate analytic the economic forefront in the region after World War II were challenges. Multinational corporations have perceived Third World driven by both practical considerations and the momentum of women from within transnational institutions which have been institutional practice and discourse to seek the consolidation of materially and ideologically connected to other institutions of complex and diffuse prewar channels of distribution and exchange colonial and neocolonial domination. On the other hand, the way that shaped Africans’ consumer habits. The postwar objective was to that women in urban southern Africa have made use of Sunlight establish what manufacturers considered to be ‘normal’ markets Soap is only directly comparable to the experience of women among Africans. The firms that spearheaded this drive — such as elsewhere in the colonial and postcolonial world through unsatisfy- Unilever, the giant British multinational firm particularly known for ing and unspoken axioms about the essential unity of the “Third its production of toiletries and foodstuffs — looked most centrally to World woman’ as a subject. Lines of connection exist, but they their marketing and advertising divisions as the institutional tools should be traced back through transnationally salient pathways: which could facilitate this consolidation and expansion. common advertising campaigns, marketing techniques, and colonial Similar projects, though as yet relatively little studied by laws regulating women. Seizing upon singular gendered features in historians and political economists, seem to have taken place across these local consuming practices and casually regarding them the developing world during the postwar era, though conditioned comparatively would be a surrender to what Mike Featherstone has by local and regional histories.> Judging from the case of southern described as the leading ‘temptation’ of current approaches to global Africa, the labor of the advertisers who were called upon to imagine culture, an emptying out of deep histories for a momentary and organize mass markets in the capitalist periphery after World

voyeurism.° War II was influenced not only by large-scale features of the world In describing the influence of colonial thought on postwar system but also by pre-existing local institutional and ideological

marketing in the developing world, it is important to begin with a_ arrangements of colonial hegemony. This occurred not only because _

look at the historical development of transnational marketing in the of the inertial weight of the past but also because of concrete capitalist periphery. In the first two decades of the twentieth connections between transnational advertising and the colonial state. century, professionalized advertising and market research were only Marketing firms in southern Africa acquired many of their just securing a niche within metropolitan capitalism. At the same copywriters and researchers during their postwar expansion into the time, most investment in Europe’s colonies was oriented towards ‘African market’ from state offices dedicated to ‘native administraextraction. Proletarianizing processes were typically uneven in _ tion’ or from the anthropology departments of local universities. many locations throughout the colonized world. As a consequence, Making a mass market from the raw material of ex-colonial colonial subjects consumed manufactured goods sporadically as subjects was a deeply contradictory project, understood by Western wage earners in a cash economy. There were considerable prewar professionals as the conversion of alien peoples, with alien needs markets for manufactured goods among colonized peoples, but into individuals possessed of a putatively new and familiarly Western much of this exchange was fundamentally governed by older _ style of desiring things. This was in many ways a restatement of the mercantile patterns of global trade, or was supplied by classically ‘civilizing mission’ that was central to colonialism.® As one of the nineteenth-century industrial concerns rather than by the new _ postwar inheritors of this mission, international advertisers in modern monopoly firms which were at the heart of metropolitan southern Africa investigated how the ‘natives’ experienced wants

capitalism by the 1920s. In colonial Zimbabwe, much of the and could be induced to form a new relationship with manumerchandise sold by so-called ‘truck’ merchants, retailers who sold factured goods. Many firms in southern Africa turned to goods to African customers, involved cheap textiles produced either anthropologically-trained individuals when they were first estabin the old industrial heartland of England or in peripheral factories lishing divisions to tackle the “African market’. These professionals

in Japan, India or Argentina. warned their employers: ‘It is only when we realise the cultural

As a consequence, advertising in the colonial world generally implications of marketing to Africans that we appreciate how tended to be spottily developed prior to and immediately following fundamentally different our task of selling to these people is ... in World War II. In her studies of the history of global advertising, marketing to the African we are faced with a completely new Noreene Janus has accurately described international advertising up situation.” Over the past half-century, market researchers and to the 1960s as ‘anything but well controlled and functional’. “The advertisers have gradually developed procedures for dealing with historic shifts in the world system that developed during and after what one marketing study commissioned in 1921 by the US World War II, including the dominance of American businesses government termed the ‘puzzling unlikeness’ of consumer demand over European concerns, expanded and reoriented transnational among non-Western peoples.® marketing and advertising in southern Africa. The 1950s saw The conditions established by colonial and postcolonial institusignificant new investments by multinational corporations, resulting tions of rule led marketers to understand their target as an alien in the growth of local manufacturing, mostly in light consumer identity (female) within an alien identity (African). Women were industries producing such goods as tinned foods, soaps and other regarded as crucial to producing markets and reproducing consumer toiletries, clothing, alcoholic beverages, patent medicines and _ practices for many reasons. The goal was to decipher indigenous cigarettes. Their manufacture necessarily required a mass market, cultures and re-orient the rules that governed desire, and both which white settlers or administrators alone could not possibly colonial and postcolonial institutions had already laid the foundaprovide. In contrast, indigenous Africans throughout the region tions for positioning women as central to this project. Women were were already important consumers of industrially produced com- supposedly being ‘liberated’ from indigenous patriarchy, and were modities, both imported and local, and had been so since the 1920s. thus seen as culturally pliable. The goods being manufactured for In addition to clothing, Africans consumed agricultural implements, the peoples of the colonial world were mostly intended for

66 © Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities

consumption within the household, regarded as a feminized sphere. conceit that remaking culture through the private and feminine The reproduction of new habits and practices was regarded as a_ sphere would ultimately ensure the transformation of the whole of female province, accomplished within the context of family life. what was imagined as problematically ‘African’. For example, a government official entrusted with establishing educational proThe engagements between empire and gender that channeled grams for female pupils called for ‘dynamic activities which shall marketers towards female subjects came in part from attitudes enrich the life of Native womanhood ... cleansing the home and towards cultural reproduction in nineteenth-century imperial through it the race’.'‘?7 Another concluded, ‘the study of Home discourse.” One common imperial view of cultural reproduction Economics develops women and girls on natural lines ... if it is well located it within the increasingly circumscribed realm of the taught it should raise the Native to a higher state of civilization and private, the household, the feminine. There were, to be sure, other mental development." senses of the developing notion of culture that worked in active Mission schooling for African girls and women in Zimbabwe contradiction to this strain of thinking: for example, the Tylorian during the colonial era typically included lessons on homecraft, understanding of culture as the ‘complex whole’ which thematically cooking and infant care. Personal, household and social hygiene (an linked all the practices of a defined ‘people’ to some coherent especially intense preoccupation in settler colonies like Zimbabwe, principle or conceptual proposition; culture in Matthew Arnold’s South Africa and Kenya) was also very important. A limited amount sense, as an elevated and distinctly masculine world of elite taste and of medical training and gardening was also included, partly because distinction; culture as the civilized, masculine opposite to elemental, both skills were much in demand among the prospective clients and feminine nature.'? But even given the multiple meanings of the idea dependents of mission-trained women. Missions in Zimbabwe and of culture, the gendered partition of the public and political from elsewhere in Africa also variably stressed the adoption of European the private and cultural was often pronounced in colonial discourse. manners.'!? The number of colonial Zimbabwean institutions The degree to which early ethnographic thinking and, by dedicated to domesticity multiplied over time. By the 1950s, there extension, the entire imperial project were tied up in the making of were a number of mission-trained African women serving as roving domains of gender which were also coded by race has been of ‘home demonstrators’, a model ‘Homecraft Village’ for use in - Increasing interest to scholars in the last decade. As Ann Laura Stoler domestic training programs was built by community groups and the has observed, ‘the very categories of “colonizer” and ‘colonized’ Rhodesian state, there was a growing network of African Women’s - were secured through formal sexual control that defined the Clubs, and the state was funding extensive propaganda campaigns domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments around domesticity in media aimed at African audiences, including by which they identified themselves ... gender-specific sexual mobile demonstration vans equipped to show films.” The training sanctions and prohibitions not only demarcated positions of power of African ‘home demonstrators’ in colonial Zimbabwe closely but prescribed the personal and public boundaries of race."!1 The resembled programs in Western, Equatorial and Eastern Africa, implications of such an analysis of colonialism are far-reaching.'* though there were important variations in the scale of the programs, The challenges of establishing a colonial order were considered by the degree to which they served the particular needs of a settler European rulers to hinge upon the reconfiguration of gender roles, population, and the institution sponsoring the projects. Other while colonial subjects’ knowledge of imperial power and of their variations came from the highly contingent development of own identities often worked against and within these hegemonic particular discursive and institutional forms in different African arrangements of masculinity and femininity.'? Many of the most localities. Nancy Rose Hunt, for example, has described how persistent crises and controversies circling around imperial authority missionaries in one area of the Belgian Congo came to understand were defined simultaneously as questions of culture and of gender: African boys as ‘elves’, a frame of reference, not repeated elsewhere attempts to ban or restrict sati in India,'* control sexual license and in colonial Africa but which had a significant local impact.”!

exchange in Hawaii, prohibit clitoridectomy in East Africa, ban Postcolonial interest in ‘development’ was intimately and beer-brewing in southern Africa, or transform such practices as_ dialogically based upon these kinds of colonial logics and programs, bridewealth and child marriage throughout the colonial world. particularly as the project of development was reoriented during the Colonial domesticity in particular was one of the key sites where 1970s and practitioners successively identified ‘problems’ which these tensions played themselves out.’ In colonial Zimbabwe, explained its failure to fulfill heady postwar prognoses. As Gustavo promoting new forms of domesticity among African women _ Esteva points out, each of these problems has “followed for a time an became a major preoccupation almost immediately following the independent career, concentrating both public and institutional establishment of colonial rule in the 1890s. In southern Africa as a attention’.22 Women have constituted one predominant class of

whole, missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century had ‘problem’. Like their colonial predecessors’ development experts increasingly come to believe that the reproduction of Christian have frequently described women both as obstacles, conservative communities was contingent upon wresting away female converts guardians who stand resolutely in opposition to modernity, and as from indigenous family structures. Missionary emphasis on the objective, passive and helpless victims who must be rescued by maintenance of nuclear households within an economy dependent foreigners from local forms of domination and backwardness.” It is upon male migrant labor carried within it the presumption that the still not uncommon to find both visions simultaneously shaping Christian and ‘civilized’ habits of succeeding generations could only _ policy and discourse among international aid workers and planners.” be guaranteed through the conversion of women in their roles as_ In some cases, the linkages between development work and colonial

mothers and wives. perspectives on women have been very direct. In southern Africa,

As a consequence, state officials and missionaries alike shared a many international aid organizations funded programs for women powerful inclination to rail against ‘the dead weight of the female which were overt continuations of colonial domesticity, such as the influence’ in African culture and to identify women as the primary teaching of handicrafts or household skills. Much of the attention force retarding the ‘civilizing mission’.'’© There was a powerful paid to domesticity in colonial Zimbabwe during the 1960s and

Timothy Burke/Marketing, Colonial Knowledge & the Female Subject in Zimbabwe ¢ 67

1970s, through the Federation of African Women’s Clubs in par- African women had been made into loyal and dedicated wives and ticular, was an outgrowth of the Rhodesian government’s cynical mothers who had assumed responsibility for ‘modern/ single-family ‘community development’ apparatus, which freely sought and households. Professional assessments of the potential of the ‘African

received aid from various foreign institutions.” market’and the design of methodologies for reaching it relied on

The manner in which European empires generated and con- such presumptions. One Lever Brothers (Rhodesia) executive fronted crises over cultural practices in their colonies, the specific declared, ‘the woman now features as the major decision maker for programmatic construction of colonial domesticity, and the post- the purchase of day-to-day consumer goods.’ Another analysis colonial refinement of these notions within ‘development’ all argued, ‘the changing status of women is particularly noticeable ... helped to gender postwar marketing in southern Africa (as well as today the housewife ... does the shopping.”*°? Mkele put it even elsewhere in the capitalist periphery) in a very particular fashion. more distinctively: “Women are ... the vanguard of progressive Most of the consumer goods manufactured for sale to colonial ideas in today’s emergent African Society in so far as the home is peoples, whether produced in southern Africa or elsewhere in the concerned. This factor is so important from a marketing and adverThird World, were household items, largely inexpensive non-_ tising point of view that it cannot be overlooked. To paraphrase a durables: cleansers, toiletries, foods, clothing, medicines. Manu- well-known idiom: Never under-estimate the size of a woman’s facturers might well have argued that if it was a cultural bias ofsome thumb — there may be a man under it!’”?! Many marketing techsort to connect the household with female purchasing, it was none niques were held to function effectively only because women were ~ of their doing, nor was it their province to undo. Such a bias could now capable of relatively free movement and were not bound by hardly be said, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, to be particular to cultural ‘tradition’. Fashion shows, for example, were a common

the developing world. strategy for marketers, reflecting the increasing commodification of

Nevertheless, these connections relied underneath the surface on women themselves. The advent of such shows was celebrated by colonial domesticity and its postcolonial analogues within develop- advertisers as a sign of the modernity of African femininity: ‘In old ment practice. Some of these linkages were simply a by-product of African society, there were no such things as Beauty Contests. ... marketing institutions. Just as international marketing generally made Now it is an accepted form of entertainment. African girls will even use of anthropological and administrative personnel and resources parade in bikinis!’*? Marketers presumed that their ability to from. colonial institutions, so its tools for reaching women in the advertise to African women was a sign of the defeat of precolonial Third World were often seized directly from colonial programs for family structures, which had rested on the power of the senior domesticity. Many postwar southern African marketers appropriated members of a lineage. Consequently, a declaration of interest in most of their characteristic infrastructure — cinema vans, leafleting, women as the linchpin of a new mass market was often accomlow-cost single-channel radio sets, home demonstration of products panied by a parallel denunciation of the power of ‘traditional — directly from state propaganda programs directed with particular taboos,’ and of the ‘elderly’ over consuming habits.

intensity at African women, and they continued to develop this

infrastructure in close cooperation with local and international If southern African women were targeted as responsible for the institutions dedicated to “community development’. As this typical reproduction of new consumer habits in ways that recalled the account of a ‘home demonstration’ session from 1970s Zimbabwe colonial logic of gender relations, their envisioned relationship to makes clear, the characteristic sites of female activity created by the production of new mass markets was also enmeshed in some of colonial domesticity were heavily infiltrated by capitalist marketing: the contradictions that had marked that logic, as well as some new Mrs. Rusere of Colgate-Palmolive has given a number of most countervailing forces peculiar to the needs and priorities of trans-

;oyable demonstrations of the use of coldwater washing tonal capitalism. ; enjoy ; ns eens The conventional wisdom that for massthe markets had to expand der, showing how it can even be used washing of ; xP powder, showing can eve g lies.... Each member then took it in turns to wash a cup and through segmentation of the consuming population p rovided a wns © under ; P fulthe disincentive ‘the’ African consumer saucer eagle eyes to of regard the watching club members whoasaiiessential] v7&;y had learned from Mrs. Rusere’s demonstration... Each member ‘Male. For the most part, the doctrine of market segmentation has took home with her a plastic bas containing toothbrush and remained merely theoretical in Third World marketing. Despite

P 8a 0° 5 ; fairly elaborate schemespowder for distinguishing groups Colgate toothpaste, packet of Cold Power washing *OU'% ‘Ay é‘lifestyle’ : 8 B® BEOUP

national market places,* transnational and toilet soapsoap 2° and social classes in particular capitalists have ended up treating various formerly colonized

Because marketers identified the making of mass markets in the peoples as ‘Others’ who desire goods according to a consistent set of Third World as a project which entailed the reconstruction of cultural rules which vary only by gender. While marketers may cultural standards, practices and sensibilities, they were bound to have seen African women as the key to changing consumer habits, focus on women. Creating mass consumption was, in the words of they also wanted to stress that women and men should develop one South African executive, a matter of trying to change ‘the _ particular, gendered needs of their own. For certain classes of goods

African way of life, the African culture, to make it conform to associated with men, advertisements and marketing strategies European standards’.”” Marketers like Nimrod Mkele were deeply appealed directly to male audiences, presuming that men would conditioned by the weight of colonial knowledge to regard women purchase these goods themselves. In the 1960s and 1970s in as the ‘bringers of new tastes into the home’. Advertisers and Zimbabwe, for example, advertisements in the African media for executives whom I interviewed in 1990 and 1991 in Zimbabwe and alcoholic beverages, certain types of toiletries and patent medicines, South Africa testified to the strength and persistence of these and educational courses were invariably directed at male audiences,

perceptions of the “African market’.* using what white advertisers believed were characteristically mascu-

These perceptions were intimately dependent upon the infra- line images and phrasings in urban African culture. In particular, structure of domesticity and reflected the proposition that many advertisers repeatedly invoked the term ‘power’, believing that

68 © Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities

African men understood this term to be a direct reference to sexual life and familial authority. The single-family household, even in potency.** Many of the advertisements most identified with women, fairly stable urban townships with semipermanent inhabitants, had such as the perennial campaigns for Feluna Pills (iron supplements), its greatest currency in the social imagination of bureaucrats and addressed women as women, not as the quintessential consumer. marketers, rather than in the lived reality of township life. Other views among marketers about how mass markets could be This paradox not only recalled deeply ingrained and widespread created within peripheral economies also relied on the legacy of _ tensions that had marked colonial society as a whole but testified, at colonial thought, but in rather different ways. Many marketers least in the southern African context, to stresses within the prior envisioned the successful identification and nurturing of a ‘middle evolution of commodity culture among African peoples. Before class’ as the key to the stimulation of consumer demand in African efforts to construct mass markets in the 1950s, the ‘kaffir truck’ (as well as other Third World) societies. Such a view has been merchants who sold manufactured goods to Africans found that bedeviled by contradictions of its own. In postcolonial Africa, small women were often their primary customers in rural areas. This local elites frequently have been the only economically important pattern provoked a continuous triangular tension in the countryside consumers of imported goods, but the ideological presumption that among traders, female shoppers, and traditional African male elites. elite taste will automatically reproduce itself in other social classes Depending upon the shifting balance of power between traders and has proved both culturally false and structurally impossible in most rural cultivators, male elites spoke of ‘truck’ stores either as a of southern Africa to date, regardless of whether we take the gap dangerous opportunity for women to exercise economic power and between white and black or between black elites and other Africans social independence or as a form of exploitation which uniquely as the key example. Nevertheless, this line of argument has repre- victimized ‘their’ women. sented important discursive competition for marketers’ contentions This sense was deepened and complicated by the anxiety and about the role of women in taste transfer. One advertiser acidly anger that many settlers expressed about the expansion of Africans’ remarked in 1970s Rhodesia that his colleagues were forever consumption. The growing African urban middle class in particular searching for an ‘Excalibur’ that would magically open the ‘African attracted the ire of whites, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, for its market’; it was either women or the middle class, but rarely both. use of fancy clothing, cosmetics and other manufactured goods

The issue of social status opens up some additional lines of which whites considered to be a sign of privilege and racial connection between marketing wisdom and gendered colonial superiority. The confluence of these attitudes with the concerns of knowledge. The example of postwar southern Africa is instructive. African men about female mobility and economic power and the Women were seen as the doorway through which Western-style role of African women in commodification put into circulation a consumer habits could pass into the lives of non-Western peoples, powerful set of cultural stereotypes that envisioned the most active through which the alien could become familiar, but, at the same and socially visible black female consumers as corrupt and culturally time, indigenous women were also the most alien of the aliens. degenerate, as temptresses and prostitutes. Such stereotypes had information is the capital of marketing and advertising, but informa- power among most whites and some African men. For example, a tion about the reality of women’s lives often turned out to be hard representative diatribe by a white colonial official reprimanded

to come by. ‘over-dressed, heavily rouged and lipsticked cigarette-smoking Marketers needed to believe that the project started under females’,*> while African journalist Lawrence Vambe spoke bitterly colonial domesticity was mostly complete, that many African of ‘emancipated ladies’ who were ‘well-washed, sweetly scented

women were becoming members of single-family households with and finely dressed’, cruelly stealing men away from ‘simple workstable housing and a private sphere of social life. At the same time, worn wives and sweethearts’ .*6 they knew full well that this was not the case in southern Africa; One of the consequences of such stereotypes was that programs actually, it was not even intended to be the case. The realities of designed to reproduce domesticity made great emphasis on ‘thriftimigrant labor coupled with decades of segregationist land removal _ ness’, stressing that African women must learn to consume humbly, policies meant that government officials, settler associations and within their means and appropriate to their racial place. Women other powerful interests, including many capitalists, regarded the were held responsible for reconstructing and reproducing consumer rural countryside as the true and proper abode of women and a_ behavior for the whole of the African population, but within a logic

peasant lifestyle as their proper mode of life. which called for restraining rather than expanding their role as The entire discursive structure of what marketers knew about consumers. Female consumption in this light was portrayed as a African women rested on one set of assumptions about African potential drag on male aspirations, another of the many ways that a households. Budget surveys and connected market research from woman could be selfish and self-absorbed, a ‘bad wife’. the 1950s to the 1970s in both Zimbabwe and South Africa organized Consumption by African women was thus already a highly their data in terms of a single-family household and concentrated on contentious subject that underlined important schisms within urban populations which were both accessible to researchers and colonial society when marketers began to set out their strategy in financially capable of purchasing manufactured goods. Yet the the ‘African market’ in 1950s southern Africa. The units of data and structural place marked out for African women when these surveys various received wisdoms about cultural reproduction through were conducted was the countryside, and the governments of the which market research understood African women were profoundly region, in alliance with many senior male African patriarchs, were at odds with the social realities of racial capitalism. Rather than continually striving to prevent urban settlement and to restrict being the most accessible segment of African communities, women female mobility. Marketers knew very little about rural lifestyles, were in fact often the most remote from the information-gathering and they generally had few plans to learn more. Even in urban or and planning apparatus of capitalist marketing. Moreover, male peri-urban settings, African men were far more visible and audible interlocutors within African communities, including black marketto marketers. Moreover, households in both areas were profoundly ing professionals recruited in increasing numbers, regarded the marked by male migrancy and thus by fluid configurations of family expansion of consumption through women ambiguously, even

Timothy Burke/Marketing, Colonial Knowledge & the Female Subject in Zimbabwe ¢ 69

angrily. Though Mkele saluted African women as the harbingers of domesticity programs, and the evolution of controversies over the mass market, he also betrayed a certain typical resentment about female consumption did not have precise analogues elsewhere. Yet agreeing to ‘fork up and smile’ and being ‘under a woman’s it is reasonable to suppose that equally powerful contradictions arose thumb’.The African man, he said, ‘tends to be conservative’, but in other contexts, with similar effects on capitalist marketing

‘this conservatism is of course encouraged by women’. discourse. For example, the significant expansion of female wage In one sense, this formulation accurately reflected the social labor in much of postwar south and southeast Asia has certainly had history of gender during the colonial era. Colonial domesticity and different but equally important effects on the general inheritance of

the construction of ‘customary law’ by the Rhodesian state colonial knowledge about gender roles. Marketing discourse over increasingly redefined the household and its relationship to produc- the last five decades about new habits of mass consumption and tion in ways that were highly disadvantageous to African women. women in the Third World has been affected everywhere by Many rural women responded by articulating and defending their peculiarly local forms of wider colonial propositions about gender, ~ own readings of ‘tradition’ which sought to preserve some of their cultural reproduction and domesticity. Moreover, some of the power over cultivation and exchange and which resisted the forces which have worked against identifying women as the essence intrusion of younger women working to promote domesticity on of the consumer, such as the desire to segment markets, have been behalf of missionaries or the state by defining ‘African culture’ in common across the span of transnational capitalism. ‘opposition to modern ways’. Equally, in urban communities, What does the preceding analysis suggest? In one sense, it might women defended their own capacity for accumulation through simply represent a version of several lines of existing scholarly prostitution or entrepreneurship against an alliance of African men analysis. For example, within marketing and business discourse, and township administrators. One of their key strategies was to some studies have long warned male executives not to be misled by assert their right to control household expenditures; another was their own cultural stereotypes regarding gender roles, particularly the publicly to mock and satirize masculine dependency and wasteful- _ statistical and organizational presumptions that shape international or ness. Colonial domesticity provided unintended resources for comparative marketing practice.” In another vein, this article could women to articulate their own agenda, through the emphasis on be viewed as a rather indirect contribution to the long tradition of thrift and the female management of the household.** Some of the debate about the definition and meaning of the household as a social most striking examples of female satire can be found in persistent unit within feminist and anthropological scholarship.* rumors circulated by township women that commercially-produced I would like to suggest another possible use for the analysis

beer caused impotence in men.*” initiated in this paper. We are coming to realize that the matter of

Marketers were generally concerned not to represent female gender lay at the heart of subtle and yet vitally important crises of control over consumer behavior as existing outside the context of imperial authority. In equally subtle and crucial ways, gendered the patriarchal order. In southern Africa, marketers often stressed perspectives within transnational capitalism about cultural reprothat women were purchasing for others. In some cases, advertise- duction, alterity and development may mark the gradual evolution ments and marketing materials showed women purchasing goods of another domain of crisis, with important historical and contemwhile subordinate to the command of husbands and fathers. porary implications. The predominant interpretation promoted in Moreover, marketers invariably represented African men as the modernization theory of capitalist development in non-Western decision-makers when it came to ‘major’ purchases of durable societies as inevitably homogenizing now seems questionable. goods. Finally, colonial domesticity was the premise upon which Instead, what is increasingly clear is that capitalist professionals have marketers approached African women as modernized shoppers who _ often simultaneously sought to produce and erase social difference,

controlled the budget and habits of'a single-family household, but it to fix and erode boundaries between identities and cultures. also reflected the deep anxieties of colonial elites about the prospect Women have been seen as the ideal subjects of marketing campaigns

of their subjects actually becoming ‘civilized’. Domesticity throughout the postwar Third World, yet they have also been attempted to outline and enforce boundaries around consuming known as the least accessible, the most alien, the furthest away from practices, to restrain African women to what whites felt were what transnational capitalism understood as the form of ‘modernity’ racially appropriate habits of consumption. This had inevitable which it monopolized. The consuming ‘modernity’ which has echoes within the social vision of white capitalist professionals in emerged in different sites throughout the postcolonial world, with southern Africa. For example, in one instance, a commercial journal all of its gendered aspects, seems richly local and meaningful for all trying to assess the market for cosmetics among African women _ that it is also uneven, contested and impoverishing. offered a resoundingly negative perspective: “The horrible sight of a dark-skinned woman whose face is plastered with cosmetics which obviously were manufactured exclusively for use by a lightskinned Notes person is a common sight in Rhodesia. ... African woman frequently | Nimrod Mkele, ‘Advertising to the Bantu’, Second Advertising Conlacks taste.... She entirely ignores the final effect in her anxiety to vention South Africa (Society of Advertisers, Durban, 1959), p. 129. do what the white woman does.’* In a similar vein, a Rhodesian Gordon, Effer, “Act Like a Man, Think Like a Woman’, International

manufacturing executive reproduced domesticity’s vision of the Advertiser (1970), pp. 32-3. oe os

consuming wife as a ‘bad wife’: ‘it is a known fact that the women 3 Mike Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and

in African society ... exert enormous influence, good and bad, on, Modernity (Sage Publications, London, 1990), p. 2. their men. The man is obliged to provide his wife with anything she Noreene Z. Janus, “Advertising and the Mass Media in the Era of the desires however reluctant he may be to purchase it." Studies in Mass Media Research (eds) Emile G. McAnany, Jorge Schnit-

. a5 Global Corporation’, in Communication and Social Structure: Critical

Much in this last set of arguments should be seen as particular to man and Noreene Janus (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1981), p. 291. southern Africa. The structure of racial capitalism, the effects of | * For some examples, see Steven Langdon, ‘Multinational Corporation, migrancy, the social vision of a settler society, the local content of Taste Transfer and Underdevelopment: A Case Study From Kenya’,

70 © Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities

Review of African Political Economy, 2 (1975); Jeffrey James, Consumer Encounters With Domesticity (ed.) Karen Tranberg Hansen (Rutgers Choice in the Third World (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1983); Noreene University Press, New Brunswick, 1993). . Janus, ‘The Making of the Global Consumer: Transnational Advertising '° Zimbabwe National Archives (ZNA) $138/150, Native Commissioner and the Mass Media in Latin America’ (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, (NC) Sinoia to Superintendent of Natives, February 1924. For analyses 1980); Richard Wilk, ‘Consumer Goods as Dialogue About Develop- of these kinds of sentiments among missionaries and officials in Africa, ment’, Culture and History, 7 (1992), pp. 79-100; Daniel Miller, Material see Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the

Culture and Mass Consumption (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987); T. G. History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Heinemann, Portsmouth, New McGee, ‘Mass Markets — Little Markets: Some Preliminary Thoughts Hampshire, 1992), esp, ch. 5; Hansen (ed.) African Encounters With on the Growth of Consumption and its Relationship to Urbanization: A Domesticity, Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Case Study of Malaysia’, in Markets and Marketing (ed.) Stuart Plattner Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946-1960’, Signs, 15 (1990), pp.

(University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland, 1985); Benjamin S. 447-74; Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Orlove and Henry J. Rutz (eds) The Social Economy of Consumption Exploitation (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1980); Audrey Wipper, “The

(University Press of, America, Lanham, Maryland, 1989). Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Movement in the Colonial Period: The

6 See Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Consumption, Canadian Connection, Mau Mau, Embroidery and Agriculture’, Rural Commodification and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Duke University Africana, 29 (1975-76). Press, Durham, 1996), for further comments on the ‘civilizing mission’ 17 Southern Rhodesia Department of Native Education, Report of the and advertising. I am grateful to Leonardo Paggi for forcefully pointing Director of Native Education (Salisbury, 1929), p. 57. out how important social difference has been to global marketing. '8 M. Waters, ‘Home Economics and Practical Hygiene’, Department of 7 J. E. Maroun, ‘Second Address: “Bantu Market” Session’, Third Native Education Occasional Paper No. 1 (Salisbury, May 1929), p. 2. Advertising Convention in South Africa: The Challenge of a Decade (Statistic 1° See Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘Colonial Fairy Tales and the Knife and Fork

Holdings Inc., Johannesburg, September 1960), p. 124. Doctrine in the Heart of Africa’, in African Encounters With Domesticity, 8 See J. W. Sanger, Advertising Methods in Japan, China and the Philippines, (eds) Hansen, and Norbert Elias, The History of Manners (Pantheon

US Department of Commerce Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Books, New York, 1978; orig. German pub, 1939). Commerce Special Agents Series #209 (Government Printing Office, 7° See Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives; Sita Ranchodw-Nilsson,

Washington, D.C., 1921), p. 26. “Educating Eve”: The Women’s Club Movement and Political

° Chris Jenks (ed.) Cultural Reproduction (Routledge, London, 1993). For Consciousness Among Rural African Women in Southern Rhodesia, nineteenth-century examples, see Christopher Herbert, Culture and 1950-1980’, in African Encounters with Domesticity (ed.) Hansen; and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (University of Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 7! See Hunt, “Colonial Fairy Tales’; Karen Tranberg, Distant Companions:

1780-1950 (Chatto & Windus, London, 1958); and George Stocking, Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (Cornell University Press,

Victorian Anthropology (Free Press, New York, 1987). Ithaca, 1989); Hansen (ed.) African Encounters With Domesticity; and

‘0 For these perspectives on culture, see Herbert, The Invention of Culture, Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, and Williams, Culture and Society 1780- ” Gustavo Esteval ‘Development’, in The Development Dictionary (ed.)

1950. On the discursive opposition between nature and culture, see Wolfgang Sachs, p. 14. Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, in * For a unique perspective-on the pull of these contradictions, see Woman, Culture and Society (eds) Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Norman Rush’s novel, Mating, which focuses on an imaginary develop-

Lamphere (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1974); Carol P. ment expert’s project for women in Botswana. MacCormack, ‘Nature, Culture and Gender: A Critique’, and Marilyn + See Haleh Afshar (ed.) Women, Development and Survival in the Third Strathern, “No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case’, both in Nature, World (Longman, London, 1991); Jane Parpart, “Who is the “Other”: A

Culture and Gender (eds) Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern Postmodern Feminist Critique of Women and Development Theory (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980) (Routledge, New and Practice’, Development and Change, 24 (1993), pp. 439-65; Kay B.

York, 1991). Warren and Susan C. Borque, ‘Women, Technology and International

4 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘“Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power”: Gender, Development Ideologies’, in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (ed.) di

Race and Morality in Colonial Asia’, in Gender at the Crossroads of Leonardo. Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodem Era (ed.) Micaela di * Southern Africa may also seem unrepresentative, for decolonization Leonardo (University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1991), p. 52. came slowly and painfully to the region. Yet many of the economic and

2 In addition to the work of Ann Stoler, also see Margaret Strobel, political transformations which were so characteristic of postcolonial European Women and the Second British Empire (Indiana University Press, societies elsewhere in the world were clearly a part of the otherwise

Bloomington, 1991); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds) formally colonial societies of southern Africa. This included ‘developWestern Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Indiana ment’, albeit in a segregationist costume. University Press, Bloomington, 1992); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture © ‘Hygiene’, Homecraft Magazine (Salisbury), May 1970, p. 6. and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (University of Illinois 7’ ‘Questions from “Bantu Market” Session’, Third Advertising ConvenPress, Urbana, 1987); Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the tion in South Africa, p. 133.

Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1703-1905 (St. 8 Cornell Butcher, Francis Makosa, Wellington Chikombero, Harare, 26

Martin’s Press, New York, 1980); Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and November 1990; Clive Corder, Johannesburg, 30 May 1991; Roger Motherhood’, History Workshop, 5 (1978), pp. 9-57. Dillon, Harare, 3 April 1991; Douglas Kadenhe, Harare, 23 May 1991; 3 Veena Das, ‘Gender Studies, Cross-Cultural Comparison and the Maurice Mathewman, Harare, 13 May 1991; Jack Wazara, Harare, 15 Colonial Organization of Knowledge’, Berkshire Review, 21 (1986). May 1991. Interview tapes are held privately by the author. 4 This practice of immolating widows after their spouses’ death exertedan ” Charles Nyereyegona, ‘Marketing to the Urban African’, Marketing immense fascination for British administrators. For two interesting Rhodesia (Salisbury), 1 (May 1973). discussions of sati’s place in imperial policy and imperial knowledge, see °° Rhodesian Ministry of Information, A People’s Progress (Salisbury, 1969).

Das, ‘Gender Studies’, and Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The >! Mkele, ‘Advertising’, p. 129. Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian * ZNAS 2113/1-2, Rhodesian Ministry of Information, 1962. Colonial History (eds) Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Rutgers * See for example Nick Green and Reg Lascaris, Communication in the

University Press, New Brunswick, 1990). Third World. Seizing Advertising Opportunities in the 1990s (Tafelberg

'5 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Home-Made Hegemony: Publishers/Human and Rosseau Ltd., Cape Town, 1990); P. J. du Modernity, Domesticity and Colonialism in South Africa’, in African Plessis (ed.) Consumer Behaviour: A South African Perspective (Southern

Kenda Mutongi/Widowed Mothers, Daughters & Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940-60 ¢ 71

Book Publishers, Pretoria, 1990). through these very categories. What is important, though, is that * See Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, ch. 5, for further discussion of they consciously presented themselves as ‘poor widows’, as idealized

5s ONA SBE 3 testimony of Location Superintendent, Gwelo stereotypes of suffering females who were believed to become 36 Lawrence Vambe, An ill. Fated People: Zimbabwe Before and After Rhodes needy and help less at ; he eath ° their Dusan. Tey fle me "

(University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1972), p. 200. stories In ways Catculated to solicit sympathy. find this usually

37 Mkele, ‘Advertising, p. 129. worked to their advantage since it placed men in the difficult

38 See Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives, and Diana Jeater, Marriage, Situation of having to defend their ideal masculinity. Only by Perversion and Power. The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern helping guarantee the economic livelihood and social status of

Rhodesia 1894-1930 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993). bereaved widows could men uphold their own self-image. Thus the

*° See Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, and essays in Jonathan Crush and relationship between them was informed by a reciprocity that

nares. Ampiet Ses a and Labor in Southern Africa (Ohio — suggests that the widows were more than passive recipients of male niversity Fress, fthens, . . _ charity. By presenting their grief publicly so as to solicit relief for _ “On the Frontiers of Trade: Cosmetics for the African Woman’, their suffecines. widows were actively able to turn what men saw as 41 Joe Van den Bergh, ‘Marketing in the Tribal Trust Lands’, Marketing stereotypical feminine behaviour: emotionality, helplessness an

Commerce of Rhodesia, July 1955. _ . ‘cal feminine behaviour: tonalitv. helpl d

Rhodesia, 2 (1974), p. 61. weakness — into strengths. That 1s, by consciously attempting to

# For the most recent example, see Rena Bartos, Marketing to Women make men feel more ‘manly’, Maragoli widows were able — at least Around the World (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1989). partially — to exploit existing gender roles to get what they needed.°

43 For a recent example which also directly addresses consumption and In particular, I argue that in the 1940s and 1950s Maragoli offers a quick overview of the literature, see Barbara Diane Miller, widows actively exploited the gendered understandings of grief to ‘Gender and Low-income Household Expenditures in Jamaica’, in improve their status and, especially, to raise their daughters. For Rutz and Orlove (eds) The Social Economy of Consumption (1989). widows, the patriarchal authority held by their husbands seemed, ironically, to become even more pronounced after their husband’s deaths. While their husbands were alive, they held power over the women’s personal welfare, acting as their economic providers and

KO protectors and endowing them with social recognition — at least in KENDA MUTONG|] theory. But when their husbands died, their passing resulted in an

immediate loss in social status and economic security, which in turn /Worries \ / increased the widow’s dependence upon already powerful of the Heart patriarchal system. Most widows had an nowhere to turn as their

Widowedeee Mothers incomes disappeared, their control over ambiguous. their children diminished andDaugh their ters place in the community became Almost & Masculinities in Maragoli , inevitably, new widows fell back upon men not to marry them, as

| k revious literature has shown, but rather to challenge them to

Western Kenya, 1940-60 ilemonstrate their ‘ideal’ Maragoli masculinity.

TTT TTT Unfortunately, the widows’ loss of control over their social and Reference , economic well-being was not an isolated or uncommon problem,

Journal of African History, 1999, 40(1): 67-86 for widowhood increased dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s

in western Kenya.t Widowhood had become increasingly widespread in Maragoli after the 1930s as the region’s high population Omwene hango [the owner of the home|] is the only person with prompted colonial officials to target Maragoli men for forced labor.®

true authority to discipline children. So, when your husband Many of these men were transported to other parts of Kenya and died, the authority of omwene hango died with him, and you were exposed to foreign diseases from which they often died. In the

left alone.! 1940s and 1950s, then, the increased pool of widows faced special

problems whenever it came to raising daughters.° For the first time, Historians of gender have shown the importance of documenting daughters — rather than sons — provided a valuable source of income

and scrutinizing instances in which gender terminologies are for their widowed mothers as the economic growth generated by invoked and employed.” A compelling instance can be found in an the war led to high increases in bridewealth. But only literate examination of the widows of Maragoli. In this upland rural area of daughters could command the highest marriage payments. about two hundred square kilometers in western Kenya, the Widows targeted Maragoli men serving in World War II in the

dynamic relations surrounding widowhood provide a useful King’s African Rifles (they became known as ‘KAR men’ in

opportunity to analyze the construction of feminine and masculine Maaragoli) as husbands for their daughters. During the war, Maragoli categories, as well as the political strategies that emerged out of became, yet again, a central recruiting ground for young men who these categories. Widows in this rural part of Kenya were certainly were sent off to serve in the war. But as often happened, before subject to the limitations imposed on them by the invocation of leaving home, or during holiday breaks, the young men contracted strict gender categorization — perhaps at this point in their lives hasty marriages. This was relatively easy for them, since, as new more than any other. And yet, surprisingly, these widows were able recruits they earned a higher and more stable income from their to use such categories for their own purposes. By expressing their military duties, and they were willing to pay high bridewealth to erief publicly — usually in ways that focused on their social and secure brides. Thus the KAR men became the preferred marriage economic needs — Maragoli widows not only reinforced the impor- __ partners, especially for the daughters of widows who were desperate tance of gender categories but also sought to redress their grievances to acquire the high bridewealth to improve their economic

72 © Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities , situation. Unfortunately, these marriages often were plagued with displays of grief, men demonstrated to their communities their own problems. When their husbands left for their military duties, for power and pre-eminence. I would like to concentrate, then, on the instance, many of the new brides experienced a great deal of politics of grief, particulary kehenda mwoyo, and on the ways in personal freedom. Indeed, some of the women were too impatient which widows articulated it in order to solicit help — particularly for companionship to wait for their husbands’ return or heard help in raising and disciplining daughters in the post-war years. rumors that their newly acquired husbands had died in the military,

and they were lured by other men into casual sexual relationships. Increased bridewealth and the education of widows’ daughters Predictably, these clandestine relationships strained their marriages in the 1940s

when their husbands returned from the war, and in the decade after | the war there was an increase in the number of reported wife- Maragoli widows exploited the gendered understandings of grief in beating cases and divorces.’ order to secure an education for their daughters. Before the 1940s, Widows were therefore forced, for the first time, to defend their most widowed mothers, like all Maragoli, hesitated to send their daughters in public law courts, either getting injunctions against daughters to school, arguing that educating them was unnecessary their husbands or seeking divorces, in order to prevent the return of because daughters, unlike sons, could never become wage-earning their ex- sons-in-law’s bridewealth. For the first time, then, widows clerks. These discriminatory views changed dramatically in the were compelled to seek remedies outside the family and the village 1940s. During the 1940s, widowed mothers struggled to educate and enter the colonial court system, a domain previously defined as _ their daughters, not only because they wanted them to learn how to male. To add to their problems, widows felt let down by their read and write, but also because they wished their daughters to daughters, for whom they had struggled to find money — primarily study home economics so that they could become competent wives

to educate them — hoping to secure them lucrative and stable for a newly emerging generation of educated, wage-earning marriages. Moreover, widows had never felt that they possessed the Maragoli men. This change in attitude was based on practical authority to discipline their daughters, largely due to the fact that observations; widows had seen the few young women who had they lacked the authority — defined as male in this culture — to do attended school in the 1930s garner higher bridewealth for their so. And they felt that the new problems they experienced raising parents in comparison with illiterate women. Having witnessed the their daughters would not have occurred had their husbands not lucrative marriages made by educated women, widows became died. Consequently, they saw all these problems as an aspect of the convinced of the economic and social benefits of educating their

grief they experienced due to their husbands’ deaths. daughters.

Maragoli widows employed a specific term to describe the The 1940s therefore saw many more young women attend

practical problems arising from their widowhood: kehenda mwoyo, primary school than ever before. For instance, in the 1942 Annual or ‘worries of the heart’. In contrast, the same widows employed Report, S. H. Fazan, the DC of North Kavirondo, attributed the another term, ovovereli, which literally meant ‘being in a state of overcrowded nature of primary schools in the Maragoli area to an sadness’, to refer to the distress they endured when someone died to increase in the number of girls attending formal classes.° So high was whom they were tied by bonds of affection alone — a young child, this increase that the Local Native Council (LNC) was forced to

for instance, or a friend or other distant relative. When further establish five intermediate girls’ boarding schools in North pressed to say what they meant by ‘worries of the heart’, Maragoli Kavirondo to accommodate the young women who graduated widows replied, “You worried about how you were going to take from the primary schools.!? By 1952, Maragoli led North Kavicare of yourself; how you will eat and take care of your children and rondo with 38 primary schools, most of them run under the who will protect you’. The implications of the different terms auspices of the Friends African Mission, and young women comdescribing grief were crucial to these women. Kehenda mwoyo, prised a third of the students. In that same year, the Inspector of unlike ovovereli, described more than sadness and was distinctively Schools’ report indicated the need to build more home science concerned with material and social responsibilities. Kehenda mwoyo rooms to cater for the increased number of girls attending these concerned the social, political, economic and emotional needs of a schools."

widow and her ability (or lack of ability) to meet them. In other Home science was emphasized at the expense of rigorous words, the distinction between ‘worries of the heart’ and ‘sadness’ literacy as officials argued that young girls did not need the latter was that between a threat to survival and a mere personal loss which form of education since they were not expected to work outside the

only affected one emotionally. | home. In 1948, for instance, C. H. Williams, the new District

When further pressed, Maragoli widows told me what they did Commissioner of North Kavirondo, noted the widespread literacy when confronted with kehenda mwoyo: ‘you looked for different as well as knowledge of homecraft among girls in Maragoli. He | ways to help yourself, and also publicly informed men in your related ‘that real progress in girls’ education is being made particucommunity of your problems, and hoped that they would show larly on the domestic side, where the standard of achievement is tsimbavasi (sympathy) or varakoverela (pity) and help you’. It seems often very good’. He further commented on how female education clear, then, that Maragoli widows employed their emotions strategi- had become a popular subject of discussion in the meetings of the cally by associating them with their concrete socio-economic needs LNC and observed: ‘there is no doubt that the education of girls

and by presenting them publicly to the male members of the arouses greater interest among the natives than any other subject. , communities as their grief. Such displays of grief were usually well- Girls are attending school because most educated men now prefer directed since ‘ideal’ masculinity implied responsibility for women to marry educated women. Parents now see the benefits of educatand helping bereaved widows meant being considered fully ‘male’ by ing daughters as these young women earn them a high dowry.’”” the community. Assisting widows in the tasks previously performed After World War II, homecraft education was also promoted by by their deceased husbands made men feel ‘strong’, ‘dynamic’ and Maendeleo ya Wanawake (Advancement of Women), a voluntary ‘paternalistic’. Furthermore, by responding publicly to the widows’ association initiated by colonial officials to set up community

Kenda Mutongi/Widowed Mothers, Daughters & Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940-60 ¢ 73

development programs to train women in home science.’ These to teach people modern ways of doing agriculture. Some programs taught young Maragoli women how to bake and sew, to ignorant women did not practice efficient agriculture methods.

employ more efficient methods of child care, and to maintain But if you were married to an educated woman, she knew cleanliness in the home.'* For example, in August 1950, Mrs. agriculture and made sure she planted her maize in straight lines, Owour, the supervisor of Vihiga Homecraft Training Center, instead of sowing it like the ignorant women. So when your wrote: ‘this month has been devoted to washing, ironing and care land was nicely planted and weeded you were proud because of family clothes ... we are emphasizing better feeding, and simple your wife was setting a good example.”!

badging of amy income, We abo ty to show Hl on CME raining public eapectbilty for men, then, became pay contin

efficient forms of farming. gent on how well the men’s wives could draw upon a formal Because the community programs and formal schooling were education in domestic science to carry out the, private responsi-

; ; a er : ; bilities of the household.” And it was just such a thorough educa-

relatively thorough in training women in ‘modern’ ways of carrying |. q ; h 4 hoped their daughters

out domestic chores, many Maragoli widows were encouraged to tron id Saeoe oa lee t MOSt WICOWS OP F mer caug a send their daughters to school, hoping that the young women would achieve in orcer to oer eideat lly. at uture vw f> “h would become good wives and earn them high bridewealths. For widow steac’y "elves to a And not el bride it ath a way tor the example, Elima Visiru, who was widowed in the 1940s, related: wt Seat emseives to acquire an ampler prideweaith. : I sent my younger daughter to school because the missionaries became a major obstacle for widows, however, because it was

| : inding the initial cash to invest in their daughters’ school fees

taught her good manners. Because my daughter was clever anda ™ainly men who worked jobs that paid cash wages. In the 1940s, good houseworker, I knew she would make a good wife, and _ fees for primary day school were about four shillings per term, and would draw on the teachings of the missionary education to fear gitls’ intermediate boarding school cost about forty shillings. and respect her husband. Education turned young girls into - Considering that clerical wages in the 1940s averaged sixty shillings

omugosi [docile], amiable and obedient women. And respectable per month, the boarding school fee was rather expensive.” men liked to marry and pay high dowries for such women." Obviously, saving for school fees became an even more onerous

task for widows who did not have wage-earning husbands.

Truphena Chore, another determined widow, related how she Maragoli widows were often forced to turn to their male relatives struggled to find money to send her daughter to school in order to (sons, sons-in-law and brothers) to obtain the money needed, and emulate her cousin, who had attended school in the 1930s and later this often required that they rely upon their status as grieving married a rich military man. According to Chore’s daughter, her widows. For example, Keran Egendi, widowed in 1941, asked her mother agreed to send her to school because she knew ‘I would be son who worked in the nearby town of Eldoret to send her money

profitable to her when I got married and earn her a big dowry like to educate her daughter. She noted: | my cousin, whose mother was also a widow.’!”

In the 1940s, educated Maragoli men increasingly wished to When my husband died, my greatest kehenda mwoyo was where I marry women not just to produce children and cultivate land, but was going to find money to educate my daughters. I was so also to perform domestic chores in new and modern ways. A grieved and worried. So I turned to my son and begged him to number of scholars have remarked on how colonialism in Africa help me educate his older sister. He agreed, and I was so was manifested in the building of ‘the home’ and especially on how relieved. He also knew that if he refused our people would such a home came to constitute a blend of western and Christian reprimand him for neglecting his widowed mother by not precepts.'® Similarly, in Maragoli, as men educated in missionary helping take care of his younger sisters. Thus he was obliged to schools in the 1930s began to move to the newly emerging cities of take care of me as a real adult man should.”

Nairobi, Jinja, Kampala and Mombasa in the 1940s, they . , . 4: ;

increasingly became preoccupied with establishing a home in 19 aynen egendl § daughter later for ed if cxemilitary man he

Maragoli. To many, this home symbolized social respectability or eh ne 4 the cas 4 fom. , TSTSEL “I SL, er son k

acculturation in both Christian and European ideas about modern- 07° COW She acl Teceree “rom lcr sonia w e remarked ity and civilization. Such social worthiness in the 1940s began with P roudly: ‘I gave him the cow because ne hysically there, and he ‘marrying well’, which meant marrying an educated woman who could see it, and because he was crucial in the education of his sister, could keep up with the modern domestic requirements of these but I kept the cash for myself. He did not ante snow how much men.'? According to James Kinziri, an ex-World War II veteran: money I received’. While Egendi’s son might have helped his mother because he hoped to receive some of the bridewealth, he was

An educated man felt proud when his wife was a mustarabu also able to perform a duty that reinforced his masculinity — ‘I did it [meaning civilized in Swahili, from ‘to be an Arab’]. And when _ because as a “man” I had to take care of my mother.’”” Like many the bora afya (Ministry of Health) people came to his house he other Maragoli men, Egendi’s son was trying to live up to the societal was not embarrassed that his wife had not cleaned the house and expectations of masculinity by performing a recognized duty. put nicely crocheted cloths on tables and chairs. If his wife did The main point here, however, is that widowhood provided an these things, it reflected well on the man. People respected him; important impetus to accumulate cash bridewealth. Unlike in pre-

they said that so and so is keeping a modern home.” vious decades, when bridewealth was paid in animal stock that was Another proud husband, Joshua Shego, and ex-agricultural officer, considered male property and was received by the family’s males (that

related: : | is, the uncles or the brothers), starting in the 1940s much of the bridewealth was paid in cash.”* Since cash was a volatile, less gendered It was important that you married a woman who was educated and more democratic asset than animal bridewealth, widows kept and knew more about agriculture because in those days we used most of it without much objection from their male relatives.2? And

74 ¢ Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities

not unimportant was the fact that cash, unlike animals, was physically cash instead of female stock, it is likely to be frittered away in the small and easier for the women to hide from their male relatives.>° purchase of consumer goods with no continuity-enabling quality The cash portion of bridewealth in the 1940s more than tripled that ties families together. Bride price in stock has a continuance-

from that of the 1930s, making it even more important for widows enabling aspect which requires, in the original system, conto protect their rights over it. The inflation in cash bridewealth was tinuous reciprocity and mutual assistance between the two partly due to the money that military men, who wanted to marry families; it operates, to some extent, as a stabilizer of marriages.” quickly, sent to the families of their bri des. For example, while in But, it was the cash aspect of bridewealth that widows counted on, the 1950s a standard brideprice was sixty shillings and two cows, in and thus the DC’s attack on the one economic resource widows the 1940s men paid as much as two hundred shillings and two were sure of receiving became yet another source of grief, one they cows.” According to Maria Jiemo, who was married in 1933, rich believed they would not have experienced had their husbands not

men often paid two cows and fifty shillings for dowry, at the died y most.*? the otherthehand, married in 1926, andanimal ce ; aLeah , ” InAndia, the end,onhowever, DCs got agreed that both cash and her husband paid only one cow and no cash. In comparison, bridewealth should be limited, and they asked that chiefs make sure Grace Isha, an educated woman whose mother was a widow, that they recorded each payment of bridewealth in their location. In

marnied ty nd t hake ang ner pusband p ud ws eto reality, though, officials often found it difficult to control the id ge unde and on shin for her dowry "AcorSng © Gooming bridewelthmatket ofthe 194s, speclly bea querrreae ak many well-paid young military men flaunted their cash to impress

competltive . Her mother related: "My daughter married “KAR their would-be brides. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that high money > her husb and paid dowry to me night away, and bought her brideprices would continue and even increase as military men were a “KAR shamba" [land] down the river." In the early 1940s, then, willing to help their mothers-in-law dodge officials’ assault on the eke as eaa’y those Wa cach pantie the effort to educate their 66h tridewealth by recording a lower price than they actually paid. Widows’ efforts to accumulate cash from their daughters’ marriages _ anced wih the Lenily your daughter wae martying into te a re

WETS however, opposed by colonial officials, who desperately down in the government book less bride price than they had

at all had tormented both colonial officials and missionaries in struggled to limit bridewealth. The very idea of paying bridewealth actually offered you’. She noted how, for example:

Kenya long prior to the 1940s. During the 1920s and 1930s, a man who really wanted to marry your daughter dutifully colonial officials had enumerated several vices resulting from paying entered in the government record book the price as one head of bridewealth. For example, Philip Mayer, a government sociologist, cattle and ninety shillings to please the government, but added surveyed bride prices in Gusiiland in the 1930s and concluded that another one head and one hundred shillings, about which he

demands for bride price were leading to theft, soil erosion, kept quiet.”

polygamy and family breakups.** Mayer was particularly concerned Esendi insisted that as long as a man knew he was getting a well-

that the payment of high bridewealth was a serious threat to the mannered, educated wife, he did not hesitate to ‘pay you more social and economic life of the community because young men, through the back door’. She also noted that a son-in-law was very unlike older men, often could not afford to pay the high bride- sympathetic to his mother-in-law because ‘he knew, that as a

wealth demanded of them. He argued: widow you had suffered to educate your daughter’. Evidently, then,

; ; the military men of the early 1940s were ‘real’ men who upheld the

as a result, young women formed unions without the consent of image of ideal Maragoli masculinity by helping widows meet their

Se socio-economic needs,

their families, or with a modified consent which, in the absence OO ds. 41

of the usual ‘customary Hes, resulted in the complete breakup of For these reasons, military men became the preferred marriage

the family at a later date. partners of many young women and the favorite sons-in-law for But like many government sociologists of the time, Mayer was ost widowed mothers. According to Belisi Shego, who was hesitant to interfere with established African customs, believing that Widowed in the early 1940s:

‘change should be left to the process of evolution.’ no widowed mother could ever refuse marrying her daughter to In the 1940s, though, as demands for high bridewealth peaked, a KAR man; they had a lot of money, and many women went officials insisted that change had to be legally enforced, and they with them and within two days the dowry was paid, they were mounted an active campaign against increased bridewealth, cash married, and the men returned to the KAR the following day.”

bridewealth in particular. For instance, in a meeting of Kenyan ; ; . Lo, DCs, H.E. Lambert insisted that cattle, not cash, constitute the bulk , Seemingly, widowed mothers had discovered a gold mine in of bridewealth. Invoking the structural-functional theories that military sons-in-law, but unfortunately, the benefits often came at a were in vogue at the time, Lambert asserted that the payment of ©°St they could not have foreseen. bride price in cattle had a ‘continuity-enabling principle’ to it that was lacking in cash.** Lambert particularly opposed suggestions by Unruly daughters, sexuality and discipline

Mayer to substitute cash for livestock in order to avoid over- a cote an vera ofthe rece ae Magl widows who had managed mary hi as This kind of change would not be ideal because it is the animal marriages. Inevitably, the men had to return to their military duties, sacrifice which binds the families concerned together for a life- leaving their young wives behind. Some of the recently married time of the couple and their offspring. The one family has daughters began to have love affairs with other men, a problem that acquired a girl, the other female stock. But if payment is made in distressed widowed mothers who felt a keen responsibility to

Kenda Mutongi/Widowed Mothers, Daughters & Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940-60 ¢ 75

control their daughters’ behavior in their husbands’ absence. But as In other instances, widowed mothers asked their male relatives widows, they lacked the authority invested by the culture in male to capture their run-away daughters and return them. Kaveya, for _ figures who could curb the young women’s loose sexual behavior. instance, asked Meshack Agoi, the chief of Maragoli, for help in For instance, Janet Kaveya, who was widowed in 1942, related the finding her daughter, who had run away to the nearby town of

difficulties of disciplining daughters: Kisumu. She noted: “when you educated your daughter, you It was hard when your husband died because you were left alone expected fer od pave good free to ws, but curing ne eee en and, sometimes, p eople and, even, your own children took you because their husbands were not around to watch them, so I went for granted. But during the Italian war [World War Il], even the ang asked the chief for help.’*” Agoi, the then chief of Maragoli, married daughters became very hard to discipline, for they had. olected this type of incident:

loose manners with men. If your husband was alive, even if he

was lost [spent extended periods of time in the city] your I used to send a deputation of about three elders and a strong daughters obeyed your rules and behaved themselves around young man to Kisumu, and have them sit at the bus stop, and men because they knew that if they did not, their father would wait for all the buses that came from Maragoli. If a single discipline them when and if he returned. But if you were a woman came out of the bus, the elders would ask her what she widowed mother, it was very hard to discipline your daughters - had come to do in Kisumu. If she did not give a satisfactory

this was your greatest kehenda mwoyo.® answer, and they were suspicious of her motives for visiting

Kisumu, the men would strip her of all her clothes, and have In the 1940s, widows were faced with new problems of disci- her wear a sack — to humiliate her; they would, then, put her plining daughters partly because increased urbanization provided back on the bus and take her back to the village, where she was new opportunities for restless and lonely women in the rural areas. made to walk around while everybody watched her and

Some of the young women ran away to the cities to become insulted her.*2 traders, domestics or prostitutes, instead of staying in the rural areas Aeoi insisted that ; his d > and a chief ; to listen to their widowed mothers reprimand them. So severe did “*8° a ng that 1¢ was his a “il man hel ac 4 we ne we to

the young women’s loose sexual behavior become that complaints contro nose youns he eb. ef ut also A cp widowed mothers

about married Maragoli women running away with other men aa aut ee vido t “ik “he oy yor . I think

dominated both the North Kavirondo District Annual Reports and. b Ppeals DY vt seh, “te me one a th are sles eal of 1 m 4 the minutes of the Kakamega LNC in the 1940s. In 1942, for Afucan most stu he that have Fommen? ow ah he ° onde d n example, the DC of North Kavirondo received a letter from G. “*71*” he ry the he contro’ vrother S sexuality oll Ko © lie Brandsma, the Prefecture Apostolic of Kavirondo Church of God, ;aaeee © © Th att "dies cae s mot ‘wv fw etimes cola Ti ated in complaining that young unmarried Luo and Sarnia men were the ettort. ese studies see contro’ of women's sexuality as a enticing young girls and married women from the southern districts 8¢®4et and colomial issue only, but a closer look at Maragoli shows

6 YORNS Bs ane hat Maragoli women, especially widowed mothers, allied with

of Bunyore and Maragoli to Uganda.** That same year, the DC of tha ¢ he “Dy SP hej vp ; ;

North Kavirondo, in a memo to the PC of Nyanza, noted ‘the men 1 t 1 ir generation 1n their chiens to regulate young women s movement of women out of North Kavirondo District should be ‘S“*¥# be avi eal Thus in Maragoh, as elsewhere ba acne, young

controlled in order to check the growing propensity amongst sender. . Soniat 4 ©came a ai t at was debated Doth across

Kavirondo girls to move into towns, to live freer lives and, even- 8°"°S® he onia - ooo cata hes h 4 all b1

tually, to become prostitutes’.° During the LNC meeting in In io - sokiz foe ee haste iL ‘élee van somiany "1 cH eb ©

Kakamega, the DC suggested that a pass law for women be instituted "#8008 TOT t0OKINE TOF New NUspParle’s as Talse FUMOTS CIFCu ated that

; heir husbands, servinga pass in World II, were long dead. to control these women and that :; transporting women without ° ; , h 5War ik widow. noted th eo dauchFor ?

_ be made an offence. The DC insisted that police apply the pass law sho Mungore attributed her son-in-law’s strange behavior to the ghosts of penge woTman. £) SCHOO! BIT 1S NOL a wOTnan, and MOst Prat girls 2

the people Kagai had killed during the war. Apparently Kagai had not Sierra Leone do not even go to school, much less graduate from

undergone the cleansing ceremony, which entailed killing a sheep, to PUMary or secondary school. -

appease the ghosts of the dead and to lessen his trauma from violent war The choice of school girls, however, is surprisingly useful. First, experiences. KPRC. NN/3/1102. For interesting historical studies of the apparent oddities themselves of the school girl category mirror

trauma, see Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, the ‘normal’ social world, provoking people to comment on Theory, and Trauma (Ithaca, 1994), Efraim Sicher, Breaking Crystal: ‘normal’ assumptions, predicaments, and possibilities for reconWriting and Memory after Auschwitz (Urbana, 1998); and Paul Antze and gtryal. In Sierra Leone, where education is not compulsory for girls, (Now You 1996), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory tyr conjugal life almost inevitably is, people view with ambivalence

4 Interview, West Mara goli, 3 May 1995. the gradual intrusion of formal schooling into what they see as the 75 Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience normal marriage process. Their responses throw into sharp relief the

in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985); and Elizabeth Schmidt, social forces that increasingly bear on girls as they progress toward ‘Patriarchy, capitalism and the colonial state in Zimbabwe’, Signs, 16 conjugal age. Second, the notions of both school and girl place

732-56. — strong emphasis on process: in this case, the making of a social identity. People in both categories — that is, school children and girls — are culturally recognized as undergoing formative processes from which numerous kinds of people could emerge.

This latter issue of social construction extends much more

broadly. Concerns with process have been raised across a number of disciplines as social scientists have turned increasingly from static views of culture that do not account for achievement or negotiation

— toward theories of action that ‘see people not simply as passive | reactors to and enactors of some “‘system’’, but as active agents and

Caroline Bledsoe/School Fees & the Marriage Process for Mende Girls in Sierra Leone ¢ 81

subjects in their own history’ (Ortner 1984: 143). The work of women in Africa have had little or no education, and most school Bourdieu (1977) and Gramsci (1971), among others, suggests that girls must drop out well before completing secondary school power operates less through force than by subtly shaping the because of marriage and pregnancy. Still, many rural girls see contexts in which people negotiate the definition of events (see also education as a ticket to leaving the village and becoming urban Collier 1988: 6). Within such frameworks, scholars are raising new career women and monogamous wives. (See Oppong 1973; questions of how people try to use, create, and negotiate cultural MHarrell-Bond 1976; Mann 1985; Obbo 1987, among others, for categories, rather than respond passively to norms, as they insightful treatments of marriage among educated urban women.) continually reshape culture afresh. Analyzing the category ‘school Whereas rural girls view education as a step toward greater girl’ draws special attention to processes by which important independence, their families view it ambivalently. Although educat-

cultural categories are continually shaped. ing a girl can improve her family’s economic well-being through

her remittances, they view it as a potential waste of valuable female

The marriage process in Africa subsistence labor if her school career, like that of many others, is

terminated by a pregnancy. Education can also erode the family’s

In this view of relationships as being constantly adjusted, material control over her marital rights by giving her more economic transactions become critical junctures that can mark the state of the options to fall back on if she refuses to marry the man her family has

relationship or rechannel it. How marriage and bridewealth trans- earmarked as a choice son-in-law. actions structure African women’s lives has, in fact, occupied Although a generation of concerted work on gender issues has considerable anthropological thought. Marriage and, in many exposed the problems in treating women only as wives, we need to societies, bridewealth are generally acknowledged to transfer legal re-examine the meaning of African marriage for rural women in rights in an African woman’s labor and sexual and reproductive these rapidly changing times. We can do so most fruitfully by services from her natal lineage to that of her husband (Radcliffe- returning to the old question of economic transfers that surround Brown 1950), bringing about little change in her subordinate legal marriage. Here I accept Gluckman’s (1965) general premise that status, especially if she enters a polygynous household as a junior African social relations are created and symbolized through transfers wife. We now know, however, that despite the formal statuses that of property. In Sierra Leone, for example, frequent gifts of money economic transfers would appear to confer on them, African are crucial symbolic markers of social relationships, including those women can carve out areas of considerable autonomy in conjugal between kin and between patrons and clients. For women of units, especially if they have several children who can help support childbearing age, however, economic transfers have specific their economic enterprises. For example, Guyer (1981) and several meaning. Any transfer by an unrelated man for, or to, a young contributors to Hafkin and Bay (1976) point out that spouses often woman — a loan, a ticket to a dance, or even sustained trading separate their incomes and expenditures, making many women _ transactions — can signal marital or sexual intent.

quite independent of their husbands economically. Others show Capturing the purpose of economic transfers for women in that, under certain conditions, women spend considerable time Africa Comaroff (1980: 37) points out that ‘prestations transform trying to extricate themselves from marriage (for example, Cohen mating, which in itself may have no intrinsic social value, into a

1971; Bledsoe 1980). socially meaningful process, and thereby locate it in a universe of We usually take as our focus ‘married’ women’s efforts to cope __ relations’ (see also Parkin 1980). Yet as Comaroff and others have

with the constraints of conjugal life or to gain independence. Yet stressed, the processual nature of marriage creates enormous central to understanding women’s options is the processual nature opportunity for manipulation. A girl’s parents may acknowledge the of African marriage. “Getting married’ is rarely a single event. money given by a man at one point as a marriage payment. But they Rather, it extends over a period of months or even years (see, for may try to redefine it later as a gift unrelated to the marriage or as a example, Comaroff and Roberts 1977; Aryee and Gaisie 1979; payment for a previous debt, should the marriage plans dissolve. Brandon and Bledsoe 1988). During this time, potential partners Because marriage payments and transactions take different forms and their families engage in what we might call ‘conjugal testing’: under different historical and economic conditions, we need to take working cautiously toward more stable unions. Because marriages a fresh look at new forms of marital transfers in the context of evolve gradually, a girl — sometimes with her family’s implicit greater opportunities for education. I ask how people attempt to permission — may test out relationships with several partners before define the economic transactions that permit a Mende girl from a

establishing a long-term one. At some point in the process, family of limited means to attend school. I refer here to adults’ cohabitation and sexual relations begin and children are born, but contributions to school fees (tuition) in particular, and secondarily these events do not necessarily coincide with marriage rituals or to costs such as room and board, uniforms, and books. with transfers of bridewealth and gifts, which can precede cohabita- School fees have become a key symbol of contemporary young tion and signify continued intent thereafter. For many a girl, youth people’s aspirations toward what is culturally termed ‘civilized.’ But consists of preparing for life with a man with whom her family beyond the apparently straightforward Western notion of school

actually began affinal negotiations when she was a toddler or even fees, the Mende place deeper layers of meaning on them, before birth, while her ‘married’ life may be marked by periodic particularly for girls. Like more conventional notions of payments disputes about outstanding bridewealth debts or charges of adultery. for women, school fees — when paid by outside men on behalf of Emphasizing marriage as an extended process of conjugal testing girls — can signal marital or sexual interest. What, then, are the highlights the fact that we know little about how a young woman as_ implications for girls’ conjugal lives as well as their chances of conwell as other people try to shape her conjugal or career potentials in _ tinuing in school? the long stretch of marital processing. This becomes even more This paper shows that rural girls’ efforts to obtain an education important in light of one of the most significant trends in contem- must be understood against the indigenous model of marriage. It porary Africa: the advent of formal Western schooling. Most suggests that by manipulating the definition of material transactions

82 ¢ Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities

for women, Mende actors try to channel or restructure each others’ strip people of land, property, and dependents are commonly options and constraints. The paper draws on material from 1981-82 trumped up against those known to have weakly developed and 1985 fieldwork in eastern Sierra Leone and from archival work patronage support. Within this political climate of uncertainty and on recent Sierra Leone newspapers, which contain rich statements instability, obtaining services of virtually any kind — jobs, legal

of cultural ideology and pose pithy dilemmas. assistance, scholarships, medical support, or even food in times of

hardship — necessitates having well-placed patrons with access to

Ethnographic background resources and to powerful members of the business and civil service bureaucracy.

Numbering about a million, Mende speakers live primarily in the Illiterate rural people are especially vulnerable. They need eastern and southeastern hinterland of Sierra Leone, although outside resources obtainable only through influence, yet suffer from schooling and employment have drawn them increasingly to the heavy-handed government officials who demand unnecessary tariffs Freetown metropolitan area on the coast. I worked in a town with and pressure them for ‘contributions’ to building projects that a population of 4,500 in the Eastern Province, an area producing benefit the administrative elite. With precipitous recent declines in coffee, cocoa, and diamonds, along with subsistence rice. Since the the national economy, people have even greater need for patrons town had several schools, many households contained the children well connected to the urban and government bureaucracies to of rural relatives or acquaintances who were fostered in to attend bypass cumbersome bureaucratic channels during shortages of food,

school in exchange for household or marketing labor. money, and petrol, and to provide them with crucial ties to the

The Mende profess patriliny and allow polygyny. Many rural international world: for travel, jobs, and access to hard foreign families now say they allow their daughters to choose whom they currency. wish to marry, but they usually exert strong pressure to influence As this suggests, having educated patrons is seen as critical to these choices: families may forbid certain choices outright and families’ economic and political well-being. Even illiterate rural — demand others. A girl is eligible for marriage after joining the villagers now try to educate some of their children to broker for Sande, the female secret society (see, for example, MacCormack them with the threatening modern world or to gain the status to 1979; Bledsoe 1984), which ritually initiates her reproductive life marry into powerful patronage networks. Investing in students’ by reputing to teach her the secrets of reproduction and wifely educations entails risks and expenditure, but it establishes claims on

skills. a the pupil’s future (Bledsoe, 1990). Indeed, successful children come

It is important to the analysis of Mende marriage as a process to under enormous pressure to share property and money freely with point out that Sande initiation is the most critical requirement for those who financed their educations — to pay their hospital bills, initiating sexual life. It is far more important, even, than rituals or educate their own children, give them a place to live — in short, economic transfers more directly related to marriage: a fact that everything, and more, that was done originally for the students helps explain why prospective suitors are expected to contribute themselves during their own dependence. heavily to Sande initiation. Sande leaders insist on separating

initiates during their liminal phase (during which their sexual ype quest for civilization | identity is ritually created) from secular scrutiny. Engaging in sex

before initiation smears the girl’s character and exposes her to the The ‘village’ or the ‘bush’ versus ‘civilization’ is the dichotomous risk of infertility. Becoming pregnant and bearing a child is even national idiom — relic, to a large extent, of the country’s colonial worse because it upstages the Sande’s role in ritually facilitating history that contemporary Sierra Leoneans themselves invoke (for a

reproduction. parallel discussion of Liberia, see Moran, 1990). A ‘villager’ (fula-hu Although the Sande maintains its ritual importance in marking a movi — ‘village-in-person’) is cast as a low-status subsistence farmer

girl’s transition to womanhood, it is losing ground to formal who languishes in the ‘bush’ (/2i). Villagers are stereotyped as living schooling in many of its training functions. Schooling is said to ina ‘closed place’, illiterate and ignorant of the outside world. ‘They impart skills important to modern women: an ability to speak and work barefoot in the dirt, bear telltale callouses and cutlass scars, write English and the training and contacts to get a white-collar job have little cash, wear dirty and unironed clothes, and cook meals and to marry a man with one. Conteh (1979:175) points out thatin without the benefit of processed foods such as dried fish and the Kono District of Sierra Leone, for example, men made wealthy bouillon cubes. Although in some contexts young people respect by the diamond-mining industry compete for educated wives who _ rural villagers as the source of valued traditional knowledge and lifemay get jobs as company clerks. Along with these changes, bride- styles, calling someone a villager is grounds for a lawsuit.

wealth per se has become less important than the understood Young people yearn to be civilized (pu — ‘modern,’ ‘civilized’; obligations of a man toward his wife’s family to help educate their pumoi — ‘civilized person’): to live in ‘open places’ where knowledge

other children and to help them with food and medical problems. of the outside world is said to uplift society and promote Changes in economic transfers for women also operate against a ‘development’ (tes-guloma — ‘to go forward’). Most young people broader cultural context of patron-clientelism (see also Richards want to be literate, wear clean, well-tailored Western-style clothes; 1986). Under the British colonial regime, local polities in Sierra speak English and Krio (the national lingua francas, known locally as Leone were drawn into a system of chieftaincies within the national pu-woo — ‘civilized words’) and entertain important visitors with parliamentary and presidential system. Within this national foods prepared from civilized ingredients. They also desire employstructure, jobs, scholarships, and other valued resources trickle ment ina civil service or business job where they can sit down, earn down through personal ties to powerful brokers who can intervene cash on a regular basis, deal with paperwork, and so on. Eventually, with national institutions (see Murphy 1981 and Handwerker 1987 they hope to acquire urban property and use other means to gain for Liberian cases). While the modern world offers opportunities for permanent footing in the city. Young people also want to buy wealth and advancement, it has its dark side as well. Court cases that cigarettes and attend modern cinemas, ‘amplifier’ dances, and

Caroline Bledsoe/School Fees & the Marriage Process for Mende Girls in Sierra Leone ¢ 83

nightclubs. To them, this is not trivial conspicuous consumption. It beginning primary school is now roughly equal, these proportions is meant to impress upwardly mobile peers, community leaders, and decline rapidly, especially as girls approach puberty and their teachers, who are respected as the possessors of civilized knowledge families begin to give sons priority for higher degrees (see also

— as well as for their roles as critical brokers for scholarship Pellow 1977: 116, 120). ~ recommendations for higher education. Especially for girls, civilization also connotes monogamy. Family ambivalence toward girls’ educations Although affairs with ‘outside’ partners are common, most men Among the most difficult barriers to a girl’s education is her own with a secondary school education have only one legal wife at a family ambivalence. Although most school girls maintain high time. Given a choice, most young women say they prefer monog- educational and career aspirations for themselves, their families’ amous marriage, which they believe will liberate them from the perceptions of their potentials are less clear. In the past, family domination of senior wives and give them greater control over the opinion was largely negative. Twenty or thirty years ago, as a man ~ household’s resources as well as more leverage with their husbands. related, “When I was growing up, there was an attitude that parents - Above all other means of becoming civilized and shedding did not want to pay the educational expenses of girls. They felt that villager status is formal Western education. The ability to pay school the girl was going to grow up to be a housewife anyway, so they expenses, particularly tuition (‘school fees’), has come to symbolize didn’t want to waste resources on her — unlike a boy, who could for children — and the benefactors who help finance them —a new _ get a job after he got an education. Also, most of the positions were life in the civilized modern world (see also Caldwell 1980; Berry open to men: even clerical work and civil service jobs.’

1985; Obbo 1989). However, supporting an education is a large Nowadays, many rural families do support their daughters’ undertaking. Students need money for room and board, uniforms, ambitions, for they know that more professional opportunities are books, school supplies, and application and examination fees. open to women. An older rural woman with no schooling asserted,

School fees themselves, even at the primary level, range from ‘If a girl is ambitious for book learning, we force her to do it.

several leones a year for government schools (in April 1986 one ‘Tomorrow she will be somebody reliable. ... ‘Today we are seeing leone was worth about $0.20 officially) to several hundred leones so many educated girls working in big offices. That is what makes for more prestigious schools. Because of the investment required to most people educate their girls nowadays, because they will bring educate especially a secondary student, parents as well as students some benefit to the home.’ themselves often turn to outside benefactors, relatives as well as Families recognize that professional daughters can help support

non-relatives, for help. them. A local school principal related that one woman, herself an uneducated farmer, hoped desperately for her daughter to succeed

Rural girls’ chances for education and civilization educationally: “I'he mother prayed that her daughter would finish

school and begin to work so that she would be released of this For girls, the most important manifestations of the civilized/village heavy work. The mother goes to the farm; even now they are distinction are two role potentials: urban career woman versus harvesting. So she wants to rest [stop farming] if the daughter gets a dependent wife of a rural polygynist. Before education was available job. ... The mother will say, “Let my child finish school and then I to her, a rural girl was clearly destined as the latter: a rural wife. All will begin to enjoy [have a better life] now.”’ her early training was directed toward her roles as a wife, co-wife, Nonetheless, most rural parents support their daughters’ and bearer and caretaker of children. Such a marriage obviously advanced educational goals with mild enthusiasm at best, because confined women geographically and economically, and channeled young women provide far more daily labor to a household than their potentials into things of a reproductive character: health . boys. An illiterate older woman explained: concerns, sexuality, physical labor, cooking, and so on." Life 1s Girls start being an advantage to you and helpful to you when surprisingly difficult even today for the wife of a powerful chief. h d and ioin the Bundu [Sand . 4 Because of increasing tensions over succession rights to chieftaincy, they are matured and join the Bundu [Sande] society and are hildren’s legitimacy can be exposed to intense public scrutiny. A given to a husband. Then she can benefit you.... When my

: ; free:

. ys, pends

ae “8 ye P © Pt nye daughter was 12, I her to a husband and started gett

h ns theTON chieftaincy against hisfrom 8 >her. Save Ber educated. fo ans...aWith artee BCtuing, ee nose SEO WEfor SO NS ene CMe AMNEY aga benefit She wasn’t boys, it depend agnates, as well as candidates from other lineages, can be taken to he education. At ab h 1 and hen the b

task for her hour-long absence from the compound on a certain On te education. /At about the age or «1 and over, when the boys

ft bout nine before son was born. As a result might completed schooling, picked up jobs and started aren onmonths ado . ;herhey will able tohave give support to the parents chiefs’ wives are confined ever morebe tightly to the compound, carming money, they 8 PP P knowing that some potential rival faction will almost certainly keep Families also see a daughter as underwriting her brothers’ educa-

written records on their unaccounted-for absences from the tion, by her work in the home but especially by marrying early and

compound. marrying a man who will help her brothers who wish to attend Increasingly, however, rural girls seek civilized urban careers. To school. ‘

this end, many rural girls go to primary school, and a few go on to These ambivalences belie a more basic view of women and secondary school. Almost without exception, girls who make it to. marriage as currency for patron/client hierarchies. Since young secondary school want professional careers of their own. The women bear valued children and provide most subsistence and twenty-six girls in a rural secondary school I surveyed (which had household labor, giving them in marriage has long comprised the 112 boys) wanted to be lawyers, doctors, nurses, bank managers, cornerstone of families’ efforts to create obligations toward both teachers, and accountants. All wanted to go on to college. Many potential patrons and clients (for example, Kopytoff and Miers 1977; wanted Ph.Ds and M.Ds. Despite these ambitions, considerably Bledsoe 1980). Family members fear that an educated woman, filled

fewer girls than boys in Sierra Leone (as in Africa as a whole) with her own importance, will become an arrogant wife who complete secondary school. Although the number of girls and boys disobeys her husband, quarrels with the co-wives with whom she

84 © Reconfiguring Identities: Femininities & Masculinities

may have to live, and refuses subsistence farm work, if such becomes Why is pregnancy so incompatible with continuing an educanecessary. Ultimately, such behaviors could drive away a son-in-law tion? The most obvious answer is that the time and money required

whose allegiance the family has cultivated. to care for a baby do not allow a young mother to return to school.

Because education for girls interferes with the long span of However, pregnancy by itself does not automatically end a girl’s marital processing, elders also fear losing control over a girl left in schooling. Many girls attempt abortion (for example, through large school for a prolonged period, or the possibility of an unwanted ingestions of presumed abortifacients, wire probes, or covert visits pregnancy. Yet they recognize that the longer she remains in to surgeons), though this can entail considerable expense and risk. school, the more desirable she will be to a civilized man ora manin Others leave their babies with their mothers and return to school. the rural chieftaincy hierarchy. Therefore, a family may play off But this is still difficult, for a girl’s past pregnancy can be used to leaving a girl in school as long as possible against the chance that she shame her, as a girl related:

will get pregnant or choose independently a man of whom they do . not approve. os schooling, Of course. you can now try to come back to the same Some parents try to resolve these conflicting pressures by hool i Oe 1 ty ked kG : exploiting the civilized auras that their daughters acquire through a ie “4 » Dut back ee i get “beck t , che Woke ou he

few years of education and forging ties with men with connections a ock 3 come ih Sohil ao se flee “4 FO Sc eh ‘4 Pa wih oe to the civilized world who can gve them money or political assis- roth, COs SP 1S ” de , “eae i mien OF arn © nal “the © tance. Such efforts are reflected in the complaints of a secondary [other] reason. [stu q ents a hen, swith sb other wale he |

school boy to the editor of a Freetown newspaper’s column, entitled Otho anit ans ‘ ee, em. wath em who «be arks. |

‘Women’s Corner’: a “i will taunt her, saying ‘koi-ma’ [a woman who has borne a

My school girl sweetheart] told me to marry her while I am still ; ; ; school boy [But] her oaents abuse insult] and even drive her To avoid censure, a girl who has borne a baby can enroll in a

school in another town where she is not known. But potential out of their pome everyume io rmy sake [because of me]. ne guardians may refuse to take her in, fearing blame if she continues problem is that i am mot working... ‘ier parents ... wanted tO her past behavior. Even for a girl who does relocate, her guardians give her to a man who is working at the Bank of Sierra Leone. may be unforthcoming, forcing her to look to outside men for

You Know some pen want thei daughter to get maried $2 Spe, In seh ces, explained a ah

1985) , " [for girls] living on their own while they are going to school: they may stay in the same compound with a relative, say, but

Pregnancy and sexwality as impediments oa gis education __‘tHeY atc nor thatch drety under the contol of that ele. Above all families’ stated fears in allowing a girl to prolong her , ; a education is the fear that she may contract an satimely pregnancy, that might be the type of relationship they would have: with perhaps by a schoolmate with a highly uncertain future. Her purpose men, who help support them. Other girls, like those in Sixth in contracting sexual alliances may appear to stem from little more Form, might rent a place with other girls. In many cases, they do than peer pressure to obtain nice clothes and sustain a civilized life- have boyfriends who help support them.

style. But as one student stressed: | pome girls undergo extreme Guess. : young secondary ane

Girls need money to use for their ... daily transactions ... when- girk wno was put to hard work in her guardian's nouseho ever they get sick or any other thing like that. So they would accidentar'y spiled’ ed h food gciore fon my it. As a pun ishmen t like money. So one of the main things with most of these girls is JT SUATCIANS Ceprive he ood tor tour Gays, yet continued to — why most of these girls become pregnated — is because of demand that she perform her normal duties. She was able to bear money. They need money. And in getting it, they have to be in this for two days, but finally h gat help rom a local shop Keeper m line with somebody who has it. And you can’t get such money return for sex. Not surprisingly, she soon became pregnant and was

unless you have to go into ‘friends’ [have boyfriends]. And that forced to crop out. byj ; bI h

person would like to make use of you, that his money going out neyons the most Obvious ool in as Pro ab i at e the is a reward for having intercourse with you. So if you are in love mothers ih se sroea hil ‘he oo" 38 "rete, symbone b, sol tne with [having an affair with] the man you like, that man will be ‘°O™P aubuty “hese om ‘Ling © att Ie betone to i cul as 1 doing everything for you. You will be sleeping with the man [his student. In fact, there are striking para cs between the cultura

emphasis]. view of school and, for that of the Sande society’s role in preparing girls marriage. Among the Sande’s most vital concerns is attempting

Ironically, therefore, the very thing that many parents fear may to restrict all knowledge about sex and reproduction to initiated become a self-fulfilling prophecy: school girls needing money may members. In doing so it creates distinctions between women who turn to outside men, increasing their risks of pregnancy and the have experienced the secrets of childbirth and those who have not.

likelihood of dropping out of school. » Sande leaders also attempt to separate girls undergoing initiation — Certainly pregnancy has an important effect on a school girl’s _ that is, girls in liminal initiation status — from their uninitiated peers.

subsequent life chances. Besides terminating her school career, it can Schools also try in theory to keep their own initiates unconundermine her chances for a desirable marriage. As a result, although taminated by experience in, or knowledge of, reproduction. As a returning to school after a pregnancy is now legal, unlike the situation result, asserted a man, ‘Girls who get pregnant are generally in the colonial and early postcolonial period, a teacher stressed that: discouraged from coming back to school. What I used to hear was ‘The schools in Sierra Leone do not generally admit girls who have that such a girl would be a bad influence.’ The awkward fact that given birth: mothers. She is not considered a school girl again.’ some girls already know about sex and reproduction, whether

Caroline Bledsoe/School Fees & the Marriage Process for Mende Girls in Sierra Leone ¢ 85

silence, as an educated man asserted: ; ;worries ;;. | Obstacles such as pregnancy at inappropriate times, family through Sande initiation or other sources, is relegated to mutual The meaning of scbool fees in the marriage process

The other thing was that pregnancy and childbirth were looked about marrying well, and symbolic incompatibility between childon as a mysterious science. Even the time I was going to school, bearing and student status suggest that girls’ schooling must be seen men were not supposed to know about it [because of Sande against the indigenous model of marriage. In this model, Mende influence]. It was taboo for a man to study reproduction in marriage is a long, attenuated process marked by labor or political biology. So the whole idea of childbirth was that it should be left support from a prospective husband, or by bridewealth, gifts, and

unspoken. So, possibly, here is a girl who has known these (especially) Sande initiation fees, that assist the parents in, or secrets. She has become a woman now. In a sense, she really compensate them for, raising the woman and preparing her for didn’t belong in school with the children. So this is why she was marriage.

kept away from the schools. , , Just as more indigenous marital transactions contain numerous One of the most important symbolic manifestations of the ambiguities that oa constantly reap The first author (a medical anthropologist) carried out participant gising to their girlfriends in the days after the event.

observation and in-depth interviewing on violence in youth sexual =” Cf. in a focus group with coloured men in Cape Town, one participant relationships over a period of six weeks with 30 young Xhosa-speaking explained that he took alcohol before he beat his wife in order ‘to get a men and women aged between 16 and 25 years, and with parents of sparkie-some steam’, and that this was necessary because when ‘sober it youths. In addition, discussions were held with young women who is almost like I am a lamb’ (Abrahams and Jewkes 1997). talked about their boyfriends and male acquaintances. The young men 18 It is likely that minor forms of assault may have been regarded as sO who were interviewed were circumcised (initiated into ‘manhood’) but ‘normal’ and commonplace as to not even warrant appearance in young unmarried, and schoolgoing. About half had working class backgrounds. men’s narratives or merit their interpretation as ‘violence’. * Physical fights between women over boyfriends were regarded by some '9 In discussing why nurses abuse patients Jewkes et al. (1998b) also draw young men as a legitimate way of resolving disputes about whom they on Moore’s notion of thwarting. should have sexual involvement with, reportedly often ‘taking the winner’. Others would choose whichever girl they wanted, and one boy Bibliograph

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© ‘Using’ is also an idiom for sexual intercourse. toriality and the youth gangs of Soweto, 1960-1976’, Journal of Southern

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Holloway, W. 1984. ‘Gender difference and the production of subjectivity’. speak out for a healthy future. Johannesburg: NPPHCN/ UNICEE. In J. Henriques, ed., Changing the subject: psychology, social regulation and Pauw, B. 1962. The second generation: a study of the family among urbanised

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Jewkes, R. 1998. ‘Promoting adolescent sexual and reproductive health’. Simpson, G. 1991. Explaining sexual violence — some background factors in the

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demiological Society of South Africa, October 1998. teenage pregnancy amongst African adolescents in metropolitan Cape

Jewkes, R., N. Abrahams and Z. Mvo. 1998b. ‘Why do nurses abuse = Town: a case-control study’, South African Medical Journal, 91, 73-80. patients? Reflections from South African obstetric services’, Social Science Wade, P 1994. ‘Man the hunter: gender and violence in music and drinking

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Mager, A. 1998. ‘Youth organisations and the construction of masculine — 1981. ‘Xhosa marriage in historical perspective’. In E. Krige and J.L. identities in the Ciskei and Transkei, 1945-1960’, Journal of Southern Comaroff, eds, Essays on African marriage in Southern Africa. Cape Town:

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—— 1994b. ‘Fantasies of power, and fantasies of identity: gender, race and Wood, K., E. Maforah and R. Jewkes. 1998. “He forced me to love him”: violence’. In H. Moore, A passion for difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. putting violence on adolescent sexual health agendas’, Social Science and National Progressive Primary Healthcare Network (NPPHCN). 1995. Youth Medicine 47(2).

Jane I. Guyer/Female Farming in Anthropology & African History ¢ 103

For the 1970s feminists, Africa’s female farmers seemed living

Livelihoods proof — analogous to woman-the-gatherer — of women’s original and massive contribution to the productive economy of the & Lifewa Sypossibility of integrating childcare nature with independent and ofto the historically late and derivative of women’swork, relegation the ‘domestic domain.’ The whole image fits beautifully with

J ANE |. GUYER Engels’s revived classic, which argued that women’s status had declined with the rise of private property and the state and, thereby,

Fem aq | e F arm I n g nN Anth ro DO | O oy with the feminist mission of liberation, which in industrial societies included reasserting the right to work. It also fits with current

& Afri can H i stor critiques of colonial economic policy which, it was argued, had y developed Africa’s export potential at the expense of stagnation in

Tn Other sectors. The fact of African female farming therefore threw Reference light on a range of other feminist concerns: the historical bases of Micaela di Leonardo (ed.) 1991, Gender at the Crossroads of ‘patriarchy,’ women’s work and social status, the effects of state

Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press policies, and the implications for women of the dynamics of ‘the world system.’ Boserup’s vision was clear, consonant with others, and intellectually and politically revitalizing across the spectrum of The intellectual space to cultivate gender studies within anthro- social sicence disciplines.? pology was created by a series of bold and sweeping attacks on the The clarity and simplicity of this vision starts blurring, however, undergrowth of naturalistic assumptions, reporting biases, and sheer when inspected consistently and carefully through Africanist rather neglect of the topic. In the 1970s a generation of feminist scholars than comparative and theoretical lenses. For understanding the repositioned earlier trail-blazing studies — such as Margaret Mead’s_ variety of divisions of labor and their change over time within

comparison of sex and temperament in three New Guinea societies Africa, the model of female farming is not only — like all (1935) and Phyllis Kaberry’s ethnography of women of the generalizations — necessarily blunt in its discriminations, but also Cameroon Grassfields (1952) — at the center of a newly recognized misleadingly focused. Patterns of production have been deeply tradition of scholarship. They reread the ethnographic corpus for gendered in Africa and Boserup’s work reopens that field of insights hardly given theoretical attention thus far. And they opened enquiry. But the times and places are limited for which the terms up the whole issue of gender to an interdisciplinary approach ‘female’ and ‘farming’ can be linked so tightly together and given emanating from feminist thinking, drawing on concepts from non- such prominence in the interpretation of production. The empirical anthropological classics: ‘domination’ and private property as used sources no longer support Baumann’s assertion of a primordial by Engels, autonomy and patriarchy as applied by Simone de _ division of labor, but rather lend credence to a view that the features Beauvoir. This stage is best exemplified by the two collections, of ‘female farming’ are relatively recent innovations associated with Women, Culture and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), and the spread of the New World staples of cassava and maize from the Toward an Anthropology of Women (Reiter 1975). Empirical synthesis, sixteenth century onward. I briefly review the evidence for this

conceptual experimentation, and polemic statement were the assertion below.

agendas of the day. But the issues embedded in the concept of ‘female farming’ are To the next generation of scholars falls the task and the more far-reaching than those of empirical veracity alone. The

opportunity to explore the space created and decide how to use it. fundamental problem is precisely what made the vision attractive The present work labors in the clearing created by Ester Boserup’s and plausible in the first place, namely the assumption Baumann (1970) brief but highly effective synthesis of the ethnography and expressed so unselfconsciously and graphically, that African farming colonial history of African female farming. She drew dramatic in the twentieth century can be taken to represent an early stage of attention to the importance of women’s productive roles in Africa. human social evolution. If ‘female farming’ is taken as the fixed ‘Africa is the region of female farming par excellence,’ where men starting point of agricultural evolution, rather than a variable

fell the trees ‘but to women fall all the subsequent operations’ product of society and history, then interpretations of African (1970: 16, 17). Against the backdrop of her earlier influential work dynamics themselves become trapped within a framework of evoluon the evolution of agricultural intensification with rising popula- tionary directionalities. They can either realize or deviate from, the tion densities (1966), she argued plausibly that persistently low path of intensification achieved elsewhere, either crossing or failing

population densities in Africa provide no incentive for the to cross the evolutionary Rubicons of household organization of development of plow agriculture, private property in land, and production, intensive agricultural techniques with fertilization, increased male labor input into farming. In the twentieth century, irrigation and the plow, and private ownership of resources. Other colonial export-crop and labor policies have withdrawn male labor configurations of technical change and social dynamics, organization thereby reinforcing a feminized subsistence food economy. She of work, and cultural constructions of gender then tend to be deals only briefly with the basis for positing a preexisting assessed in terms of their relationship to world evolution; the specific connection between African farming techniques and female labor, dilemmas and directions of current change can hardly be ‘seen’, citing prominently Baumann’s classic work that suggests that an through this optic. One needs to shift the perspective, to see African association of forest ecology, dominance of root crops over cereals, farming not as a living exemplar of a primitive stage but as a system minimal cultivation of the soil, and female farming have persisted of knowledge and practice with its own history, innovations, and ‘in the African primeval forest ... from time immemorial’ (1928: prospects, some — but not all — of which may bear usefully provoca-

294).! | tive resemblance to others, past and present.

104 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

Comparison then shifts to new ground as well. The relevant responsible for reaping. The collective and individual choreodescriptive methods are those applicable to all work, regardless of graphics are particularly intricate for indigenous rice production in whether it is agricultural or industrial, in one continent or another, West Africa (Linares 1981; Johnny et al. 1981), which remains

in the ‘domestic’ or ‘public’ domains. In this framework for ritualized even where it has ceased in recent times to be a major considering work and gender, studies of Africa may offer intellec- staple (Brydon 1981). tual resources to a wider debate, rather than merely provide a model The contrast with the common mode of cultivation of both of of the foundation from which other systems evolved. In the second the New World staples is striking. The division of labor for cassava part of this chapter I analyze the changing division of labor in the and maize 1s based less on activities 1n sequences than on products or Beti region of Southern Cameroon, drawing on a concept that _field-types in repertoires. Throughout Africa cassava is generally appears in the literatures of anthropology, sociology, and social grown on individuals’ fields, with little collective labor and — as far history, namely the idea of rhythmic structures, and highlighting its as I have found — no ritualization at all. In many regions it is prepotentials for a dynamic understanding of the gendered division of dominantly a female crop. Richards’s description of maize among

labor. the Bemba fits the same pattern as cassava: hoeing mounds in individual plots for crops other than millet “was considered hard and Part 1: The limits of evolution’ unromantic work by the Bemba, quite unlike millet cultivation’ (1939: 304).

Baumann constructed his female farming model on the following To add a further piece of circumstantial evidence to the assumptions: that forest farming is the primary form of African emerging picture of close consonance among the old staples, there agriculture, that root crops can be grown by rudimentary tech- seems to be no basis for any evolutionary assumption that root-crop niques, that women are suited to such techniques, and that produc- cultivation in the forest preceded cereal cultivation in the savannah. tive work in such economies is socially individuated and culturally In fact, archaeological work on the oldest African farming system unelaborated. When cereal cultivation enters the cultural repertoire studied in detail, the Kintampo culture in Ghana of well over two Baumann suggests that all this shifts: to the savannah, to more thousand years ago, suggests a savannah-border ecology and a intensive techniques, to greater male input, and to elaborated social combination of root and cereal production (Flight 1976: 219). forms to deal with peak harvest labor demand and the managerial Extrapolating from the ethnography, one can speculate that both

demands of storage. types of crop may have been grown under the interdigitated,

Logical and plausible as it seems, this picture is now radically at activity-specific, sacralized regime characteristic of current cultivavariance with historical knowledge, mainly because the root/cereal tion methods for the old staples. None of the old staples was distinction fails to discriminate between the ancient African monopolized by female labor. Since by contrast the individuated, cultigens — yams within the root category and sorghum, millet, and secular, product — or field-specific — female farming seems so rice within the cereal category — and the recently imported particular to cassava and maize, one can suggest that it has been cultigens of cassava (a root) and maize (a cereal). The social produced historically by a recombination of elements in the old organization and gendered division of labor for cultivation of the system, and by both technical and social innovations.* By the time ancient staple crops taken together, and for the imported cultigens Baumann synthesized the ethnography in the 1920s, this process taken together, have their own striking uniformities, cutting was already deeply entrenched enough to seem ‘traditional’ and, as

completely across the roots/cereal distinction. Boserup suggested, was probably reinforced by colonial policies that Cultivation of the ancient staples is characterized by interdigitation directly or indirectly favored maize and cassava cultivation.

of male and female, group and individual tasks, supported by an The shift in labor organization from the old to new staples is — activity-specific cultural definition of the division of labor, often likely to have entailed important consequences for distribution of literally choreographed and set to music, and infused with ritual the product. Under the old regime, specific productive activities symbolism. Yams — a root crop — provide one example. As Forde often implied specific claims on the product. Rubrics for distribu(1964) described cultivation by the Yak6 of southwestern Nigeria, tion were enacted through the significance given to generative

ownership of seed yams is individual and heritable. Men clear the interventions in the agricultural cycle, whether prayer and new farms, working in groups of twelve or more. The women then consecration by chiefs, tree-cutting by men, seed acquisition by make the mounds in which the yams are planted by both men and _ individuals of both sexes, or observation of routine religious and women working together. Weeding is female; staking and training pragmatic nurturing rituals by women. Crop cycles, labor cycles, the vines is male. Harvesting is a joint activity; washing and carrying the cultural emphases given to certain phases of cycles, and rights in

are female. Storage barns are built by men, but ownership of the resources and products were all mutually implicated. The harvested yams is individual according to ownership of the seed- individuation of entire crops or field-types brought shifts not only yams. Distribution is further structured by social ties between the in labor synchrony itself — group/individual, male/female, senior/ owner and his/her network, and the harvest is marked by collective junior — but thereby also in the jural and cultural legitimation of

ceremonial. claims on.the product. If precolonial agricultural practices were

Audrey Richards’s (1939) classic work on the Bemba productive progressively incorporating New World crops, then gender economy provides a comparable example for the indigenous cereal, configurations had already changed and were probably still millet. Tree pollarding was carried out by groups of young men changing by the time that colonial civil servants, missionaries, and following the chief’s ritual declaration of the opening of a new early anthropologists made the ‘baseline’ descriptions that Baumann

fertility cycle. Women stacked the branches, men put fire to the relied on. .

fields, and then men planted with their wives following behind to The approach to gender and agricultural change through crop cover up the seed. Men fenced the fields against wild animals, while and labor cycles is consonant with new work in African history and women did whatever tending was required and were exclusively with both old and new ethnography of African production systems.

Jane I. Guyer/Female Farming in Anthropology & African History * 105

It also fits with a broader literature on the apparent generality of week in a clay oven or by an individual three times a day with a rhythm and synchrony as aspects of labor control. Within anthro- battery of implements and props for stage-managing the meal.’ But pology, Douglas and Isherwood (1979) have pointed to the gender such a definition automatically generates static images, with major, and status concomitants of the frequency of obligatory tasks; female even revolutionary, changes of technique and social relations autoand low-status workers tend to engage in the higher-frequency tasks matically relegated to secondary and contingent importance. carried out within narrow spatial confines, a pattern that male and Imprecise and conservatively biased at best, a task-structure high-status workers try to avoid. The profound status implications approach has the added limitation of providing no way of addressing of changing work routines can turn the timing of work into a the comparative value of men’s and women’s work, nor any shifts in subject for bitter antagonism, subterfuge, and sabotage. E. P. labor time or claims on resources and products. Since male/female Thompson’s (1967) famous article on the subordination of the new differentials of time and value are revealing — as task structures are industrial labor force to factory discipline and Sabean’s (1978) work not — of gender inequality, feminist scholarship has homed in on on gender-specific intensification patterns in European agricultural methods that measure these dimensions of the gendered division of history are peaks in a large corpus of work in several disciplines on labor.* No interpretation of change can do without attention to the power and meaning of work rhythms and the implications of value and time allocation. My own concern 1s not whether they are

trying to change them.° important at all, but whether they can figure prominently in initial But before simply applying these ideas to the modern history of dcscriptions of change in the labor process, and for two reasons. an African ‘female farming system,’ it is necessary to backtrack, to First of all and most pragmatically, they are very difficult to reassess the available methodologies for describing the gendered reconstruct with precision for the past. Second, as quantitative scales division of labor, including those on which the evolutionary they depend on prior definitions of what is to be measured: “work’ position has rested. Besides referring issues upward to the abstract as a category of activity, modalities of value (price, returns to labor level of guiding paradigms — either universal evolutionary paths or or cultural construction), and units of labor (time spent or effort African historical dynamics — one has to dig down into the tools and expended). All are problematic, and the easiest solution to each may concepts of description and analysis through which theory and data lead straight back to tasks as the single least ambiguous and most are linked. Since change is an entirely relative concept, the terms of empirically identifiable descriptive term. Better — it seems to me —

description and the choice of historical time frame more or less would be to try to illuminate aspects of the path of change first so as create the degree and kind of change one can perceive. The terms to apply any of the conceptually difficult methods for addressing of description contain guiding theoretical assumptions and deter- relative value only to those particular cultural themes, historical mine analytical possibilities, even though they can often seem to be _ turning points, or social loci which one has already identified to be

independent and self-evidently ‘right’ for the topic. It is worth crucial. These are the pivots of change: the tasks, routines, or asking, therefore, about the nature of the working concepts and cultural conceptions which constrain possibilities and set the terms methods which generated the relatively unchanging — ‘stagnant’ — in which alternatives can’t be envisaged. It is at this later stage in the vision of women’s agricultural work in Africa. They may have been iterative process of conceptualization, data-generation, interpreta-

too blunt and undifferentiated to capture subtle shifts. By implicitly tion, and further, more focused data-generation that other working with the major stages of evolutionary change as criteria of approaches including evolutionary approaches where appropriate — significance, only a very few African innovations in the smallholder can be brought back in as experimental explanatory models.

sector, such as the plow and animal traction in parts of Central and A focus on the timing of work meets the criteria for such an Southern Africa, could possibly qualify as significant change. initial description. It throws into relief changes in agricultural Thereby, relevant data may have been altogether omitted. practice, however limited they may seem by comparison with great The longest anthropological tradition of sustained concern with evolutionary watersheds; it highlights the social and cultural links the gender division of labor is in cross-cultural studies. Here, between, activity and claim which seem so central to African researchers have relied on task specificity by gender as the basic data material life but are poorly captured by standard descriptions of task

for comparison, and for two legitimate reasons: such descriptions structures; and it allows us to perceive the power of gender in are simpler and less ambiguous than any alternatives, rendering shaping — rather than simply submitting to — forces for change. At highly diverse ethnographic sources amenable to comparison; and the same time it opens up, rather than closing out, the possibility of they can be reduced to a standard list, allowing scholars to make drawing on other available methods for dealing with specific aspects

inferences about universals, correlations, and contingencies — con- of the course of change.

cepts central to the theoretical thrust of crosscultural studies.° In what follows I present Beti agricultural history as such an

Task lists, however, are too crude a mesh to capture the nuances exploration, recapitulate the interpretive and methodological probof change in labor patterns as African agriculture has altered over lems presented above for an empirical case, and apply the alternative this century. The criteria of definition become too concrete. If a method of focusing on the rhythmic structures of work. male farmer uses hired labor and his wife cooks for them, is this ‘cooking’ or something else? If women stretch the old rubric of part 2: Gender and modern agricultural change harvesting crops for family provisioning to cover wage work on jy, peti social histor

cash crops on local peasant farms or seasonal labor for agribusiness, 1s y :

this still ‘harvesting’ and in what sense? If women are doing the The Beti-speaking peoples have historically inhabited a vast terrisame tasks on the farm as at the beginning of the century, but doing tory extending from what is now Southern Cameroon into Gabon them on larger areas and with greater control of the product, how and Equatorial Guinea. They moved around in migratory patterns does this figure as change? It is easy but deceptive to see any task that seemed to have no particular direction until the nineteenth over time as ‘the same thing’ regardless of context. Cooking looks century, when the presence of trade in European goods at the like cooking, whether done by a whole village collectively once a coastal ports attracted village headmen to move deeper into the

106 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways forest, toward the coast and away from the savannah-border environ-_ century were quite different from those of the late twentieth

ment that seems to have been their home for centuries (see century due to the decline in large-scale polygyny, a rising age of Laburthe-Tolra 1981). Language and certain common cultural marriage for women, the legal requirement — in principle — of a principles are the only manifestations of Beti unity. Precolonial Beti woman’s consent to her own marriage and the legal recognition of

society was segmentary in structure, constituted by independent her capacity to consent to her daughters’ marriages, the disvillages linked to one another by ties of kinship, affinity, and the appearance of widow inheritance, and a general increase in formal,

exchange relationships of their headmen. legal rights for women. Similarly cultural constructions of gender

German and French colonizers, and then independent govern- have surely shifted in some respects in response to the replacement ment after 1960, enacted measures and pursued policies which of quite powerful female cults by Christian doctrine (Fernandez effectively halted Beti migration, abridged village autonomy, 1982). Economic rationality as a sole explanation of conservatism in transformed religion, and brought production into the service of female farming begs the question of why rural food markets were so regional and national interests. Beti villages were forcibly seden- slow to develop in this area, leaving self-provisioning as the only tarized as the road network was built during the first part of this viable mode of acquiring a regular food supply. And the ‘indigenous century. A chieftaincy hierarchy was instituted, replaced after 1945 knowledge’ argument must incorporate not only the cautious by a civil service hierarchy for local government. During the inter- experiments in food cultivation but also the quite rapid and bold war years most of the Beti population around the Cameroon capital innovations made by smallholders in cocoa cultivation and market city of Yaoundé converted to orthodox Roman Catholicism. Three gardening of fresh vegetables, and by large-scale agricultural great forces for change have reshaped production: export crop entrepreneurs in a variety of undertakings (Guyer 1984b). Each one production of rubber and palm kernels initially enforced through of these explanations adds a dimension of understanding; each relies, cash, taxation and direct requisition up to the mid-1930s, the rapid on — and therefore promotes the collection of — a different set of

development of cocoa cultivation around this time and particularly data. ]

after 1945, and the rapid expansion of the urban food market for Rather than elevate the interpretive problem to an abstract

Yaoundé, after national independence. theoretical level where one could try to reconcile these various ‘Female farming’ of food crops can seem stagnant by comparison positions with one another, we need, as I have argued, to return to with the radical nature of other social, cultural, and economic the descriptive level. At the level of ethnography, one asks whether change in Beti life. Women still carry out the same tasks they didin the descriptive categories have tended to discriminate too little or, the precolonial period, with a similiar repertoire of crops, tools, and conversely, discriminated too much or too soon by assuming that field types. They are still responsible for the daily diet with some of the criteria for defining the key elements or processes were the same valued components at its core, still work longer hours than unproblematic. If one starts over, puts the whole picture back men, still have little direct control over wealth and heritable together, then there is a simple initial question to ask about the resources. Various theoretical orientations could be used to address remarkable sense of continuity that all observers, of all theoretical and interpret this situation. Boserup could certainly see her classic persuasions, have seen in systems such as this: is there any particular combination of low population density and colonial extraction of aspect of the position of women and the nature of their agricultural male labor. Neo-Marxists posit articulated modes of production practice which creates the impression of stability over time or with patriarchal control of junior and female labor as a structural which they themselves identify as central to their productive lives? feature ensuring conservatism in familial relationships and activities Through participating in women’s daily routine and recon(Meillassoux 1981: Rey 1979). Cultural theorists could well see the structing farming patterns for the past, my own vision became persistance of fundamental gender conceptions, not only in centered ona particular field-type, the afub owondo, groundnut field. sanctioned modes of labor control but in the symbolism of male Alone among the differing fields in the Beti repertoire, the work as vertical in movement, dealing with wood and creating groundnut field has general and persistent importance, grown by all erectness or height (tree cultivation, yam-staking and harvesting, women farmers, apparently continuously over at least the past tomato cultivation with long-handled hoes) and female work as hundred years. It is central to women’s work routine. Its crops are a dealing with mud and foliage, bending, circular or pliant in motion source of pride in farming skill, provide essential ingredients to their (over the shorthandled hoe, the cooking fire, the grinding stone, cooking, and represent their contribution to wealth and welfare. the mud for house-building, the groundnut harvest spread out to Thus, the groundnut field gives the impression of an anchor or dry in the sun). An economic rationalist could look at conditions in pivot to women’s position and to the agricultural economy and the food market and suggest that no household could afford to ecology. Agricultural improvisations and innovations over the years, specialize out of self-provisioning without sacrificing the quality of by both men and women, have integrated with it rather than the diet. And undoubtedly an ecologist could gloss ‘stagnation’ in invading or replacing it. more positive terms as ‘stability,’ pointing out the fine-tuning of the It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the characteristics of this

cropping system to the social and natural context. field represent in a lived routine many of the pragmatic, social, and Each of these explanations of stability/stagnation is plausible for cultural aspects of gender relations more generally. It is cultivated the Beti case even though they would seem to be theoretically with the female tool, the short-handled hoe. For reasons having to opposed to one another. But each is also quite partial. Colonial do with the type of land, the cropping pattern, and the sequence of export-crop policy may help to explain patterns in the feminization activities, the groundnut field has always been amenable to of food-farming practices during the palm kernel and cocoa eras, cultivation by a woman working alone. This entails both pragmatic but state policy is not as helpful in addressing. the very limited advantages, due to women’s unpredictable access to male or group response to policies promoting male participation in food farming labor, and the personal prestige advantage of demonstrating individin response to the urban market after 1960. ‘Patriarchal control’ is, ual skill, Groundnuts are the only crop that can represent this skill in likewise quite variable over time. Its social forms in the nineteenth _ the public context since they alone of the crops that women control

Jane I. Guyer/Female Farming in Anthropology & African History ¢ 107

have a single harvest season and need to be dried in the open court- temporally contained within the longer cycle. She did have claims: yard in front of her kitchen. When older women try to convey the on the crops needed for cooking, including the intercrops and changes in their groundnut harvest over their lifetimes, they second-season harvest in the esep field and all the crops in the indicate the area of their courtyard covered by the drying nuts groundnut field. But these claims were themselves culturally rather than the area of farm cultivated or even the number of validated by prior generative acts. baskets stocked away. By virtue of their storability, groundnuts in The two smaller cycles — a repetitive groundnut-ekodog cycle for the past constituted the only agricultural crop through which a women and the single-season plots for women and dependent men woman contributed personally and uniquely to her husband’s — were associated with low status. Widows, clients, and junior men wealth. Each wife gave a certain proportion of her harvest to her regularly cultivated on restricted cycles because the ideal cycle husband to be kept for his own or other collective purposes. Besides embodied a scale of-collective activity and a division of labor that being a regular ingredient in the daily diet of starch and vegetable- could only be mobilized by a man of importance with wives, based stews, groundnuts can also be prepared as roasts and cakes for clients, and sons who could be mobilized to fulfill each of the stages.

the festive, favored, and transportable diet associated with the male The pre-cocoa system consisted of a set of variations on these activities of travel, exchange, and entertainment. For all these themes, tailored to regional ecological conditions, embroidered by reasons a woman can express a pride in her groundnut harvest particularities of local politics, or improvised by individual headmen which goes beyond the routine satisfaction of fulfilling a mundane _ exercising the essential freedom of leaders to go a step beyond

duty. customary knowledge and social organization. During the early By focusing on this field, with its deep associations with female colonial period from the end of the nineteeth century to the 1930s

life and labor, one can ask, not what has happened to ‘female several new crops, activities, and kinds of labor organization were farming” but, how has this field, with all its symbolic gender load grafted onto the indigenous pattern. Palm kernel production hardly and pragmatic gender implications, changed in both its internal affected cultivation because the palms grew wild and labor for organization and its external links to the entire, field system, and to cracking the kernels was not demanding enough, except possibly the wider productive economy? The changing rhythms of work during the Great Depression, to result in any dramatic reworking of and control of the production, taken as a whole, become the central the field system to accommodate it. Obligatory contributions to subjects to describe. Subjects such as the ‘position of women’ or requisitions for urban food supply, village rice fields to feed ‘female farming’ are then removed from the center of direct atten- construction crews, and free labor on the administrative chiefs’ large tion, to be replaced by a descriptive method that is intrinsically and experimental plantations have all come and gone. New crops imbued with gender conceptions. The varying and shifting ways in were introduced, but they were retained very selectively after which gender conceptions and practices have worked over time can government pressures were lifted. Cocoa was by far the most then be treated as an empirical question, in a word, discovered, important of the introduced cultivars, but its expansion among

rather than derived from theoretical premises. ordinary farmers dates from the mid-1930s and particularly from _

In the late nineteenth century the woman’s groundnut field 1945. Innovations in farming techniques, labor organization, and constituted one phase in the farming cycle. The culturally dominant distribution during the early colonial period all depended on cycle lasted over twenty years, extending from the clearing of new administrative pressure of one sort or another, which ultimately land — often virgin forest — through a year of predominantly male limited their long-term direct effect. cultivation (esep), followed by a short fallow (bindi), two to three Important indirect effects of colonial rule on farming practice years of female cultivation (afub owondo: the groundnut field), anda stem from measures other than those specifically aimed at produclong fallow (ekodog) back to primary forest. The long temporal tion. Forced sedentarization of settlements implied restrictions on reach of the full cycle was matched by its distant spatial reach into the long esep cycle and encouraged repetition of the embedded the lands surrounding the village, eventually establishing plots far shorter cultivation cycles. During the same period, people began to enough away to facilitate the removal of the village itself. The experience the contradictory effects of colonial and church policies female cycle appears as a subcycle: following the esep field, the on marriage and the position of women. They abandoned largecultivation-fallow cycle was shorter and the plot was considerably scale polygyny and thus eroded the conditions under which men smaller than esep, so it could be repeated within a single long cycle could mobilize enough clients and sons to clear large new esep plots of forest to forest. A further set of field types operated on a yet more and enough wives to divide up a large esep fallow (bindi) into the restricted time-space cycle; single-season fields were often culti- smaller groundnut plots. By the time cocoa became a major crop vated by individuals opportunistically and devoted to monocrops or there were already reasons why esep cultivation might have slipped

dry season vegetable gardens on wetland. in frequency of cultivation if not in cultural importance.

The long cycle demanded the most male labor and evoked the To a considerable degree, cocoa took over the esep (or ekpak in greatest social and symbolic resonances: the warrior symbolism of Eton dialect) type of field. Asked what happened to ekpak, one man tree-cutting. and cultivation in the esep field of the prestige crop of told me, ‘Our cocoa fields are our bikpak [pl.].’ Cocoa was planted melon-seed (ngon) used in exchange and feasting. To clear the land in the shade of the food crops and grew up to occupy permanent was to establish a general claim on the fertility thus activated. A forest plots. The annual work rhythm — the timing of the cocoa man, ‘he clears, he eats’: a li, a di. In its most literal meaning this harvest, and the tasks themselves of cutting the pods, decorticating, refers to the two points at which an important man — mfan mot, a and drying the beans — resembles very closely the timing and real man — participates in the food economy: at the beginning and at_ organization of tasks for the melon-seed harvest. The smoothness of

the end. Culturally, the act of clearing set powers of creativity in fit is remarkable. This quality, along with the opportunity that motion analogous to marriage and impregnation, establishing claims cocoa afforded for the small producer to make a significant cash that reached forward into the indefinite future. A wife’s claims were income for the first time, accounts, I believe, for the apparent lack

derived and encompassed, just as the field itself was spatially and of dispute over labor issues. Women had always tended the

108 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

secondary esep crops and helped with the melon-seed harvest, and social constraints on resource mobilization by women.

they continued the same functions when the main crop was cocoa. The expansion of food for Yaoundé as a result of postRubrics for male-female shares in cocoa income seem also to Independence urban growth set up dynamics that flowed into the have followed very closely the principles of distribution for the ongoing processes of technical adjustment to the cocoa conditions melon-seed crop. Wives and dependent female kin get a small lump described above. In the early 1960s returns to labor were still low in sum or proportion of the crop in kind, and female harvesters get a the food sector, so men were not lured back en masse into food share of the beans. The cash income realized from cocoa is treated farming in the initial expansion period. Moreover, it was now like the headman’s own share of melon-seed, associated with difficult for men to requisition female labor back into a jointly feasting, exchange, and social investment rather than routine needs. defined agricultural operation, a household endeavor. Women had After about seven years, however, when the trees are fully already expanded the restricted cycle of the field system to cover bearing, the divergence between cocoa and esep becomes more both growing seasons. The groundnut field was already managed on apparent. When cocoa trees grow beyond a certain height there can an individual, day-in/day-out work rhythm, and its staple crops of be no intercrops and the land does not go through the full cycle cassava, groundnuts, and leaf-vegetables had become the dependback to fallow. There are two results: the grand cycle and its able core of the diet. dependent short cycles are severed from one another into two The three main strategies available to women for expanding separate land-use cycles, and women lose — through their literal production, given an already intensified cultivation system were: (1) disappearance — the staple food crops from the male stages of the old to expand and intensify the groundnut field itself to include more cycle. Not only the esep intercrops but also the other predominantly marketable crops; (2) to revive (in some areas and by some women male staple crop, yams, went into decline because of seasonal who could still get access to male labor for heavy clearing) a smaller

pressures on male labor. version of the esep field, feminized in its products and labor patterns

The disappearance of the material embodiment of what were not to conflict with the insistent demands of the groundnut field; contingent and derivative claims was a serious loss for Beti women. and (3) to extend the most restricted cycle of specialized one-crop,

Replacement of a crop, task, or technique by another with similar one-season plots requiring neither male labor nor multi-year

characteristics — such as happened with melon-seed and cocoa — occupation of the land. |

provides a basis for extrapolation from the old rubrics for distribu- Again, patterns of labor have adjusted without major dispute, tion without the need to invoke abstract principles. By contrast, because they have built on the already advanced separation of the when an element is dropped from the task or crop repertoire two cycles. It is income rather than labor that has become the issue altogether, renegotiation of claims entails abstracting from their of male-female dispute. material representation and dealing with them in a conceptually And since it is men’s claims to women’s income which are now explicit way, for example, as outright dispute. For the 1940s and at issue, not vice versa, there has been a public and general aspect to 1950s, the sources give little sense that Beti women could validly the debate. The ‘a li, a di’ (he clears, he eats) formula loses conbring issues into the public arena for debate. One of the most often viction when the cycles of production are disconnected, when there quoted proverbs with respect to women is, “The hen does not crow _ is very little clearing of virgin forest any more, and when women in front of the cock’ (Tsala 1975: 275). Women did complain, but as__ clear their short-fallow plots for themselves. Even longer cycles of Binet (1956: 60) suggests for the 1950s, by opting out rather than claims have always existed, however, behind the one embedded in engaging in the claim system: “They cannot help but envy the men _ production itself, and both of them publicly articulated: resources and look for ways of equalling them, by planting their own crops or are inherited from one generation to the next in the male line, and

by escaping to the cities.’ bridewealth payment entitles a husband, in principle, to the wealth

Women adjusted to the loss by extending those farming activities his wife produces. The three cycles linking act and claim — the that depended least on male participation: by planting two intergenerational, the marital, and the productive ~ provide layers

sroundnut fields a year instead of the single large one that hadin the — of justification. None is intrinsically more important than the other past been grown only in the technically optimal of the two growing _ because they coexisted without obvious contradiction in the past. In seasons. This gave not only more groundnuts, compensating for the the twentieth century, their relative priority as a principle for maledecline in melon-seed, but a greater and more seasonally constant female spheres of control has been thoroughly confused by modern supply of the major female-produced staple, cassava, making up for customary and legal interventions that have tried to institutionalize

the partial loss of male-produced yams. A colonial agricultural inconsistent bits and pieces of ‘tradition.’ Legislation and the court report suggests that crop density was also increased at about the system have strengthened inheritance in the male line, tried to

same period, around the late 1940s. undermine bridewealth payment, and given quite strong legal

To gain access to men’s newly augmented incomes women took backing to rights based on mise en valeur, actual development an indirect route, through developing a whole series of seasonal (cultivation) of the land. The first strengthens the long male cycle of occupations such as liquor distilling, cooked-food selling, and trade intergenerational claims, the second undermines a man’s claims over

in imported beer which diverted men’s incomes through the his wife, and the third provides women with a positive weapon market, rather than demanding it through the claim system. Such against male control. responses by women to income loss must be seen as an expression of As Sally Falk Moore (1986) has pointed out for customary law, political weakness, of their lack of access to a public platform from the rules are always open to interpretation, and one of the most which they might renegotiate directly, in terms of general principle ambiguous aspects may be which strand, within a system containing

rather than traditionally accepted material embodiments, their multiple links between act and claim, should predominate as claims to goods produced outside their own restricted cycle. The conditions shift and be elevated to an abstract principle as Western entire response creates an agro-ecological and economic dynamic legal concepts based on status are brought in. Even in situations that is critically marked by cultural constructions of gender and the where people are not in outright dispute about the general nature

Jane I. Guyer/Female Farming in Anthropology & African History * 109

and validity of the claims themselves, this issue of priority among policies, and a host of other interventions affect the conditions several relevant bases for claims may render the whole situation under which the members of local groups deal with one another; ambiguous. And these are issues affecting key interests since there and working outward from the rhythms of work and income to the may be profoundly different implications for control and distribu- forces that account for them may help to incorporate such tion depending on which ‘rhythmic tension,’ with which temporal supralocal forces into analysis. The influence can work in the other

reach, is invoked. direction also, from local to supralocal. At certain moments, issues

Beti men have an interest in maintaining a long, encompassing that have smoldered within local communities may blaze across the concept of productive cycles. The interpretation of ‘a li, a di’ most regional or national horizon. In Southern Cameroon, dispute over favorable to a man is: because he clears — no matter how, long ago, or control of women’s incomes made waves at the national level in even if it was his father or father’s father who organized the actual 1983, in a way that cannot be understood in terms of the history of work — he eats. The claim is affirmed, even though its material stagnant food-farming techniques or female subordination alone. justification in the act of clearing has receded into the distant past. Through the 1960s and 1970s most of women’s cash incomes The strongest basis for all male claims would be to fix the key genera- were not only too low but earned on too much of a routine, tive act so far back in personal and family time that it is no longer penny-penny basis to be devoted to any expenditures beyond direct contingent on any production cycle, of whatever length. Ownership analogues of their past in-kind responsibilities for food, plus a few of the land would then be claimed by virtue of inheritance. personal needs. In the early 1980s, a change in the national governBeti women, in contrast, have an interest in a narrow and literal ment provided a somewhat more liberal atmosphere for local interpretation, at least with respect to control of their cash income: organizations, and women’s incomes had risen enough to support a if he clears — recently, himself — he eats. Otherwise, since a woman mushrooming growth in rotating credit associations. In 1983 a furor can clear the secondary bush for herself, her husband has tenuous developed within the national political party about the apparent loss grounds to claim his share of her income. Using the same act, of control by the women’s branch of the party of these women’s clearing, and by extrapolating from virgin forest to secondary bush, associations in the Beti area, the Centre-South Province. The a woman can elevate what used to be a derivative claim to a primary concern at the national level was that spontaneous organizations

claim. were growing far too fast to be incorporated into the structures of a

The twentieth-century legal and social process of abstracting one-party state. Party dismay, however, was expressed in gender general principles about resource claims involves extrication from terms; the women’s branch was brought under scrutiny for its the material embodiments — the crop, the technique, the task, the inability to control the female population. In the public debate, generative intervention — which were their outward and visible criticism of the association meetings invoked the symbolism of male expression in the past. This is not a simple translation, as the claims: in sexual terms (what were women really doing at their example explored here indicates. The levels can become dissonant credit association meetings?) and in terms of the grounding of with one another, for material, cultural, or jural reasons. And since women’s life rhythms in insistent domestic demands (were they it is only under certain circumstances that principles are openly neglecting their cooking and childcare duties to take off on Sunday disputed as such, one has to look for other means besides con- afternoons?) frontation by which control is avoided, attenuated, or gradually The ambiguous state of gendered income claims is at the heart of won over. In some cases the dissonances may be unintended conse- the issue. Credit associations give women something they can quences of changes elsewhere in the system. But the possibility that hardly produce from their pattern of cultivation, namely interthey are strategically and deliberately engineered must not be ruled mittent peaks in their cash income. Never before have women out. Ideally the difference between unintended consequences and_ produced a rhythm of income with marked peaks and troughs, the production of confusion for particular long-term purposes could except through their groundnut harvest, which is hardly combe supported with evidence. Often such evidence is almost mercialized at all. Their pattern of agricultural intensification over impossible to come by except for the policies of functionaries in the the twentieth century has reinforced a smooth seasonal income public sector. For a particular council of chiefs, or a particular profile. Women’s open participation in a means for producing colonial regime, and in relation to particular measures taken, one lump-sum income peaks tacitly demonstrated the relative freedom might plausibly differentiate between contradictions in the out- of their own cycle of activity and claim on income from the male comes of an inadvertently incoherent policy, and the formation ofa cycle that had enclosed it.

coherent policy to create contradictions. But the difficulty of ,

generating historical evidence for negotiations of the ordinary Conclusion

population should not dissuade us from considering the possibility | |

that similar processes were at work in local arenas. The Beti example is organized as a series of interrelated cycles. In

The issue is not so much to categorize responses — opportunism, attempting to understand the course of change, one is then not innovation, passive resistance, or concerted conscious struggle — but working with dubiously measurable processes such as intensificato develop ways of recognizing dissonance so that some sense of the _ tion, subordination, and increased work, but with changed elements, parameters of agency is preserved — even where the documentation changed synchronies, and specific dissonances under particular is lacking, even where there is no clear agreement on the criteria for historical conditions. This method has the added advantage of not defining elusive processes such as ‘struggle.’ At least the space can be separating material, cultural, and political descriptions from each created in which an understanding of the terms and implications of other, nor making an analytical distinction between ‘macro’ and ‘struggle,’ negotiation, and the processes of change in the gendered ‘micro.’ A single basic description of time-space rhythms and their

division of labor can be nurtured. meaning obviates the awkward stage at which such standard

This method may also help to illuminate the interaction of local analytical distinctions have to be superseded in order to splice the systems with the wider political and economic context. Prices, legal various dimensions of social processes back together. Having made a

110 © Livelihoods & Lifeways

time-space description, one can then expand the analysis in a ° The most salient papers here are Murdock and Provost (1973), Burton, number of analytically different directions — symbolic, organiza- Brudner, and White (1977), Ember (1983), and Burton and White tional, ecological, and drawing where necessary on the older (1984). The authors of this series of papers have begun to critique their intellectual resources of structural and evolutionary analysis — own methods. They note that certain categories need to be broken

; ; ; , down: animal husbandry varies to theontype animal. the without losing all potential for coming back to according an analysis based blemof is broad ry ; But ; a ; ; problem is broader than subdividing old categories. In history, evolutheir unity in social practice. tionary sequences go backward: stratification within societies may

Such an approach does several things at once. It allows us to see decline as well as rise. Some correlations cannot possibly be read as significant changes in production and distribution in African family sequential entailments: under most preindustrial conditions cereal systems that have been left hidden by past descriptive techniques. It production with peak labor needs cannot evolve out of processes of preserves agency without giving up the inspiration provided by intensification ” tropical forest root-crop zones. What were thought to structural theory. It builds gender into the method of studying € derivative developments appear to nave their Own dynamic: the production, rather than making the position of women the central ctiect of craft sp ecialization on sericultural intensification 1985) all focus. And finally, it allows the specifically African course of urther examination, to be stronger than the reciprocal (Dow 1985). agricultural change a the past century to be reconstructed, to stand structures need to be redefined and variables that capture relative values alongside the evolutionary hypotheses about intensification derived and time allocation need to be added.

.; ; these conclusions suggest that for more fine-grained analysis task

from other places and other eras of history. 7 See Guyer (1981).

The image of African female farming is a kind of origin myth. In 8 It is worth noting that the concern with gender inequality in feminist shifting the methods of description, one brings African farming into scholarship cuts across quite radically different theoretical positions. the same moment of world history as we also inhabit, and opens it Strathern insists on culture-specific approaches to value, personhood, and to the same debates about the intellectual tools necessary for under- transactability (1984, 1985), whereas the thrust of both neo-Marxist

standing the gendered division of labor. value studies and comparative time-allocation studies has been to work toward a single scale, usable for direct comparisons.

° The information on this episode is taken from a confidential report

Acknowledgments commissioned by the government. It is not published and therefore

cannot be cited. The report itself showed considerable wisdom, pointin

This chapter is based on field research carried out in Cameroon, out that these associations are a major economic and development asset financed by the National Institute of Mental Health (1975-1976) and should not be destroyed — even if that were possible. I do not know and the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science how the report was acted upon, although certainly the relationship Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies between the central party and the women’s branch was addressed. It (1979). I was a research associate at the National Advanced School may be some years before the real effect of such momentary eruptions — of Agriculture in Yaoundé. The chapter synthesizes arguments among all the others that affect political dynamics — can be assessed. made at greater length elsewhere (Guyer 1984a and b, 1988). Part 2

recapitulates data reported in my article in Current Anthropology Bibliography |

(1988) and does so with the permission of the journal. I have , , .

benefited from many comments on this piece, particularly from the Baumann, H. 1928. “The division of work according to sex in African hoe

Gender Studies group and Micaela di Leonardo at Yale Universi _ culture." Africa 1: 289-319.

eneer ota group . ; 4 ty, Binet, Jacques. 1956. Budgets familiaux des planteurs de cacao au Cameroun. where it was first presented in this form. Pans: Orstom. Boserup, Ester. 1966. The conditions of agricultural growth. Chicago: Aldine. Notes ——— 1970. Woman’s role in economic development. London: St. Martin’s Press. Brydon, Lynne. 1981. ‘Rice, yams and chiefs in Avatime: Speculations on

‘ Boserup herself steps deftly around an explicit commitment to the jevelopment of a social order.’ Africa 51 (2): 659-677.

Baumann’s timeless view of precolonial agricultural history, insisting that Burton, Michael L., L. A. Brudner, and D. R. White. 1977. ‘A model of ‘It is widely but mistakenly assumed that such “traditional” systems are the sexual division of labor.’ American Ethnologist 4: 227-251.

necessarily passed on from one generation to the next without ever Burton, Michael L., and D. R. White. 1984. ‘Sexual division of labor in undergoing changes ...’ (1970: 17). With her central focus on the era of agriculture.’ American Anthropologist 86: 568-583. ‘development,’ however, she offers no alternative to Baumann’s vision Douglas, Mary T., and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The world of goods. New

of the precolonial past and hence implies the evolutionary primordiality York: Basic Books.

of female farming. Dow, Malcolm M. 1985. ‘Agricultural intensification and craft specializa-

2 Critiques of this logic appeared quite early (see Huntington 1975), tion: A nonrecursive model.’ Ethnology 94 (2): 137-152. rediscovering Baumann’s initial poor opinion of the status implications Ember, Carol R. 1983. ‘The relative decline in women’s contribution to of women farming; to him it was poor and primitive agriculture they agriculture with intensification.’ American Anthropologist 85: 285-305

were practising. Fernandez, James W. 1982. Buwiti: An ethnography of the religious imagination in

3 'This section of the chapter is abstracted from Guyer 1984a. Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. |

* It lies beyond the arguments of the present chapter to reconstruct what Flight C. 1976. “The Kintampo culture and its place in the economic these might have been for the precolonial era. Insofar as the same kind prehistory of West Africa.’ In Origins of African plant domestication. J. R.

of shift in the division of labor seems to hold when one old staple is Harlan, J. DeWet, and A. Stemler, eds. The Hague: Mouton. replaced by another, as Haswell describes for the Gambia (1975), it Forde, Daryll. 1964. Yako studies. London: Oxford University Press for the

seems not explicable either in purely technical terms or in terms of the International African Institute.

cultural foreignness of the crop. Possibly the economics and politics of Guyer, Jane. 1981. ‘The raw, the cooked and the half-baked: Observations slavery, increasing military ambition, religious conversion, and expanded on the division of labor by sex.’ Boston University African Studies horizons of trade both drew men out of local contexts and undermined Center Working Paper No. 48.

the collective ritual basis for old agricultural styles. —— 1984a. ‘Naturalism in models of African production.’ Man (n.s.) 19:

> Concepts and methods are more fully elaborated in Guyer (1988). 371-388. |

Richard A. Schroeder/Marital Metaphors & Conjugal Contracts in The Gambia’s Female Garden Sector ¢ 111

—— 1984b. Family and farm in Southern Cameroon. Boston University | African Research Series No. 15. —— 1988. ‘The multiplication of labor: Historical methods in the study of RI C HARD A ° S C HR O EDER

ender and agricultural change in modern Africa.’ Current Anthropolo / ° 59 (2): 347-272. ° eres’ “Gone to thei r Second ! Haswell, Margaret. 1975. The nature of poverty. London: Macmillan. ,

1975): 1001-1012. '

Huntington, Suellen. 1975. ‘Issues in woman’s role in economic develop- H U sb and S ment: Critique and alternatives.’ Journal of Marriage and the Family

Johuny NL J. Karimu, and P. Richards. 1981. ‘Upland and swamp rice Marital Metap hors & Cony ugal Contracts farming systems in Sierra Leone: The social context of technological in the Gambia’s Fem ale Garden Sector change.’ Africa 51: 596-620.

Kaberry, Phyllis. 1952. Women of the grassfields: A study of the economic position

of women in Bamenda, British Cameroons. London: Her Majesty’s Reference

Stationery Office. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 1996, 30(1): 69-87

Laburthe-Tolra, Philippe. 1981. Les Seigneur de la Fares. Essai sur le passe historique, Vorganisation sociale et les normes ethiques des anciens Beti du

Cameroun. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. , “an: :

Linares, Olga. 1981. ‘From tidal swamp to inland valley: On the social Introduction: of marriage and market gardens organization of wet rice cultivation among the Diola of Senegal.’ Africa Since the mid-1960s, the response of Gambian women to pro-

51: 557-595. longed rainfall deficits, IMF/World Bank mandated ‘austerity

Mead, Margaret. 1935. Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. New measures,’ and opportunities created by gender-equity oriented

Meillassoux, York: W.Claude. Morrow. oyMaidens, _development expenditures has been intensify commercial 1981. meal and money: Capitalism andto thegreatly ;

domestic community. London: Cambridge University Press. vegetable and fruit production. Although the phenomenon of a

Moore, Sally Falk. 1986. Social facts and fabrications: ‘Customary’ law on female cash crop system 1s perhaps not quite so anomalous as was

Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980. London: Cambridge University Press. once assumed, The Gambia’s garden boom is one of the more

Murdock, G. P., and C. Provost. 1973. ‘Factors in the division of labor by dramatic cases on record. The hundreds of women’s communal

sex: A cross-cultural analysis.’ Ethnology 12: 203-225. gardens along the Gambia River Basin have replaced the male Reiter, Rayna, ed. 1975. Toward an anthropology of women. New York: peanut crop as the primary source of cash income in many areas.

Monthly Review Press, So , ._. , From forty-five to eighty percent of the women in highly

Rey, Pierre-Philippe. 1979. ‘Class contradiction in lineage societies. productive horticultural enclaves on the North Bank now earn

_ Critique of Anthropology 41—60. , moreand cashdiet thanon their husbandsRhodesia: (Schroeder 1993a); Richards, Audrey. 1939.4:Land, labour Northern An 2 ~.this, - ”despite ,P

economic study of the Bemba tribe. London: Oxford University Press for the significant market constraints and competition with would-be

International African Institute, 2nd ed. 1995, James Currey. orchard owners for land, water, and labor resources (Schroeder Rosaldo, Michelle, and Louise Lamphere, eds. 1974. Women, culture and 1991, 1993b, 1995b; Schroeder and Suryanata 1996).

society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. One of the offshoots of the surge in female incomes and the

udies > 218-224. ; Cogn; ,

Sabean, David. 1978. ‘Small peasant agriculture in Germany at the intense demands on female labor that have been produced by the See: 218 nineteenth century: Changing work patterns.’ Peasant boom has been an escalation of gender politics centered on the Strathern, Marilyn. 1984. ‘Subject or object? Women and the circulation of Wek ha rua Whitehead once called tee onyugal Sous, valuables in Highlands New Guinea.’ In Women and property — women as itenead | ). Focusing on _ Several weenem a-spcaKking property. Renee Hirschon, ed., 158-575. London: Croom Helm. communities in one of The Gambia’s premiere garden districts — 1985. ‘Kinship and economy: Constitutive orders of a provisional along the northern Gambia-Senegal border, I outline two phases of

kind.’ American Ethnologist 12 (2): 191-209. political engagement between gardeners and their husbands below.

Thompson, E. P. 1967. ‘Time, work discipline and industrial capitalism.’ The first phase, comprising the early years of the garden boom, was

Past and Present 38: 56-97. characterized by a sometimes bitter war of words. In the context of

Tsala, Theodore. 1975. Minkana Beti. Douala: College Libermann. these discursive politics, men whose wives seemed preoccupied with gardening claimed that gardens dominated women’s lives to such a degree that the plots themselves had become the women’s ‘second husbands.’ Returning the charge, their wives replied, in

effect, that they may as well be married to their gardens: the financial crisis of the early 1980s had so undermined male cash crop

production and, by extension, husbands’ contributions to household finances, that gardens were often women’s only means of financial support during this period.

As the boom has intensified, so too have intra-household

politics. The focus of conflict in the second phase — which extends into the mid-1990s — is related to the use of cash crop income and

: , the amount of time gardeners allocate to their complex horticultural enterprises. These struggles mirror the image several authors have painted of ‘non-pooling’ households in Africa (Guyer and Peters 1987; Dwyer and Bruce 1988; Stichter and Parpart 1988), except

! that Gambian women enter budgetary negotiations holding the

112 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways , economic upper hand. I document below the wide range of tactics struggling for survival. That is why [relations between men and gardeners and their husbands have used to try and control house- women] halve] changed, if you want to do something for your hold budgets. Generally speaking, I have found that women in husband, you must go to the garden (North Bank gardener).

arden districts have assumed greater budgetary responsibilitie ; ; from; garden proceeds. I argue to below while this outcome ; ; ; they are _ ;ingarden goes directly theirthat personal use,part thatofisgardeners, why appears some respects to be a capitulation on gardening. the : more concerned with Probably that is why some of 5 . : ee &anpctary Tespon’s > ... because what produce from including increasingly obligatory transfer of cashthey to their husbands ; é the rice fields is meant mainly for home consumption. But what they produce from the

it can also be read as both strategic deference ;, 7: ; themand are atsymbolic odds with their husbandsdesigned (Gardener’s;husband). to purchase the freedom of movement and social interaction that

garden production and marketing entail. I contend that garden The significance of this investment pattern is that it fed into a incomes have indeed won for women significant autonomy and dramatic intensification of the demand for women’s agricultural new measures of power and prestige, but that these gains only come labor. The garden boom marks a fundamental shift away from

8 Uy gard:

at a price. predominantly rainfed agriculture toward irrigated production based on ground water. Not only must gardeners mobilize for a Development ideology and female horticultural production second full production season with the cessation of seasonal rains,

' ae but high evapo-transpiration rates during the dry season gardening

During colonial days, there was unity, enough rice in store and period necessitate a rigorous watering schedule. Gardeners irrigate peanuts. There was no competition as such. ... [Later] different their crops twice daily — in the morning and evening when evapostruggles emerged. As a result both men and women struggle for transpiration rates are lower due to cooler temperatures. These tasks

wealth. (Gardener’s husband) can take up to six hours a day, depending on the distance between

(North gardener) oan or va } women fromBank family living compounds was widely criticized. Their

There is no rice; the rains don’t come. There are no groundnuts; yee and garden sites and the extent of an individual gardener’s the rains don’t come. Everything comes from the garden now. 70°N8°: ; During the first phase of the boom, the routine absence of

Whereas the roots of The Gambia’s garden boom le in both a husbands claimed that no good would ever come from the gardens complicated set of agro-ecological shifts related to the twenty to and that women should stop neglecting their marital responsibilities. twenty-five percent decline in average annual rainfall since the early A key complaint stemmed from the fact that women were no longer 1970s (Norton et al. 1989) and subsequent attempts to ‘adjust’ the available to greet guests properly. As one male informant put it:

Gambian economy to suit the needs of international debtors . (Schroeder 1993a), the intensification of market gardening was also Presently you are here talking to me but my wives are not here.

the product of increased capital expenditure in women’s agriculture They are not doing what 1s obligatory. If you pad found them by donor and voluntary agencies. The basic rationale for prioritizing here, they would have given you water to drink, and perhaps horticulture over other development objectives in The Gambia was you would need to wash as well. I am now doing ... what they

developed under the auspices of the Women in Development are supposed to do.

(WID) programs following the 1975 UN declaration of the Inter- Indeed, the work regime followed by women and extolled by the national Decade of Women. These projects were (and are) charac- developers as the embodiment of positive maternal values very terized by a strong underlying ideological conviction that women quickly became imbued with meanings associated with a failure to are motivated in their economic activities in ways that differ funda- jreet marital obligations. As one woman described the situation: mentally from those of men. Put simply, women were considered «Some men, when they are asked about their wives, they will say, to be more attuned to the “bread and butter’ issues of food and «she js no longer my wife; she has a new husband.”’ The phrase, family welfare than were men; they were considered to be better «he’s gone to her husband’s,’ (Mandinka: ‘a taata a ke ya’), used by parents because they were seen to be more responsible providers men to indicate that their wives were not at home, but working in (Whitehead 1981; Schoonmaker-Freudenberger 1991).' Funding of their gardens instead, became a shorthand for marking women’s women's projects was thus a logical, direct, and cost-effective means neglect of responsibilities, misplaced priorities, decentered obliga-

of making investments ‘pay off’ in terms of family well-being. tions, shirked duties; it demonized gardeners as bad wives.

In the context of the mid-1980s, this rationale dovetailed neatly When asked directly to interpret the garden-husband metaphors, with the mandate to intervene to save ‘starving African children,’a jen and women in the garden districts offered two distinct mandate that emerged in the wake of the devastating famines that readings. One interpretation, common among men, reflects the swept the Sahel and the Horn. The combined effect was a sharp frustrations they confront in the garden boom: to wit, gardens upsurge in international aid, which targeted with increasing gominate women’s lives to such a degree that their husbands hardly specificity the Africa region, agricultural development, and female... them anymore on a day-to-day basis. According to this producers (Thiesen et al. 1989; Watts 1989).* The enactment of interpretation, which was widely acknowledged by the gardeners WID strategies in The Gambia consequently translated directly into themselves, the gardens have supplanted husbands’ wishes as the hundreds of grants to women’s garden groups for barbed wire, primary ordering force in a woman’s workday.

1:2....

tools, hybrid seed, and well-digging costs.

A wife is brought home to fulfill her obligations to her husband.

Mapping marital metaphors She should be around her husband all the time to render such services. For the case of the garden work, women are away from It is because wives had nothing to do before except sitting near home almost the whole day. They do not perform what is their husbands. But now wives are running both day and night required of them. (Gardener’s husband)

Richard A. Schroeder/Marital Metaphors & Conjugal Contracts in The Gambia’s Female Garden Sector * 113

Vegetable growers ‘greet’ (saama) their gardens (and not their housing amenities, and furnishings. This source of power was only husbands) when they water their vegetables first thing in the enhanced by polygamous marital practices and the opportunities morning;* they spend their days ‘at the side of’ their gardens; and __ these afforded to play wives off against one another.

they bring their gardens water at dusk — that is, at precisely the time A second advantage was derived from the husband’s rights in when a man might expect his bath water to be delivered. Conse- divorce proceedings. In the event of a divorce, the bride’s family is quently, gardeners’ marriage partners find themselves increasingly required to refund bridewealth payments. Consequently, when without companionship and forced, by default, to assume new marital relations reach an impasse, divorce is not automatic; the domestic labor responsibilities. This is especially true of older men, financial arrangement between the two families must first be who have been economically marginalized due to age or ill health undone. Typically, the woman flees or is sent back to her family so and who spend a great deal of time within the spatial confines of the that the family can ascertain to its own satisfaction whether she has family compound or its immediate vicinity. Early in the boom, the made an effort in good faith to make her marriage work, The onus

loss of these ‘prestige services’ caused a great deal of bitter is on the woman to prove her case, and she is not infrequently

resentment. admonished by her own family to improve her behavior before By contrast, women often offer an interpretation of the gardens being returned to her husband. ,

= husbands metaphor which emphasizes the importance of garden The advent of a female cash crop system has reduced the earnings in meeting household budgetary obligations. For them, significance of both these sources of leverage. Women’s incomes gardens have, for all practical purposes, replaced husbands as the now outstrip their husbands’ in many cases (Schroeder 1993b):

principal OY of cash for subsistence and other forms of con- Before gardening started here, if you saw that your wife had ten

sumption (‘Women are doing what men should be doing’). dalasi Id ask h h he cot it. At that t th

Somewhat sardonically, they maintain that women may just as well abass yh woure &s f; rw te she BOL: ‘ ; “hugh “ie

be married to their gardens. One grower underscored the point eB, 0 omer source OF income tor women except their husbands. dramatically by asserting that not just her garden, but the well bucket .-- But nowadays a woman can save more than two thousand

; AY BY assem Jus 5 ; dalasis while the husband does not even have ten dalasis to his _ which she used to irrigate her vegetables was her husband because S k their wi here th he; everything she owned came from it: “This [indicating her dress]; this name. O9 NOW Men cannot ask thei’ wives where taney get their

ae meer a money, because of their garden produce. (Gardener’s husband)?

[her shoes]; this [her earrings]; this [miming the food she put into her mouth]; and this [clutching her breast to indicate the food she Consequently, male authority has been reduced (‘If she realizes she fed her children, her voice rising in mock rage] — they all come is getting more money than her husband, she may not respect [read: from this bucket! That’s why this bucket land [the garden] is my obey] him’), and the extent of gardeners’ economic influence has

husband!’ expanded dramatically. The simple fact that women can now largely Clearly, the Mandinka marriage system has been under signifi- provide for themselves (‘If we join [our husbands] at home and cant strain due to the changes accompanying the push toward forget [our gardens in] the bush, we would all suffer ... even if he commercialization. Equally apparent is that the hard fought doesn’t give you [what you want], as long as you are doing your

rhetorical struggle in which men and women have mapped marital garden work, you can survive...’) constitutes a serious challenge to meanings onto garden spaces has, as its object, the right to occupy _ the material and symbolic bases of male power.

the moral high ground vis-a-vis the broader battle over the conjugal In the first phase of conflict brought on by the boom, men contract. A variant gardens = husbands metaphor, promoted by openly expressed their resentment in pointed references to female men, marks women’s gardens as their ‘second husbands.’ Here, the shirking and selfishness. Their feelings were also made plain in men’s rhetoric invokes the tensions and resentments that accom- actions taken by a small minority who forbade their wives to garden pany a man’s taking of a second wife. It reflects the fact that while or agitated at the village level to have gardening banned altogether first marriages are often arranged, second marriages may be under- (Schroeder and Watts 1991). In the second phase, men dropped taken by choice. The usage echoes jealous charges that men give their oppositional rhetoric, became more generally cooperative second wives preferential treatment because they consider them (Stone, Stone, and Netting 1995), and began exploring ways to prettier and stronger, or because they are more fertile than their benefit personally from the garden boom. Seizing the opportunity, older co-wives. In seizing and using the ‘second husband’ metaphor women, accordingly, began a prolonged attempt to win their husto castigate women, men in garden districts attempt to turn the bands over and generate the goodwill necessary to sustain productables on their wives in order to assume a superior moral position tion on a more secure basis.

from which they can wield leverage in the renegotiation of The key to vegetable growers’ success in this regard lay in their

conjugality that almost inevitably ensues. strategic deployment of garden incomes. For reasons that I explain below, the disposition of garden income often concentrates in the

Raising the stakes hands of older women who work in tandem with their daughters. This is significant, insofar as an older woman’s social obligations are

This is a striking reversal of fortunes. Before the garden boom, men likely to be broader than those of a younger woman. In deciding in Mandinka society had powerful economic levers at their disposal, how much of the surplus generated by the work unit will be which they could, and did, use to ‘discipline’ their wives (Carney allocated to each individual member of the group and what form and Watts 1991). They controlled what little cash flowed through the compensation will take, the unit leader shapes the complex the rural economy because of their dominant position in peanut politics of the horticultural boom. She chooses, for example, production and were thus in a position to fulfill or deny a range of whether to buy a bag of rice for her daughter and son-in-law’s needs expressed by their wives. These included such basic require- family, to pay for the school expenses of a nephew or grandchild, to ments as clothing, ceremonial expenses (naming ceremonies, disburse portions of the cash surplus at season’s end to each work circumcisions, and marriages for each individual woman’s children), unit member, to give a cash gift to her own husband, or simply to

114 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

keep the funds for herself: In so doing, the woman accumulates a groundnuts in some cases. In the whole of the village, you can significant measure of power and prestige, elements which in the [easily] count the number of men who have eight bags [the

past might well have been exclusively enjoyed by her husband or rough equivalent of D1,000]. And out of that [you must other male relative by virtue of their control over the groundnut subtract] seed [and] fertilizer ...1t is only the women’s sector that

cash crop. | contributes greatly at this moment. When they are developed, Rural Gambian households were under significant economic the men will also develop.

stress in the late 1970sleft and,by early 1980s when theisboom began. ;..; ; - :The impression these comments that the choices Given the poor market conditions facing the male cash crop sector ; mae ;time, women made with regard to the disposition of at-the manyhave mensome were forced into what might be called .others ' theirbygarden ; Sauer incomes, motivated by compassion and more legitimate default concerns, vis-a-vis have theirmet customary obligations to feed or ,; ; ; ; 4: strategic their mark. There is, however, a third otherwise provision their families. Survey data show that both ; ; ; é . members possibleofinterpretation ofand these actions. According male senior garden workpote: units women working on their + ato , ;some informants, the disposition of women’s garden incomes may be own onof many economic responsibilities that were ; men not a: ;have ; : ataken matter choice. These informants pointed out;in that also traditionally ascribed to men. Fifty-six percent of the women a ; in ar : ; actively pursue opportunities to ingain access toKerewan, their wives’ sample of:one hundred women surveyed theand village of ; are money. arwomen .:. In other words, the cash gifts in-kind contributions for example, claimed to have purchased at least one bag of rice in Cs ; 6 or ; make their majority families buy mayall beof construed by men.- This 1991 for their1:families.° Thetogreat their ownas_a; ‘taking’ ;

; ane proposition requires closer inspection.

(ninety-five percent) and their children’s (eighty-four percent) 7

clothing, as well as most of the furnishings for their own houses.’ Large numbers absorb ceremonial costs, such as the purchase of feast The price of autonomy

day clothing (eigh ercent), or the provision of animals for ,

y g 8 ‘y Psacrifice. ), or te p ; 7Many [Our husbands] thought we were wasting our time And, in the bush, religious pay their children’s school expenses.’ ; ; but when they realized the benefits they started praying for; us.

: : (North Bank gardener)

in a handful of cases, gardeners claim to have been responsible for

major or unusual expenditures, such as the roofing of family

compounds, the provision of loans for purchasing draught animals Open admissions by men in the Kerewan garden district that they and farming equipment, or the payment of the house tax. There is, consciously engage in maneuvers to gain access to their wives’ unfortunately, no baseline data which could be used to gain incomes are understandably quite rare. Those who did divulge historical perspective on this information. Nonetheless, several male information on this topic stressed the difficulty of generalizing informants stated unequivocally that, were it not for garden about the strategies they were describing and felt it important to incomes, many of the marriages in the village would simply failon emphasize that men engaged in such practices only when they knew

‘non-support’ grounds. that their wives could afford to share their assets. These caveats

One category of income expenditure by Kerewan’s gardeners notwithstanding, the data shed a great deal of light on the process of still remains unexplained. Of the women sampled, thirty-eight per ‘negotiation’ and mutual ‘accommodation’ precipitated by the boom. cent reported undertaking some measure of direct support of their The first set of strategies can loosely be described as loan-seeking. husbands via cash gifts, typically dispersed in small, regular amounts, It consists of several different circumstances under which men ask such gifts occasionally amount to hundreds of dalasis. They stem their wives for money, each with its own degree of commitment

from the gardeners’ desire to promote harmony, to overcome toward eventual repayment and its own threat of reprisal, should resentment, and to encourage their husbands to relax control over the funds not be forthcoming. The simplest scenario involves asking their (the wives’) labor; in short, cash gifts are used to buy goodwill for a loan with no intention whatsoever of repayment. In this case, (see discussion in Schroeder 1993a). in this regard, the effect of the the crucial consideration for the husband is how much to request. If gifts has been quite decisive. Witness the following statements of he aims too high, his request may not be granted because his wife

two men married to North Bank gardeners: can legitimately say she does not have the means. Also, if she does

2 ; rive a larger sum,toshe much more likely to either upon Todayrare no one would sayhim [she’s gone herishim husband’s]. ... Every 5 8insist meey P co ere repayment or refuse to grant an additional loan in the future man who is in this village whose wife should is engaged in this garden mae . he fail to make restitution. The ideal, then, is to ask for a work, the; substantial benefit of amount, the produce goes to him first before the ; . in order to make the wife can even enjoy her share of it. That is why those statements ; request (and its attendant loss of face) worthwhile, but to keep the request small enough so they used to say would not be heard now. ... In fact menwritten ;:: i ; ; ; that the eventual financial loss can be absorbed or some effectively among us, if it were not for this garden work, their marriages oe a off by the woman without retribution. Informants indicated that would; not last.;for Because their [own economic] efforts cannot ; ,neta request D40-50 — slightly less than an average week’s carry one wife, much less two or three, or —even four. Women earnings would be a reasonable amount in most cases. can [now]: support themselves. They will buy beds, mattresses, After defaulting more than once on repayment, orIn upon encouncupboards, rice ...: from the produce ofwife, these gardens. ... fact ; oS ; tering resistance from his a man may resort to an intermediary I can comfortably say that gardening generates a greater benefit . who will request the loan on his behalf. There are actually two or than the peanut crop that weos[men] cultivate. Beforeinyou offer a So,occur. In one, the three different scenarios which this;might

any help to people farming groundnuts, it is better you help 5as; aé surrogate. ;. ; doing : man’s wife realizes that the third partygardening is acting She people gardening, because we are using to ae ; nae survive nonetheless participates in thethat, transaction willingly since she knows in the event of default, she can at least pursue the matter At the moment, a man cannot get from his groundnut farm what through the traditional cort system. She would not consider taking

a woman can earn from her garden. Not even two bags of similar recourse in the case of her husband’s direct default. Moral

Richard A. Schroeder/Marital Metaphors & Conjugal Contracts in The Gambia’s Female Garden Sector ° 115

economic forces (Boughton and Novogratz 1989), operating within My informants provided two hypothetical examples. In the first, the family unit and among the traditional elders who run the courts, the husband decides to return home unannounced from a firewood would likely produce an unfavorable ruling on the presumption cutting expedition or a hard day of work on the family’s fields. He that the money was used for some form of joint family benefit arrives at a time when he knows his wife either 1s in her garden or

(whether in fact it was or was not). has yet to draw the evening water supply from the town tap (in the

A second case of loan-seeking via intermediary typically takes village in question, the public taps are routinely closed from 10:00 place under conditions in which the wife is not aware that the loan am to 5:00 pm). He then demands to know why there is no bath is actually intended for her husband. This option presents itself water waiting for him, complaining: ‘I came from the farm very when the husband has already exhausted his other, more straight- tired and dirty, and this woman wouldn’t even help me with bath forward prospects, or in the event he is simply too ashamed to ask water!’ In the second scenario, he intervenes as his wife administers his wife for cash directly. Since the wife has no knowledge of the a beating to one of his children for some obvious infraction: ‘How fact that her husband will be the end beneficiary of the loan, this can you be so cruel to your daughter!’ option retains the advantages of the first form of ‘indirect’ loan: she A third case, which occurred in one North Bank community, more willingly acquiesces to terms because third party loans are involved a more extreme form of reprisal. A group of women more enforceable than direct loans between marriage partners. described a domestic dispute which took place during the month of

Moreover, from the husband’s perspective, his prestige is not Ramadan, when practicing Muslims are expected to fast from sacrificed in the process. In practice, however, the husband must sunrise to sundown. A row broke out at 6:00 am when a man beat

still meet the terms set by his surrogate for repayment. his wife, ostensibly because she failed to provide him with water to A variation on the strategy of loan-seeking via intermediary perform the pre-dawn ablutions which mark the opening of the occurs when a third party, typically a junior family member, or even _day’s fast. The women recounting the incident roundly condemned a child, first approaches the husband for a loan. In this situation, the the man because they were convinced that the real motive behind

man refers the would-be loan recipient to one of his wives. the beating was retribution after the man’s wife refused to honor a (‘Presently if any child asks his/her father to buy anything for loan request. him/her, he will say to that child, “go to your mother.”’) It is It is important to note that in all of these cases, the man’s strategy worth noting that whether or not the husband has cash of his own is to try and occupy the moral high ground; even in the more at the time of the request is not necessarily an issue. Indeed, if he ambiguous Ramadan case, the man could claim that his prayers does have cash on hand, his objective in diverting the loan request were disrupted by his wife’s failure to perform her ‘wifely duties.’ may revolve around that fact precisely: his aim is to protect his Moreover, it should be apparent that choosing a pretext for a fight personal assets and shift the loan burden onto his wife’s shoulders.'° in the context of the garden boom 1s a simple matter. With women Two other more casual ploys round out the gamut of loan- routinely absent from family compounds and cutting corners in seeking behaviors. Both entail the regular battle between husbands order to juggle competing demands on their labor, men are in a and wives over everyday petty cash expenditures, or what I will position to selectively invoke the abrogation of any number of tradirefer to collectively as ‘fish money.’ These involve cash outlays for tional norms which govern marriage relationships. The message, in meat, fish, cooking oil, sugar, condiments, matches, candles, flash- any event, is quite clear: women who do not comply with requests light batteries, and laundry soap — in short, all the basic recurrent for cash or acquiesce in the niceties of the loan-seeking charade will expenditures of everyday life in rural Gambia. Typically, the woman pay a different sort of price. The number of beatings and shouting (or a small child sent on her behalf) will mention to her husband as_ matches does not have to be terribly high before this point sinks in.” he is about to leave for the morning that she needs money to buy .___To be sure, the tactics men use to alienate garden income need fish so she can cook lunch. This is sometimes done deliberately in not necessarily poison social relations in this manner. Indeed, front of guests if she wants to embarrass him for some reason. He informants produced a short list of strategies with the opposite will complain that he has no money and ask her to ‘help’ him _ effect, which they placed under the general heading of ‘sweetness’ (maakoi) with a small loan, or forestall her request until later, and (diya). In the first hypothetical circumstance, the man is exceedingly then not return before lunch has already been cooked. Alterna- nice to his wife — what might be called in English, ‘buttering her tively, he will leave the house in the morning with the deliberate up.’ He may support her positions in public discussion or even intention of shirking on the ‘fish money’ obligation altogether, advocate on her behalf in matters of substance having to do with her before his wife even has a chance to ask him for money. In each of garden.'* Alternatively, he may offer material support by contributthese cases, the net effect is the same — the wife ends up paying out ing labor, lending her his donkey cart,'* or providing a small cash of her resources for something that should, by custom, be the loan. He thus places himself on secure footing with his wife in order

husband’s responsibility."! to benefit from her good graces when she makes her decisions

| A woman’s failure to provide a loan or pick up everyday expenses regarding the distribution of her financial assets. can result in a variety of sanctions being imposed upon her. One The final set of strategies employed by men seeking to control extreme response 1s for the husband to resort to outright theft. While their wives’ money entails decisions over the disposition of their my informants emphasized that this tactic was rare, they acknow- own cash crop returns. I have already alluded to the fact that men ledged that such incidents do occur. Much more common are the routinely default on the financial obligations they are expected to quarrels men initiate with their wives in order to raise the stakes in fulfill (“If you tell your husband to buy you a shirt or a pair of money matters. The basic strategy is for the man to carefully selecta shoes, he will say you are crazy, I have more important things to pretext for picking a fight with his wife. The incident should not do’). Much of this behavior can justifiably be attributed to the occur immediately after the loan request has been denied, nor generalized economic hardship that has accompanied the economic should it occur so long after the request that the connection is trends of the 1980s. Above and beyond such ‘legitimate’ default

obscured altogether. circumstances, however, are steps taken by men to deliberately

116 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

default on their responsibilities. This they accomplish by quickly from ever knowing how much cash she has on hand in the first disposing of their own cash assets before the exigencies of everyday place. This requires that she adopt a ‘false face’ of sorts within the

life (‘fish money’ or third party loans) absorb them. family compound (Pred 1990; Scott 1990), as though she were not The key consideration for men in such circumstances is to engaged in a complex, year-round production system, involving choose an investment target that meets with the tacit approval of his perhaps a dozen different crops, grown in three or four sometimes wife or wives. Examples of expenditures that would be fully sanc- far-flung locations, each generating its own seasonal pattern of

tioned would include: the purchase of corrugated zinc pan or income. In order to create and maintain this fiction, women rarely concrete for a construction project on the family living quarters; discuss garden matters with, or in the presence of, their husbands. acquisition of a horse, donkey, or additional animal traction equip- This resolute silence stands in sharp contrast to the running ment for farming purposes; or payment of costs associated with discussion and debates women engage in along the footpaths to and ceremonial occasions such as circumcisions or dependents’ from, and in, the gardens themselves. A veritable stream of informamarriages. Likewise, investment in a seasonal petty trading venture tion concerning prices available at the different North Bank market would be largely beyond reproach on the grounds that some joint outlets (lumoolu) is exchanged as women move about and tend to

benefit could potentially be derived from the income generated by _ their crops.

the husband’s sales efforts. Far less welcome would be the purchase Many gardeners hide their income by using intermediaries to of luxury items such as a new radio, fancier furniture for the carry produce to market on their behalf. Survey results show that husband’s personal living quarters, or expensive clothing. well over half of the women in my research sample rely at least A woman’s reaction to her husband spending money on other occasionally on someone else to carry produce to market for them. women hinges on the circumstances. A middle-aged woman with- Others ship produce to market directly from garden sites. In this out a co-wife may not object strongly to her husband marrying way, their husbands are prevented from actually seeing the produce again since she stands to benefit from sharing her domestic work- assembled in one place, an opportunity which would allow them to load.!* However, when the husband already has more than one _ develop a clearer sense of how much their wives actually earn.

wife, and his money from groundnut sales or salary payments Women also sequester their savings in such a way that they provides little or no apparent joint benefit, the assumption may well cannot be touched by their husbands. This they accomplish in a be that he is squandering his money on gifts to girlfriends, perhaps _ literal sense by wearing ‘money belts’ on a regular basis. Larger cash the most ‘illegitimate’ expenditure of all. This and other deliberate sums, meanwhile, are commonly given to older female relatives or default practices are not only frowned upon by women, but are trusted neighbors for management and safekeeping. In one village,

actively resisted, as the next section demonstrates. for example, gardeners have opened up savings accounts with a

local shopkeeper (Shipton 1995). The shopkeeper and a trusted

Buying power local civil servant keep parallel records which indicate running , balances on individual accounts. Assets are thus protected from A Mandinka woman is still the same. It’s the men who changed. seizure by the merchant, who is held accountable by the civil

(North Bank gardener) servant. At the same time, the shopkeeper pays no interest and is

— free to use the cash to capitalize his business or engage in money-

The description of tactics I have compiled establishes that women lending. In exchange, women benefit from keeping their assets do not simply buy their husbands’ goodwill outright. Men push their relatively liquid without exposing the extent of their accumulation advantages wherever they can to shift the balance of economic power to husbands directly. in the household (back) in their favor. Men are not in a position to Even with such diversionary tactics in force, the peak of the leverage their wives’ consumption choices at will, however. Indeed, marketing season almost inevitably brings with it increased ‘loanthere is considerable evidence that women are firmly resolved to seeking’ behavior on the part of men. Consequently, the second protect their interests, as the following quotation demonstrates: major area of attention for women concerns controlling the terms our husbands stopped buying soap, oil, rice.... We provide all under which loan agreements are undertaken. Thus, if a woman’s these things. Obviously our marriages would change. We do all husband repeatedly defaults on a loan, she may choose to stop this work while our husbands lie around home doing nothing, 8*@nting him loans altogether. Alternatively, she can wait for, or Whenever we return from gardening, we still have to do all the ist upon, the intervention of a third party to the loan transaction. cooking, and all our husbands can say is, ‘Isn’t dinner ready yet? In the relatively rare event that this fails to generate the desired outAnd then they start to shout at us. Remember, this is after we COM* of a reasonable repayment rate, the woman may choose to ae have already spent the whole day at the garden working.... A the risky route of public disclosure. Airing the dirty laundry o husband who has nothing to give to his wife — if that wife gets intra-marital finances is a virtual invitation to divorce; the messiness

something from her own labor, she will surely find it more of such a scandal would almost certainly damage the woman's difficult to listen to him. We women are only afraid of God the Tputation along with her husband's. Such a course may, noneAlmighty. Otherwise we wouldn’t marry men at all. We would theless, be preferable to enduring the repeated predatory demands

have left them by themselves... Men are always instructing us, Of @ greedy husband.

you better do this or that for me, while they sit at the bantaba Instead, the woman may opt to try to strategically preempt her [the neighborhood meeting place] all day doing nothing. They husband’s loan requests by giving him cash gifts before he even asks

describe us as foolish, but we are not, and we will not listen to for them. Such gifts amount to an attempt to carry out an

them. (North Bank gardener) increasingly obligatory transfer of assets under terms which the women themselves control: rather than suffer the whims of their Women use several different strategies to protect their cash incomes. husbands, women determine both the amount and the timing of the The most basic approach for a woman is to prevent her husband gift, thus inoculating themselves against unexpected and exorbitant

Richard A. Schroeder/Marital Metaphors & Conjugal Contracts in The Gambia’s Female Garden Sector ¢ 117

loan requests which run the risk of disrupting personal plans at in- as climate and international market perturbations which are well

opportune moments. beyond local control. By contrast, the ‘ability to tap into’ another Finally, when all else fails, women simply opt for the same sphere or ‘shift responsibilities’ is directly related to the localized

solution widely employed by their husbands — they tie up their cash power dynamics that have taken shape in the garden districts. These

assets by spending them as quickly as they receive them: have to do with moral economic forces, strategies of deception, and

; | ; aeis,the tactics marital income, and What happens some menof would likenegotiation their wives concerning to loan themproperty, 8 8 property some money out of their garden sales. Many times womento will :; Ce ; ; ; Since ‘coping’ strategies and ruses designed shift responsigrant the requests, but most of them will never be refunded. So ,.,... ; ; ; — . bilities are inorplay at all times, becomes extremely difficult, women gradually limit, refuse, credititto their husbands. We ; .;from ; or |

; 47 power relations. |

: an tactic: analytical standpoint, prise the[with two apart. Negotiations have a new when we goand totomarket our—produce], od: over ; cash transfers between men women become quite literally — we simply spend all our money thingsLoans that are weloans need, _. war ; . give and takeon situations. untiland men stop paying

come home with no money at all to avoid the loan requests ; oe ; altogether. (North Bank gardener) ;

them. Then, they either become ‘cash gifts,’ as described above, or the source of more serious struggles which may lead to divorce. By Among the items women buy under such circumstances are a similar token, gardens are ‘husbands’ that control women’s labor,

dowry items for their daughters such as dishes or pieces of cloth. until they become ‘husbands’ that provide food for women’s While some of the men interviewed bitterly criticized their wives families. Such ambiguity inflects a final reading of women’s for assembling overly lavish trousseaus for their daughters, this tactic ‘autonomy’ in the context of the garden boom. While there is may simply be a woman’s response to her husband’s own profligate evidence that acts of accommodation undertaken by women on the spending habits. In cases where deliberate default is mutual, the North Bank have softened the rhetorical stance their husbands once family’s financial security is obviously placed in jeopardy, and the took against gardening, the achievement of this accommodation

marriage itself rests on quite shaky ground. ‘plateau’ has not alleviated the pressure on women entirely. They must still meet a rigorous set of financial obligations: not only must

Conclusion they contend with the domestic financial squeeze engineered by their husbands, but they do so under the pressure of surplus extracThe Gambian garden boom has clearly produced dramatic changes tion from traders and transporteurs. This double bind is exacerbated in the normative expectations and practices of marital partners in in drought years when the irrigated vegetable crop becomes the the country’s garden districts. In the context of climate change, new only bastion against generalized food shortage and extreme foreign investment patterns, and structural economic adjustment, economic hardship.

the growth of a female cash crop sector has virtually inverted the The price of autonomy notwithstanding, women in The economic fortunes of rural men and women in The Gambia. Asa Gambia’s garden districts have succeeded in producing a striking partial consequence, men have withdrawn key financial support new social landscape — by embracing the challenges of the garden from their families. At the same time, the rigors of a double crop boom, they have placed themselves in a position to carefully (rainy/dry season) rice and vegetable production regime have extricate themselves from some of the more onerous demands of forced women to either default on, or otherwise finesse, a variety of marital obligations. Indeed, in a very real sense, they have won for domestic labor obligations. In short, both men and women have themselves ‘second husbands’ by rewriting the rules governing the responded to the garden boom in ways which have led to a signifi- conjugal contract, Thus, the product of lengthy intra-household cant reconfiguration of customary marriage practices (cf. Carney and negotiations brought on by the garden boom has not been the

Watts 1980). simple reproduction of patriarchal privilege and prestige; it has been Discursive politics have played a prominent role in the negotia- a new, carefully crafted autonomy that carries with it obligations

tions that have accompanied those changes, The wielding of marital and considerable social freedoms.

metaphors as weapons in a battle to seize and/or regain the moral |

high ground has resulted in something of a standoff: men have used Notes the gardens = husbands metaphor to force their wives to transfer , .

control of at least a portion of their assets or face continued verbal 1 would ake to acknowledge ue fouow ‘on funding sectoral for generous assault. Women gardeners have appropriated the metaphor to ‘SUPPOM cumng Held wore me Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation

d th tual fail € their husbands t de fj Research Award, the Social Science Research Council/American Council

he funili © , he erie “for the r ir Ausbands Co provide fOr of Learned Societies International Doctoral Research Fellowship for Africa, their families and have won for themselves considerable freedom to the Rocca Memorial Scholarship for Advanced African Studies, and the go about their gardening tasks unimpeded. In short, the gardens — National Science Foundation Fellowship in Geography and Regional husbands metaphor encapsulates the mutual default of both marriage Science. Special thanks to Dorothy Hodgson, Sheryl McCurdy, Marjorie

partners on customary responsibilities. Mbilinyi, Susan Geiger, and Jane Guyer who read the manuscript and Generalizing on societies with ‘a pronounced division into male offered advice and encouragement. |

and female spheres,’ Jane Guyer notes: ‘the specialization [of budge- __' Kabeer (1994, chapter 5) provides an excellent review of the maternal

tary responsibilities] is never complete; it oscillates according to, rus literature. ¢ 4 duct ;

each sex’s ability to cope with its own sphere, and its ability to tap € Promotion Of commodity production among women also reso. ac ee and Watts (1993) have171-72). dubbedThe the ‘market into thenated otherwith or towhat shift Peet the responsibilities’ (1988, ; -? : “bili ; 1 Gambia is di ly tied h ; f triumphalism’ of the Reagan/Thatcher era. In this regard, the indus-

abuity to cope in rural Gambia Is directly tied to the capacity o trious work habits of market gardeners matched perfectly developers’ individuals to earn cash incomes and, thereby, to the respective agendas to promote entrepreneurism in remote corners of the third fortunes of the separate crop production systems. These fortunes world. Judging from the inflow of capital directed at ‘gender equity’ can vary widely by household; they may also hinge on factors such oriented projects, including the $16.5 million invested in the Jahally-

118 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

Pacharr rice project (Carney 1988), and a five-year (1990-94), $15.1 Bibliography

million Women in Development Proiect — at the time of its establish- | ment, the only ‘free-standing’ WID project in the world funded by the Boughton, Duncan and Jacqueline Novogratz. 1989. ‘The Gambia: World Bank — it is clear that ideologically motivated gender programm- Women in Development Project Agricultural Component.’ Banjul:

ing is highly lucrative turf in The Gambia. Indeed, struggles over the Government of the Gambia/World Bank Women in Development rights to control WID-oriented developmental largesse are being waged Project. at all levels, from individual marriages up to nation-wide projects Carney, Judith. 1988. ‘Struggles Over Crop Rights and Labour within

(Schroeder 1993b, 1995b; Carney 1992). Contract Farming Households in a Gambian Irrigated Rice Project.’

3 At least one North Bank community banned gardening altogether in the Journal of Peasant Studies 15, no. 3: 334-49.

mid-1980s because of the irritation men felt at losing this highly 1992. ‘Peasant Women and Economic Transformation in The symbolic service from their wives (Schroeder and Watts 1991). Gambia.’ Development and Change 23, no. 2: 67-90.

* It is a traditional sign of deference for a woman to go to her husband’s_ Carney, Judith and Michael Watts. 1990. ‘Manufacturing Dissent: Work, sleeping quarters first thing in the morning and greet him with a curtsey Gender, and the Politics of Meaning in a Peasant Society.’ Africa 60, no.

before going about her daily affairs. This is especially the case when a 2: 207-41. large age differential exists between marital partners. Women inter- —— 1991. ‘Disciplining Women? Rice, Mechanization, and the Evolution viewed on this topic admitted that garden work sometimes interferes of Gender Relations in Senegambia.’ Signs 16, no. 4: 651-811.

with this practice — “Yes, it’s true because a man may go [to the mosque] Clark, Gracia. 1994. Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by

for dawn prayers and continue on some errands in the village. Before he West African Market Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. comes back home, the wife may leave for the garden without seeing Dwyer, Daisy and Judith Bruce, eds. 1988. A Home Divided: Women and him.’ In most cases, however, women go out of their way to continue Income in the Third World. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

performing this highly symbolic gesture. A pattern of shift work Guyer, Jane. 1988. ‘Dynamic Approaches to Domestic Budgeting: Cases

between women and their daughters has even evolved to accommodate and Methods from Africa.’ In A Home Divided: Women and Income in the

this and other similar expectations and, thus, preserve marital harmony Third World, edited by Daisy Dwyer and Judith Bruce. Stanford:

(Schroeder 1995a; Clark 1994). Stanford University Press

> The Gambian dalasi was exchanged at a rate of D7.35 = $1.00 in 1991 Guyer, Jane and Pauline Peters, eds. 1987. ‘Special Issue: Conceptualizing

when this quote was recorded. the Household: Theory and Policy in Africa.’ Development and Change

© This is a substantial contribution. Prices for rice ranged in the neighbor- 18, no. 2.

hood of D200 per bag on the North Bank in 1991. By comparison, the Kabeer, Naila. 1994. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development

annual rural per capita income is roughly D1,500 and the average Thought. New York: Verso.

income for Kerewan gardeners is D1,096. Norton, George, et al. 1989. “Analysis of Agricultural Research Priorities in

’ Husbands and wives commonly occupy separate living quarters. Women The Gambia.’ Banjul, The Gambia: Department of Agricultural sleep with their husbands on a rotational basis with other co-wives; Research. typically, a rotation lasts for two days and nights, during which time the Peet, Richard and Michael Watts. 1993 ‘Development Theory and Environ-

wife ‘on-duty’ also cooks and cleans for her husband. ment in an Age of Market Triumphalism.’ Economic Geography 69, no. 3:

§ In an informal survey conducted in 1989 of mostly well-to-do gardeners, 227-53. eight of thirty-frve women surveyed had purchased the ram or goat for Pred, Allan. 1990. ‘In Other Wor(l)ds: Fragmented and integrated

that year’s major Islamic feast day of Taboski (Id ul Kabir). Observations on Gendered Languages, Gendered Spaces, and Local

° Although only twenty-seven percent of the research sample reported Transformation.’ Antipode 22: 33-52. paying for their children’s schooling, not all women had children of Schoonmaker-Freudenberger, Karen. 1991. L’Intégration en faveur des school-going age; thus, the proportion of women with children in school Femmes et des enfants: Une évaluation des projets regionaux intégres who pay schooling expenses themselves is actually considerably higher. soutenus par le gouvernement du Sénégal et UNICEF.’ Dakar: UNICEF. '° It is also important to recognize that the weight of the moral economy Schroeder, Richard. 1991. ‘Of Boycotts and Bolongs: Vegetable Marketing

shifts with the transfer of the loan obligation. By passing the buck, so to on the North Bank.’ National Workshop on Horticultural Programspeak, men force women into a difficult position: if the women then ming in Rural Gambia. Banjul, The Gambia, 14 November. refuse the loan, they appear hard-hearted; if they push too hard for —— 1993a. ‘Shady Practice: Gender and the Political Ecology of Resource repayment, they strain family and friendship ties; if they choose not to Stabilization in Gambian Garden/Orchards.’ PhD thesis, University of

pursue the matter, they forfeit their assets. California, Berkeley.

'! These sorts of domestic budgetary battles did not originate with the —— 1993b. ‘Shady Practice: Gender and the Political Ecology of Resource garden boom, nor are they unique to The Gambia (Guyer 1988). The Stabilization in Gambian Garden/Orchards.’ Economic Geography 69, no.

outcome of such negotiations has, nonetheless, shifted decisively in 4: 349-65. men’s favor since the recent increase in women’s incomes, —— 1995a. “Better Homes and Gardens: Women’s Work and the Irriga2 There is, in fact, little evidence that the incidence of domestic violence tion Transition in Gambian Agriculture.’ 91st Annual Meeting of the has risen since the onset of the garden boom. If anything, it may have Association of American Geographers. Chicago.

declined. See the later discussion of ‘sweetness.’ — 1995b. ‘Contradictions Along the Commodity Road to Environ-

negotiate access to land. 325-42.

‘3 For example, some men have been instrumental in helping their wives mental Stabilization: Foresting Gambian Gardens.’ Antipode 27, no. 4:

4 The loan of a donkey or ox cart is not an insignificant gesture. Since Schroeder, Richard and Krisnawati Suryanata. 1996. ‘Gender and Class men control virtually all animal traction resources in The Gambia, Power in Agroforestry: Case Studies from Indonesia and West Africa.’ vegetable growers would otherwise be forced to carry hundreds of kilos In Liberation Ecology: Environment, Development, and Social Movements,

of produce by head pan a kilometer or more to the village. Many edited by Richard Peet and Michael Watts. London: Routledge.

women without the benefit of ‘diya’ do so anyway. Schroeder, Richard and Michael Watts. 1991. ‘Struggling over Strategies,

's Her response rests very heavily on how both her husband and the new Fighting over Food: Adjusting to Food Commercialization among wife treat her once the new marriage agreement is struck. As the senior Mandinka Peasants in The Gambia.’ In Research in Rural Sociology and wife, she expects to be accorded greater respect than her junior partner. Development: Vol. 5, Household Strategies, edited by Harry Schwarzweller

The fact remains that the presence of a co-wife is often critical to a and David Clay. Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press. woman's successful management of her domestic duties in the event she Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.

chooses to expand her garden enterprise. New Haven: Yale Press.

Megan Vaughan/Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic & Cultural Unit ¢ 119

Shipton, Parker. 1995. ‘How Gambians Save: Cultural and Economic Jane Guyer provides no easy answer, though she does suggest Strategy at an Ethnic Crossroads.’ In Money Matters: Instability, Values, that the second response, with its emphasis on change and ‘indeterand Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, minacy’, is a more hopeful way forward. In practice this seems to

_ edited by Jane Guyer. Oxford: James Currey. | mean a focus on ‘relationships’ at all levels: the changing relation- -

Stichter, Sharon and Jane Parpart, eds. 1988. Patriarchy and Class: African hj £ individuals within the ‘h hold’. relationships bet Women in the Home and the Workforce. Boulder: Westview Press. ships OF individuals within tie household , relationships between Stone, M. Priscilla, Glenn Stone, and Robert Netting. 1995. “The Sexual households, relationships of individuals to complex groupings

Division of Labor in Kofyar Agriculture.’ American Ethnologist 22, no. 1: beyond the household, relationships between generations, and (most

165-96. crucially) relations between men and women. All these variations are

Thiesen, Arthur, et al., 1989. ‘African Food Systems Initiative, Project to be studied initially through the entry point of ‘relations of pro-

Document.’ Banjul, Gambia: US Peace Corps. duction’, but are not to be explained or defined by the latter. Guyer

Watts, Michael. 1989. “The Agrarian Crisis in Africa: Debating the Crisis.’ suggests that we look, first, at what resources are at stake in a com-

Rea ag in Human Geography Hitmen ve aes The Politics of Domestic munity Gneluding people), with an awareness of how their relative Budgeting.’ In Of Marriage and the Market, edited by Kate Young, Carol Y*US* CAB Chahge OVET ame. then we should look at the contro

Wolkowitz and Roslyn McCullagh. London: CSE Books. exercised over these resources, the complex contracts, negotiations

and shifts which take place at all levels of society in response to this, and the varied patterning of relationships which results.

| All this places yet greater emphasis on historical studies, and

| Guyer suggests that anthropologists are looking for more of these. | Paradoxically, it would appear that whilst anthropologists look more MEGAN VAUGHAN and more towards ‘processes of change’, historians become more . . and more fixated by ‘structures’ in an attempt to pin down change. Wh ich F am | ly M° Guyer for example, thegreater structural conceptoutside of the ‘lineage mode states, of production’ hasthat held attraction anthroProblems in the Reconstruction of the History pology than inside, and mainly for historians. But the search for . structures on the part of historians is not only a function of their of the Family as an Economic & Cultural Unit own ideological ends. The problem of form and substance occurs at ——_————— ——— _—. $$$ i tthe level of the sources as well as at the stage of the analysis.

Reference ] Direct historical sources for the ‘history of the family’ are sparse

Journal of African History, 1983, 24 (2): 275-83 for most areas and most periods of African history. Whether we are

dealing with the writings of colonial anthropologists, or with oral sources, we are faced with the problem of how to interpret both This brief article seeks to explore some of the major methodological continuity and change. Colonial writers may present us with ‘the problems associated with the study of the history of the family in disappearance of the tribe’, the decline of the authority of the elders, Malawi. It draws on both contemporary and historical material in the disintegration of the family, and so on. Oral testimony, on the order to illuminate what I see as two major and interrelated prob- other hand, may present a view of the past within an apparently lems. The first problem is that of the unit of analysis, since ‘the family’ static cultural framework, illustrated by enduring symbols.” This

is obviously too ill-defined a concept for this purpose. The second, problem relates directly to the issue of the ‘unit of analysis’. closely related, issue is the relationship between ideology and social Historians in the field, nervously clutching their anthropology realities, and how this complicates the use of historical sources. method manuals, may breathe a sigh of relief when presented with

, a clear framework of analysis by informants who say ‘this is how our . . society is organized’, but unless we are careful to distinguish

Ideology and the unit of analysis between form and substance we will fall into the trap from which

In a recent review article Jane Guyer summarizes the problem of anthropologists are only now beginning to extract themselves. This the unit of analysis as it is seen within anthropology.! She detects 1s not to say that ‘cultural history’ is to be ignored. On the contrary,

two broad trends in the response of anthropologists to their it should be integrated into our analysis of social relations; if, recognition of the need for comparative study. First, a shift away however, we wish eventually to write a ‘total’ history of the family from ‘the analysis of local forms in terms of local social and eco- then there is an initial stage at which we have to separate cultural logical conditions to consideration of their position in regional, forms from substance at the level of the sources, before we can material and international structures’. This has resulted in the reintegrate them again in a more objective way. increasing use of ‘peasant terminology’ such as ‘household’ and In the following section I set out to illustrate the problem of the ‘community’. Secondly, a shift from ‘classification of local forms in unit of analysis, and how this connects with ideology, using a typological schema ... to understanding in terms of processes of contemporary and an historical example from Malawi. a

change, which are to some degree indeterminate’. ,

In analysing the first response, Guyer demonstrates that merely the household and the invisible matrilineage: lessons from the

switching the terminology does not solve the problem. ‘House- resent

hold’ presents as many problems as ‘lineage’; neo-Marxist models P with definite structural ends hold as many drawbacks as the old The following remarks derive from a survey of rural women in the classificatory terms of ‘patrilineal’, ‘matrilineal’ and so on; historical Zomba district of southern Malawi.? The survey was concerned models with a defined end — peasantization, proletarianization, mainly with questions about agricultural production, and took the modernization — are as unsatisfactory as previous evolutionary schema. household as its unit of analysis.

120 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways | The people of southern Malawi are traditionally, and theoreti-. not perceive this as ‘food sharing’. As the male members of the cally, matrilineal, and the great majority of the women interviewed group are served separately from the women and children, the lived matrilocally. Except in areas of extreme land shortage, all adult transfer of food between households is even less apparent to them. women have rights to land in their maternal village. The main food Occasionally women say that they have received gifts of flour or crop grown is maize, supplemented by a wide range of other crops _ relish from relatives living in another village and this, by contrast, such as cassava, millet, sorghum, sweet potatoes, pulses and other they do perceive as food sharing. Whilst food sharing has probably vegetables. There is no cash-crop common to the district as a always taken place between matrilineal relatives, increasing economic whole, though in some areas people grow cotton, tobacco, sun- differentiation between households means that it is becoming more flowers, grains or rice. Women have always played a major part in central to the economic organization and welfare of certain groups. food production here, but in recent years women have come to As far as cultural perceptions go, however, it has not yet moved assume more and more responsibility for subsistence production. from the realm of virtually unconscious co-operation between Population pressure in the area gives rise to the necessity for family households of similar economic status to a more self-conscious sharmembers to provide an income from wage labour or other off-farm ing between people with different economic resources.

activities. In the more fortunate households, agriculture is com- A similar problem is encountered when trying to obtain bined with trading of some sort, but in the poorer households adult information on labour co-operation within the matrilineal group. males might have to leave the family farm altogether to seek wage Certain tasks, such as the harvesting and processing of food, have employment in other areas. A common strategy in poor households traditionally been the subject of labour co-operation between is for adult males (and sometimes women) to spend much of their women, and women cite these examples when asked about labour time doing wage labour for the more prosperous of their neigh- cooperation. However, in general they claim that each woman bours, often remunerated in kind. The very unequal distribution of retains major responsibility for work on her field: “This is my field, land in the area, combined with the different labour requirements and that is her field — we work on our own fields’. Here again, as of each household in its life-cycle, gives rise to an active local subsistence production becomes increasingly the responsibility of

labour market. women working without male help, it is clear that a great deal more

The phenomenon of the “‘female-headed household’ is very labour co-operation amongst women takes place than is usually common. In some areas almost 40 per cent of women are working articulated. Even a day’s observation in a village proves that the entirely without a husband, being divorced, separated or widowed. delineation of fields between matrilineal relatives can be very fluid Of the remaining 60 per cent, approximately one-third are in effect indeed. Women, especially those without husbands, help each other running the farm without an adult male, although they might at all stages of the cropping cycle, as well as in harvesting, storing receive some cash remittances from their husbands. In those house- food, pounding grain, fetching water and firewood. As with food holds where the husband is permanently resident and working with | sharing, labour co-operation between households has always taken his wife, there is no clear division of agricultural tasks according to place, but it assumes a more crucial role in the absence of so many sex, although all domestic and child-care duties are the responsibility adult men. of women. In approximately 70 per cent of cases, households in the The near invisibility of the economic role of the matrilineage in survey were unable to produce enough food for their subsistence the culture of the area contrasts strongly with the emphasis placed needs, and in 40 per cent of cases households could not feed them- on the matrilineage in its more formal role as a political and ritual

selves for more than seven months of the year. unit. Ironically, these latter roles are probably those which under

Large parts of the picture of change in this society, however, are modern political circumstances are becoming more fluid. Yet, when obscured by the use of the household as the unit of analysis, and this asked questions about social organization and the structure of is further complicated by the women’s perception and articulation authority, people frequently describe a ‘traditional’ matrilineage, of their own position. This can be illustrated through two particular, involving a group of sisters with an elder brother or uncle overand central issues — food transfers and labour co-operation. seeing their affairs. The increasing importance of the matrilineage as Ideally, each adult woman has access to land on which she grows a unit of production and consumption has, by contrast, not yet the food to feed her immediate family. She will own a grain-bin in found a place in the public culture of family forms. which she stores her food, and which is hers alone. A group of sisters living in neighbouring huts will each possess their own grain- phe matrilin eage and the invisible household: bins, and it is apparently unheard of for one sister to take grain from problems in the past another’s bin. This ideal of household self-sufficiency seems to be very strong, and to this extent justifies the use of the household as The previous section has shown that the lack of ‘fit’ between socio-

the unit of analysis here. Women continue to own and repair economic realities and their cultural expression creates many grain-bins which they are only able to fill to a tenth of capacity. problems in analysing present-day social and economic change. Not owning a grain-bin amounts to admitting destitution. Never- Historians attempting to reconstruct the history of family structures theless, closer observation made it clear that the poorest households are faced with this problem in a more extreme and compounded (often headed by women alone) were heavily dependent on food form, given that they do not have the opportunity to observe transfers from their more prosperous relatives; though information ‘reality’ and contrast it with the information given. If people’s on these transfers was difficult to obtain without direct observation public expression of their current economic and social circumof cooking and consumption habits. Food transfers are, in fact, dis- stances can be misleading, how much more difficult to interpret guised as much as possible. Where a number of sisters, or sisters and statements about the past and to try and identify which period, if

other maternal relatives, eat communally, each woman cooks her any, they refer to. |

family’s food and brings it to one of the houses where the meal is to All societies express a certain nostalgia for the ‘ideal’ social take place. Food is transferred at the stage of eating, and people do organization. When discussing their past, the people of this area of

Megan Vaughan/Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic & Cultural Unit ¢ 121

Malawi emphasize the importance of the exogamous clan as well as were at a more advanced stage of evolution, and that the more the matrilineage, as a locus of ‘familial’ ideals. The clan was the patriarchy could be introduced into the society, the more likely it widest ‘family’ group to which an individual belonged, and marriage would be to ‘progress’. On the other hand, there was a certain between clan members was prohibited. This ‘reported reminiscence’ amount of nostalgia for an ideal ‘traditional’ African family type and of the clan refers to the events of the second half of the nineteenth system of authority which were widely supposed to have been century, a period when social and economic structures were in fact eroded by contact with the European. Women within this society undergoing quite rapid change. The emphasis placed on the clan were understood to be oppressed by the men and forced to perform unit can be explained partly by its present-day decline (the element an amount of heavy agricultural labour unfitting to their sex; but of nostalgia), and partly by the very real function which it seems to they were also regarded as using the matrilineal system to oppress

have performed in the nineteenth century in facilitating the their husbands. The insecurity of the husband within his wife’s assimilation of immigrant groups into the society of the area.* village was blamed for a wide range of ills, from immorality to Despite the universal emphasis placed on the exogamous nature of retarded economic progress. One early colonial writer went so far as the clan, however, information from genealogies shows that in to include in his memoirs a chapter entitled “Feminism in Nyasasome cases it could function as an endogamous unit, allowing for land’.’ Clearly these kinds of sources are only useful for a history of the self-preservation of a group under threat.> The crucial, if some- European thought on African social formations. what obvious, fact is that if one is going to study the history of social To sum up, both oral and written sources specifically concerned formations over time using oral sources one needs to be aware of with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structures the possible distortions in this kind of evidence. In this instance, of kinship relations and it is difficult, if not impossible, to know how genealogical data could be used as an independent check on one _ these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. At best

aspect of the oral information. they provide us with an indication of cultural perceptions of kinship

Another example of the problems involved in interpreting this and family, but they do not integrate these perceptions with ecokind of data is the forms used to describe migrations at different nomic realities — the two spheres stand separated. Even the cultural ~ periods in history. Early migrations (probably taking place in the late forms described may be difficult to assign to any point in time. fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) are described as clan migrations, and remembered by the name of the leader of the clan (in all casesa_ p eyond the family man). By contrast, nineteenth-century migrations are frequently described as the movements of women, apparently acting indepen- I should now like to propose a way forward which might help to | dently of their male relatives. Yao migratory groups entering this overcome some of the problems I have outlined. Whilst Jane Guyer area are thus often described in terms of a named female ancestress provides no clear answer for the anthropologist (or for the historian), and female relatives moving into a new area and marrying among it does seem to me that some of her emphases are useful and point _ the indigenous inhabitants.° It could be that the use of the clan in us in the right direction. First of all, at the level of ideology, we the first instance is simply a function of the event’s distance in the should be looking primarily at ‘process’. Secondly, at the level of past and the difficulty of recalling group movements in anything but what we hope to define as social reality at any point in time, we a very generalized way. The use of female groups in the latter should be looking at relationships and transactions. Ultimately we instance is, however, more difficult to interpret. In a matrilineal should be able to combine these two approaches in order to see society ‘ancestresses’ are well remembered, and it could be that how the individual’s changing roles and positions connect with the describing migrations as the movements of women is simply a_ generation of social norms and cultural forms.’® This is a formidable cultural idiom. However, it is also the case that amongst the Yao at task for the anthropologist, who must set out to observe in detail this time men were frequently absent on long trading expeditions, transactions and relationships and shifts in these at all levels of and this may have enhanced the importance of matrilineal struc- society. For the historian it would seem to be an impossible task. It tures. Also, this was a period when women in particular were is one thing to try to understand the process of change in relationfrequent victims of the slave trade, and it is not inconceivable that ships as it appears in the present, quite another to reconstruct this there were groups of ‘rootless’ women wandering in this area. All process in the past. I would suggest that the nearest we can get to a these suppositions, however, are themselves based on the kind of knowledge of the history of the ‘family’, avoiding the problems of evidence which is vulnerable to distortion and misinterpretation.’ ‘ideology’ and the drawbacks of structural and evolutionary models, Written sources for the history of family structure are no less is to approach the subject ‘sideways’. What I have in mind is an problematical. For southern Malawi in the colonial period there are approach that will help to define the boundaries of kinship, very few direct sources for such a study. They consist of the amateur marriage and other institutions by skirting round the edge of these anthropological observations of missionaries and administrators, and issues. Just as a study of insanity in society may tell us more about later the writings of anthropologists of the Rhodes-Livingstone ‘sanity’ than a direct onslaught on the latter would, so a study of Institute.* To a greater or lesser degree, all these writers seem to me non-familial relationships may tell us more about the ‘family’ than a to have been trapped within their preconceptions of the formal direct approach would. This is how I interpret William Beinart’s

workings of a matrilineal system. study of youth gangs in the Transkei.'! This approach has the added Much of the writing on the ‘family’ by missionaries and adminis- advantage of necessarily connecting the ‘family’ to wider structures

trators is centrally concerned with the apparent instability of in the community and to the larger-scale economic, social and marriage in the area (an instability usually attributed to the disinte- political processes which have affected it over time. I illustrate this . erative effects of European rule), and with the position of men ina _ through the example of a non-kin relationship between women in matrilineal society. There was a considerable amount of ambiguity Southern Malawi known as chinjira.? in European attitudes towards African matrilineal systems. On the Chinjira is a relationship between two women formed indepenone hand, there was a general feeling that European family systems dently of their respective families. It is a special friendship involving

122 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways : | , the kinds of social, ritual and economic obligations more often raising activity which she would otherwise be unable to perform. associated with kinship ties. The most public form of this relation- A study of chinjira thus tells us something about the limits of kinship is in the giving of material, emotional and ritual support at ship and marriage in this area, and indicates that placing a woman times of crisis in each woman’s life. The relationship is frequently rigidly in the analytical unit of ‘lineage’ or ‘household’ would — brought into play when either the woman herself, or a member of obscure as much as it reveals. Furthermore, chinjira tells us someher close family, is sick. In one documented case the young son of thing about the effects of large-scale, long-term economic and an anjira (one of the partners in a chinjira relationship) had been sick social change, and can be placed in an historical perspective. _ in hospital for some months. During this time his mother’s anjira Chinjira appears to have originated amongst Lomwe immigrants walked two miles to and from the hospital to bring food to the boy, who came to work in this area from the turn of the twentieth his mother and aunt. She also cared for the boy’s brothers, sisters century. It can be seen as a response not only to the constraints of and father at their own home. The boy was finally removed from ‘kinship’ (from which there had probably always been escape the hospital uncured, and a week later his father had a dream which mechanisms), but also as a response to very new economic circumindicated that the child was spiritually possessed and would have to — stances and different levels of stratification. More research on the undergo a ceremony known as mtume. There was only one woman _ origins of chinjira, ‘genealogical’ tables of chinjira relationships, and in the area who was able to perform such a ceremony. She lived in documentation of the break-up of these relationships, could tell us a a neighbouring village, but the information that she was able to help great deal about the structure of ‘kinship’, and marriage ties over followed an extremely circuitous route, flowing through a mixture time, and the ‘process of change’ within these institutions. of kinship and chinjira ties, until it reached the boy’s mother. The

jira. | ; ras

mtume ceremony itself involved only women, and the main Notes | |

at ches ay ere accompanied and supported by both female kin ' Jane Guyer, ‘Household and Community in African Studies’, African In this instance the chinjira relationship worked side by side with Studies Review, xxiv, iti (1981), 87-137. eae J P Y 2 Many anthropologists have noted the phenomenon of what I shall call

y opologis ote p enon of w c

Kinship ties to secure and p erform a ritual cure. In other ways, | _ ‘cultural lag’. T. S. Epstein discusses something like this in-her Economic however, chinjira performs functions complementary to those of Development and Social Change in South India (Manchester, 1962), 328.

kinship ties. One aspect of the relationship much stressed by Detailed and fascinating accounts of the ‘complex relation between informants is confidentiality. A woman should be able to confide in normative ideals and situational adjustments’ are provided for widely her anyira in a way which she cannot with members of her kin different communities in S. Falk Moore and B. Myerhoft (eds), Symbol

group. Women do not form chinjira relationships with any women and Politics in Communal Ideology (Ithaca; 1975). a

who might have even a remote kinship link with them. The element * Undertaken as part ofta larger study on “Women, Policy and Planning in

ra ; ; ; egan Vaughan, ‘Social and Economic Change in Southern Malawi: a

of personal trust and friendship is central to chinjira, and if ever, we , commissioned by the UN Economic Commission for Africa. confidentiality is broken, the relationship ends immediately. Loa. study of rural communities in the Shire Highlands and Upper Shire _ Chinjira not only acts to supplement and complement kinship Valley from the mid-19th century to 1915’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of ties but also modifies the woman’s dependence on Marriage ties. In London, 1981), 218. Some clan names were common to the indigenous all the cases enumerated, partners in chinjira came from households Nyanja and the immigrant Yao. Yao immigrants could thus be welwith complementary economic resources. Chinjira is almost exclu- comed into the area on the grounds that they were fellow clan sively formed between women living with their husbands on members, even though their language and many aspects of their culture

company ‘lines’ on tea estates, and women living in villages nearby. =, WeFe foreign, . .

The women on the ‘lines’ mostly originate from distant villages, or A group of Nyanja of the Mwale clan practised a policy of in-marriage

; : in the late nineteenth century, at the same time as the Mbewe clan of

are immigrants from Mozambique. They no land in the area the Yaoand wereusing enereeticall d using cl devi ; ;have getically out-marrying the ;clan asthe a device

and are not allowed to brew beer on the estate’s premises. They are for assimilating more and more Nyanja into their ranks. thus entirely dependent on their husband’s weekly wage for their —« Vaughan, ‘Social and Economic Change’, 147. livelihood. Households in nearby villages, however, have more 7 Evidence for the instability of the nuclear family amongst the Yao comes

varied sources of income. The men usually perform some wage from ‘reported reminiscence’ of the many rituals devised to ensure labour on the tea estates, but the women are engaged in food fidelity on the part of women whose husbands were away on trading production and in activities such as beer brewing and distilling, their expeditions. Clearly there is a problem in dating the origins of these

prospective customers being the estate workers. rituals ane of knowing how far concerns expressed in them reflected

Whenever a woman visits her anjira is obliged take a, Tt wethe "ld contributions THES. ; ; ae : qr: would take more than she a brief paperto to discuss

of

present with her. Women from the ‘lines’ take small manufactured these anthropologists, and I do not deal with them here. J. Clyde goods purchased from local shops. Women from the villages take Mitchell’s work concentrates largely on the structure of matrilineality foodstuffs from their gardens. It would be ridiculous, said inform- and authority amongst the Yao, and economic change is analysed within ants, for a woman from the ‘lines’ to bring her anjira grain, or the this framework, Mitchell’s most valuable contributions to a study of the woman from the village to bring her anjira soap. Women in this area history of the ‘family’ in this part of Africa come in some of his articles: thus use the relationship to help them complement their household ‘The Yao of Southern Nyasaland’ in E. Colson and M. Gluckman (eds), resources and to escape some of the constraints of their economic Seven Tribes of British Central Africa (London, 1951), 292-353; Prelim-

circumstances. This is evident in the case of beer-brewing. inary notes on land tenure and agriculture among the Machinga Yao’, Although the relationship does not formally extend beyond the Rhodes-Livingstone J., X (1950), 1-13; “An estimate of fertility in some ; ; Yao hamlets in Liwonde District of Southern Nyasaland’, Africa, xix, iv two women, a woman in the village can expect custom for her (1949), 293-308. Mitchell’s The Yao Village (Manchester, 1956) cites an beer sales from the relatives and friends of her anjira on the estate. unpublished paper by him, ‘Marriage among the Machinga Yao’. In return for this, the village woman will occasionally allow her Mitchell also addressed the problem of the ‘household’ in an article anjira to use her premises to brew and sell beer — an important cash- which foreshadows much later work on the subject: “The collection and

a | , Janet M. Bujra/Women ‘Entrepreneurs’ of Early Nairobi ¢ 123 treatment of family budgets in primitive communities as a field problem’, Not only did these women of early Nairobi achieve financial

Rhodes-Livingstone J., VIII (1949), 50-56. - security for themselves (thereby swelling the ranks of an African

Another sociologist based on the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, property-owning petty-petty-bourgeoisie), but they also played an David Bettison, examined the structure of households in periurban active role in creating a socially viable urban community composed

, villages around Blantyre-Limbe and attempted to relate this to the £ di hnic el In th £ ‘pulat; 1 t position of these households within lineages, ‘clusters’ and villages. Such 0% TTYSTSC ethnic elements. in the process of manipulating clements

an approach, if it had been more generally applied, would probably have from various social and moral codes to their individual advantage, proved more fruitful than analyses centred solely on ‘matrilineality’. See and of forging for themselves social relations which would facilitate D. Bettison, The Social and Economic Structure of seventeen villages, Blantyre- life in a new and insecure urban setting, they contributed to the Limbe, Nyasaland (Rhodes-Livingstone Institute Communication no. creation of an essentially new set of urban social institutions.

12, Lusaka, 1958). _ It is not easy to find models for an objective sociological analysis

. Hans Coudenhove, My African Neighbours (London, 1925), of prostitution. Much of the literature on the subject, if not merely Sally Falk Moore states that ‘changes in the relative positions of descriptive, is charged with a moralistic tone or with psychological

individuals and changes in social regularities are connected though not 51 ations — it sees prostitution as a ‘social problem’, as ‘deviant

co-extensive phenomena’, and that these connexions are discounted by behavior’ ‘ndicati £ holosical ; ty. F |

structural models. Instead of seeing ‘change’ as the opposite of PeHAvlor, OF as an indication of psychological immaturity. Prom ‘regularity’, she suggests that it is more useful to ‘conceive an under- MY point of view there are two inadequacies in such formulations. lying, theoretically absolute cultural and social indeterminacy, which is The first is that they fail to locate prostitution as a social phenome- only partially done away with by culture and organized social life, the non with social implications. Only rarely do they shift their focus patterned aspects of which are temporary, incomplete, and contain from the prostitute herself to her social context. The second problem certain elements of ambiguity, discontinuity, contradiction, paradox and js that they assume a cultural universalism in relation to prostitution.? | conflict’. S. Falk Moore, “Uncertainties in situations, indeterminacies in Most of these analyses stem from the study of prostitution in Europe

Communal Ideology. ‘sleadi citut; different social charact d

culture’, in Falk Moore and Myerhoff (eds), Symbol and Politics in |. America. When transposed to other contexts they are often 1 William Beinart, “The Family Youth Organization, Gangs and Politics mustcacing since prostitution assumes a ditterent social Character an

_ in the Transkeian Area’. Conference on the history of the Family in 4 differently regarded in different social contexts.

Africa, SOAS, September 1981. Fo } , There is another line of argument which would appear poten-

'2 ‘What follows is based on the research of Mr Pexie Ligoya, a student of tially more productive, and which has been put into its most Chancellor College, University of Malawi, though I have placed my vigorous form by Marxist writers. This approach would put own interpretation on some of his findings: P. M. C. Ligoya, “Chinjira prostitution firmly in the context of. a capitalist society in which All between Women in Thyolo District’, Department of Sociology, social relations are subordinated to the cash nexus. It sees prosti-

Chancellor College, Student Seminar Paper, 1991. tution as merely one expression of exploitative social relations, and in particular it holds up bourgeois marriage as a mirror to prostitution. All this is important for it directs our attention to prostitution as an economic as well as a social phenomenon, and encourages us to look at the wider framework of power within

CO WCH it emerges. In relation to early Nairobi it would provoke us

J ANET M. B UJ RA to speculate on the fact that prostitution occurred within the context of an exploitative colonial society where traditional social Wo men / F ntre @ reneu rs’ relationships were rapidly destroyed by aassumption money economy. On thebeing other hand, the underlying here, as in most

of F 7 r| Y N 2those i ro bi who * otherpractise writings it onare the subject, is that prostitution “degrades’, and that its ‘victims’. My interpretation in this

Study will be somewhat different. Whilst accepting that the women Reference | I describe were, in a sense, ‘forced’ into prostitution by economic Canadian Journal of African Studies, 1975, (2): 213-34 necessity, I shall argue that they turned the situation into one of economic advantage. Far from being degraded by the transformation of sexual relations into a sale of services, they held their own in

Introduction ‘respectable society’ with men. From being passive sexual objects, they became actors in a social drama of their own making. And in a What follows is essentially an essay in social history, based on very real sense prostitution allowed them an independence and material which arose incidentally out of a wider study of class freedom from exploitation that would not have been possible had formation in Nairobi. My focus here will be on the independent they chosen any of the other socio-economic roles open to them — role played by women, both in this process and in the social as wives, or as workers in the formal economy of colonial Kenya.5 definition of a particular urban African community. The women I My interpretation here will also differ from that of Fanon, so describe here were able to take advantage of a certain demographic perceptive in most respects as regards colonial and post-colonial and socio-economic situation to achieve high incomes and thereby society. Fanon lumped prostitutes together with shanty-dwellers, to acquire property. Through prostitution and beer brewing they _ thieves, exploited domestic servants, and drunkards, as members of accumulated savings which they invested in building or buying the lumpenproletariat. He emphasized the revolutionary potential of houses, and occasionally in petty trade. Their ability to accumulate such a class, which had nothing to lose in any confrontation with savings in this way equalled or surpassed that of men in the earliest the colonial masters. As far as this case study is concerned however, phase of Nairobi’s history, and until today women own almost half prostitutes can more usefully be seen as aspiring members of the the houses in Nairobi’s oldest existing ‘African location’, Pumwani. embryonic petty bourgeoisie which emerges under colonial rule — a

124 @ Livelihoods & Lifeways :

class which Fanon describes as those who profit — ‘at a discount to emerged coincidentally, from women who were more open or more

be sure’ — from the colonial economy.® garrulous or more willing to talk about themselves.

In making this kind of analysis I am avoiding the issue of ,

whether or not prostitution is in itself morally abhorrent, or whether jy Early Nairobi: the immigrants

it in fact inhibits a ‘true’ liberation of women. All I mean to say here

is that in this situation it allowed women, within the limits of an Nairobi was founded in 1899 as a bridgehead on the Uganda exploitative colonial context, to gain an unusual measure of equality Railway; a node in the first modern communications network of with men, that this is interesting and that it requires sociological East Africa. Within the space of a few years it had a population of

explanation. thirteen and a half thousand, over two-thirds of whom were Africans.* There were women as well as men amongst these earliest

| Sources for social history African immigrants into the city, although in 1911 men outnumbered women in the ratio of six to one.° In a description of

Nairobi is fascinating ground for the social historian since its Nairobi written in that year, we find the first mention of development spans barely a lifetime. Thus there are people still alive prostitution in the town, in what appears to be a reference to the who were born in the city in its earliest days, or who came to settle forerunner of the present-day River Road:

we S ry y colonists a 10

there when it was little more than a collection of tents and grass Behind the government offices runs the Nairobi River, through

uts, a staging camp in the opening up of East Africa to European tivated almost entirely by Indjans. On the bord f interests. The municipal and political history of Nairobi is already hte ewes See ee ey OY erneeenenerees aia ll known —it is the history of a town established bv colonists and is swamp are several houses, some of which are occupied by ... lareely by and forby colonists. A history can of African ran largely S story sesettlement in native prostitutes who pay rent to the Indian owners. the city still remains to be written — that such a history exists, even The women who came to Nairobi in the first two decades of the

if ignored by official historians, is undeniable. But where does one century were from many different tribes and they had come from go for the material? Official records tell little, though they suggest widely-scattered areas. We cannot explain their presence in the much.’ The earliest African settlements in Nairobi were razed to the town simply in terms of its proximity to their birthplaces. Whilst it sround long ago. The majority of Nairobi’s population today is true that some were born just a few miles away from Nairobi,

knows little or nothing of its past. there were others who had travelled two or three hundred miles or

The oldest African settlement still existing in Nairobi is Pum- more to get to the town. The majority were either Kikuyu (Kenya’s wani. Even here, few of the inhabitants know that Pumwani was _ largest ‘tribe,’ whose homeland adjoins Nairobi) or Kalenjin (Nandi born of earlier settlements, of Mji wa Mombasa, Pangani, Maskini, and Kipsigis, whose homeland lies in western Kenya, some one

Kaburini and Kileleshwa. By careful searching however one can hundred to 150 miles away from Nairobi). ,

find here some of the city’s oldest residents, whose life histories tell What compelled these women to leave their rural homes for a something of the struggle for survival in the earliest days. strange and alien town, and once there, what forces propelled them My account is based on the evidence of such people, backed up into prostitution? Purely personal reasons undoubtedly motivated wherever possible with written sources. In addition I have drawn many to leave home. Marital discords, quarrels with parents, on an attempted 100% sample of resident Pumwani landlords whom widowhood and childlessness would appear to have been significant I interviewed in 1971. There were then 317 houses in Pumwani, in many cases. Thus there was the Luhya woman whose husband 132 of which were occupied by resident landlords. 42.2% of the beat her until she could stand it no longer, and ran away. There was houses in Pumwani were owned by women, of whom 76 were the Nandi woman who quarrelled with her husband after he took a resident landlords. All of these 76 women were interviewed within second wife, and then fled from home in anger. There was the my sample of 127 resident landlords (the remaining five residents Kikuyu woman who ran away after her father tried to force her into could not be contacted). Since I was particularly interested in the marriage — ‘he sold me, as if I were a goat.’ There, were other earliest period of Nairobi’s history, I drew from this larger sample a women who had eloped from their villages with attractive strangers, sub-sample of 41 women landlords, comprising all those who had _ like the Nyamwezi woman from Mwanza who had been seduced come to Nairobi before 1925 (and who therefore had at least 45 by a Ganda gunbearer and followed him to Nairobi, or the Luhya years’ residence in the town), and all those who had been born in woman who told us that: ‘A certain man deceived me into accomNairobi before 1910 (and who were thus at least sixty years old). Of + panying him to Nairobi, but once we got here he just abandoned these forty-one women, nine had been born in Nairobi, whilst the me.’ There were, of course, some women who came to Nairobi

rest were born elsewhere. with their husbands or their parents, but these would seem to have

If we take prostitution to be the manifest sale of sexual services been the exception rather than the rule. Much more common were to men by women then not all the women in this sub-sample had the accounts of being brought to Nairobi by a mother, or by sisters, been prostitutes — indeed a few would seem definitely not to have or aunts, or other female relatives who were already pursuing anbeen. But from evidence of what they themselves said, or what independent existence in the new town. others said about them, it would seem likely that the majority had There were many women who said that they had left home after

been prostitutes at one time or another. their parents or spouses died. Such women often claimed that as a Even after putting all this evidence together there are still many result of their bereavement they had been left without material questions ‘which remain unanswered’ and in some places I have had support. While this may have been true, it would surely not have to fall back on intelligent speculation due to lack of facts. My been normal for traditional society, but would suggest an unusual questionnaires, for example, were not designed to elicit information degree of social dislocation existing in some areas at this period.

about prostitution per se, and I did not therefore ask many of the Indeed what may look like purely individual reasons for an questions I otherwise might have asked. The material gained action when we examine specific cases may take on a more general

Janet M. Bujra/Women ‘Entrepreneurs’ of Early Nairobi ¢ 125

significance when we consider them in aggregate. It is clear that the colonial intrusion. They were press-ganged or persuaded into women, like men, were affected by the disturbed conditions of life joining the British as soldiers, or they endangered life and limb in in many parts of east Africa in the last few decades of the nineteenth fighting against them. Many (especially among the Kikuyu) lost century. Colonial intrusion was only the last of a series of catas- their land and became mere squatters on ‘European’ land. Others trophic episodes which upset the conditions for normal life in this were forced into wage labour by starvation, taxation or sheer period. Disastrous drought, famine, and epidemics of rinderpest and physical coercion. In such large-scale social upheavals, however, smallpox struck many areas, decimating humans and livestock alike. women could not help but be affected. An interesting case in point Between 1891 and 1894, for example, the Kamba suffered is the effect upon them of the building of the railway line. How this successively from a rinderpest epidemic, a famine and a locust affected men is clear — Africans of many different tribes were invasion.'! The Masai were hit by rinderpest and smallpox in the recruited to work as labourers in the construction of the railway, 1880s and early nineties.!? Epidemics of cattle disease and human and they often worked far away from home. Asian ‘coolies’ were maladies affected the Nandi in the late 1880s." The kind of disrup- also imported in great numbers to work on the line. The workers tion and suffering that such disasters entailed can be seen from the were housed in camps along the route of the railway. Describing two following case histories of women who came to Nairobiin the such camps in this period in the Kalenjin area, Sir Frederick Jackson

early days: said that they were °...crowded with prostitutes ... there were . . rumours of the Lumbwa — a subsection of Kalenjin — becoming Maimuna Salim” was born around 1895 of Masai parents. She restive on account of so many of their young women being told us that when she was very young, ‘there was famine in inveigled away from their homes and harboured in these sinks of Masailand and my people left their home in Kajiado and came to iniquity.’'¢ It is not of course possible now to say how many of these

Kikuyu Station’ (Kikuyu Station is a small settlement about women were actually inveigled into the camps and how many fifteen miles away from Nairobi, but fifty or sixty miles from turned up there of their own accord. Nor is it possible to judge the Kajiado). When they reached there however, Maimuna Ss parents extent to which these women were products of the earlier disturbed died and she was left an orphan. She was taken in by a Kikuyu political conditions in the Kalenjin area. What is clear however is family and brought up as one of them. When she grew up she that of the many Kalenjin women who later turned up in Nairobi, married a Rabai who brought her with him to Nairobi. They most came from areas nearby the railway line, and many of these built a house in Mji wa Mombasa (one of the early settlements) rad spent periods in small urban settlements in Kalenjin country and then her husband died. Maimuna stayed on: ‘After my before coming to Nairobi:

husband died I didn’t get another husband. There was another . way then of earning a living.’ Although Maimuna sometimes Mama Upesi, a Nandi woman, was born around 1895 in a

describes herself as a Masai she has never revisited Masailand. village not far from where the Nandi Orkoiyot (leader) was

‘Why should I go back there 2’, she says, ‘I became a Kikuyu.’ assassinated by a British military expedition. Mama Upesi’s father was killed in this fighting when she was a small child. She was Zeitun Ahmed, a Mkamba woman, was born around the turn of married off in early puberty, but continually quarrelled with her the century. Her parents were from Kitui, but they left home in husband. Eventually she ran off with some passing cattle herders order to escape from famine in that area. They struggled south to and ended up in Kisumu, the terminus of the railway line. After Taita (about 150 miles away), and this is where Zeitun was born. spending a few years there she eventually came to Nairobi. —

Whilst she was still small however her parents died, leaving only | a oo,

her and one older sister. They were rescued from Taita by a Thus not all these women came straight to Nairobi. But once clansman who returned with them to Kitui. Zeitun recalled with having left home they generally headed for some nearby urban bitterness how this clansman had ill-treated them and how he C&Mte. The reason. for this was that such centres ae generally had tried to force her to marry against her will. She ran away to Outside the orbit of customary law, and they often contained people

another female relative, but finally ended up in Nairobi. of different tribes. The old saying : “Town air makes free,’ would

[*All names in case studies are fictitious. ] seem to be very relevant to the motives of many of these women. It

seems likely that once in such centres they would sooner or later These disturbed physical conditions then were the background hear about Nairobi as an expanding town of good opportunities. to imperial penetration in eastern Africa at the end of the nine- Certainly several Kalenjin (and some Luhya) women said that they teenth century. The expansion of British colonial domination came to Nairobi to join other women of their tribe already there. provoked resistance from many quarters, and in some areas this was

whose resistance was the most active and prolonged were the , Kalenjin (who fought several violent battles with the colonial As we have already noted, there is mention of ‘native prostitution’

both bitter and protracted. It is of relevance here that the peoples 44) “Native prostitution’ — a municipal social problem

intruders between 1893 and 1906)'* and the Kikuyu (whose in official records as early as 1911. Probably the first prostitutes in sporadic and disorganized resistance continued from 1890 to Nairobi were camp followers of the soldiers of the British East 1906).° The reaction of the British to this opposition was often African Rifles, or the Asian ‘coolies’ working on the railway line. brutal and punitive in the extreme. Many people were killed One of the first Nandi prostitutes, for example, is said to have been (including the spiritual leader of the Nandi) and crops, livestock and a women called Fauzia, who first set herself up in the Indian bazaar houses were wantonly destroyed. And when we add to all this the near the town centre. She was very ‘successful’ and was reputed to large-scale alienation of Kikuyu land by European settlers, it need have had many Asian and European customers as well as Africans. not surprise us that there were suddenly many Kikuyu widows and She is said to have herself encouraged many Nandi women to come

orphans without material support. to Nairobi, and she put them up when they first arrived and helped Clearly men were more immediately touched than women by them to establish themselves.

126 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways . Fauzia later removed to Pangani where she built a house for The reason for this lack of organization, whether for exploitation herself. Prostitutes were soon to be found in all the early African of prostitutes, or for mutual help as prostitutes, would seem to settlements, to the outrage of ‘respectable’ European opinion. derive from the advantageous economic position in which these Indeed, one of the arguments put forward in support of demolish- women found themselves. They did not need middlemen to find ing the ‘native villages’ and building a new and sanitary municipal clients for them since prospective customers were in abundance. ‘location’ for Africans was that venereal disease was becoming a Rooms from which to operate were cheap, compared to the profits serious problem in the town. On 5 November 1918, the municipal which could be made. In short the laws of supply and demand

committee received: operated in favour of these women to such an extent at this period

... A letter from a Committee appointed by a public meeting that there na no reason for them to a need an shrewd sons convened to consider the question of venereal disease ... in P ‘here they veded © P ne - aout in ae nM ae 1 - . . anos which the importance of the Native Location as a first measure ch ore ey abl © , P a. “e id agains he omy ra wail f th Nocal

towards the controlling of native prostitution was urged." ST eee eee eee eee oe tiie community, in which they were active and integrated participants,

When the ‘Native Location’ (Pumwani) was finally built (in as we shall see below. 1921-22), one of the first public buildings erected there was a , | venereal diseases clinic. Prostitution had not been checked oe ge eee ae

however. Although the smaller African urban settlements (Mji wa IV Prostitution: precipitating factors Mombasa, Maskini, Kileleshwa and Kaburini) were demolished in That prostitution was widespread in early Nairobi will now be the early twenties, Pangani was not demolished until 1938. By the evident. Let us look next then at the social and economic factors late twenties both Pangani and Pumwani had a large population of which precipitated women into becoming prostitutes. It seems clear independent women, many of whom had made good and built or that at least some of the women who came into Nairobi in these

bought houses there. early days had already embarked on a life of prostitution in other

Both early and later European officials based their judgment of places. Most of the rest were probably aware that for a single the women of Nairobi on two erroneous assumptions derived from woman, life in Nairobi usually entailed prostitution. Nevertheless it Western experience of prostitution. They took it for granted that is important to assess what other possible lives these women might

these women were the tools of unscrupulous men, and that they have led, and to point out the factors which made prostitution

were organized into brothels.’* In his evidence to the Kenya Land almost inevitable. .

Commission in 1932, the Nairobi Municipal Native Affairs officer The first of these factors was undoubtedly the demographic commented on the many young Kikuyu girls who were coming imbalance of the sexes. From the beginning men vastly outinto the town after running away from their parents. ‘Moham- numbered women, and even today there are more than half as medans get hold of these girls, he said, and marry them to friends of many men again as women among Nairobi’s African population. theirs.”!9 In his evidence to the same commission however, the Men from all over East Africa had come to Nairobi, attracted either Superintendent of Native Locations noted that there were Nandi by the opportunities of earning cash from wage labour, or by the and ‘Baziba’ (i.e. Bahaya) women in Nairobi as well as Kikuyu, and chances for making quick profits in trade in a centre of expanding that these women, ‘seem to have an affinity for town life’..° In population. These men rarely brought wives with them in the early

speaking of Pangani, another official commented unfavourably on days, although some later returned home to marry. It is not the ‘parasite class who rely mainly on keeping lodging houses and _ surprising then that there was a demand for women in Nairobi.

brothels for their livelihood’.”! A 1941 report described Pangani as a The second factor was that employment opportunities for place where, ‘the lodging house keeper was indistinguishable from women were largely non-existent in the early colonial urban

the brothel manager’ .” economy. What wage employment existed was, by and large,

Neither of these assumptions would seem to be borne out by my employment for men. Although a few women were able to obtain own evidence. In the first place prostitutes in Nairobi were never jobs as servants or ayahs, even here they were in competition with subject to exploitation by pimps or brothel owners. Each woman men. Moreover domestic service was a sphere in which labour was seems to have organized her business separately and lived indepen- exploited to the full — wages were pitifully low, hours long, and

dently. Landlords, whether men or women, were glad to have them accommodation poor. : , as tenants — they sometimes paid slightly more rent than others and In the very early days some were able to make a good living by in any case they always had money with which to pay. But the brewing beer and selling it to men, though in general beer brewing landlords had no control over them except as tenants, and if some was an adjunct to prostitution rather than a separate occupation. Pangani and Pumwani houses could be described as ‘brothels’ it was From 1921 however the city council forbade the brewing of beer because they housed a number of independent operators, not by Africans.”> They set up a municipal brewery in Pumwani and

because the landlords or anyone else acted as a ‘manager’. were soon doing good business. A few African women were

Nor did these women organize themselves to any large extent as employed there as workers, and it seems probable that this conprostitutes. The Nandi women in Nairobi (but not only as prostitutes) stituted the first wage labour for women on any scale in Nairobi. were informally led by Fauzia, whom they described as their Queeni. This attempt to establish a council monopoly in local beer was not She is said to have spoken on their behalf and to have had ‘influence of course entirely successful, for it was soon noted that ‘drunken

with the DC’ in this early period. It is important to emphasize natives’ had been seen, who were getting beer from ‘other however that in spite of Fauzia’s influential role in encouraging sources’.** Nevertheless, even though women went on brewing and other Nandi women to come to Nairobi, she was not a middleman _ selling beer, they were now subject to harassment, arrest, imprisonin the business of prostitution. Prostitutes from other ethnic groups ment and fines. Many paid out a percentage of their profits in bribes seem not to have been organized even to this informal extent. to police, to persuade them to turn a blind eye to their activities.

Janet M. Bujra/Women ‘Entrepreneurs’ of Early Nairobi ¢ 127

Beer brewing was thus not such an attractive proposition as it had It tied her to the control and limited resources of a particular man

earlier been. whilst her sisters were making money for themselves. Nor did it

A woman might also have made a subsistence living by selling guarantee a permanent home or secure future for either herself or cooked food, vegetables or firewood. Opportunities for the kind of her children, No wonder then that one old woman, an exextensive small-scale trade in which West African women early prostitute, when asked if she had ever been married, replied crossly, began to specialize would seem to have been inhibited here by de “Why do you insult me? My house is my husband.’ Property was facto monopoly of the field by petty Asian traders. In a later period indeed a firmer base for long term security than marriage, but some women (most particularly Kikuyu) built up a thriving business property could only be achieved through prostitution.

as middle-men in the vegetable trade, but it is unlikely that in this Thus these women often settled down into permanent unions early period many women made more than a bare pittance in this only after many years of successful independence, or they drifted line. Moreover, it was not long before municipal control was into and out of temporary liaisons interspersed with stretches of extended over this sphere also, making it illegal to operate without more covert prostitution. Maryam Wambui, a Kikuyu woman, a licence. Thus both beer brewing and small-scale trading were came to join her mother’s sister in Pangani around 1920. This activities more likely to be carried on by elderly women who could woman had already built herself a house from savings accumulated

no longer earn money as prostitutes. as a prostitute. Maryam also became a prostitute, inherited the

One possible alternative to prostitution in early Nairobi would house on her aunt’s death nine years later, and then built another have been marriage, and indeed almost all the women in my sample house for herself in Pumwani where she let out rooms. Only then had been involved in fairly long term relationships with men at one_ did she marry an elderly Somali man, with whom she stayed until period or another of their lives. Only four said they had never been his death. Women such as these were responsible only to them-

married. But what did ‘marriage’ mean in this context? _ selves; they married when and whom they chose, and they took full Many writers have noted the fluidity of forms taken by relations _ responsibility for the upbringing and support of their children, since

between the sexes in urban areas in Africa, and Nairobi was no they could not rely on men. exception. Describing the Mulago area of Kampala, Southall and There is another factor however that needs to be taken into _Gutkind relate how prostitutes may become ‘lovers’ or temporary account in understanding prostitution in this context — and that is the wives, and temporary marriages may turn into permanent unions.» relationship between prostitution and infertility. In a surprising In an analysis of Sabo location in Ibadan, Cohen describes the case number of the cases J studied infertility seems to have been evident. with which ‘prostitutes frequently marry and slip into the anony- Thus 14 (34%) of these 41 women had never borne a child, and a mity of wifehood and wives frequently divorce and emerge into the further 10 (24%) had only one child (remember all are now past freedom and independence of prostitution.’”° The situation in early child-bearing age). This relationship between infertility and prostiNairobi (and indeed in Pumwani today) would seem more similar tution is not peculiar to this study — it has been noted in other studies to that pertaining in Mulago than to the Sabo case. In Sabo, the two too — in Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, and Timbuctoo for example.?’ states, of prostitution and marriage, though transmutable, are There would seem to be three reasons why such a link is apparent. opposed and clearly set off from one another, and there are no The first is that even in town infertile women are unlikely to intervening gradations as in Pumwani or Kampala. The explanation enjoy permanent formal marriages, since most men wish for for this difference would seem to be that Sabo is an ethnically children in such marriages. An infertile wornan might perhaps homogeneous community and that its population is wholly Muslim. occupy the unenviable position of a second wife, but few are In such a situation, though urban, the state of marriage was clearly prepared to accept this in an urban context. Such women are sanctioned and defined. In Mulago however, and in Pumwani today, therefore likely to become prostitutes, with perhaps short periods as we are dealing with communities which are ethnically and religiously temporary wives. Conversely, extremely fertile women are less heterogeneous, and where a multiplicity of possible models for a__ easily divorced. As I have already suggested, childlessness is perhaps ‘real’ marriage may exist. In Pumwani today for example, marriages what drove some women away from home in the first place. Nadel, may be formalized by an Islamic or Christian ceremony, by in writing of the West African situation, argues that: ‘barrenness is a customary law, by a civil ceremony — or by a combination of one or state outside conventional morality’ — it is an abnormal situation more than these. In fact many so-called ‘marriages’ in Pumwani_ which calls forth abnormal responses.”

today are merely unformalized temporary unions, easily entered It would also seem logical that the most successful prostitutes into and easily broken. If this is true of present day conditions, it is were likely to come from that category of women who were likely to have been even more true of the conditions prevailing in infertile, simply because it was easier to operate without the early Nairobi. Even where a marriage was formalized by a religious encumbrance of children. Women with children were forced to ceremony, this would not, in itself, ensure stability, since, with a employ young girls or old women to look after their offspring multiplicity of models, there were no clear-cut sanctions to enforce whilst they attended to business. marriage rules. A man might abandon his wife, or take on another Thirdly, there is an obvious link that women who are involved with impunity. Divorce was easy in Islamic law, and both Islam and_ in prostitution are likely to contract venereal diseases, some of

traditional codes allowed for polygamy. which may lead to infertility.

In fact neither men or women had much incentive to enter into a formal marriage in these early years. Men were often still thinking y prostitution and the urban social c ommunity

in terms of a wife from their village (if they were not indeed already

married at home). Supporting a wife and children in town was _ All the factors so far discussed would help towards an explanation of burdensome and entailed few corresponding benefits. Men could, the existence of extensive prostitution in early Nairobi. But we also and often did abandon women to bring up small children as best have to understand how it was that women were able to make such they could. For a woman too, a formal marriage had little to offer. a life socially viable and tolerable. We have to remember that they

128 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

had come from many different places and different ethnic origins. A their religion — they built mosques and they converted many to few had relatives in the city (especially those who had been brought Islam. Amongst their converts were both men and women, to Nairobi by female relatives or parents), but the majority had although women appear to have been in the majority. It was not none. Most have some fellow tribeswomen in the town, but a few that women had essentially different motives from men in condid not have even this potential support. As we have seen, a large verting to Islam, but rather that they had more need of what Islam group never bore children. Sometimes they had left home in could offer in an urban context. It offered urban social security, circumstances which made it difficult for them to return. Only moral neutrality and a model for economic success. eight of these 41 women still visited their home districts frequently. In East Africa Islam has largely been an urban religion. In Another nine had actually been born in Nairobi. Of the rest, eleven Nairobi it offered a complete social system owing nothing to rural had not been home for many years (from seven years to sixty years modes of life and taking no account of ethnic differences. This ago) and three had never been back. Some of those who had never urban religion provided a framework within which people could been back expressed extreme antagonism to the very idea of interrelate on a new basis, it provided an authority structure, it returning : ‘Why should I go there?’ said one. ‘I have no need of ordered life crises, it offered literacy and formal education, and it them.’ Such women had completely severed their rural ties. This is even structured the passing of time with communal celebrations of partly a reflection of the unpleasant circumstances in which many of one form or another. To convert to Islam involved at one and the these women had left home. But it also reminds us that, in contrast same time the rejection of a person’s tribal origins and his or her to men, few women had rights to land on their own account in the acceptance into a new set of urban relationships. Since women had rural areas. Only three women claimed to have land at home, often cut themselves off more critically from their rural origins than although another woman had put her savings into buying a farm had most men (due to the circumstances in which they left home

elsewhere. and to the occupation they had adopted in town) they had more

What I shall argue is that given this background, these women need of an urban substitute for rural securities than had men. Indeed developed urban institutions to make life socially viable for them- some women spoke as if coming to live in town was synonymous selves, and in the process of so doing contributed to the creation of with conversion. “Why,’ said one, “everyone who came to Nairobi an urban community. I shall point to three factors which were changed and became a Swahili Muslim.’

significant here: conversion to Islam, the ‘adoption’ of pseudo-kin The Islamic community was conceived of in the idiom of

and the acquisition of urban property. kinship. Once having become a Muslim, all other Muslims became

one’s ‘relatives’ or jamaa. This word may have many shades of

Conversion to Islam meaning, but it is usually used to mean kindred, plus perhaps

Many of the earliest male immigrants into Nairobi were from the neighbours and friends — fellow members of a cohestve community coast of East Africa, a region which has been Muslim for many (ujamaa). For these women the ujamaa wa kiislamu ~ the Islamic centuries. Although there had been some conversion to Islam by community — replaced that of their tribe and relatives at home. One inland tribes at points along the old Arab trade routes to Buganda, woman, when asked why she became a Muslim, replied simply: ‘I Islam had no large scale up-country following. Most of the women wanted jamaa. They will bury me.’ I describe here were not, therefore, born into the Islamic faith. In The problem of death and burial was indeed a critical considera-

spite of this, very many were converted to Islam in the course of tion for people who had cut off ties with their rural homes, or their new lives in town.”? What was it that persuaded these women whose families lived hundreds of miles away. Who would bury one

to embrace a new faith in such numbers? with dignity in an alien place? For Muslims, God was in every

It has often been argued that women are more prone to place, and Muslims could therefore be buried anywhere. The

religiosity, more attracted to new religious sects, and more active in Muslim community of Nairobi took the responsibility of burying its spirit possession cults than men, and it has been suggested that this is dead and they had their own burial ground. Thus many of these because women are a ‘deprived’ or ‘peripheral’ category.*° I would women, when asked why they had converted to Islam, simply argue, in this case at least, that these explanations are too negative, posed another question: “Who will bury me if I die here?’ A Kamba and that they impose notions of male centrality on the material woman argued the case as follows : | which are not necessarily justified. One could reasonably argue that My religion means more to me than anything. When I die my

all the Africans who came to Nairobi were a deprived category fellow Musi; Wb Yv. ;

; : ellow Muslimslabour will bury me.of You think these Wakamba would since they formed the exploited force a colonial economic hel 5me. - 31 . rrr elp me ? Not at all — more likely they would just abandon system, whilst being excluded from social and political participation

in that system. Status ambiguity and peripherality no doubt affected The process of conversion was in itself a symbolic adoption into them all in relation to the overriding colonial framework. On the a new set of social relations. When a person becomes a Muslim he whole women did rather well out of the situation — they profited on — discards his tribal name and takes on a ‘religious name’, by which he

the sidelines without directly participating in the new socio- (or she) is always known afterwards. There is no mass conversion in

economic colonial order. Islam (at least not in this situation): each conversion is an individual

The earliest settlements in Nairobi were based on a score of event. It may be initiated either by the convertor or by the person coastal Muslim immigrants — often men who had served with the who wishes to be converted, but generally speaking the convertor is British and had stayed on in Nairobi, making a living from trade or male. The new convert then takes this man’s name as his or her employment (often as gunbearers for European hunting expedi- ‘father’s’ name. Thus ‘Amina Sharif’? would in this context be tions). They built houses and let out rooms to later immigrants into ‘Amina converted by Sharif’. The convertor has certain obligations

the city. The first leaders to be recognized by the colonial in theory towards those whom he converts. He is supposed to teach authorities were men of this type, and they appointed them as chiefs them the rudiments of the religion, and to act as their guardian. Not of the various African ‘villages’ in Nairobi. Such men did not forget everyone takes their responsibilities seriously, but generally the

Janet M. Bujra/Women ‘Entrepreneurs’ of Early Nairobi * 129

convertor did maintain a special relationship with those whom he themselves openly in the streets, but only so long as this did not converted. It seems likely therefore, that for some women in this conflict with their need to make an income. Islamic authorities early period, the motive for conversion was to gain a patron were never strong enough to contain or control such women, even amongst those more rich and successful within the community. had they wished to do so (in some cases of course, they were comFor some women conversion was very clearly a negative act of promised by participation). rejection. Hamuda Maksudi, a Kikuyu woman, ran away from Although they could not aspire to religious or political leaderhome after her father tried to force her into marriage. She settled in ship within the confines of a patriarchal communal religion like Pangani, where she became a prostitute — she was later to build a Islam, these women could and did take an active part in organizing house in Pumwani. In Pangani she approached a Segeju religious behind the scenes. Women have always been energetic in initiating teacher and asked him to convert her to Islam. She was explicit religious celebrations, and in collecting money for religious about her motives. ‘I was escaping from my father’s influence. I purposes. They were also very active in the numerous welfare didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.’ It is relevant to societies which sprang up in the early settlements of Nairobi. The my argument however, that in rejecting one father she was gaining majority of these societies were Muslim organizations, some with an another, whose name she still bears. Conversion was thus never ethnic or regional focus, others purely religious. Some of these simply a negative act; in rejecting one set of social relations one societies financed religious education, others organized dances and

gained another. concerts, all of them celebrated religious occasions, most of them

It is of some interest that none of these women explained their extended mutual help to their members in times of sickness or conversion in terms of marriage to a Muslim, although it is probable hardship, and all were active in burying their dead. Women were that some women originally converted for this reason. Islam would very strong in these societies, although the leaders were generally seem to have been more significant to these women in its capacity men. The existence of such societies, not only made urban life to absorb them into a pseudo-kin community, rather than in its easier and more socially satisfying for individual men and women function of legitimising affinity. Nevertheless, once having become alike, but their creation added one element to the developing social a Muslim, as opposed to being simply a Kikuyu or a Nandi, these structures of the urban African settlements. Other societies, ethnic “women’s marital choice was no longer restricted to men of their rather than religious in definition, arose in these settlements in later own ethnic group, as were the choices of non-Muslims. Of those years, although they were never as vital or as urban-focussed as the women in my sample who had married at all, 46% (17) claimed that Muslim associations.*4* Welfare societies then have undoubtedly their present or last spouse was a man from a different tribe to their played a role in making a life of prostitution tolerable in Nairobi,

own, and many had borne children in such unions. although they were not set up for this purpose. More than half of

One might reasonably ask whether Christianity could not have the women in my sample belonged to Muslim welfare societies, and played the same role as Islam in this early period. When most of some belonged to more than one such association. these women came to Nairobi however, missionary works was in its Finally, we can see a ‘class’ identification in patterns of conversainfancy. A Protestant missionary church was set up fairly early on in tion to Islam by these women. The religious and political leaders of Nairobi, but it seemed to cater more for Africans who had already these settlements were Muslims who, having made money by been converted to Christianity before coming to Nairobi. Islam by employment or trade, invested their savings in property which contrast had a much longer history in East Africa, and in Nairobi it could be rented to others. Prostitutes who made good were to was propounded by other Africans within the context of an on- follow the same pattern, thereby ensuring a steady income for going social community, rather than by Europeans who did not live themselves and security in old age. with, or like, Africans. Muslims were also a good deal more tolerant of prostitution and The adoption of pseudo-kin of illegitimacy than were Christian missionaries, even though both Through Islam these women came to belong to a community religions condemned these practices in theory. This is brought out which played many of the functions which at home would have by the story of a Kipsigis woman who came to Nairobi somewhat been played by kin. Nevertheless many of them also felt the need later. She had at one time worked as an ayah for Europeans and had_ for kin at a more intimate level. One way of doing this was by been converted to Catholicism. In Nairobi she bore an illegitimate creating ties of ‘blood brotherhood’ (undugu wa kuchanjana). What child. She claimed that when the priest came to hear of this she was usually happened was that a man and a woman came to an arrange-

refused the sacrament. ment whereby afterwards they helped each other as brother and

,I was y. .bitter ; sister. Thus a certain Ganda woman who had built a house in and very angry, so I went to Shekifu, a prominent P and who had no child d t of blood broth and rich local Muslim. I told him, ‘I want to become a Muslim,’ hood with TG w ie ac whe t her. ma mn ‘uP act © Ider! ro hit so he converted me. ood with a Ganda man when they were both quite elderly. In their

old age they lived in the same room and helped each other in everyIslam itself does not, of course, condone prostitution. But the thing. They died in fact within two days of each other. conditions of life in early Nairobi made moral niceties practically This woman was not an exceptional case, for as we have seen, impossible to uphold, either for women or for men.*® By the time many of these women had no children of their own. This situation conditions had eased, a relaxed and somewhat laissez-faire morality created problems for them in old age, for who would take care of had established itself: Prostitutes who espoused the cause of Islam them if they fell sick? Who would provide companionship and

moreover, were ready to ignore its teachings when they were support for them in their old age? And who would inherit their irrelevant or opposed to their interests (in this they would not seem property when they died ? Accordingly many of these women took to be different from the followers of most religions). This is seen foster children to bring up (eleven cases out of 41). In the same way most clearly in their manipulation of inheritance codes (see below). that some of them had been brought to Nairobi by older sisters or They paid lip service to notions of Islamic modesty by not flaunting by aunts, they themselves also sent home for brothers’ or sisters’

130 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

children to bring up. Or they might find some alternative in town — Writing in 1939, Peristiany mentioned a case whereby this the old lady mentioned above, for example, used to have a Gisu __ practice was already being adapted amongst the Kipsigis:

Muslim friend. This friendiedied, leaving young daughter, Loe,different ;; _ Nowadays thisainstitution is sometimeswhom used to very

the old lady brought up as her own. It was this girl who arranged . ; known for adopting children when they have none of own, ;in, a . ; after earning quite a large’surn of money astheir a prostitute and they are sometimes said to purchase babies. In nearly all these ; . 45 ; .;children town.orThis she invested cattle and two cases the are whose described by the in woman her ‘married’ own, she ; erwomen, :;source of ree ‘husbands’ and theiras children are and a substantial ; ; ends, Thus Mariam, note, name, a fat unmarried the funeral when old woman Nandi women wellahad . Muslim ; . ; the woman whodied. lived near myaretent, returned to the Reserve

gives themincome a name which disguises their origin. . to her, asthese theyresorted help to herd Another practice; which women such as to was ; 38the cows and till large fields

, ; , : of maize for her. woman to woman’.marriage. Those who had contracted marriages

such as these were likely to be property owners, since the main What Peristiany does not make clear however, is that this woman purpose of such an arrangement is to ensure heirs to inherit their was creating heirs, not in the line of any husband, but for herself and

wealth: in her own name. The point is that neither Kikuyu nor Kipsigis | rain . When we interviewed Mwanaisha Adamu, a Kipsigis woman, customary law allowed women CO inherit property.” To justify this

; : kindfour of marriage in terms of kimila then, is toof disguise in the; langshe claimed to have children, and pointed out one them On ;‘tribal Lop uage of traditionalism a radical departure from established to us — a small girl of about three years old. Since she was over ; practice. seventy at the time we were not ‘i. sure what to makehereofthenthis. ; ; ; 4: women What I am suggesting is that story in Nairobi these When she died a few months later however, the whole ;;in.| order .| :Mwanaisha ; _ manipulated thenever elements of various social andhad legalleft codes came out. had borne a child. She 4: ; ; to facilitate the life they had chosen, but by so doing they created home when quite young and gone to Kisumu, later turning up new modes of behavior suited to urban life 5 , in Mji wa Mombasa. There she had lived with a soldier for a few " months, but had never married since. She had been a successful The acquisition of urban propert | prostitute and a house in from Pumwani and hadthat also acd Property ;. ; | Ithad willbuilt already be clear thetown foregoing successful prostitupurchased property in Kericho —a small in western Kenya. |. : , , she er - 7. tion enabled these to build and buyKipsigis houses in..town. When became elderly shewomen ‘married’ a young ; . toIn : -* acquiring urban property they formalized their committment woman. Whereas Mwanaisha had been converted to Islam in ; or ; urban life and assured themselves of a comfortable old age; :in; an | Kisumu long ago, this girl was, at per least nominally, a Catholic. 2 ar : . urban setting. Forty-two cent of the houses in Pangani were The; ‘marriage’ wasby justified not inin terms of religion however, _ ? owned women 1932, and by 1943 forty-one per cent of the but in terms of customary law (kimila). The girl then had four Pumwani houses were in the hands of women: children ‘illegitimately’, children who were, however, the legitimate offspring of Mwanaisha. When Mwanaisha became ill the Mama Chege, a Kikuyu woman, was born in Mji wa Mombasa girl came to Nairobi to look after her.*° She took her to hospital, in 1905. Both she and her mother were successful prostitutes. stayed with her until her death, and finally organized her urban Then in 1921 the municipal council decided to demolish Mji wa Muslim burial. The children, three of whom had been living Mombasa and build Pumwani. “We were called by Chief Lali

with Mwanaisha, will inherit the old lady’s property. {the headman of Mji wa Mombasa] and he asked. me if I could

; ; ;this afford to build case, a house. told him I could, even woman though I, was Nor was an isolated forBoth II came across a Kikuyu ~; ; not married at the time.’ Mama Chege and her mother built who had also organized such an arrangement for herself, as well as a h ; oF : ouses in Pumwani, and Mama Chege spent about on ,hers. Nandi woman. All were property owners. Muslim law of£100 course does not countenance such ‘marriages,’ and in fact its laws of inheri- A few women owned more than one house. Thus Fauzia, the

tance are strongly (though not wholly) male-biased. It is not surpris- Nandi woman leader, was able to ‘live well and build many houses.’ ing then that these women prefer to ignore them. Nor do they wish A certain Meru woman owned three houses in Pumwani and is said

_ their property to fall into the hands of the government (through the to have owned others in Mombasa. When she died suddenly some Public Trustee) if they die without heirs. Hence they often get some- years ago, leaving no heirs, her property reverted to the Public one to write a will for them or to act as their verbal executor, andin Trustee.*! Quite a few of the women described here had acquired these cases they specify a particular heir or heirs. Alternatively, two houses in Nairobi, and some had also invested in property woman to woman marriage is an effective adaptive mechanism to outside Nairobi. It is of interest however that this was not in the the situation they face. It is worth pointing out however that form ofa house in the village of their birth, but house property in although woman to woman marriage is indeed one of the com-_ other urban centres of East Africa — in Mombasa, in Kericho or in ponents of both Kipsigis and Kikuyu customary law,-it is in both Tororo. It was not that such property brought in handsome profits. cases a mechanism designed to produce male heirs in the patrilineal line. Letting out rooms in Pumwani, for example, rarely brings in more In the Kikuyu case a widow was usually inherited by her deceased than Shs.300 a month, even today. Nevertheless this was a secure husband’s brother (i.e. leviratic marriage). But if her husband had left and steady source of income, and allowed some women to branch no brother, and if she had borne no sons, she might contract a out into other enterprises. Thus several owned shop licences which woman to woman marriage in order to produce male heirs to keep were rented out for almost as much as they got for rent. One was her dead husband’s name and property.*° Amongst the Kipsigis an _ herself a shopkeeper, whilst others rented out one of their rooms for elderly woman without sons might arrange such a marriage whilst use as a shop — again allowing them to demand a much higher rent her husband was still alive and with his consent. Again the purpose than what they could have got for renting rooms as such. Although

was to produce male heirs to her husband’s name.*’ a couple of women had bought land in rural areas with their

Janet M. Bujra/Women ‘Entrepreneurs’ of Early Nairobi ¢ 131

savings, these were exceptional. By and large these women had _ state/class formation. Bujra, J. 1982, ‘Postscript: Prostitution, class and the

invested in urban rather than rural property: state in Sumner, C. (ed.), ondon.Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment, Heinemann, Zafrania Faraj was born around 1910 in Mji was Mobasa, the 1 Needless to say, changes in social attitudes have been reflected in illegitimate daughter of a Kipsigis prostitute. Both she and her writings on prostitution. Whereas the earlier writings (see, for example, mother were converted to Islam by Faraj, a Nubian. Zafranian’s even E. G. Glovev, “The Psychopathology of Prostitution,’ Institute for mother was so successful that she was able to build a house in the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, UK, 1943) were harsh and Pumwani, and to buy four others — two in Mombasa and two in punitive, later writers (products of a more permissive age) adopt a more

; ; , imilarly, the more modern the account, the racier the description of

Kericho. Zafrania inherited all these on her mother’s death. She pumane tone (see, for example, Gibbens, 1962 or Bryan, 1973). herself has drifted into and out of a life of prostitution, and at the prostitute’s actual work (see, for example, Young, 1970). But the present, aged Sixty, she has a ‘temporary’ N ubian husband. She basic framework of analysis does not change very much.. has borne children but all have died. In addition to her five 2 There are other writings on prostitution (Fernando Henriques, Prostituhouses she also owns a shop licence and is thus very well off by tion and Society, vol. 1, McGibbon and Kee, London, 1962) which

~ Pumwani standards. a , attempt cross-cultural reviews of the phenomenon. Very often such

| Not oo,all -the.prostitutes reviews run into definitional problems because the range of practices of early Nairobi were as successful as these loosely covered by the term ‘prostitution’ is so wide, and rarely do they

women, of course. Amongst those who came to the town in the come up with any general hypotheses about the subject. early days there were undoubtedly many who did not save enough ° See, for example, Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, p. 101, to build or buy a house. Unfortunately the evidence at my disposal where they describe the status of women in bourgeois society as ‘mere

allows me to do little more than speculate as to the fate of those instruments of production’. There is an interesting and stimulating women who were less successful. For some it probably meant an discussion of the Marxist approach to prostitution in particular, and to eventual and ignominious return home, for it is clear that life in women in general, in S. Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution,

, ” _— Penguin, London, 1972, Chs. 3 and 4.

town for ani elderly worlan, without property or children 1S difficult 4 See, for example, Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the

indeed. This is indicated by a parallel survey of Pumwani tenants State, p. 138. Similar arguments occur also in some Women’s Liberation which I made in 1971. In this ten per cent sample of household literature on prostitution. (See, for example, Women Endorsing Decriminalheads, there were only 15 women who would have fitted the isation, 1973, where it is argued that prostitution is, ‘a blatant example of characteristics of my landlord sub-sample. Thus, whereas elderly the sexual oppression of women. The sexual ideology and economic

independent women formed 32 per cent of my landlord sample, exploitation which force poorer women into criminal prostitution are they comprised only 4 per cent of the tenant sample. Whereasa few _, Pressures to which all women in our society are subject’ (p. 137). of these fifteen women were supported by children living elsewhere This point has also been made by H. Benjamin and R. E. L. Masters

:; Nairobi, - 4: : (Prostitution andchildless. Morality, New York, when ‘the old in more thanwhich half were order to eke an 1964), q which ‘did ; they criticize ; ; ; , ogma,’ ‘did notInhesitate tooutpronounce sweatshop labour, even existence they were selling beer or vegetables illegally, looking after actual starvation, preferable to the “horrors” and “immorality” of a the babies of younger women, or still working as prostitutes. Two prostitute’s career.’ p. 21. women who were too sick to work any longer were dependent on © F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin, London, 1961, p. 47.

community charity. Fanon’s arguments about the lumpenproletariat can be found in the My main interest in this study however has been those women same work, pp. 104, 109. a .

; ‘ie 422 With} a fire in government offices in ,

who did succeed in Nairobi. These women essentially joined the ' One problem here is eat most ot Naropts official records were lost in ranks of an embryonic urban African petty bourgeoisie. Within ’ Figures fom the 1906 census, Political Record Book, Nairobi District, File

: i. ; , | , , Kenya Archives.

the overall context of colonialism this was a puny and stunted | De/ NBL1/1/1. K .

classe’, for although it emerged under the wing of colonial rule, it 5 jyiq was always prevented from expansion by protected European and —» qhig Asian control of the most important and profitable sectors of the = LN. Kimambo, ‘The Economic History of the Kamba: 1850-1950,’ in economy.*? Nevertheless, that women should form an important B. Ogot (ed.), Hadith, 2, EAPH, Nairobi, 1970. element in such a class is in itself interesting. They were able todo ” C.G. Rosberg and J. Nottingham, The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism

so partly because they found themselves on the credit side in the in Kenya, EAPH, Nairobi, 1966. . '

balance sheet between supply and demand, and partly because © %- K. arap Ng’eny, ‘Nandi Resistance to the Establishment of British institutions of male control over women were unable to develop _,, epimstration 1893-1906,’ in B. Ogot (ed.), op. at., 1970.

effectively in this situation. 'S Rosberg and Nottingham, 1966, pp. 12-16.

Notes London, 1930.

'e Sir F. Jackson, Early Days in East Africa, Edward Arnold and Co.,

‘7 Minutes of the Nairobi Municipal Council for that date. * Earlier versions of this paper were given at seminars at the University of | '8 Wayland Young argues that these assumptions are fallacious even for Sussex, at, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and at the University prostitution in London. The London prostitute rarely has a ponce, he

of Dar es Salaam. I am grateful to the members of these seminars for their asserts, nor are well-organized recruiting agencies common. See critical discussion of my analysis. Special thanks are also due to Patricia Wayland Young, ‘Prostitution,’ reprinted in Jack D. Douglas (ed.), Caplan, Betty Fitton and Marjorie Mbilinyi for their stimulating and useful Observations of Deviance, Random House, New York, 1970, pp. 70, 77,

comments on the paper, and to my assistant, Mr. Paul Kakaire for his help 80. in collecting information. In an earlier reprinting of this piece (1982), a '? Kenya Land Commission, Evidence, Vol. I, p. 1123. postscript extended the argument and lifted it beyond a story of endurance, = Ibid., p. 1136.

survival and women empowering themselves (i.e. not simply being ! Ibid., p. 1153.

empowered) to address the significance of sexwork in a dependent capitalist 22 K. A. T. Martin and T. C. Colchester, ‘On the Housing of Africans in

economy based on migrant labour and characterised by certain kinds of Nairobi, with Some Suggestions for Improvement’, Report submitted

132 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

to the Native Affairs Committee of the Municipal Council of Nairobi, *° J. Middleton, The Kikuyu and Kamba of Kenya, IAI, London, 1965, p. 48.

. Neairobi Municipal C 1M; Council: October 18. 1921. Beer brew:18, 7 J.. Beer G Penistiany, of the Kipsigis, George Routledge Municipal Minutes, October brewingThe andSocal Sons,Institutions , pp. ,

and prostitution are linked activities in Pumwani and in some other * Ibid., pp. 82-3. It is interesting that this woman had returned to the areas of Nairobi until today (see J. F. Kariuki, ‘Kariobangi Beer Brewing rural area. Unfortunately Peristiany does not tell us how she was and Prostitution: A Case Study in Urban Social Problems,’ Child regarded by her family or others there, or if indeed this was her actual Development Research Unit, University of Nairobi n.d. 1972). The natal home. He notes earlier that Kipsigis women who ran away to brewing of beer for sale by individuals was prohibited until 1972. become prostitutes were either girls involved in unhappy marriages (p.

*4 NMC minutes, May 11, 1922. 92) or others who had refused to practise infanticide on their illegitimate

° A. Southall and P. C. Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making, E. A. Studies, children (p.54). He, does not appear to have much sympathy for their

no. 9, EAISR, 1957, pp.. 158, 165. predicament or their solution to it, for he comments that: ‘When they

Paul, London, virus of syphilis.’ (p. 54).

* A. Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa, Routledge and Kegan are rich they return home and introduce into the blood of the tribe the *7 Lesley’s study of Dar es Salaam showed 48 per cent of such women ~* Middleton, op. cit., p. 47 and Peristiany, op. cit., p. 211.

childless, whilst an additional 29 per cent had only one child. J. K. © See the Kenya Land Commission Evidence, Vol. I, p. 1129, and the Lesley, A Survey of Dar es Salaam, EAISR, Oxford, 1963, p. 235. A earliest records of Pumwani plotholders (files of the Nairobi City

sample of prostitutes in Mombasa showed that 65 per cent (of 174 cases) Council). had no child, and only 1 per cent had more than four children. G. M. = *"_ See Pumwani plotholders’ file. Wilson, ‘Status Ambiguity and Spirit Possession,’ in Man, 2,3, and reply “ This view would appear to have relevance not only for Nairobi, but also

to Lewis, ibid., 2, 4. A study in Timbuctoo suggested similar degrees of for Dar es Salaam (and presumably other places, where prostitutes infertility among prostitutes (H. Miner, The Primitive City of Timbuctoo, similarly invested their savings in urban property (see Lesley, op. cit., Doubleday, New York, 1965). See also J. Carlebach, Juvenile Prostitutes p. 235).

in Nairobi, E.A. Studies no. 16, EAISR, Kampala, 1962. *® See J. M. Bujra and P. Caplan (eds), Women United, Women Divided: 8S. F. Nadel, A Black Byzantium, OUP, Oxford, 1942, p. 154. The Female Solidarity in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Tavistock, London, 1978, childless women described by Nadel became traders and prostitutes. for an extended analysis of this African petty bourgeoisie. *° "The majority of these conversions took place in Nairobi, but there were

also some women who were converted in places like Kisumu, Kitale,

Nakuru or Eldoret — that is, at other urban centres where they had

stayed for a while before coming to Nairobi. Three quarters of the } |

women in my sample (i.e. 31) were Muslims, and twenty-five of these §=——————_______Eseseseseseee were converts to Islam. Of the other six Muslims, five were women

born in Nairobi of tribally mixed unions, some clearly illegitimate. N A K A N YI K E B . M U S | S | 30 Wilson, op. cit.

31 Needless to say, non-Muslims are not ‘abandoned’ in this way if they die B ag an d a Wo men 'S in town. These days their fellow tribesmen collect money to send the

body for burial back to the rural area from which the deceased originally . ar i

came. But in the early years communications were such that this would N | 2 ht Ma rket Activ It es

have been impossible. Some of those who died in these early years were =§ ———————____________—————————SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

cial Gazette for , where it is stated that the expected to 7

Offa Gasete for 1911, where itis seated that the NMC expected to Reference

spend some 1500 rupees in 1912 on the ‘burial of natives’). , Bessie House Midamba & Feltx Ekechi (eds) 1995, Afr an 2 For women who, in their old age, return to the rural areas with their Market Women & Economic Power: the Role of Women in African urban wealth, the adoption of Islam has a different, and more purely Economic Development, Westport: Greenwood Press

negative implication. Lewis makes this clear in describing Kotokoli |

women from Togo who migrate to Ghana as prostitutes, and then oa

return home. Here the adoption of Islam is ‘a means of escaping from The night markets that have proliferated recently on the streets of paternal authority and the burdensome demands of kin’ (Lewis, 1966, suburban Kampala are an important component of the informal

p.50, drawing on the work of Alexandre, 1963). economy that emerged in response to the economic crises in 33 ‘What kind of evaluation these women had of themselves and of the way Uganda since the early 1970s.! These markets are invigorated they made money is difficult to assess now. Some represent themselves primarily by women vendors who offer their customers a wide as the victims of circumstances: “When times are hard a person has to use election of foods, from quick snacks to full meals. The term applied his ordermarkets to live.’ Others themselves in casually universal;, as ;wits , tointhese in the justify Luganda language — toninyira mukange (TM),

istic terms “We women were created by God to give pleasure to men. lated j Enolish ‘don’ 5 i h Others however had a code of conduct even in the practice of prostitu- @MSlated into English as dont step in mine — encapsulates the

tion, like the Luhya woman who told us that she had ‘stopped going aggressive minicapitalist ethic that motivates vendors to participate. with men’ when her daughter began, ‘in case we should sleep with the This chapter examines women’s significant contributions to the

same man’. While one sometimes found whole families of women informal economy through their night market activities. The

engaged in prostitution, there were other women who were concerned central argument of the chapter is that women, as revealed in their that their daughters should not become prostitutes, and who had sent contribution to night market activities, have made and continue to them back to the rural areas ‘lest they get spoilt’. On the whole however jyake 4 significant contribution to economic life in Uganda.

these women took prostitution for granted as part of the urban way of The chapter is divided into three parts. Part one presents a

life, and either denied or ignored its implications for morality. ,; f L, literat bout Usanda’ parts. we P It

** For a more detailed description of these societies, see J. M. Bujra, Tevilew OF the itera ure abou Banca s CCONOMUC CTIsis. tC aTQues Pumwani: The Politics of Property, Report submitted to the Social Science that male bias is pervasive in this literature, which has paid little

Research Council of Great Britain, 1973. attention to women’s contributions to the economy. This male bias

5 It is at least possible that the girl was already a prostitute in Kericho is not unique but originates in colonial-period literature, which (where Mwanaisha had a house) when the old lady ‘married’ her. overlooked women’s participation in cash crop production.

Nakanyike B. Musisi/Baganda Women’s Night Market Activities * 133

Part two traces the historical background of the ‘eating out’ He describes how the Obote II regime, faced with the recession and industry in Kampala. It argues that the origins of the night market severe balance-of-payments crisis, ‘turned to the international activities are closely related to the crisis in the restaurant industry institutions and to bilateral donors for large-scale assistance’ _ and hence should be traced historically. The data present a structural between 1981 and 1984.° As Mugyenyi describes the situation, the analysis that includes consideration of sex, race, class, and rural- Obote II Agreement with these institutions was negotiated in a

urban dynamics. situation in which political factors were more salient than economic

Empirical data on women’s participation in night markets are ones.? The agreement called for a massive devaluation of the presented in part three. The main thesis is that the economic trans- Ugandan shilling from 8.4 to the US dollar to 78. Loxley, formation Uganda has experienced since the early 1970s (economic Mugyenyi, and Jamal agree that these policies had a negative effect mismanagement under Idi Amin and subsequent governments, civil on the urban working class because the agreement ‘relied heavily on war, and most recently, structural adjustment programs) has affected expensive, short-term IMF credits’ to the extent that the debtboth men and women. The main burden of the economic crisis has service ratio had jumped from under 20 percent in 1981 to 55 affected women more heavily than men, however, because women percent of export earnings by 1985."°

have been the primary producers and distributors. of food. These policies were continued reluctantly by the National Resis-

a a tance Movement (NRM) government, which has signed two major

Male bias in the economic literature on Uganda structural adjustment agreements, in 1987 and in 1990, with the

_ World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Inflation remained

The male bias characteristic of scholars who study the more recent high, and by July 1988 a second stabilization effort was put into place. Ugandan economy is revealed in the writings of Marxists and non- According to a British scholar, Reginald Green, historically Western Marxists alike (Lateef, Ochieng, Jamal, Loxley, Mamdani, Banugire, contact with African societies has had an uneven effect. Continuing and others). For example, in his brief description of the economy _ his analysis to recent IMF and WB policies, Green writes, for ‘urban

prior to 1972, Vali Jamal, a senior research economist with the wage earners — formerly above the absolute poverty line — the real International Labour Organization (ILO), states that there were purchasing power of whose wages has fallen so sharply that it is clear ‘huge inequalities along racial, occupational and geographical lines’ oth they and other household members have had to enter “informal”

but makes no reference to gender inequalities.» While Jamal sector activities to survive and that their living standards have presents detailed evidence showing the effect of economic changes nevertheless declined precipitously’ (italics added)."!

on food consumption patterns and nutrition levels among various Diane Elson’s explication of the IMF’s and WB’s strategies and segments of the Ugandan population, he fails to give credit to priorities is useful with respect to understanding how the policies in women for their contribution to the maintenance of adequate place between 1981 and 1984, as well as those adopted by the subsistence food levels even during the period of economic and NRM government in 1986 and 1987, affect women. Elson agrees political crises. He leaves the reader with the erroneous impression with the analysts of Uganda’s economy that ‘the important question that only men were farmers and wage workers in Uganda.’ Jamal is js not whether to adjust but how to adjust.” Elson advocates also oblivious to the fact that expectations about what work is changes in both policy objectives and areas of intervention. In her appropriate for men and women are culturally defined and that view, ‘adjustment with (gender) equity’ would introduce changes access to economic resources is constrained by cultural beliefs about that ‘encompass not just relations between the public and private sex roles. Jamal fails to analyze the differential effect of the sector control of resources, but between women’s ... and men’s astronomic decline in wages on men’s and women’s standards of control of resources.’ living within the urban working class. Nor does he pay attention to =n the other hand, Christine Obbo argues that the comsex as a factor that influences the responses of urban men and moditization of food is affecting the health status of children, as

women in their efforts to make a living. women sell more nutritious foods, such as eggs, fruits, and vegeFirimooni Banugire, an economics professor at Makerere Uni- tables, to generate incomes and then spend some of the money they versity, describes how the collapse of the modern formal sector of earn on medical care for problems of malnutrition.'* For Obbo, the the economy resulted in the astronomical growth of the informal real causes of poverty existed prior to the implementation of the

sector. He writes, “The inability of the majority of the working SAPs, which only aggravated the situation of the vulnerable population to meet even five per cent of their basic needs (women, children, and the elderly). If women’s activities in the requirements out of the formal wage incomes [forced them to] the night market are viewed as taking place in Uganda’s ‘second perpetual search for “informal” incomes to fill their yawning basic economy,’ Janet MacGaffey’s suggestion that the second economy needs.* Banugire’s work, which focuses on the social effects of ‘exists for political as much as economic reasons’ is vital to this Uganda’s Structural Adjustment Program, is surprisingly gender chapter’s argument. MacGaffey presents the following statement: ‘It blind.° Though Banugire documents the decline in social services js important to see them not simply as solutions to household since the 1970s, he makes no mention of the fact that the decline survival or individual subsistence problems, but rather as political

affects men and women differently. options, co-opted by political discourse.’'* MacGaftey strongly

__ While giving greater emphasis to ethnic dynamics as they believes that the informal economy, which she prefers to call the affected economic policy than Jamal or Banugire did, John Loxley ‘second economy,’ is ‘essentially a political phenomenon ... at least shows sensitivity to the situation of women.°® He argues: empowering the unskilled or the semi-skilled.”"* ,

Women were particularly hard hit by the crisis, often having to | undertake petty trading as well as holding down a regular job, Historical background of the ‘eating out’ industry | carrying the burden of the housework and dealing with the

acute problem of shortages of goods and deterioration in health In Buganda, as in many precolonial African economies, much of the

care and other social facilities.’ external trade was an activity of the state administration. Contact

134 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways | , with Arab and Swahili traders and European explorers and bought lunch in town every day. The restaurants offered African, missionaries led to trade becoming monopolized by Buganda’s state modified Indian, and Arab dishes ranging from cooked matoke — bureaucracy. This gave rise in many areas to the growth of (plantain) to milk. A. B. Mukwaya’s data indicate that as early as peripheral markets in which ‘the market place’ was present but ‘the the 1940s a small number of women were engaged in hotel _ market principle’ did not determine acquisition of subsistence or the activities. Mukwaya notes that these women, who started their location of resources and labor.'? Paul Bohannan and George businesses with very meager resources, were ‘mostly single women Dalton, who make the distinction between ‘the market place’ and moving out of childless marriages.’ Citing one such woman, who,

the ‘transactional mode of market exchange,’ write ‘after noticing that many men in [her locale] had no women to _ The market place is a specific site where a group of buyers and a cook for them [she] bought an old paraffin tin for fifty cents, three f sellers meet. The market ... principle ... entails the shillings worth of firewood and two shillings bunch of plantain.’

Bre Or SETS NCE P P Mukwaya’s description of this woman’s marketing activity after six

determination of labour, resources, and outputs by the forces of . h yas Cescrip dj hat the vj c an has b

supply and demand regardless of the site of transactions. The “™ me evening indicates that the pioneers of what has become ket principle can and often does operate outside the market COMtemporary IM were active in the 1940s.

marset Pie acan an Pfirm o aehires By labour, the mid-1960s, had become more place, as P when is soldKampala’s in the was real ylarge ©suburbs , P enough _business 218 metropolitan, and land the population to support the

estate market, or grain is sold on the ‘world restaurant market.industry.” j oo xh: Vali Jamal argues that by the late 1960s one

The colonization of Buganda brought tremendous institutional could speak of urban wage earners as the ‘labour aristocracy.’ The changes. First was the growth of economic activity organized on the minimum wage had been raised sixfold by 1970. The increasing market principle (market dominated economy), with the con- number of town dwellers divorced from the primary means of food comitant attenuation of redistribution and reciprocity. Second were production would have signaled positive growth for the food the social changes whereby labor, entering the market, moved industry. However, a number of constraints operated against African. geographically and occupationally in response to market demand.’® town dwellers’ full utilization of the industry. Christine Obbo Since then, commodification has become an integral part of the suggests that many unskilled town dwellers were unemployed and - Ugandan economy as a whole. However, men and women did not lacked the basic means of survival.?* Those who were employed = become involved in market activity in the same ways. The growth were content to return to their homes at meal times. Those who of the market principle and the increasing participation and _— could afford it would avail themselves of small snacks sold by local changing roles of women in market activity (predominately cooked street vendors. The majority, however, went without lunch.”

food) must be examined in relation to broader aspects of the Restaurant meals were always too expensive for those workers, changing political economy in Uganda. Because eating out is not who were part of the aspiring middle class. These workers gave traditional in Uganda, the first commercial eating places were high priority to providing their children with the best education associated with foreigners. These early eating facilities were estab- possible and to purchasing modern material goods, such as china lished as transportation developed along the trade routes and as_ dishes, bicycles, gramophones, radios, clothing, and other items for trading centers expanded. The completion of the Uganda railway in their families. Because eating out was an expensive luxury, meals 1905 was a significant step in this process. It is important to note were usually prepared and served at home. that the restaurant industry developed along racial lines. The elegant Home-prepared meals offered several advantages to the house-

restaurant buildings that catered to the Europeans were often hold head. First, they were the product of the unpaid domestic painted white, in contrast to the Indian restaurants, which were labor of women family members. Second, they had generous usually painted combinations of green, grey, red-brown, and white. portions (a generous portion was guaranteed, always, to the African restaurants were housed in a range of structures — modest household head — the man) compared to the portions served in restaurants were built of mud brick and had corrugated iron or restaurants. In addition, when the household head ate at home, he thatched roofs; more substantial African restaurants were in very was served with due respect. Moreover, home-cooked meals were elegant buildings similar to those owned by Indians. While the consumed in a familiar environment and an unrushed atmosphere. restaurant industry developed along racial (European, Asian, and These factors, together with the economic disincentive, combined African) and class lines in its formative years, the Africans who to make home-prepared-and-served meals preferable. patronized restaurants were predominately migrant workers and However, by the end of the 1960s, and against all odds, eating long-distance truck drivers hauling goods between the coast andthe out had become more acceptable to the Baganda, particularly those

interior. of the lower middle class. To meet the food demands of this Despite efforts of the colonial administration to constrain urban- segment of the population, there was a proliferation of African

ization, it was estimated that close to 100,000 Africans lived within restaurants offering full African meals as increasing numbers of a five-mile radius of Kampala by 1957. The Africanization of the working people found themselves away from home at lunch time. administrative bureaucracy and the development of small industries, According to both Obbo and Jamal, these urbanites had to devise a combined with the fact that African food was not packagable, means of survival in towns.” attracted workers to eat out, although working-class people generally The restaurant industry was beginning to boom at the time the preferred home-cooked to restaurant food. Home-cooked food Indians were expelled in 1972. Western-type fast-food restaurants, tasted better, portions were more generous, and such food was such as Wimpy’s, Mona Lisa, Chez Joseph, and El Dorado, had

ethnically authentic. opened in Kampala in addition to the formal hotel-based restau-

Hence, there is ample evidence that by the 1960s hotels (restau- rants. The secretary general of the Hotel and Allied Workers’ rants) were kept by many Baganda and others, such as Arabs, Union was among those who hoped the industry would gain by Idi Swahili, and Indians. These hotels varied in popularity, and their Amin’s coup.?’ However, Amin’s ad hoc and unpopular economic clients were mainly clerks whose homes were distant and who and political policies resulted in a drop in local industrial produc-

Nakanyike B. Musisi/Baganda Women’s Night Market Activities * 135

tion. The country’s increasing isolation from the international contributed to the upsurge in the development of the roadside food economy resulted in the quick transformation of Uganda’s economy industry. First, after 1972, African entrepreneurs stepped in to fill. into the magendo economy, characterized by hoarding practices. the void left by the expulsion of the Indians. Because food vendors _

Artificial commodity shortages, price inflation, and black- met the needs of an increasingly large working-class clientele, marketeering.** Many essential commodities, such as fuel (for both ftoninyira mukange continued to grow and attract people in the cooking and transportation), milk, sugar, and meat, were in short towns. Second, the growing population resulting from migration supply. Reginald Green suggests that by 1980, the black market into Kampala and its neighborhoods guaranteed the industry a (magendo) accounted for 51 percent of the country’s GDP. Inflation stable market. Third, increasing numbers of these urban dwellers was so high that the average income of city workers in 1980 was were divorced from direct control of resources such as land and equivalent to only 6 percent of the 1972 rate.” However, Jamal fuel. Whereas eating out had previously been viewed as convenient presents a convincing argument that despite the gloomy trends in for those away from home at mealtimes or as during the period of the modern sector and in the export crop sector, enough food was Amin’s rule, as a way of showing off wealth, something new was produced during this ‘lost decade’ to meet the population’s needs.** now taking place. People were leaving home to purchase food The magendo economy was associated with the emergence of a from toninyira mukange because doing so was essential to their way new class in Uganda — the ‘get rich quick’ people, locally known as __ of life. mafutamingi.>*' For a variety of reasons, the mafutamingi patronized

restaurants. First, restaurants provided a venue in which business po dynamics of TM transactions could be struck. Second, the mafutamingi had limited |

time to return home for meals. Many divided their time between Since the early 1980s, TM has grown steadily in suburban Kampala;

bootlegging and several female consorts they were obliged to and it has now spread to many other urban areas in Uganda. The entertain. For many, beer drinking and late-night dancing became steady success of TM raises a number of important historical and integral to their lifestyles. Being at home at mealtimes was no longer economic questions regarding the relationship between gender and meaningful to them. In addition, because they had money and market activities. Qualitative changes are occurring in the social and could give big tips, the quality and quantity of the service they economic structures associated with the change in eating habits and received at these places was kingly. Their desire for deference, market activities. These changes have been dictated by a number of respect, and glorification was no longer dependent on the behavior factors, such as who has access to land, labor, and reliable sources of of members of their households. Moreover, frequenting restaurants income and how urban space in suburban Kampala is used. enabled them to show off their newly acquired wealth, especially to The following data are based on a preliminary survey of a larger

their consorts. Many innocent young women fell victim to these research project we are undertaking to study TM activity in men through whom they had access to luxurious meals and Kampala. A sample of 69 vendors and 31 regular customers in nine lifestyles. Last, while there is no doubt that the mafutamingis could locations is represented in this preliminary sample.

provide their families with essential commodities, the variety of The class base and function of TM are revealed by none other meals prepared by the restaurants was more attractive to them. The than the fact that TM vendors are found mainly along the roads in high prices of these meals, however, were prohibitive for ordinary less affluent neighborhoods with low-rental properties in suburban

Kampala citizens. Kampala. Many operate in crowded slum areas such as Mulago Hill,

The magendo economy during Amin’s rule was also accompanied Kibuye, Kivulu, and Nakulabye, where as many as eight people live by a general state of lawlessness and civil disorder. In the face of not in a single room.*° On certain roads. the TM vendors replace day

only perverted and corrupt law enforcement but also serious vendors who deal in used clothes or raw foods. The markets are shortages of materials and buildings, the food industry searched for always overcrowded and noisy. The vendors, who are not licensed, ways to meet town dwellers’ increasing demand for cooked meals. tend to congregate where people pass, for example, along morning The result was an upsurge in local roadside food vending,” an and evening work routes and at major road intersections, as well as

activity that continued into the night and came to be known gates and entrances of institutions such as schools, hospitals, or popularly as toninyira mukange (‘step not in mine’). During the day, colleges. Other common sites include outside day markets, near bus

some TM vendors would ‘invade’ work sites for lunch. At night, and taxi parks, bars, post offices, banks, cinemas, factories, hair the roadsides of suburban Kampala became the center of the TM - salons, nightclubs, and road junctions. They arrange themselves in vendors’ aggressive minicapitalist ventures under paraffin candle lines and operate from makeshift tables or mats laid directly on the

lights. ground. Many vendors make use of locally made paraffin wick During the 1970s, when the demand for restaurants was increas- lamps (munaku tadooba — the meek does not suffer), while others rely ing, restaurant owners had difficulty supplying the materials to meet only on light from shops or the streetlights. Some vendors who do the expanding market demand. Capital and exotic commodities not operate by candle light (paraffin lamps) move their locations (including food and cooking equipment) became increasingly scarce frequently. It is in these market activities that Bagandan women

and expensive.* Restaurant owners had little choice but to have become increasingly involved since the early 1980s. Small purchase materials they needed to meet the increasing demand on _ streets and poorer neighborhoods are served primarily by women the black market. At this time, food vendors, as well as other types vendors, while bigger intersections and better-off neighborhoods of vendors, were often harassed by the police and by military and and ethnically mixed populations are served by both men and

prison wardens. women.

The years 1980-1991 witnessed a rapid growth of the informal Most ‘TM women workers start operating after dusk; they may economy, during which roadside vendors not only increased in close as late as midnight. The first signs of activity in the night TM numbers but also gained sophistication with respect to the quality markets occur at about 5:15 p.m. At one market, for example, a and quantity of the goods and services offered. A number of factors woman selling fresh tomatoes, onions, and dried fish appeared.

136 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

Shortly thereafter, vendors who sell roast maize (corn), cooked before they managed to save enough capital to start their own maize, and milk organize their affairs. Once they arrive at their businesses; 12 per cent were financed by relatives, friends, husbands, vending locations the vendors set up their businesses with the or partners. A few inherited small amounts of money that they used utmost speed. Toward 5:45 p.m., both male and female vendors to start , TM. Fewer than 7 per cent had borrowed the money to who sell items such as fried cassava, liver, and chicken appear with start the business. A smaller percentage of women have regular

their charcoal stoves; and by 6:00 p.m. those with other types of paying jobs, but because of high inflation rates, they must cooked food appear. Shortly thereafter, women and children supplement their income through TM. Most of these women hire carrying already cooked food on their heads appear with their other women to buy the food, prepare it, and sell it. Pour of the benches. At around 7:30 p.m., the male vendors frying emputa (Nile working-class women expressed their willingness to directly engage perch) become very busy. Women selling fried foods such as Nile in TM themselves if they lost their jobs.

perch bring their wood. They have the fish already cut up into Most women engaged in TM are the sole supporters of their smaller pieces, ready to be barbecued or deep-fried. They are also families. The married women are in most cases forced to participate

equipped with water and soap for their customers to use after in TM because their partners do not earn enough to sustain the eating. The market becomes very active around 8:00 p.m. and does family. TM vendors, whether men or women, either rent single

not slow down until after 11:00 p.m. rooms or share accommodation with husbands or partners, relatives, or friends. Asked whether they used family planning, 87 per cent of

Women and the TM trade the women said they did not. Renting single-room houses,

: maintaining a family, and paying school fees for the children are

Most women involved in TM vending were forced to engage in major problems for these women. The survival stress drives many of this activity because of the economic changes in Uganda in the last them to TM operation. While their children could be doing well at thirty years. Many of these women’s husbands or partners have no _ school, the stress and strain they live under because they try to help regular jobs. Others, dissatisfied with the poor village life, have their mothers prepare the food or engage in direct sale in the night migrated to Kampala. Some have been abandoned by careless market tends to make them give up school early and thus end up in husbands or partners or lost them in war or to AIDS. Still others TM themselves. Of all the children engaged in TM, 62 per cent had

have been separated from husbands or partners because of mis- mothers or aunts who were TM operators. Young girls who understandings or other problems such as opposition to polygyny become pregnant before finishing school also end up in TM. Our and poverty. TM has also attracted single mothers who dropped out survey showed that this was the case for 40 percent of young girls of school and left home. Because of economic problems, these who operated in TM. women have had to take major responsibility for their own and On the other hand, men who engage in TM are mostly boys for their dependents’ support. Some women have been attracted and whom no one has paid school fees or older men who have been encouraged to join TM to support themselves. Lacking sufficient frustrated by low-paying jobs and an urgent need for an indepeneducation to be gainfully employed and lacking access to land, these dent income. Some of these men have regular 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 women have become the backbone of the night market. Although p.m. jobs in the low-paying sector — they work, for example, as many admit that it is a difficult and tiring job, they accept or tolerate street sweepers or slash the grass in the city; a few are office boys or

TM because they have no alternative way to earn a living. clerks. Most men engaged in TM, nonetheless, depend on their

There are interesting comparisons between men and women _ female relatives to do the cooking. The few who do not (perhaps who engage in TM activities. On the one hand, the night market because they have none) deal in fried foods, for example, fish (the women range in age from fifteen to over seventy, while men are Nile perch and tilapia), meat, or chicken which they buy and fry,

commonly no more than forty. Because far more women are roast, or barbeque on the spot (mucomo). | illiterate in Uganda than men, women have fewer chances of At dusk, when the market activities begin, space is equally employment in the formal economy. Though many night market gendered. Well-lit streets tend to be served by women and children women had acquired a little primary education, others have anda few men, while dangerous locations, which are characterized virtually no formal education; yet they are self-sustaining. One- by less competition, tend to be served by men or male youths. To third were either widows, orphans, or people who had been protect themselves from harassment or unnecessary exposure to displaced either by the war of liberation or by AIDS. Another third undesirable people, or even rape, girls tend to carry out business had been separated or divorced from their partners. The remainder near their mothers or other female relatives, while boys are seen were either unmarried or refused to reveal their marital status. alone. Many of those who considered themselves married had partners The division of labor in the night markets reveals not only who did not stay with them permanently, because they either had gender but ethnic identity. In Wandegeya market, for example,

jobs in far away places or were polygynous men. Baganda night market women tend to concentrate on typically

The ways women are drawn into TM operation are equally Buganda traditional foods, while women from Toro specialize in revealing of gender disparity that has roots in the unequal access to roast chicken, and those from the north concentrate on cooked or resources and their distribution. Several women entered TM on_ roasted corn. Each woman vendor has a specialty. Some serve full their own, while others got involved after being employees of TM meals such as a combination of plantain and beans, cassava and vendors. While many have never worked outside the household beans, fish, and a variety of greens. Others specialize in only one (some have worked as housegirls), others were involved in other item, such as boiled eggs, chapatti (a sort of pitta bread), peas, groundbusinesses before joining TM. Some female TM vendors work with nut sauce, cooked cabbage, or just greens. Still others become their male partners. More than 75 per cent of all the women known for different sauces they have improvised which add variety surveyed opened business with small amounts of capital; 37 per cent to ordinary dry foods such as cassava, yams, roasted potatoes and had worked as porters or toiled at other low-status occupations bread. Many of these foods are also available in a precooked form.

Nakanyike B. Musisi/Baganda Women’s Night Market Activities ¢ 137

Some night market women specialize only in local drinks, such as__ or after drinking in a nearby bar. Such men often send barmaids to banana and passionfruit juice. Sodas, fresh milk, varieties of teas, fetch meat from a vendor. Youths may stop to eat inexpensive food. coffee, porridge, and local brews, including beer (tonto) and crude Many of those who buy roasted or cooked corn are schoolboys or

gin (waragi), are also available. girls or university students who cannot afford the expense of full Much of the food sold by the night market women is purchased meals. Customers prefer to buy from the night market women who at the day markets or from neighboring villages, since very few TM _ speak their own language.

vendors grow their own food (they do not own land). In addition Twenty-one of the customers in our study prefer not to eat in to food items, about 2 per cent of the TM Women sell articles such TM but do so out of necessity. Some of these carry their food home as second-hand clothes, toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, biscuits. in containers after purchasing it from TM night market women. matchboxes, saucepans, and a variety of household items needed for These women often make special appeals to their customers, who

day-to-day use. are shy, encouraging them to try TM meals by reducing prices. In Our research significantly indicated that participation in TM is the TM market at Owino, the main streetlight was disconnected patterned by gender. Men are very active in trading in luxury because shy customers were afraid of being seen. Most customers goods, while the activity of women vendors is restricted to selling eat in silence and bend closely over their plates so that they cannot foodstuffs and other small commodities in the day markets and be identified by passers-by or other vendors. This behavior violates processed food in the night markets. Two-thirds of those who sold Baganda norms of food consumption and etiquette, but it illustrates cooked food in TM were women. Information from men who sold _ the discomfort felt by some customers who feel that eating in TM is

cooked food revealed that it had in most cases been prepared by below them (class or culture consciousness). women and the men did only the marketing. In some cases, men Answers to a question about why most TM vendors are women sold manufactured goods in the night market. This division of labor revealed a stunning gender bias prevalent in Kampala. Among the reflects Baganda expectations with respect to gender hierarchy in many reasons given were that women have traditionally been which women are responsible for agriculture, cooking, and distri- responsible for cooking ‘good’ food, that women have mastered the

bution of foodstuffs. soft persuasive language to lure customers, and that women are The survival role that TM is currently filling is exhibited not endowed with more patience than men. Betraying their sexism, only by the class of the vendors and the areas they operate from but informants who believed that the marketplace was not a proper | also by the variety of people TM serves. Customers include people space for women stated that women with weak morals use TM as a of all classes, from professionals and factory workers to peasants and venue to acquire male lovers so that they can ‘retire from poverty.’ slum dwellers; adult men and women, as well as children, and Despite the fact that they must put up with the distrust of such

people of different occupations. For example, there are office customers, many women involved in TM have developed good employees, taxi drivers, day vendors, family people, and single men relations with their customers and have acquired genuine friends and women who return late from their jobs. Many are working who can back them up economically. men who do such jobs as building or hawking; others are civil TM market activity has given rise to a special culture and language servants, and others are self-employed shopkeepers, mechanics, and _ that separates the TM population from the general population. Night even prostitutes. Most live in the area of the TM night market market women have developed a special language, not understood by women they patronize. The fact that today people of different customers, which they use when quarreling, discussing prices, and occupational backgrounds utilize TM is an indication that the need assessing customers, particularly those they believe will not pay or

for survival is currently felt by all. whom they view as worthless or potentially dangerous. This

While the age of the customers varies in relation to the space or language includes terms that indicate the value of money. For street of operation, bachelors respond to TM in large numbers. example, ekida, indicates 10,000 Ugandan shillings (UgShs; about Since they view cooking as a woman’s task but do not have enough US$10); ekida piece, 15,000 UgShs; ekidashini, 100,000 UgShs;

money to marry, they maintain relationships with female partners or _ ekitiyondosi, 1,000 UgShs; pajero, 500 UgShs; ekigana, 100 UgShs; and

hire cooks. In general, customers have unstable low incomes based ekyamusi, 50 UgShs. These are not Luganda words, nor do they on daily remuneration and prefer TM to the inconvenience of belong to any particular language, but they are specific to TM.

buying charcoal or paraffin and taking time to prepare food On the other hand, night market women also use a number of themselves. In some places, boys thirteen years old or younger eatin slang words and expressions familiar to customers to advertise their TM. Such youths have dropped out of school for one reason or the goods. For their part, the customers have developed slang to let other and lack parental control. They do all sorts of odd jobs during market women know their financial difficulties.27 When customers the day, such as working in quarries breaking stones, playing cards, want a good meal for less money or want to eat on credit or want to or even stealing. Others, such as university and boarding school warn the vendor not to cheat them, they use kinship terms such as students who live in hostels, patronize TM to supplement their aunt, mother, uncle, child, or in-law in an effort to establish a inadequate school diets. A small number of people with kin in fictitious kin relationship. Similarly, night market women resort to hospitals, as well as household heads (men or women) who bringin terms of respect such as ‘my boss,’ ‘elder,’ ‘my master’ to put money late at night, find TM convenient. Selfish men, acting themselves in a humble position vis-d-vis customers. secretly so that they are not recognized by people who might know Examples of the slangs vendors use among themselves are given them, buy either corn, corn-flour, or cassava and beans (poor foods) below: for their families and more nutritious foods, such as fish, chicken, fried rice, greens, barbecued beef or chicken, and vegetables, for Step not in my throat (Do not take away my customer)

themselves. , ,

Consumption is patterned by sex, age, and ethnicity. Men usually They are passing by you (You are being cheated) eat the most nutritious foods, such as meat or roast chicken, during That one is from the red tiles (That customer is a policeman or |

138 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

woman, has no money; reduce the price) Third, proximity to the road makes for unhealthy conditions.

. ; e vagaries the weather. Each its particular encouraging words toofpersuade her or him to season purchase)brings bl Dutine th oh k k ; He or she is a judge or doctor (She or he has no money or is very great discomfort; some, including those with babies, brave the rain, opinionated) a cold, and mud for four to six hours. Those without hot charcoal , , , stoves have a particularly rough time. Moreover, when it rains That one needs to be jump-started (That customer needs Because these women operate without shelter, they must cope with problems. During the wet seasons, night market women work in

Blow the smoke (Such and such a person is engaged in witch- unexpectedly during their active hours, it is difficult for TM

craft so watch out) women to budget for a day’s work. During the dry season, dust

Do not make me a driver (Please do not turn me into a slave) from the roads often gets mixed into the food forcing the women to reduce prices so that customers will still buy from them. Moreover, Examples of the slang between customers and night market women nights during the dry seasons tend to be cold.

include Fourth, at certain locations, near the Owino market, for example, My sibling or my mother! (Please, I have no money, but offer Ne ane de and their daughter ri their conditions of ses bove

me something free) ot only do customers run off with their plates, but homeless boys and girls steal their food and other property and beat customers up. That one is a charcoal stove (She or he is impertinent) Lacking protection, customers and marketers alike face this I have unloaded (I have finished selling for the night) insecurity and the threat of being robbed; at times serious injuries

have occurred. TM women operators in Owino and Nakulabye The women concurrently carry their gender politics on the spot markets have begun to organize in an attempt to solve this problem. in the process of luring customers. For example, if a customer is One strategy is to hire storage space for their property during nonmale, the women may remind him of his obligations to his family business hours. In some places, these women have engaged the by saying, ‘Sir, sir, take some food to your children,’ or “Your wife militia of the local resistance councils to patrol the market. will love this yam,’ and so on. As one woman who identified herself Because most of the streets and areas where TM women operate as Nakato said, women ‘adequately know that men tend to think are poorly lit, most of them use paraffin candles. However, lights about themselves first before their families’. Newcomers to TM installed in the Nakulabye and Wandegeya markets for purposes of activity who have not served an apprenticeship and thus have not security were deliberately switched off to ensure anonymity since

fully acquired the language, culture, or aggressive behavior some customers do not want to be identified. Moreover, balancing characteristics of TM activity are not likely to be successful. a charcoal stove or hot food on one’s head 1s potentially dangerous. TM women experience a number of work-related problems. A slight mistake while walking can cause one to stumble and lead to First, TM activity is a tiring job which many women combine with | serious bodily harm. Several women have suffered serious burns in other responsibilities, including domestic tasks, such as laundry and this way.

cleaning and childcare. Many women start work early in the Equally important, many night market women incur losses morning when they purchase food items and return home very late because they have no way to preserve unsold food. This problem after selling everything. Preparing meals is time consuming. Some has forced some of them to close their operations. Some give women start cooking around noon so that they can be ready by leftover food away because they do not want it to go to waste. about 4:00 p.m., when they eat lunch to be ready to take up their Others take leftovers home as a late supper or breakfast for housepositions in the market by 6:30 p.m. Other night market women hold members. Because of lack of adequate storage facilities, most take their suppers in the night market while engaged in TM since vendors purchase food in small quantities in daily use for fear of they return to their homes very late. Because most do not have time __ losing their base capital or their profit. to care for their children, they either employ maids or leave the The structure of TM as a business venture gives rise to potential children with a relative or older children. Some of these women conflict between night market women and customers. For example, operate in both the day and evening markets, selling whatever a night market woman who establishes regular customers faces the

remains from their daymarket activity in TM. problem of extending credit. A customer may pay at first but dis-

Second, prices in TM markets are not formally regulated, but they appear after getting credit, thus causing losses to the vendor. Night are not determined haphazardly. Because competition is tough, prices market women need to be paid daily for the food they sell because in TM markets tend to be lower than those in the day markets. When the money they earn is essential to their own subsistence; moreover,

setting their prices, however, women must take several factors into they need a daily turnover to stay in business. If a customer pays consideration: the cost of the foods they purchased, fuel costs, and the only after eating a meal, the woman is at a disadvantage because the cost of utensils. For fear of chasing customers away, prices must not customer can claim that the food was not good and thus offer a low be set too high (prices are sometimes set in accordance to customers’ price. Most operators have resorted to a system of ‘pay and get looks). Most TM women discount their own labor, which, as in served,’ even though this may reduce the number of potential their homes, is not paid for. Experienced night market women customers. Haggling over the price exposes these women to insults tactfully reduce the quantity of food served to customers. Male and abuse from customers, who sometimes use shameful words. vendors who sell fried food tend to benefit more from TM than Experienced night market women claim they have learned to cope

vendors who sell meals that require lengthy preparation, as the with such insults by paying little or no attention to abusive former do the frying on the street itself and incur little waste. Envy customers and not reacting in the expected manner.

and fear of witchcraft, which some vendors believe is used to make In the majority of TM markets, activity takes place outside their businesses fail, is sometimes experienced by night market official government control; and in some locations, it is even

women who sell the same types of foods. difficult to identify the market authorities. Thus far, it is not

Nakanyike B. Musisi/Baganda Women’s Night Market Activities * 139

necessary to have a government permit to operate TM; and except unnecessary social controls that emerge from economic depenfor Owino market where the city council has attempted to dence. In most cases, these women vendors control the profits they intervene on several occasions, the government has not put any make from TM activity, although in situations in which women systematic policy in place that would either encourage or stop TM work with male partners or are employed by other women, the activity. In Owino, some vendors either pay 100 Uganda shillings profits are controlled by the partners or employers. These women (10 US cents) per night or obtain a permanent place for 5,000 use what they earn to cover day-to-day household expenses, such as shillings (US$5) from the market authorities. Policies with respect buying soap, food, paraffin, and other commodities, and to pay to the operation of the Owino market were created after local children’s school fees, purchase children’s clothing, and secure restaurants and day market vendors complained that night vendors health care. Some of them use the proceeds to support dependent were taking their business away.** The same incident happened at family members, such as elderly parents.

the Nakulabye TM, which used to be along the main road to TM is a very empowering experience for the women who Wandegeya near the day market. It was removed by the city council participate in it. The fact that researchers found female vendors to be

after complaints from the day market vendors charged that ‘very aggressive and very money minded’ indicates the emergence of ‘customers were no longer buying from the main market as TM a minicapitalist spirit in these women. Four out of the six research

offered competitive prices.’ | assistants reported that many of the female vendors ‘behave as if they Most urbanites want TM activity to be maintained and encour-_ were men, they are very aggressive [and] cannot be easily threatened

aged rather than abolished. In support of this view, they argue that like women in the old days.’ This observation suggests that night market women are helpless people who have no other way to aggressive behavior is not a characteristic of males only, underlining earn a living and that women engaged in TM are able to pay school _ that aggressiveness is a learned trait rather than an inherited one. The fees for their children who, in turn, will help them in their old age. women are challenging and breaking down (though with difficulty) Supporters also state that they believe customers need the services the social construction of female and male gender characteristics. offered by those who make candlelight roadside dinners and that only the night market women have been able to fill the demand for Conclusion

inexpensive cooked food. Night market women themselves,

however, are divided about whether they favor or oppose govern- The political and economic crises in Uganda since independence ment intervention. Because of the disorganized and, at times, have dramatically transformed the lives of Baganda women. These unhealthy conditions characteristic of TM markets, some of these women have been pulled into the informal sector of the economy women argue that the government or city council should provide more than at any other time in their history. The Ugandan case proper places from which they can operate, as well as basic amenities _ illustrates that women collectively have had less access to the civil

such as stalls and streetlights. They also want some provision to service jobs or the lucrative trades in the formal sector than men. regulate prices. Others, however, argue that if they are forced to Nonetheless, some women have profited from their participation in carry out their TM business off the roadsides they will not be able the informal sector as candlelight dinner providers. Their trading to attract enough customers. In addition, they fear that government roles have been and continue to be essential for the development of

intervention will lead to taxation, which they do not want. Kampala and its suburbs. Women cater to, and maintain the Despite such problems, many vendors evaluate their TM activity resurgent process of urbanization by their participation in food favorably because it provides them with incomes with which they production in the rural areas and the sale of processed foods in TM. can support themselves and their families. Some women state that The social organization through which cooked meals are pro-

TM activity has freed them from reliance on men for basic survival duced by the night market candlelight women vendors and and that they are now free to choose their lovers not because they consumed by the customers reveals important social networks, class need economic support, but because their economic autonomy relationships, and linkages between the formal and informal sectors gives them greater control in their relationships. Moreover, TM has of the economy. In many ways, the contemporary manifestations of helped them meet the obligation imposed on all citizens to pay a_ capitalism drew upon and transformed existing cultures and social sraduated tax and thus assist in the development of the country. relations, including gender relationships. This study has shown that Most night market women have high expectations about what the capitalist social relations can be modified and reinforced within TM will enable them to do in the future. Some believe it will the indigenous social, cultural, political. and economic arenas. enable them to experience upward mobility and hope to get Candlelight dinners on Kampala’s suburban streets not only illusenough money to move into more lucrative businesses within the trate the integration of Baganda women into market activities but informal economy. Many, for example, want to sell second-hand also demonstrate how a social activity that was once limited to the clothing (mivumbo). Others hope to return to the rural areas from household has become a business activity. The problems these

which they came. They continue with TM, however, because they women face are dictated by forces outside of their control. , have no alternative source of income. Most women hope their TM Moreover, the restructuring of choices available to consumers is activities will enable them to survive in a hostile economic _ being dictated by the rising food and fuel costs brought about by the environment, educate their children, buy land in the rural area, changes in the economic structure. Thus, emerging patterns through eventually move to a bigger business, and thus achieve economic which cooked food is provided and consumed relate to the changindependence. Some, who have become outspoken on this issue, ing patterns in the levels of public and private expenditure. These have millennial expectations and believe that they will be rewarded same patterns indicate a need for the rise of a fast-food industry, as

with a better life in the future. women start with small-scale self-employment for basic survival in a There is no question that TM has enabled some women to hostile economic environment. achieve some semblance of freedom from dependence on male rela- Toninyira mukange offers on-site meal consumption or ‘take-

tives. In this way, it has liberated them from some of the away’ options at prices that are very attractive and comparable to

8

140 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

those of raw food. The ‘menu’ at the sites offers a variety of attrac- phia: James Currey and University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). p. 9. tive foods all cooked in the traditional way. Customers, apart from 16 ‘Initiatives from Below: Zaire’s Other Path to Social and Economic

those who take the food home, do not have to wash dishes or Restructuring’, in Governance and Politics in Africa. edited by Goran

follow certain customary eating rituals. Moreover, they are not Hyden and Michael Bratton (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner

hed. Nor do they share in the work. Another advantage to the Publishers, 1992). p. 243. , , , ay

FUS d - hat th ys or. di ‘al Be tO | '7 Paul Bohannan and George Dalton, Markets in Africa: Eight Subsistence

vendor is t at C ere 18 NO prior irect commercia advertising. Economies in Transition (Garden City. N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Instead, advertising is done on site by direct inspection of already 1965), p. 5.

prepared food, thus luring potential buyers; the competition ‘8 Jbid., pp. 2-3. between vendors is a real drama. Most important, the meals are ” Ibid., p. 25.

affordable, delicious, and ethnically authentic and acceptable. °° A. W. Southall and P. C. W. Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making: Kampala

A systematic study of the changes currently way in Kamand Its SuPrs: oe 54 9 (Kampala: East African with ; tute of under Social Research. , aos p.night 54. pala and its;suburbs, involving the activities of these market nstl ; ; women food vendors, is needed to further look into the composi- ° ne "i M nawaya, The Marketing of Staple Foods in Kampala, Uganda,

labor2 force outside the household, changesTheir in theStruggle arkets inforAjrica, p. 56.Indepen, fon Of the a , Best See Christine Obbo, African Women: Economic

financial contribution of women and men to the domestic unit, and dence (London: Zed Books, 1980). Chap. 2. the social networks through which TM participants are linked to Vali Jamal, ‘Uganda’s Economic Crisis: Dimensions and Care,’ in Beyond the street and neighborhood cultures and to the wider economy Crisis — Social Development in Uganda: Proceedings of the UNICEF-MSIR

and society. Conference, Mweya Lodge, edited by Cole Dodge and Paul Wieke (New

Notes 5 Tbid., p. 22.

| 4 See Obbo, African Women, pp. 23-24. York: Pergamon Press, 1987), p. 126.

2° See Obbo, African Women; Jamal, “Uganda’s Economic Crisis.’

This chapter was written in collaboration with Jane Turrittin. It reports on 7” See Mahmood Mamdani, Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (New York:

preliminary work ofa larger research project now in progress. I am also very Heinemann Educational Books, 1983), p. 37. grateful to several Ugandan research assistants, headed by Fred Bukulu of 7” Ibid., Banugire Firimooni, “The Political Economy of Magendo Society: Makerere University in Uganda, who administered a preliminary survey in The Case of Uganda’, Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR),

between December 1992 and August 1993. Academic Forum, 1985; Banugire Firimooni, “Class Struggle, Clan . Kampala Politics and the Magendo Economy’, Fourth Mawazo Workshop. ' The kingdom is called Buganda, the people, Baganda; the language, Makerere University, April 26—28. 1985, Banugire Firimooni, “Towards Val pingeculture, Aiganda: tne Uganda country,Crisis,’ ganda. in , Chanei yy Appropnate Poncy Framework yor a Magende Economy 5 Eastern ali po Jamal, Agrarian Contextand of the Changing rica Social Science Research Review, Vol. 2. No. 2, ; ‘Employment,

Uganda, edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (London: Incomes, Basic Needs and Structural Adjustment Policy in Uganda, Jan C 1991) 81 1980-87’, the World Bank " he Afri Deb ditedVy b ames Currey, . p. . — , in The e tneIMF or ank and tne rican MWebt, edite

3 Tbid.; Vali Jamal, ‘Coping under Crisis in Uganda,’ International Labour Bade Onimode, pp. 95~—110.

Review, Vol. 127, No. 6. 1988, pp. 679-701. 9 See Vali Jamal, “Coping under Crisis in Uganda’, International Labour

+ Jamal, ‘Agrarian Context’, p. 95. : Review, Vol. 128, No. 6,1988, p. 687.

5 ‘Employment, Incomes, Basic Needs and Structural Adjustment Policy * Jamal, ‘Uganda’s Economic Cnisis’, p. 123. in Uganda. 1980-87’, in The IMF, the World Bank and the African Debt. *! Mamdani, Imperialism and Facism, pp. 39, 53. Mamdani describes this

vol. 2, edited Bade Onimade (London: Zed Books, 1989). p. 101. new social group as ‘a class of persons for whom fascist terror provided a © Loxley acted as an economic advisor to the Ugandan government framework for quick enrichment. These were the main local benewhen President Museveni engaged the services of a Canadian ficiaries of the Amin regime. [Their] investments were directed towards government research agency (IDRC) about economic recovery plans high-risk, quick-return activities. They preferred commerce to produc-

john L 4 The“The IMF. theWor World Bank and R a tive investments, ne magendo fo “:by commerce.’ According to ohn Loxley, , the ank an econstruction in amdani, their lifestyle “was marked incessant and conspicuous

Uganda’, in Structural Adjustment in Africa: Céte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, consumption. They lived like a declining nobility, determined to make Ghana, Morocco, Madagascar, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, edited by as big a show of their wealth as possible. Each competed with the other Bonnie Campbell and John Loxley (London: Macmillan, 1989). p. 71. to deck “his” women with the most expensive jewelry ... Show-off, 8 Ibid., p. 72; see also. E. O. Ochieng, ‘Economic Adjustment Programmes decadence and waste — these were the hall-marks of mafutamingi life’

in Uganda, 1985-88,’ in Changing Uganda, edited by Holger Bernt (p. 39).

Hansen and Michael Twaddle (London: James Currey, 1991). p. 43. 32 Jamal. ‘Uganda’s Economic Crisis,’ p. 129. ° Joshua B. Mugyenyi, ‘IMF Conditionality and Structural Adjustment * See Mamdani, Imperialism and Fascism, pp. 48-49.

under the National Resistance Movement’, Changing Uganda. p. 63. 34 Munno, April 25, 1974; Voice, April 25, 1974; see also Mamdani, '© Tbid., p. 65. Imperialism and Fascism, pp. 51-52. 11 Reginald Green, ‘The Broken Pot: The Social Fabric, Economic * Other locations where research is being undertaken include Kikoni,

African Debt. 36 Research Notes, 1992. | Disaster and Adjustment in Africa’, in The IMF, the World Bank and the Nabanankumbi, Kalerwe, Wandegeya, Owino, and Katwe.

2 Diane Elson. ‘How is Structural Adjustment Affecting Women?’ ~* The youths use special whistle sounds to warn each other and to com-

Development, Vol. 1, 1989, p.60. municate other messages. Research assistants gathered terminologies ‘® Tbid., p. 71. whose meanings are not yet clear to us. 4 Christine Obbo, ‘Women, Children and a Living Wage’, Changing °* Similar complaints led the city council to remove the Nakulabye TM,

Uganda, p. 108. which was near the day market along the main road to Wandegeya.

5 Janet MacGaffey, with Vwakyanakazi Mukohya, Rukarangira wa Vendors in the day market complained that night market vendors had Nkera, Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Makwala ma Mavambu ye Beda. taken away their business. and Walu Engundu, The Real Economy of Zaire (London and Philadel- °° Research Notes, 1993.

| Lisa A. Lindsay/Nigerian Railwaymen in the Colonial Era ¢ 141 when they are not necessarily followed, gender norms provide

LISA A. LINDSAY people with ways of understanding and leading good or bad lives as

men and women. This definition positions gender relations as a

Shu nti ng Between M ascu | r ne structure of society, but they are also historically contingent and continually transforming. In a continual cycle, gender norms form

| qd ea | S the social apparatus within which people operate, while that structure is modified through the practices of individuals shaped by + one it. How does that work? A persuasive answer is that gender is N igenan Railway men in the Colonial Era ‘performative’, that is, ‘constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.” When people engage in actions that they define as male or female, or when they attribute male or female characteristics to particular actions overtly or through the subtleties

European capitalism, historians tell us, developed in conjunction of language or symbolism, they help to create, maintain, or with particular gender relations and ideologies.! Over time, as men transform ideologies and structures of gender.°®

increasingly dominated waged work, notions of separate spheres for In Yoruba societies of the 1940s and ’50s, generally men and

men and women, and of male breadwinners, solidified. Men’s women both contributed to the family economy. Although gendered identities came to be linked with their position in the variations existed, typically men farmed and women traded, and

labor force.” : each were responsible for certain household expenditures. These

Scholars of Africa have probed the link between masculinity and economic roles contributed to their gendered identities. As studies work primarily in terms of migrant labor or domestic service.? of Yoruba women have shown, women traded because to do so was Workers in both fields have had to juggle different identities and part of being a woman, a wife, and a mother. Trade allowed them conceptions of how men behave at home and away at work. This to help provide for their children, contribute to their lineages, and paper is about masculinity and a different group of Africans: railway maintain some financial independence from their husbands. For workers in colonial Nigeria.* Those occupying the ‘middle levels’ men, money helped facilitate the transition between ‘small boy’ and of colonial African societies, like civil servants or permanent wage ‘big man’ status. It was used to marry, educate children, build laborers, pose a particular challenge to the researcher.65 Firmly houses, and participate in ceremonies and gift-giving. The more rooted in their home communities, these people nonetheless were money a man was able to spend, the greater his status within his influenced by colonizers’ domestic ideals. Railway workers, par- community, the ‘bigger’ a man he was. Still, access to money was a ticularly those who made stable careers of it, were one such group necessary but not sufficient component of masculinity. Men also of Africans. In this paper I examine some of their gender and _ were expected to participate in the affairs of their natal and affinal domestic ideals and point to tensions over masculinity between families and to cultivate patron-client relationships. Similarly,

them and their colonial employer. women’s crucial economic contributions did not diminish men’s

The paper also identifies some methodological issues related to status as household heads, as wives were to show deference to their the study of gender and colonialism. How do we get at ideologies husbands and see to most domestic needs of the family unit.’ of gender held by Africans in past time? What kinds of sources can In general, colonial-era railway workers sought regular wages as we use? One way is to look for points of tension, moments when a means of becoming financially independent and establishing colonized peoples asserted their own visions in contradistinction to themselves as adult men, within the ‘traditional’ framework of how those of European colonizers or employers. On those occasions Yoruba men were to behave. In interviews, retired railwaymen in when they faced direct (but perhaps unintentional) challenges to Lagos and Ibadan gave a variety of reasons for the railway’s appeal:

their understandings of how men and women were to behave, the smart uniform worn by workers; the capability and physical Africans asserted their own notions of gender. Records of such strength of railway men; commitment to building a nationalist confrontations are valuable and rather easily identified by historians. enterprise; and the opportunity to travel.’ But beyond these reasons,

More difficult to tease out of written or oral histories are subtle over and over again pensioners said they had wanted to join the clashes, based on differing but not explicitly articulated assumptions. railway because of its reputation for steady pay with good prospects

Additionally, there were moments when railway workers and for promotion. As a fictional 1940s-era railway worker remarks, administrators participated in a shared discourse about gender, but ‘there is no denying that there is money in the Railway and it is the one that perhaps masked a complex tangle of motives, expectations money that we are all after.”° In a social context in which money and assumptions. This paper presents examples of all three of these helped to cement relationships and buttress social power, their situations in an attempt to probe the shifting masculine ideals held regular earnings gave railway workers enhanced status as men. by some railway men in southwest Nigeria during the late colonial ‘When you have a [steady] job at hand it’s then your relatives know

period. your value and respect your opinion,’ one retired railway man By now it has become almost commonplace to write of the noted.'!? Regular wages made men attractive to women too: ‘If

constructedness of gender and its malleability in historical context. anybody who works in the railway comes your way you would like Gender is a multi-dimensional concept, carrying descriptive and to marry him. At that time [1940s-’50s] railway paid very well..., so prescriptive elements. At is most basic, gender is a social category people loved them [the employees] and liked to mix with them.’ imposed on bodies, an understanding about what it means to be Their jobs provided career railway workers the money not only to male and female. But it also signifies relationships between men and_ marry, but later to support and educate children and to enhance the women and their relative positions in society. As a fundamental family’s standard of living. M.O. Adegbite summarized the benefits aspect of social relations — including economic ones — gender forms of working for railway: ‘I married, I got children, I built this place

a major component of personal identity and subjectivity. Even [his house].’”

142 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

Opportunities for stable, remunerative work in the Nigerian servants at home and that to go without them at work would bring railway increased dramatically in the post-World War Two period as hardship; that living conditions would be substantially improved by

a result of new trends in colonial administration. As part of a servants; and that the servants could help the guards with minor movement toward greater ‘development’ in the African colonies, duties. They agreed that they would pay their own servants and that British and French administrators began in the 1940s to promote they, not the railway, would be responsible for any accidents the creation of a stable working class. Skilled workers in certain key affecting the servants. When informed of the request, D. C. industries would be encouraged to make careers in wage labor, thus Woodward, the Traffic Manager, voiced his opposition. While providing reliable manpower for capitalist projects and reducing the acknowledging that his department’s rest houses were inferior to tendency towards strikes and urban disorder. Residentially and those of the Mechanical Department, he pointed out that caretakers culturally separated from casual and informal sector workers, they were employed at the larger rest houses and soon cooks would be as and their families would become the nucleus of respectable African well. For the meantime, cooking utensils were available at all the

working class communities. houses, and guards should be able to fend for themselves."

In Nigerian cities, labor stabilization was implemented slowly Two months later the guards again raised the issue, arguing that and partially, never affecting more than a fraction of wage earners, ‘a man fully exhausted whilst on duty could hardly be expected to

who were themselves a small portion of the population.4 The do his own cooking.’ Objecting to management’s argument that government railway, taking orders from the Colonial Office and some cooks were already provided in rest houses, the guards’ particularly vulnerable to the kind of labor instability that planners representatives said that they were too few and that they did not wanted to reduce, was in the forefront of this limited movement. know the preferred cuisine of guards from different regions of the Those railway workers classified as permanent came to earn regular country. Woodward’s incredulous comment was that servants were salary increases, fringe benefits, and pensions; they also were subject not necessary and that nowhere in the world did train guards travel to the colonial Nigerian state’s most concerted attempts at social with their own retainers.”

engineering. Apparently, however, some concession was made, because four

Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, administrators imparted years later the Train Guards’ Union complained that management European-based ideologies about workers as men to these plans. The had revoked guards’ right to travel on limited trains with personal srowth of capitalism in Europe and America had entailed the servants. Instead, the railway provided two cooks in the staff cars. development of separate spheres for men and women. In a series of The union complained that so few cooks could hardly provide food ideological dualities, men became associated with public life and and act as servants for the ten guards assigned to them. Further, the wage earning, while women were linked to the home and social cooks were alleged to be ignorant of regional diets and recalcitrant, reproduction.'® Colonial policy-makers assumed that a permanent refusing to wash singlets and shoes. The administration did not wage worker should be the head of a nuclear family, which would budge this time, though, and suggested instead that the union work

live with him near the place of his employment. Working men with it to find acceptable compromises and improve facilities. were to be fed, accommodated, and made ready for another day of Guards were no longer to bring servants on trains.”! labor through the efforts of their wives, who were seen as having The clash over train guards’ servants offers a window into the

few significant money-earning activities of their own.'® ' differing assumptions about domesticity held by some railway Affected by local gender norms, colonial efforts to transform workers and administrators.” Woodward and other officials did not Nigerian families, and the demands of their jobs, Yoruba railway understand the importance guards attached to food and those who workers at times had to negotiate competing ideas about what it prepared it. They seemed mystified that workers showed such meant to be a man. One way of examining the relationship between _ strong preferences about cuisine, a subject they assumed to be the railway men’s and administrators’ conceptions of gender is to focus concern of women, and they did not acknowledge the guards’ on moments of tension, when differences come clearly into view. concern with the social relations embedded in having a personal For men, masculinity is an ‘occasional matter’, only becoming salient cook. In Yoruba society, adult men preferred not to prepare their in specific contexts. When, for example, an American man is asked own food: this was the task of their wives or ‘small boys’ (juniors or to hold.a purse, he does so in a manner to convey the impression — servants). Having someone else do one’s cooking was a mark of that it is not his but a woman’s. In this case, he is ‘performing’ — or adult manliness. Further, most believed that their cooks should be making visible ~ maleness, and doing it ‘in such a way as itis seeable people directly attached to them, both because of fears of poisoning as having been there all along.’!? Of course, most of the time railway and because controlling a dependent cook was a sign of adult workers were hardly concerned with analyzing their gendered manhood. While railway employees tended to know more about identities. But occasionally their work for the colonial employer cooking than other men, they still saw it as a mark of their status. challenged their assumptions about what it meant to be aman and One informant, exhibiting typical concern with food and its put them in the position of ‘performing’ masculinity, as the preparation, lamented that the hardest thing about separation from

following two examples show. his wife was that she was not able to cook for him. He dealt with

Many railwaymen at one time or another had to travel away this by learning to do it himself and then supervising a domestic from home. Rest house accommodations were usually available, servant. But only rarely did he yield to circumstances and prepare

but they included only basic amenities. Sometimes cooks or his own meals.” stewards were provided at the temporary accommodations, but Railway administrators seem to have assumed that even though many railway workers had to provide for themselves.'* In 1946, they had to provide rest houses for traveling workers, the domestic representatives of the Train Guards Union requested that guards be concerns of cooking and cleaning were not really official business. allowed to take servants with them while traveling to attend to Rail stations, even rest houses, were work places, and domesticity them in the rest houses. To justify their request, the guards pointed impinged on such spaces to the minimum extent possible. But in a to insufficient staff in the rest houses; the fact that the guards had variety of ways, railway workers asserted the difficulty of separating

Lisa A. Lindsay/Nigerian Railwaymen in the Colonial Era ¢ 143

work from domestic life. To the chagrin of their employers, they worked in at least two locations over the course of their working attempted to make the railway recognize their household needs and _ lives.22 The numbers are probably much higher. Respondents in a

obligations. survey of railway retirees were transferred on average 2.5 times in

Another such telling incident related to medical benefits. One of their careers, with several relocating up to ten times.” the characteristics of a responsible Yoruba husband and father was Transfers were particularly difficult because usually they required that he saw to the health of his dependents. Providing medical care the establishment of two households (more in the case of polyto those attached to him showed a man’s commitment and affection, gamous men), either temporarily or indefinitely. Transferred men as well as his status as a “big man’ with economic power.” In 1956, could leave their wives and children and establish a separate railway workers became eligible for free medical treatment in household in the new place of work; or they could go ahead, look special clinics throughout the system. Three years later Olaolu§ for a new home for their families, and eventually bring the wives Oduleye, the secretary of the federation of railway workers’ unions, and children to the new location. My survey of pensioners revealed complained to the corporation’s Chief Medical Officer, John that 43% of them had lived apart from their wives for six months or

Dryden, that workers’ young children were not included in the more. Complicating matters were women’s trade, which often medical benefits. Oduleye argued that work time would be wasted inclined wives not to move, and children’s education, which was if fathers had to take their children elsewhere for health care.» difficult to establish and provided disincentives to relocating. When Baffled, Dryden wrote to General Manager Emerson, ‘It does not men had more than one wife, they frequently left one household appear to me that it should normally be necessary for the fathers to behind and moved with another.

take the children... Why cannot the mothers undertake these In a 1938 staff circular responding to complaints about the responsibilities and not waste Corporation’s time?’ Emerson agreed, inconvenience of some transfers, General Manager McEwen stressed

telling the union that fathers should not take their children for that workers’ opinions were of no relevance. Transfers were not a medical treatment. ‘Where it became necessary for this to be done,’ right, he insisted, and the needs of the railway, not personal he wrote, ‘their mothers can undertake these responsibilities, and preferences, determined who would be sent where. After seven the older children within the age-group mentioned can always years in one district (changed to five in the 1950s), a worker could attend such clinics [unJaccompanied.’ Management assumed that petition for a transfer, but it would be contingent on convenience men’s work was outside of the home, and wives could be counted and good conduct. Nothing was guaranteed.”

upon to care for the children. Throughout the colonial period, railway workers petitioned for

But this was not always the case. Women’s work, the residential favorable postings and protested transfers to areas undesirable to separation of working spouses, and men’s traditional obligation to them. Most of these requests mentioned family obligations, like

provide medical care meant that railway workers (and other Abraham Falade’s repeated entreaties in the 1950s that he be

working men) often had to forgo work obligations when their transferred closer to his home town of Abeokuta so that his children children fell ill, One Mr. S. Okiti, an engine cleaner working in could go to school there and he could care for his grandmother.*! Lagos, had been disciplined for arriving at work eighteen minutes Similarly, Jebba Garuba was transferred from Jebba to Aro late on 24 May 1948. His explanation was one of many that stressed (Abeokuta) in 1953. He protested that he had just been discharged

family obligations: from the army and rejoined his eighty-seven year old mother. Well, on this very day, my daughter fell sick seriously. But being Garba aske d for cancelation of tne ransier ‘ly me grounds tat he

unable to leave her alone with her mother, I sent for my brother nee 4 to be ne] h mot ad in J ‘h a. F n rep'y “hs: istrict a at Lagos to look after her. But before the arrival of my brother I inten Sede “he to advise that oe G “ab are not 4 sd

8 y ferred and spent seven years»P at Aroy before going back to Jebba for work.” transterre sOMns

found that the time is gone. So immediately [after] he came I left Into Consideration when postings are made. ‘aruba was indce for the rest of his career.” Okiti brought out two points at odds with management assump- When workers lived away from their home towns and families, tions: that he could not leave his child with her mother, and that he they could only visit them when on leave from work. From 1941, had to take responsibility for tending to her health. For him, unlike permanent employees were entitled to fifteen days per year of paid for railway administrators like Dryden and Emerson, this was part of leave; daily-paid (i.e. casual) workers received one week per year

what it meant to be a man. from 1944. These benefits improved over time, and by 1960 daily-

Men’s involvement in their households’ domestic affairs also led paid workers received fourteen days of paid leave annually after to more subtle clashes between railway administrators and workers. they had been employed for three years.*? Still, visits were Officials conceptualized men’s duties to their families primarily in infrequent: one Rufus Awoboyade wrote in 1958, for example, that terms of economic contributions, but railway workers in southern it had been eleven years since his last visit to his hometown.** Of my Nigeria conformed at least partially to indigenous models stressing informants whose parents had been alive during their railway the expenditure of time as well as money. For them, it was careers, almost half only saw them once a year, and many saw them necessary to visit relatives, help their families with medical care, and less often. Subject to the discretion of their supervisors, employees

take part in family ceremonies and meetings. Thus, public/private were also eligible for unpaid casual leave for emergencies like the divisions were not aligned for railway workers’ families as adminis-_ illness or death of parents, wives, or children. In addition, workers

trators assumed them to be. requested casual leave to attend ceremonies, enroll their children in This can be seen in the case of transfers. Although it was not at school, attend extended family meetings, or deal with ‘domestic

all unusual for Yoruba couples to spend time apart — the division of matters’ in their hometowns.

labor often required travel for both parties — railway transfers made Similarly, workers reported late for work or missed days entirely the duration longer and the distance farther. Personnel files, which because of family obligations. Paul Opara, a coal man at Iddo station

vastly underreported transfers, indicate that 45% of employees (Lagos), for example, protested in 1948 that he was fired after

144 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways . missing half a day’s work. He argued that his truancy was justified officials had long resented discrepancies between the salaries and because he needed to see to his ill and pregnant wife. Ina more working conditions of Europeans and Africans. One of their chief poignant example from the same year, J.O. Makinde, a mason in grievances was that European officials were entitled to separation the Engineering Department, wrote to his supervisor to explain his allowances when African workers who also maintained two homes

long absence: were not. These ‘children’s (separate domicile) allowances’ were to forwithout the fact that children lived In fact I ask for| a;- compensate week leave pay;officials’ but when I reach P apart ee, Pfrom , ; them and reflected the administration’s assumption that European home I could see that the condition of my wife was very serious, :; , : ; at ; men were responsible forwas the maintenance ofbut their children she_ is in pregninance [sic.] and about to deliver, it was or er to ; ; . home. Trade unionists argued that the same situation applied not possible until 7 days, before she can delivered, but the child Nicer; : 4: a, ;in; dead igerian workers to7. relocate away from their families was deliver body. During theseworkers), time,compelled there wereand nobody ; . : (like railway therefore they should be granted the to help me in order to look after her beside me, my father which

; same allowances.

she lived withone washeseriously sick too. - a alsotomadelook Nigerian labor activists the broader argument that I am the only born and I have nobody after ; and ; wages were not sufficient for workers to support wives him.; .Ichildren, have to look twointerest of themofafter some days when ;the :; ; governandafter that the in the social reproduction

my wife had should delivered died. allowances. When I beread her, on ;; ; ment payshe family In [buried] a 1944 radio broadcast, my returning work II.S.M.O. was told that I have been dismissal, ene ; uniontoleader Shonekan pushed thiswhen point: I am trying to explain all these matter, I got the telegram from

Idogo village that my father has died. Some employers forget that his [a worker’s] children are not When I received the telegram, I have to go in order to given free education, but he tries his best ... to educate them. beread him, I return on Saturday 2/1/48. They forget that his children are a valuable contribution to

I beg the Administration to please pardon me for my lateness society who in the future, will assist mentally or physically in and to give me benefit of doubt, first let this be to me, sir, my developing the wealth of the nation and defend the State. He is ,

first warning.* ~ not anyHefamily allowance by either the State or the ; ; ; employer forpaid these. is forced to distribute his scanty wages on These are these just twoimportant of innumerable requests for indulgence based proyand ~ . ry Wages ¢ ; wer items which go to make him his family

oan ; good citizens.

on family obligations. Workers knew that work was supposed to be . 38 separated from their family lives: “There is no need for you to think

of home once you are on duty.’** But as the volume of requests like Eight months later, Shonekan raised the issue at the annual Makinde’s shows, when work threatened important family obliga- congress of the Federated Trades Unions of Nigeria. Arguing that _

tions, railway men asserted a different vision. ‘many of us have wives and children to support,’ and that wage

Thus far the discussion has highlighted the tension between two _ levels were insufficient, Shonekan recounted arguments in favor of different types of gender ideologies: those held by Yoruba employ- family allowances made by politicians in Europe and South America.

ees and British administrators. The examples point to a relatively His motion, “That the Government of Nigeria be requested coherent system of views, with railwaymen asserting that men had _ earnestly to formulate schemes for family allowances, and to enact important roles within their families and officials trying to enforce a an Ordinance sanctioning their payment by all employers to all distinction between the (male) world of work and the domestic married African workmen throughout the country,’ passed unanisphere. But these examples are only part of a more complex picture. mously amid cheers by those present.*?

Workers and administrators also participated in a shared discourse The Nigerian trade union movement of the 1940s was about men’s economic contributions to their households and their dominated by the Railway Workers’ Union, the colony’s largest breadwinner status in relation to women. In this on-going conver- and the first to be formally organized. This union was at the foresation, ideological and economic motives, and various ‘European’ front of the 1945 general strike in Nigeria, which united workers or ‘Yoruba’ influences, intertwined to form a complex sense of throughout the country in calling for cost of living increases and masculinity among railway workers. Debates over family allowances other benefits. Family allowances, as a counterpart to European _and family wages were one component of this conversation. ‘separation allowances,’ were part of the workers’ demands and As mentioned above, both Yoruba women and men traditionally were brought to the attention of W. Tudor Davies when his earned money and were responsible for certain household expenses. commission investigated labor conditions in the strike’s aftermath. During the depression of the 1930s, and even later, employers and Tudor Davies’ report called for greater stabilization of the Nigerian colonial officials had argued that formal sector wages could be kept labor force, but it did not fully support African family allowances. low because men were assisted financially by their wives. Workers, Still, it did recognize the legitimacy of union claims and endorsed a however, stressed that women’s trading income was not enough to. male breadwinner norm for Nigeria. Tudor Davies wrote, “The keep a family afloat, and that men should be considered primary sooner the male ceases to rely upon the economic contribution of

breadwinners. For example, in response to union petitions, the the female to the family exchequer, the sooner will the wage Bridges Commission on the Cost of Living in Lagos (composed of structure be founded upon a more correct basis.’* an African majority) suggested in 1941 that although the wives of For the next two years trade unionists pressed for the extension most government workers earned separate incomes, they were not of family allowances to Africans. Government officials refused, wholly self-supporting. Therefore, Bridges suggested factoring the arguing that Nigerians could be expected to move their families any

costs of dependents in wage calculations, because rising costs place within the territory rather than maintain two homes.*! The

affected workers’ entire households.°’ Harrigan Commission, which addressed wages in the civil service,

The support of dependents also figured in trade unionists’ opposed family allowances on the grounds that they were none of demands for parity with European workers in Nigeria. Union the government’s business and would be too complicated in a West

Lisa A. Lindsay/Nigerian Railwaymen in the Colonial Era ¢ 145

African context, where ‘the word ‘family’ may be taken to mean represent some overlap between officials — expatriate and Nigerian

not only a wife and children but every near relative.’” — and workers advocating a family-based wage. The second edition Although documentation is more scarce for the period after of ‘Nigerail’ introduced a page called ‘Claypot Club: for the Benefit 1947, it is clear that union officials did not drop their demands for of Wives and Daughters of Railwaymen’. ‘No railway man can be separation allowances altogether. In December 1950, at the efficient and happy without the fullest co-operation of his wife (his recommendation of a Senior Whitley Council (arbitrating body), better self)’ began the introduction, ‘and it is to this end that this Nigerian senior officers of the civil service, including railway column is reserved for the benefit of our womenfolk.’ The editor officials, became eligible for children’s allowances comparable to then invited women to submit their letters for future publication. those paid to expatriates. The new rules authorized payment for up Surprisingly, since no call for letters had been issued previously, a to two children at the rate of 57 per year within Nigeria and more note from a ‘Stationmaster’s Wife’ appeared in that very issue. It outside of the country.* Having conceded the principle of parity seems to have been written by Sam Epelle, “Nigerail’s editor. with European officials, administrators now opposed the extension Under the headline “Mrs. Stationmaster Says — Let’s Give Our of allowances to junior level employees on economic grounds: Menfolk Happy Home Life,’ the letter voiced views typical of ‘With polygamy and large families, the cost of introducing a railway management and colonial officials. ‘Mrs. Stationmaster’ [universal] scheme of family allowances in this country would be _ began by referring to railway men as economic providers: ‘... My prohibitive.’ Still, through the late 1940s and into the ’50s union friends and I know what goes on in the Railway where our demands and directives from the Colonial Office pushed the husbands, fathers and relatives make their (and our) living.’ Then colonial government, and the railway administration, toward she emphasized the importance of women in reproducing the greater emphasis on male workers as family providers. In 1953 the railway labor force. “Our message to women all over the railway Secretary of State for the Colonies conducted an inquiry into the system,’ the anonymous writer suggested, extent to which a family wage system prevailed in Africa. Nigeria's is that they should give their menfolk a happy and comfortable

reply that family obligations were taken into consideration h life which mul an hd , in , ae -calculating .éindicated ome life which can stimulate them to greater output men’s wages.* At by least some family hijassist ;;: - _ achievement. It is only doing sorecognition that we, theofwives, can obligations appeared in the Gorsuch commission report on civil the orowth of Niceria’s oreatest means of transport. The procress

servants, as its calculations for necessary wage levels were based on £ fs Rail 8 8 - its future j P fat P f; 8 th the ‘assumption that the recipient has more than one mouth to i ih rT rd 8 uF P dh : ” eamnilic od " de. or the

feed. ...’*° Still, Gorsuch did not explicitly recommend family ve CT railway ee eee ne es pees Ok tae ae ; officials, successful and profitable operation oftilthe system. allowances for junior and by 1957 at least some unions were still including them in their demands.‘ Other references in ‘Nigerail’ reinforce the idea of male

The debate over Nigerian family allowances shows that domestic breadwinners and home-bound wives. A cartoon, for example, ideologies, at least those expressed in print, did not neatly divide showed a woman with a baby on her back talking to her visibly Africans and Europeans. In spite of the development of a male shocked husband. “But if I spend more than you earn,’ she says, ‘it’s breadwinner norm and generalized ‘family wages’ in Britain,** just as good as if you were earning more.’>! Women, this suggests, administrators were not willing to extend such principles auto- had no understanding of rational economics: better to leave men in matically to Nigerians. And although most wives of Nigerian trade charge of finances and the world outside the home. Articles on unionists worked outside the home, union officials agitated for child-rearing, cooking and sewing implied that these were the wages that recognized men as household providers. The most primary occupations of workers’ wives. ‘Nigerail’ never acknowobvious explanation for these developments is economic. When ledged the usual domestic arrangement in Yoruba families, with administrators wanted to keep wages low, they pointed to women’s women working outside of the home and controlling their own trade as an excuse for not paying men a family wage. This does not incomes. mean that colonial officials in Nigeria did not support the idea that Why would this be? One answer is that ‘Nigerail’ was an organ male workers should financially support their immediate families, as of the railway administration, which, as part of empire-wide efforts

the next section shows. Similarly, in a period of inflation and to stabilize labor and working class families, encouraged the increasingly assertive trade unions, labor activists called for family development of European-style domestic units. The fact that the allowances or family wages as a strategy for raising general salary editor — and indeed, many railway officials by the 1950s — was levels. Further, there was not necessarily a contradiction between Nigerian does not necessarily negate this interpretation. But male breadwinners and women’s work, and women’s trade co- although management published ‘Nigerail,’ workers read it, which existed with the expression of patriarchal ideals. For one thing, the suggests that the attitudes expressed had some resonance with the strict separation of male and female finances meant that men _ railway workforce. As we have seen, railway men (or at least their honestly did not know how much women earned and were able to union representatives) increasingly described themselves as family assume that they provided most of the household’s support.” breadwinners in official representations. Further, as I argue else- Further, as is discussed below, the male breadwinner ideal gained where, by the late colonial period many urban railway workers strength among Nigerian wage earners as some urban families were taking on more and more of their households’ support. With

became more dependent on wages. , their steady paychecks, they were increasingly under pressure to

By the 1950s the Nigerian Railway was blatantly promulgating a meet recurring expenses like food and school fees that would male breadwinner ideology, as one of its publications makes clear. otherwise have been covered with their wives’ trading income.” In 1956 the N.R.C. publicity office began publishing ‘Nigerail: the As railway men increasingly acted as breadwinners, in their Journal of the Nigerian Railway Corporation.’ By this time, many households and in public pronouncements, it seems that steady railway officials were Nigerian, including the magazine’s editor. earning became part of their conception about what it meant to be

The male breadwinner rhetoric contained in its pages seems to aman. :

146 ¢ Livelihoods & Lifeways

This brings us back to gender as a performative phenomenon. If, Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC:

as Butler argues, gender identities are constituted by their very Duke University Press, 1999). a ,

; ; ; ; y (New York: , y , grap

expressions, the male breadwinner ideal may have become part of — ° Joan_Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis

stable railway men’s gendered identities through the ways in which P, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University ress, 1988); Rose, Limited Livelihoods, introduction; Judith Butler,

they portrayed themselves as such. Men came to stable wage labor Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identit

to be able to be a man in an older context; that is, to get money to Routledge, 1990), quotation on p. 25. marry, build a house, or build up relations of patronage. But this put 7 The best study of Yoruba women and the link between work and them in a situation where they were affected by the structures of gender identity is Niara Sudarkasa, Where Women Work: A Study of

urban wage labor and the gender assumptions of their employers. Yoruba Women in the Marketplace and in the Home, Anthropological Papers Their sense of themselves as men was shaped by both ‘traditional’ No. 53 (Ann Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan,

practices and new structures associated with colonial-era wage 1973). For more on Yoruba women, see Bolanle Awe, “The Economic labor. As the clashes over medical benefits, transfers and leave show, Role of Women in a Traditional African Society: The Yoruba Example, hari le breadwinner ideal did not obscure indigenous in La Civilisation de la Femme dans la Tradition Africaine (Paris: Presence

SATs 4 Male ; Ss Africaine, 1975); La Ray Denzer, ‘Yoruba Women: A Historiographical nouons of how men should behave, imp articular that they should Study,’ International Journal of African Historical Studies 27 (1994): 1-39;

be active participants in the affairs of their households. Further, Cheryl Johnson, ‘Towards a Conceptual Framework for the Study of defining themselves as breadwinners was not incompatible with African Women: A Case Study of Pre-Colonial and Colonial Yoruba recognizing the importance of wives’ trading activities. Stable Women,’ Red River Historical Journal of World History 55 (1979): 52-63; railway workers of the late colonial era developed a sense of their Wambui M. Karanja-Diejomaoh, Perceptions of Marriage, Family and own masculinity at times in overt contrast to the gendered ideals of Work in Nigeria: A Study of Lagos Market Women (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford their employer and at other times sharing some of the terms. It is University, 1980). More general works on Yoruba social and gender the shifting and contested meanings of these terms — like relations for the first half of the twentieth century are N.A. Fadipe, The breadwinner, father, and husband — that point to transformations in Sociology of the Yoruba, edited by Francis Olu Okediji and Oladejo O.

ey? ? P Okediji (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1970 [1940]); Samuel

masculine ideals among Yoruba wage-earners. Johnson, The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning

| of the British Protectorate, edited by O. Johnson (Lagos, Nigeria: C.S.S.

Notes | Bookshops, 1976 [1921]); William Bascom, The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969); and Edward 1 This paper is based on research conducted in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria Ward, Marriage among the Yoruba (Washington, DC: Catholic University

in 1993-94 with the invaluable assistance of Babajide Oyeneye. I of America, 1937) and The Yoruba Husband-Wife Code, Catholic gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Joint Committee on African University of America Anthropology Series, No. 6 (Washington, DC: Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Catholic University of America, 1938). Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Ford, Mellon, 8 Interviews with G.E. Gbenoba, Odo Ona, Ibadan, 22 March 1994 and and Rockefeller Foundations. It was originally presented at the 1995 M.O. Shofekun, Odo Ona, Ibadan, 4 April 1994; ‘Life History of Pa Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Orlando, Florida. Michael Alamu Odede,’ hand written by Michael A. Odede in April, Since then, this material has been reworked, and now appears, in 1994; and ‘Autobiography,’ hand wntten by Anthony Nnodua in April, different form, in my book, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social 1994. Thanks go to ‘Jide Oyeneye for assistance in conducting Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). interviews with Nigerian railway pensioners and to Olusanya Ibitoye for Parts of this paper also include material from Lisa A. Lindsay, ““No Need transcribing and in some cases translating them. ... to Think of Home”? Masculinity and Domestic Life on the Nigerian ° Onuora Nzekwu, Blade Among the Boys (London: Heinemann, 1962), Railway, c. 1940-61.’ Journal of African History 39 (1998): 439-466 and p. 118.

‘Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, Interview with Mr. B. Aruna, 28 December 1993, Eko Tedo, Ibadan. and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike.’ American‘! Interview with Mrs. Rebecca Uchefuna, Oke Bola, Ibadan, 21 February

Historical Review, 104, 3 (1999): 783-812. | 1994.

2 For examples from Britain, see Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: '* Interview with M.O. Adegbite, Afonta, Ibadan, 28 December 1993. Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of | ' On labor stabilization in Africa, see Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and California Press, 1992) and Keith McClelland, ‘Masculinity and the African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge:

‘Representative Artisan’ in Britain, 1850-80,’ in Michael Roper and Cambridge University Press, 1996). John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800 ‘+ Wage earners made up less than 4% of adult Nigerian men in 1948 and

(London: Routledge, 1991). about 2% of the total population in 1959. Tade Akin Aina, ‘Class

3 Two examples are T. Dunbar Moodie with Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Structure and the Economic Development Process in Nigeria,’ Odu: A Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley: University of California Journal of West African Studies 29 (1986): 17-36. Press, 1994) and Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants °. See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes:

and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: 1989). For an important contribution on masculinity in Africa, see Luise Hutchinson, 1987) and Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The White, ‘Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939-1959,’ International University Press, 1986).

Journal of African Historical Studies 23 (1990): 1-25. ‘6 Frederick Cooper, “Industrial Man Goes to Africa,’in Lisa A. Lindsay

4 This article, and the larger study on which it is based, is primarily and Stephan F. Miescher (eds.), Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa concerned with Yoruba workers from southwest Nigeria, although (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003). some evidence relates to the larger pool of employees. While they ‘'” Wil Coleman, ‘Doing Masculinity/Doing Theory,’ in Jeff Hearn and formed the vast majority, not all railway men in southwestern Nigeria David Morgan (eds), Men, Masculinities and Social Theory (London:

were Yoruba. Ethnic minorities indigenous to the region, a small Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 198.

number of Hausas and a much greater number of Igbos worked in 8 Descriptions of rest houses and cooking facilities in the 1940s and ’50s are

Lagos, Ibadan, and along the railway route. in Nigerian Railway Labor and Welfare Office file GM 27 vol. 1, “Train

5 On colonial ‘middles,’ see Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon; of Guards’ Union’ (Nigerian Railway Corporation headquarters, Lagos).

Lisa A. Lindsay/Nigerian Railwaymen in the Colonial Era ° 147

'9 Minutes of meeting between Railway Labor Officer and representatives on recruitment (NRC Lagos). of the Train Guards Union, 19 November 1946, and Acting Traffic *° Interview with Ayo Salako, Eko Tedo, Ibadan, 15 February 1994. Manager to General Manager, 24 January 1947, both in GM 27 vol.1, *” A.F.B. Bridges (chair), Report on the Cost of Living Committee (Lagos:

“Train Guards Union’ (NRC Lagos). | Government Printer, 1942), p. 101.

0 Train Guards’ Union to General Manager, 26 March 1947 and Acting * Excerpt from 26 April 1944 speech on Lagos Radio Distribution Traffic Manager to General Manager, 4 April 1947, both in ibid. Service, in The Nigerian Worker, published by the Federated Trades 21 General Secretary, Train Guards’ Union to General Manager, 20 Union of Nigeria, vol. 1., no. 5, April 1944, p. 4, in GMS 310/72, “The December 1951 and Chief Superintendent to Chief Secretary to the Nigerian Worker’ (NRC Lagos).

Organization, 5 March 1952, both in ibid. . °° Excerpt from speech entitled ‘Family Allowances’ in The Nigerian

22 For more on the links between colonialism and gendered visions of Worker vol. 1, no. 7, December 1944, p. 2, in ibid.

domestic life, see Karen Tranberg Hansen (ed.), African Encounters with * W. Tudor Davies (chair), Enquiry into the Cost of Living and the Control of

| _ Domesticity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). the Cost of Living in the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, Colonial Office

3 Interview with Mr. M.O. Shofekun, Odo Ona, Ibadan, 4 April 1994. No. 204 (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 48. 44 Ward, The Yoruba Husband-Wife Code, pp. 57-78; Fadipe, p. 89. 41 Minutes and correspondence in CSO 26/46820/S.1 (Nigerian Archives

| 5S. Olaolu Oduleye, Secretary-Treasurer of NUR(F), to John A. Dryden, Ibadan). ]

Chief Medical Officer, 4 August 1959, in GMS 302/22 vol. 1 (NRC *” Walter Harrigan (chair), Report of the Commission on the Civil Services of

Lagos). . British West Africa, 1945-46 (Accra: Government Printing Department,

26 Dryden to Emerson, Confidential, 12 August 1959; and Emerson to 1946), p. 8. Oduleye, 20 August 1959; both in ibid. 43 General Manager’s Staff Circular No. 11/50, 6 December 1950 in GMS 27, Maurice Hall, Loco Inspector’s Office, to S. Okiti, 26 May 1948, with 335 vol. 1, ‘General Manager’s Circulars’ (NRC Lagos). Mr. Okiti’s explanation on the back, in GMS 33/2, ‘Petitions from Ex- “ Minute from S.L.A. Manuwa, Inspector-General of Medical Services, to

Servicemen about their Conditions of Employment’ (NRC Lagos). Secretary of State, 20 July 1953, CO 888/10. 8 Based on a random sample of 434 personnel files from retired, termi- * HJ. Marshall, Acting Governor General of Nigeria, to Secretary of State nated, and dead railway workers from the western region of Nigeria Oliver Lyttelton, 15 April 1955, CO 859/810. located at the Ebute Metta (Lagos) headquarters and the Ibadan office of “ L.H. Gorsuch, chair, Report of the Commission on the Public Services of the

the NRC. Governments in the Federation of Nigeria, 1954-55 (Lagos: Government

2? One hundred sixty-eight pensioners, who had joined the railway Printer, 1955).

between 1932 and 1965, were surveyed by the author, ‘Jide Oyeneye, “ See ‘List of Allowances’ n.d. [November 1957] in GML 302/2 vol. 1 Olu Ibitoye, and Olufunmilayo Carew in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria in (NRC Lagos), which includes children’s allowances for senior officials

1993-94. only. ‘Rapson Recommendations: Rail Workers to Lead Delegation to

3° General Manager’s Circular No. 766/SR492, 22 September 1938, Government,’ Daily Service (5 August 1957) mentions a protest advo‘Transfers — African and West Indian Staff,’ in GMS 28/47 vol. 1, cating children’s allowances for junior officers. Interestingly, by 1968 ‘NTCSU — Third Stage Departmental Council Meetings’ (NRC the railway workers’ union (NUR) opposed the payment of children’s

Lagos). allowances altogether, on the grounds that they only applied to senior

31 Personnel file of Abraham Adepoju Falade, WP 6689 (Ibadan Pension servants and they were unnecessary in the context of high salaries and

Office, NRC). other perquisites. ‘NUR Demands Abolition of Allowances,’ Morning

2 District Superintendent to Jebba Garuba, 23 September 1953, and other Post (2 April 1968). records in Jebba Garuba’s unnumbered personnel file (Ibadan Pension ‘* See, inter alia, Rose, Limited Livelihoods, Wally Seccombe, ‘Patriarchy

Office, NRC). Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in

33 ‘Improved Conditions of Service of Railway Employees,’ Daily Times (6 Nineteenth-Century Britain,’ Social History 11 (1986): 53-76; and Jane

October 1941), pp. 1 and 5; General Manager to Heads of Departments, Mark-Lawson and Anne Witz, ‘From ‘Family Labour’ to ‘Family 20 August 1943, in GMS 337/16 vol. 1 “Rates of Pay and Conditions of Wage’? The Case of Women’s Labour in Nineteenth-Century CoalService: Servants’; General Manager’s Staff Circular No. 15/60, 6 mining,’ Social History 13 (1988): 151-174.

August 1960, ‘Leave to Daily Rated Employees’ (NRC Lagos). 9 Sudarkasa, ch. 6. 34 Personnel file of Rufus Adewale Awoboyade, WP 6330 (Ibadan * ‘Nigerail: Journal of the Nigerian Railway Corporation,’ December,

Pension Office, NRC). 1956, p. 4, in Edward Charles Ealey papers, Rhodes House (Oxford).

35 Paul Opara to Chief Mechanical Engineer, 30 July 1948, and J.O. = °! Ibid.

Makinde to District Engineer, 4 October 1948, both in unnumbered file * Lindsay, Working with Gender.

148 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

° eae process for potential members, may apply to the entire religious

Transforminge Most Traditions: compte. of these cults were democratic in their inclusion of large

Gender, Religion numbers of people, both men and women, and most provided a central focus for religious activity in their respective societies. In | & 7] C ultu re’ | Buganda and the nearby Sese Islands in Lake Victoria, however, elitist cults relied on small numbers of professional mediums;> and in Unyamwezi, the Swezi society formed only one of a large number

IRIS BERGER of esoteric organizations that filled functions ranging from

, divination to snake charming. Such organizational divergences

ve one area to the next. TO STI ar 1 many ways. All were patrilineal, lived in scattered settleRebels or Status Seeke rs? combined over time with differences in social, economic, and

political settings to effect some variations in women’s roles from

Women as Sp irit Mediums in East Afr lcd The peoples of the interlacustrine and Nyamwezi regions were

Reference ments rather than compact villages, and spoke closely related Bantu Nancy Hafkin & Edna Bay, eds, 1976, Women in Africa: languages. Various combinations of agriculture and cattle-raising Studies in Social and Economic Change, Stanford: Stanford formed the basis of economic life. With the exception of the Kiga

University Press in southwestern Uganda, all the peoples of these two regions had

some type of centralized political structure. The forms of political organization varied considerably — from large, relatively unified Throughout Africa women have played a prominent role in spirit- kingdoms (Buganda, Bunyoro, Nkore,° Rwanda, and Burundi) to possession cults and ceremonies. Indeed, in the interlacustrine and clusters of small states (Buhaya, Buha, Unyamwezi, Usukuma, and Nyamwezi areas of East Africa — southern and western Uganda, Usumbwa). Nonetheless, all showed a relatively high degree of class Rwanda, Burundi, and northwestern Tanzania — their participation division, sometimes between a ruling clan or family and commoners,

in other spheres of precolonial religious activity was severely sometimes between a minority of upper-class pastoralists and a limited. Recent anthropological explanations of this phenomenon majority of lower-class agriculturalists. In the latter cases stratificahave focused on the leverage that possession allowed women to _ tion possessed an ethnic as well as a political dimension, with the exert in specific conflict situations. I. M. Lewis, for example, upper and lower classes identified as Tutsi and Hutu, respectively, in

centered his wide-ranging comparative study Ecstatic Religion on Rwanda, Burundi, and Buha, and as Hima. [Huma] and Iru, tensions between men and women and found numerous cases _ respectively, in Bunyoro, Nkore’ and Buhaya. Religious beliefs and where predominantly female spirit possession cults functioned as practices reinforced the cohesion of both families and larger political ‘thinly disguised protest movements’ against the male sex.! A study units; but except for some of the spirit cults and rituals performed at of female mediums in the interlacustrine and Nyamwezi regions, royal courts for the benefit of the entire kingdom, most religious however, suggests that this ‘sex war’ hypothesis defines only one observances occurred within either the nuclear family or the lineage aspect of the problem; for, in addition to supplying an anti-male (both of which were male dominated). outlet, cults also offered large numbers of women initiates an In these predominantly hierarchical societies, women’s positions unusual degree of authority in ritual situations and provided smaller depended on their status in the class system; a woman was inferior

numbers with long-term positions of high status. to a man of her own social level, but she was superior to one of

Spirit cults in these two areas” centered on groups of legendary lower status.* Nonetheless, by definition women occupied a socially heroes known collectively as Cwezi or Imandwa. Legends trace the subordinate place; although a few upper-class women attained cults of these deities to an early state in western Uganda whose considerable wealth and authority, men possessed political power, rulers bore the name Cwezi. According to tradition, after the judicial rights, the right to inherit cattle and land, and, ‘indeed, ... Cwezi kingdom declined, people began to honor the spirits of their [the right] to independent action outside the walls of the house.’ former kings.* By the 1800s closely related religious movements The few women who were able to rise above their sexually assigned spanned an area stretching southward from the kingdoms of standing did so by gaining the favor of a male superior, often by Bunyoro and Buganda in modern Uganda to Buha, Unyamwezi, such means as manipulation, lying, or flattery (Albert 1963: 180). and Usukuma in northwestern Tanzania. In these southern sections Women of all social levels were expected to be subservient and of the cult area, as well as in the neighboring states of Rwanda and_ obedient, as the following quotation from Albert (1963: 180-81) Burundi, the cult focused not on the Cwezi but on another set of makes clear: “Unlike a man, a Rundikazi [Rundi woman] in public

spirits dominated by a legendary hero known alternately as does not speak, nor does she look you in the eyes. To each Ryangombe (Lyangombe) and Kiranga. But the historical ties question, she answers Ndabizi? How should I know? In public, she between the Cwezi and Ryangombe cults remains clear from their lets it be thought that she knows nothing about politics, or where numerous common deities, their similarities in organization and her husband is today, or even the wedding date of her daughter. She mythical themes, and their large clusters of shared terminology. 1s the modest and obedient wife of her husband, the mother of her Most notable among the latter are forms of -cwezi or -swezi (e.g., children, the conscientious mistress of her house, who is always bacwezi, baswezi, buswezi) and of -band- (e.g., emandwa, imandwa, working. Whatever she does, she does within the limits of her embandiva), all of which refer, in different areas, to groups of deities various feminine roles.’ Throughout her life, a woman was subject and to cult members and the organizations that they formed.* The _ to her father’s will, despite the fact that after marriage she also had to

related verb kubandwa, which designates the initiation or training obey her husband. A woman’s reference to ‘my home’ actually

Iris Berger/Women as Spirit Mediums in East Africa ¢ 149

meant her father’s kraal. Only over her younger sisters, her children, Unyoro and seemed to have cattle of their own so that they do and her husband’s subordinates did she possess any authority. not depend entirely on begging for subsistence. The natives all

A set of well-defined attitudes delineating the differences respect them very much, never refusing them food when they between men and women lent ideological support to female sub- call, and treating them as religious devotees. Anyone may join ordination. The people of Burundi believed, for example, that their number by attending to certain forms; and the family of a women’s greater strength suited them better for manual labor; but Bandwa does not necessarily follow the same occupation. I knew their clumsiness, lack of agility, inability to control their emotions, one of them, the captain of a band of soldiers. This whole and proneness to jealousy left them generally inferior to men. And country was once occupied by people of this class, called despite the recognition of their continual hardships in childbearing Wichwezee, who, according to tradition, suddenly disappeared (the reason given for women aging more quickly than men), the underground. male role in procreation was believed to be more important than Emin Pasha, a German who converted to Islam and changed his the female. According to a local proverb, “Woman is only the hile vine in the Middle East. f 4 his attent; passive earth; it is the man who provides the seed.’ Despite D@S W0NS GOVINS Mh kus TONS ASK DOCS US aren OR MORE

Sor ; ; reer specifically on the female adherents, as the following extract shows

variations of female and Schweinfurth et al. 1888: 285 , subordinationinindetail, Burundithis alsogeneral held truepicture for the other societiesinferiority in the (Schweinturth et al. ) interlacustrine and Nyamwezi regions. The most striking figures among the crowds of people loitering

_ Nevertheless, in the religious systems of these regions we find about here were the Wichwezi [Cwezi] sorceresses, a large scattered references that indicate opportunities for women to rise number of whom are found at the court of every Wawitu [Bito, above their general status of inferiority through various roles and the ruling family of Bunyoro] prince. Clothed in bark cloths, activities. In the culturally related areas of Burundi and Buha, for yellowish brown or dyed black — one wore even the handsome example, both men and women might enter the hereditary mtone, a fine bark cloth with black patterns — so that the whole profession of ‘rainmaker’, muvurati. And in Heru, one of the six body is covered, they also not infrequently wear skins of goats or states of Buha, there lived a woman rainmaker (Kicharuzi, ‘the one sheep, and occasionally [of] cheetah or otter, ... and adorn or who cuts water’) whose fame as ‘the chieftainess of rainmakers’ disfigure their heads with objects of every conceivable descripcovered all of Buha and extended into neighboring Burundi. With tion. These ladies are certainly not beautiful, and they would ordinary practitioners as her subordinates, she acted on behalf of the hardly be eligible for vestal virgins, but they are feared, and chief of Heru in cases of severe drought (Scherer 1959). But it was therefore venture to take many liberties. As is always the case

the spirit-mediumship cults that offered women the greatest where professional interests are concerned, they vie with one avenues for active participation in religious life. Raymond Firth another in eccentricities. One at Rionga’s [a local chief’s] court (1950: 141) has defined spirit mediumship and distinguished it from erunted every minute; another sat down beside one of the spirit possession. “Spirit possession is a form of trance in which company, wanted her shoulders rubbed and her head bent.

behaviour actions of a person are interpreted as evidence of a Th hiohlicht the 1 5 ¢ h control of his behaviour by a spirit normally external to him. Spirit dg area 'S se tne nf their METS © hein ¢ kine” te

mediumship is normally a form of possession in which the person is "UMS, the nature Of some of their Vien th their str Tee COSé conceived as serving as an intermediary between spirits and men. tumes, and the respect they commanded from those around them.

ve ;isThe cults in whichthethey participated centered on a mytholThe accent;here on communication; actions and words of the , ¥ Participate Y mediums must be translatable, which differentiates them from mere opically eae P antheon associated with ‘ong dea d or legendary spirit possession or madness.’ Such possession is interpreted favor- *'78° val The & ae Pacnomena, ith P a Le ar wh we ations. ably as a sign that a god has chosen a person to be inhabited by him Frequently the © chil ee CONCEENE 1 themse ol wit “Ited the periodically for the good of the community. Thus, extending Firth’s een such as childbirth and agriculture. People sd on ted tl ‘ definition, spirit mediumship implies communication between the 800% 07 Tesiat iffieultic as 2 P hat seiche ha ee leer d Ps nm Spccla supernatural world and a particular social group for which the ©°°#S'0"S when difficulties arose that might have resulted from their

medium is an agent. neglect. It was felt that, if properly conciliated, the gods could

The bizarre (in European eyes) appearance and behavior of the N. sure the neath, P ede enty, and fertility or tet olower °. interlacustrine mediums captured the attention of several early brow ces usually acquired the abuity to intercede with the ceities travelers to the area. Grant (1864: 292-93) described them at some through a formal initiation Ceremony, although sometimes direct

length. possession rendered this unnecessary. A person’s prolonged illness, for example, might be interpreted by a diviner as a particular spirit’s A class of mendicants or gentle beggars called “Bandwa,’ allied to signal of its choice of a medium. When a woman was ‘signaled’ in

the Wichwezee [Cwezi cult members], seem spread all over this way, a ritual was conducted that taught her the necessary these kingdoms. They adorn themselves with more beads, bells, professional skills; the ritual also marked her rise to a new and brass, and curiosities than any other race and generally carry an higher social status and, sometimes, to membership in a new social ornamented tree-creeper in their hands. Many of their women group. look handsome and captivating when dressed up in variously- The underlying themes of these ceremonies stressed the initiate’s

coloured skins, and wearing a small turban of barkcloth. One passage through a ‘liminal’ or ‘indeterminate’ phase, one that man amongst them wore, from the crown of his head down his Turner describes as having ‘few or none of the attributes of the past back, the skin of a tippet-monkey to which he had attached the or coming state’ (Turner 1969: 80-81). Following this phase comes horns of an antelope. They wander from house to house singing admission to a new society that is superior to the profane one and

and are occasionally rather importunate beggars, refusing to separated from it by special regalia, a secret vocabulary, spirit leave without some present. A set of them lived near us at possession, and esoteric knowledge. Within this new order, the

150 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

adherent passed through the main stages of life — birth, childhood, illness, which is in many cases virtually restricted to women. He marriage — suggesting the idea of a new ritual and spiritual life that continues with a description that suggests the essential features of paralleled ordinary existence, but on a higher plane. The indicators the East African cults (Lewis 197 1: 30): ‘Such women’s possession of this enhanced status varied from place to place. It was implicit “‘afflictions” are regularly treated not by permanently expelling the everywhere in the intimate relationship to a group of spirits possessing agency, but by reaching a viable accommodation with it. generally conceived of as kings or extremely important and power- The spirit is tamed and domesticated, rather than exorcized. This ful people. Explicit signs included food taboos similar to those of treatment is usually accomplished by the induction of the affected the upper classes, a view of non-initiates as minors incapable of full woman into a female cult group which regularly promotes possessparticipation in community affairs, and possession of legal immunity ion experiences among its members. Within the secluded cult group, or particular rights and privileges. This high status, however, was possession has thus lost its malign significance.’

temporary and situational except in the case of professional Although only Lewis has devoted a full-scale study to explaining mediums and priests attached permanently to temples. Others this phenomenon, most works on spirit possession attempt some probably assumed their normal position between ceremonies, as analysis of the high level of female participation. Some concentrate indicated by the application of food taboos only to ritual situations. on the psychological characteristics of possessed women: S. G. Lee, The cults operated on several different social and political levels for example, attempts to relate possession among the Zulu of South — from small localized kinship groups to royal courts — but all of Africa to particular personality types and forms of neurosis; he these levels remained decentralized and independent both of each suggests that active and aggressive women tend toward possession other and of political officials (but note that Buganda is an _ (as diviners), whereas feminine and passive women report a history exception to this). The main rites usually took place among kins- of crying accompanied by ‘an intense subjective feeling of fear, men or neighbors, although ceremonies also occurred at the courts localized between the shoulder blades’ (Lee 1969: 143). Aidan of local chiefs and kings. Colonial rule disrupted activities at this Southall, by contrast, writing on the Alur of northern Uganda, latter level profoundly, however, making them difficult to recon- focuses on the external situations that may generate psychological struct. Dancing, rhythmic music, mediums speaking in an esoteric distress. He views possession cults as offering women release ‘from language and dressing and acting the role of the possessing spirit all the frustrations of ordinary life. ... Married women usually have to

lent a theatrical quality to these ceremonies that has led Michel live away from their own kin, among people who are relative Leiris to describe similar rituals conducted in parts of Ethiopia as_ strangers. Their status is inferior, their work monotonous and their

‘living theater’. diversions few. If in addition they fail to produce healthy children, Accounts everywhere emphasize the predominance of women _ in a society still subject to very high infant mortality rates, they fail

in these cults. Speke (1863: 266-67) described a visit to a District in the chief matter which can compensate for their general Chief of Rumanika in Karagwe, a former Haya kingdom in north- disabilities and their prospects are correspondingly dim. It is hardly

west Tanzania: “Many mendicant women, called by some surprising that some women become keen devotees of spirit Wichwezi, by others Mbandwa, all wearing the most fantastic possession’ (Southall 1969: 244—45). dresses of Mbugu (barkcloth) covered with beads, shells, and sticks, It is difficult to assess whether such analyses might be valid for danced before us singing a comic song, the chorus of which was the interlacustrine and Nyamwezi cultural areas, especially since long shrill rolling, coo-roo-coo-roo, etc.... Their true functions none of the research done on the kubandwa cults has offered any real were just as obscure as the religion of the negroes generally; some psychological information about them. Moreover, I would be called them devil-drivers, others evil-eye averters. But whatever, hesitant to interpret as ‘neurotic’ a type of behavior that involved they imposed a tax on the people.’® The early Church Missionary such large numbers of women in different societies and that was Society members in Buganda invariably described women as the viewed favorably by those societies. Southall’s assertions, in mainstay and most enthusiastic supporters of the “Lubare [spirit] particular, would need to be tested by determining whether women superstition’;'° a Catholic missionary in the early part of the themselves shared this view of their situation. Since few observers twentieth century, writing of the people at the southwestern tip of took any particular interest in the ‘femaleness’ of cult members per Lake Victoria, depicted the Swezi as a secret society ‘to which most _ se, we know little about such characteristics as the woman’s average Bazinza women belonged’;'! and May Edel (1957: 146) termed the age at joining or her marital status. We also need information on the spirit cult among the Kiga of southwestern Uganda the ‘emandwa of problems that women of different social classes faced at particular the women’. Elsewhere, too, observers have agreed on the large _ stages of their lives, on the lives of women who did not become cult numbers of female members in spirit-mediumship cults, although adherents, and on changes over time in female participation in rarely have they offered exact estimates, and although the balance of particular cults. Nonetheless, despite the lack of information on the sexes undoubtedly varied from one community and one deity to these and other important questions, we do have available considerthe next. In the Ankole District of Uganda, for example, emandwa able material on women’s roles in the kubandwa cults and on the initiates were ‘at least as likely to be female as male’, whereas mainly sources of the cults’ appeal to them. women joined the more recent cult of Nyabingi. In Bushi, an area Most data point to the cults’ primary concern with a number of of eastern Zaire with close cultural relations to neighboring female problems, most commonly sterility, childbirth, and marital Rwanda, almost all young girls were dedicated to the deity difficulties, with an emphasis on the first of these. F. M. Rodegem Lyangombe before marriage. And women formed an estimated 95 (1971:1 928) calls the cult of Kiranga in Burundi a ‘regenerative rite percent of the members of the Benakayange cult, which developed aimed at valorizing fertility.” The main object of the traditional in the early twentieth century in honor of a group of people killed mbandwa cults in Bunyoro, according to John Beattie, is to assist

by Belgian soldiers (Colle 1937: 199, 205-7). women to bear children; consequently, many Nyoro attributed

This prevalence of female mediums is hardly unique. Lewis colonial government and missionary attempts to eradicate mbandwa refers to a widespread form of possession, regarded initially as an to a desire to cause their gradual disappearance as a people (Beattie

Iris Berger/Women as Spirit Mediums in East Africa ¢ 151

1961: 13). Similarly, among the Sumbwa of western Tanzania, the house and when I went back to my father’s house he refused to traditional story of the death of Lynangombe, the cult’s central take me in.’ The voice then asked if she were hungry and when spirit, records the hero’s last pronouncement: ‘Whoever comes to she admitted it she immediately found a basket of cooked peas my tomb to pray will be heard by me and I will help him in his and a gourd of beer at her feet. After Rutajyura Kyuna and the trouble.... I will help women in their confinements and I will give children had made their meal the voice commanded her to children to barren women. Let everyone pray to me and I will help return to her father’s house saying that it would protect her, and them’ (Cory 1955: 924). Although Sumbwa husbands sometimes at that moment the spirit of Nyabingi entered her. expressed uneasiness at their wives’ joining, the Swezi, the case of a On her return to her father’s house she sat down beside one nervous or barren wife always proved sufficient argument; to avoid of his granaries and proclaimed herself as the Nyabingi. Soon all domestic trouble, the men would pay the fees and ask no questions the people round about brought her gifts of food and beer. (Cory 1955: 927). Finally, Bésch, writing on neighboring Seeing this her father hastened to build her a hut and to set aside Unyamwezi, describes the majority of female cult members as rovisions for her. He also provided several large baskets for the sterile (1930: 209). This stress on fertility would suggest that reception of the offerings. Eventually he found it necessary to kubandwa appealed to younger married women of childbearing age build her many large granaries.

ry 19 Although Sui , pirit of Nyabing |

yspay p gu ! 8 _Peop’ Pp yabing “ dass or et ,

y , JOEY OF a PFOVIS! ASO P a

of theit hetbands’ nese saeoge alternative to the worship According to tradition, Kanzanira herself had relied on the Lewis argues that such therapeutic pretensions simply masked Spinitual P ower OF Nyapingt 60 h am fled tos “he ner father, no

the cults’ real aim of protest against the dominant sex, offering wal re i. © sk "he CE ae Cane ri 16 ‘8 he °

women both protection from male exactions and an effective noedine hid bei 1 fo them, sanzanis Then he di the p od. vehicle for manipulating husbands and other male relatives. He hor fate 1 4 © ih ” tailed. B, siete When she was iscovere terms such cults peripheral — that is, they play no direct part in 7". ater OFCere Tl mec, Out “tine. init men tO - OWS upholding the moral codes of the societies in which they appear, veereble " ooo ent ED and comanding an P ah. on hie, d ner

and they are often believed to have originated elsewhere. (Their noun ‘ “i mens So her ‘Cth, wee he oN i. se FCP ek counterparts, central cults, support society’s moral codes and COUBMY [DAVE Me OO Met Tater gave Ber e arith K soumen

provide an idiom in which men compete for power and authority.) Uganda. The spirit that had appeared and spoken with Kanzanira’s

; os ’ voice was that of Nyabingi (Bessell 1938: 74-75).

In brief, Lewis sees peripheral cults as a feminist subculture generally Th les defintely b © Lewis’ Hi F th

restricted to women (though sometimes including lower-class men wh epinte 8 COBY foece Our Mewis ‘hsteeee ith. © as well) and protected from male attack through their representation P. Iehc ct b at Spirit P teant on omer Geseribe. thee site ho men, of being a therapy for illness. Underlying this interpretation is the * 7 OU8 ; gaining advantages May Cescrbe tne sivia Ie toe view that these movements stem from threatening or oppressive I De PA than the Lube iy war between ‘ne ml h (Curley 1973: conditions (physical or social) that people can combat and control ). Defining the kubandwa cults as perip ard Owevet, Poses only by ‘heroic flights of ecstasy’. These cults thus represent an problems in terms of both the foreignness of the spirits and the

attempt to master an intolerable environment relationship of the cults to the moral codes of society. (Lewis defines

Both in myth and in practice, the East African cults shared some ublic morality as concerning the relationships between people and of these features. Women among the Soga of eastern Uganda had 2 OUP s.) Although some of the gods in every culture originated control over their husbands during possession (Lubogo 1960: 247), elsewhere, people remain conscious of the alien nature of only the and Shi women in polygynous marriages might feign seizure by the relative newcomers and firmly consider the older gods as national spirit Chihan Gahanga in order to get rid of a rival. Colle cites a case *P irits. Thus Lewis's charact Shbotine of unwelcome aliens in which the deity said through the medium, ‘Yes, I will leave her, originating among hostile neighboring peop C3, OF mischievous but only if the concubine is driven out; if that other woman is not nature sprites existing outside society and culture’ would apply only driven awa I will kill someone here’ (Colle 1937: 187-88) occasionally. And, despite regional variations, in most areas the cults Possession by such a ghost was seen as harmful; it had to be Were relatively thoroughly integrated into the established order, exorcised. Similarly, in the Rundi cult of Kiranga, a medium whose P articularly in terms of ideological and organiz ational involvement husband threatened to beat her might simulate possession. ‘Kiranga with the existing rituals for family spirits. Thus, Lewis's theory does is there, the husband tells himself, and he will prevent himself describe one way in which the interlacustrine and Nyamwezi spirit fom harming her’ (Zuure 1929: 65) A more recent Rundi sect. 2!0UPS served their female adherents; but most of the cults also

Umu napartteure (fom - anz-. ‘to dominate” and -rucuru- occupied a central enough position in religious life to render their , sbowe " thee ted women “seeking escape from their husbon ds’ characterization as peripheral inaccurate. Indeed, this very centrality domination. The ‘cure’ for a wife’s symptoms of trance, illness, and probably explains the status elevation associated with them. And

crying included not only initiation but acceptance of the woman’s mP vement of status must have been an element in the cults

control over household goods and of her refusal to continue “PPS? F ; ; carrying loads; henceforth the husband had to provide her with a An additional factor may have been the authority and license of

servant or transport loads himself (Rodegem 1970: 371-72) the ritual situation itself, which frequently offered women a share in Some of the Nyabingi myths express a similar theme. In an the status and prerogatives of men. In Busoga, for example, where account of one, as told by Bessell (1938: 75), Kanzanira, a woman WOmen normally could not sit on stools, all female mediums had

possessed b the s ite of Nvabinoi. met a woman named their own skin seats and were treated as men during possession;

Reatajirakiiuna P yaninsh afterward, however, they resumed their ordinary status and with it

Jeune. all the restrictions that customarily applied to members of their sex

[The voice of Kanzanira asked] “What is it that troubles you?? (Lubogo 1960: 247). During the Rundi ceremonies, women wore [Rutajirakiyuna] replied: ‘My husband has thrown me out of his men’s ceremonial dress (called imbega), sat on stools, carried spears,

152 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

and had the right — ordinarily denied them — to judge in trials.'2 In deities may have transcended such characterization, the Nyoro view Buha, a woman dressed as a man and treated as a great chief led the of Nyabuzana probably expresses a general attitude. She had no hut procession that completed the initiation ceremony. She bore the dedicated to her, but ‘stays at the hearth because she is a woman’ name Ruhang’umugabo (from umugabo, ‘adult male’ or ‘husband’). (Beattie 1961: 32, n. 9). During the procession, which involved gathering food and begging Despite anthropological interpretation of such rites as reinforcing from people, people hurried from their houses and greeted her with the status quo, and despite the temporary nature of possession, the words, ‘Ganza, mwami nven’ongoma’ (‘Greetings to you, great mediums were highly respected members of their societies.

chief’) (Van Sambeek 1949: 1, 72). In the Nyoro ceremonies to Furthermore, the cults also provided them with access to more remove a yellow, frothy substance associated with thunder and __ stable and institutionalized high-status positions. In the words of lightning that could drop from the sky, “The women ... kept Max Gluckman, becoming a diviner 1s the ‘only way an outstanding strolling up and down, holding and shaking their spears and shields [Zulu] woman can win general social prestige’ (quoted in Lee 1969: like men at war...’ (Nyakatura, 1970: 60). Similarly, one of the 141). Robin Horton (1969: 42), writing on Kalabar1 communities female deities was named Rukohe Nyakalika Irikangabu, she ‘who in Nigeria, echoes a similar theme. “The fully-developed complex wields shields like men’. The Rwanda ceremony of kubandwa_ of possession roles typically figures a man: not just an ordinary man, abolished sexual differences; all initiates, men and women alike, but a man of wealth, power, and status. In adopting this complex of acquired a virile masculine quality, umugabo (Arnoux 1912: 844). roles a woman is enabled, from time to time, really to “be” what Among the Hunde of eastern Zaire, the spirit Mbalala, which she has always yearned to be but never can be in ordinary normal possessed women, carried a spear without “becoming a leper’ life.’ Writing specifically on Bunyuro, Beattie (1969: 169) repeats (apparently the normal punishment for such a transgression of sexual this theme. “The social status of women in Bunyoro is low, as it is boundaries); sometimes the possessed woman danced with a spear elsewhere in East Africa, and subservience and deference towards and shield ‘just as if she had become a man’ (Viaene 1952: 405). men is traditionally expected of them. But as mediums ... they can A small body of material also suggests that the cults functioned as command attention and respect, as well as providing themselves, if vehicles for expressing hostility against the social order in general or they practice divination, with a substantial source of income.’ against particular people, especially superiors. Although none of the Similarly, an Nkore source observes that women normally were not examples applies specifically to male-female relationships, it seems regarded as people and could neither possess nor inherit property; unlikely that women would have ignored such opportunities. In only certain “great witches” and princesses of the royal family were Rwanda, a list of highly unflattering or obscene names of spirits exceptions’.'* Others indicate that female mediums were trusted included Nkunda Abatutsi, ‘I love the Tutsi’ (in this context clearly with tasks not ordinarily granted to women; thus, again in Nkore, an ironic expression of attitudes toward the upper class); and _ the pickets and spies for cattle raids often were “women devotees of possessed persons had complete freedom to express any feelings they the spirit-king cult who circulated freely between the western wished since others accepted these words as those of the spirit. Lacustrine kingdoms’ (Stenning 1959: 15). This also points up the Individuals bore no responsibility for their utterances. “They could itinerant lives of many mediums, suggesting, that at least some speak inconsiderate words, abuse their parents or their superiors, female emandwa possessed greater freedom and geographical without anyone dreaming of asking for compensation after the mobility than did ordinary women. In addition, many were able to ceremony was finished’ (Kagame 1967: 766). These instances are use their positions to accumulate relatively large amounts of wealth. particularly interesting in view of the predominance of lower-class In Bunyoro, by the 1950s, initiation might involve the payment of agriculturalists, Hutu, among cult members. In Buha, where the a fee as large as £20 and the provision of large quantities of beer and cult’s social composition is unknown, possessed people behaved ina food. While this may exceed precolonial payments, a typical song of similar fashion. ‘Another only abuses everyone, even the chief of the ceremony goes: “You get plenty to eat [in the society of

the country if he is present’ (Van Sambeek 1949: 1, 79). babandwa] and as well as that you put your hands in other people’s The explanation of this ritual rebellion probably lies in the purses’ (Beattie 1957: 152-53). A Nyamwezi account asserts that concept of possession as a liminal state in which all ordinary rules of the fees, paid in units of five (shillings, hoes, pieces of cloth) to society are suspended — thus permitting such transgressions as become an ordinary initiate and in units of 50 to gain access to the criticism of superiors and men dressing as women and women as higher levels, tended to make functionaries of the cult wealthy men men. In Buha, for example, ‘Initiates who dress as their spirit say and women. These fees, however, also made access to higher

that they are no longer men, and they allow themselves many levels of the cult difficult for anyone but the rich. Rundi, for insults and even dishonest actions that they would not permit example, usually were fairly old by the time they became mediums themselves in a normal state’ (Van Sambeek 1949: 2, 53). The because of the wealth required'® and in Rwanda the funds necessary temporary nature of this state is of paramount importance; and to undergo the second stage of initiation made it less easily leadership and prestige often accrue to the medium only while she accessible to the poor (Coupez 1956: 135). But this requirement is possessed. In this way women may be allowed possibilities for might explain the cult’s particular openness to women as opposed to status, but the predominant ideas about female inferiority or about other low-status people, since a woman’s access to her husband’s women’s place in the established social order are not threatened. In resources gave her an asset unavailable to a poor man.'’ Again, fact, the theatrical nature of possession ceremonies may well however, essential data on male versus female acquisition through reinforce this feeling that the occasion is out of the ordinary. these positions are lacking. Additional evidence in support of this interpretation comes from A small number of women also were able to attain positions of two facts: most female deities are concerned primarily with female national prominence. In the Mubende District of Katara (the former activities (especially agriculture and fertility); and most are also Nyoro kingdom), the medium of Ndahura, the spirit of smallpox, conceived of in positions of subservience to men (usually as wives, possessed not only her own temple but an extensive domain. daughters, sisters, and slaves of male deities). Although some female According to the earliest available description (Lewin 1908: 91-92):

Iris Berger/Women as Spirit Mediums in East Africa ¢ 153

Mt. Mubende ... was at one time a sacred place regarded by both was going to cure the king by speaking a single word only. The Baganda and Banyoro with reverence and dread, for thereon chiefs, especially the older and more influential of them, hailed dwelt Ndaula [Ndahura], the spirit of Smallpox, guarded by the her coming, and began to make every preparation to receive her priestess Nakaima of the Basazima or snail tribe, with her wand with honour. Nkinga made of a bull s tail studded with shells and beads. The Although the immense power of the king by the mid-nineteenth

spirit’s home was in the had midst of a her lofty grove of huge trees .remained |é;. | - century, reduced independence, this medium

perched on the highest peak of Mubende. ... the priestess ... is one the m seemed in the kinedom

still alive and it is said that when the spirit Ndaula takes possess- U7 ONS SNE Bloke Estecmaen oe 5

; In Nkore, a female diviner, Nyabuzana, possessed aa land. and a ion of her,; palace her face and hands become with smallpox at Ibanda Hill in Mitoma.covered She performed ceremonies at each

marks which remain for a whole day. -

new moon and directed a four-day ritual of spirit worship that The kings of both Bunyoro and Buganda treated the site with became an important part of the royal accession ceremonies. In great respect, and Nakaima received offerings from both rulers on addition, she functioned as a source of information to the king on the occasion of smallpox epidemics or when they had queries that the movements of his enemies and bewitched other chiefs to they wished the spirit to answer. Ndahura, through his medium, facilitate their defeat. Her prestige allowed her to walk about in her ~ also played an important role in the accession ceremony of the ceremonial dress and claim any cow she wished; no one refused, mukama, ‘king,’ of Bunyoro; without this god’s aid, the king ‘could believing that the emandwa themselves had chosen the cattle not properly “eat” Unyoro.’ Furthermore, the spirit’s prestige (Williams 1937: 309; Gray 1960: 167-68; Bamunoba 1965: 95-96). exempted Mubende Hill from both Nyoro and Ganda attack. Much larger numbers of women could attain highly regarded Frequently, the main deities had women dedicated to them as __ positions as local mediums and priestesses. The Toro clan priestess, wives, these women not being allowed to marry while in the spirit’s the nyakatagara, could communicate with one or two of the clan’s service. By far the most important of these women was the official Cwezi spirits. She directed the construction of shrines, advised on wife of Kiranga in Burundi, Mukakiranga. J. M. M. Van der Burgt their maintenance, offered prayers on periodic visits to homesteads,

writes: !8 and invited initiated cult members, singers, and musicians to partici. . ; pateininwhich rituals.heGenerally, she shared the directionmaster, of ceremonies In Burundi, was untillocal now the uncontested ; : eo ; with the most important medium, the kazini (Taylor; 1957: Kiranga (the devil) possesses for himself two herds of cattle, each

, 198-200). Nyoro group mediums, more commonly women than as a fiefcalled his iburunga, or Kiranga. sacred mountain, administered by a; |;them :; oo, meermaunes authority was unquestioned in all otheris, matters, to treat Vestal the of ThisNyoro priestess it derive ishad said, a: oe ; wife ; respectfully at all times. informants their title, one presided over by an Ngabe, sacred bull. Satan also possesses men, held such high status that even the household head, whose

condemned to perpetual, virginity. She enjoys great authority nyakatagara, from the verb okutagara, ‘to be| ,free what and is exempt from allédues to ae the king. latter j. doubts a ,to; do an | oneof likes, to be Nonetheless privileged.’ Beattiethe (1961: 15-18) the accuracy hasaeher watched to prevent her that fromthe violating her ; | meen eeroeer ; . | closely this etymology, but implication is plain. the obligations, in whicha leader casenotes she would be putmembers to death withAmong all ; . Sumbwa, of the female cult organized the work those of her family. She assumes her position at the same time as . so a

; king . .; of does; womenwhen and arbitrated quarrels them (Cory 1955: the the latterindies, she between is condemned to take ar son: if to th : he dies before him. she ; laced b 936). One account from the Tabora District of Unyamwezi

P othe Ir to the ¢ i Tary sne dies betore fim, she 1s Teplaced DY describes a woman named Kanunga as the Mtwale Mkubwa, Great

2 ano | er youns git _ Chief of the Swezi of Uyui; another account refers to the mnangogo _ Mukakiranga played a major-part in the great national ceremony and the mnangogokazi, the society’s chief and chieftainess. Writing of umuganiro, a yearly spiritual renewal of the kingdom in which all on Shinyanga District in Usukuma, a colonial officer noted that Rundi participated. Together with the king, she presided over one ‘women have equal status with men, and many female members of portion of the ritual; and she filled a crucial role in the remainder of _ the Baswezi have been nominated in the past as chieftainesses.’”° it. “She and the king are equals and hold Burundi in common. The An even greater degree of female power prevailed in the cult of king is the visible chief of it. Kiranga incarnates himself in his wife Nyabingi. In Rwanda and southwestern Uganda, the bagirwa and, through kubandwa or initiation, she becomes Kiranga in (priests and priestesses) adopted the style of the interlacustrine kings,

person’ (Gorju et al. 1938: 45). surrounding themselves with a large personal entourage) often

Though not equally central to national unity, the medium of armed; collecting tribute; and using or threatening to use physical Mukasa, the god of Lake Victoria, also occupied an influential violence to consolidate their positions. Some adopted still another female position, as shown by the account of an early missionary in prerogative of royalty and appeared publicly only on litters. In

Buganda.!” addition, of course, they cultivated a strong aura of supernatural It is more than a month back, that we first heard of the intended PO’ both beneficial and malevolent. One account (Rwandusya | 1972: 138) describes the arrival of the priestess Rutayirakiyuna in journey to Rubaga (the capital) of one of the most noted Gods Rukia (or evil spirits) in Uganda, for the purpose of curing the king. 5A This Spirit 1s named Mukasa, and he is supposed to be the chief A mysterious woman, possibly from the country of Bahima, deity of the Victoria Nyanza on which lake he has his dwelling. arrived in Rukiga. She was accompanied by hundreds of This spirit has gone by the name of Mukasa for generations back worshipers [sic] and ordered that she be taken to Kyante where

and takes up his abode in some witch of great power or she wanted a temporary court.

medicine woman. All the people, and especially the boatman ,

and islanders, hold this medicine woman possessed by the evil It is said that she was ‘Ekyebumbe’ who could appear and spirit Mukasa to work miracles, and the report spread that she disappear and could cause anything to happen. All the Bakiga

154 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

feared to approach her for fear of death or other misfortune hood organizations extremely fluid, and with geographical mobility | which could easily arise from being associated with such a_ high, the cults were dissociated from any kinship connections and personality. She was worshiped [sic] by many Banyarwanda but came to form highly delineated, independent corporate groups. not at first by the Bakiga. After some time her fame grew wide With this decline in the importance of kinship ties came the only and high, spreading like fire until King Rwabugiri IV of instance in the area of women’s involvement in cults of lineage Rwanda came to learn about it. He ordered his representative in ghosts; only here could they preside over the rites to honor deceased

Bufumbira to investigate. members of the group (Millroth 1965: 134; Bésch 1930: 137).

The Nyabingi cults of northern Rwanda and southwestern

Though her conflict with the Rwandan king soon led to her Uganda offer another instance of autonomously organized religious beheading, during her life Rutajirakijuna achieved ‘an almost royal groups. By the late nineteenth century, these cults had successfully power’ and always received the royal greeting, “Kasinje!’ accom-_ eclipsed those of bazimu and emandwa, both fully integrated with panied by hand-clapping. Eventually she changed her original patrilineages (Edel 1957: 146). Here the historical setting was the name, Rutajirakijuna (‘she who lacks support’), to Rutatangirwa attempts of the Rwanda state, and later the Europeans, to conquer omu Muhanda (‘she who cannot be stopped on her way’, i.e., the politically decentralized areas. The new cults provided a new,

invincible) (Bessell 1938: 75). militant form of organized resistance; and in these groups, centered

Probably the most famous priestess was Muhumusa, who ona female spirit, a number of famous women were able to exercise claimed to be a wife of Rwabugiri, immensely powerful nineteenth- substantial power. Pertinent here, though, is the problem of century Rwandan king. One tradition records that after her son’s _institutionalizing female authority; for although women apparently succession as king had been successfully challenged in a civil war she acted as the chief priestesses in an early period, as the position fled to the north and gathered a group of adherents around her by acquired increasing power in the late nineteenth century, male personifying Nyabingi. But German support of the reigning king, _ priests became more prevalent.” Thus, as in the Unyamwezi lineage Musinga, doomed her attempt to install her son as king, and she cults, women seemed to gain some positions only at times when turned her attack against the Europeans. “As the Nyabingi she raised they possessed relatively low value. This raises the question, a large following both of Bakiga and Banyaruanda. Proclaiming impossible to answer from available material, of whether women herself the Queen of Ndorwa and liberator of it from the Euro- participated more actively in the initial stages of spirit cults when peans, in the course of 1911 she swept through the country, raiding, possession might have been more spontaneous and less regulated _ looting, and burning’ (Bessell 1938; see also Des Forges 1972: than in later stages. It also suggests the possibility that the imperfect 153-54). Another priestess, Kaigirirwa, participated in organizing fit between the interlacustrine and Nyamwezi areas’ religious the. 1917 Nyakishentyi revolt in Kigezi District, which began with movements and Lewis’s definitions arises from the process of _ an attack.on the local Ganda political agent and 63 of his followers. historical transformation by which peripheral cults may evolve into

Eventually she was killed while resisting capture. central ones. But although the data do point to a trend toward

All of these instances of local female leadership occurred in greater integration with older institutions over time, they do not religious movements that were relatively independent of lineage necessarily verify a process of linear progression from one form to organization. This independence stemmed from the fact that in the other. Furthermore, it seems that in their possible historical role some areas the new cults eclipsed those of lineage ghosts, whereas in as peripheral, kubandwa cults have assumed more importance as a others they took the form of autonomously organized groups not continuing vehicle for popular protest among both men and based on kinship ties.”! Since lineage cults represented the husband’s women than as a strictly feminist outlet. Although they allowed family, perhaps their eclipse in itself enhanced the possibility of women a prominence not otherwise available to them and certain female religious participation. In Bunyoro and Toro the process was___ vehicles for pressuring men, other aspects of protest they embodied eradual, probably occurring over a period of several centuries; in have been as much against a social order oppressive to men and

Unyamwezi and Rukiga, on the other hand, it developed women alike as against the specific subordination of women. The specifically as a result of historical changes during the nineteenth mobilization of Nyabingi followers against Rwandan and then

century. European overlordship illustrates this theme, as does the cults’

In Bunyoro and Toro by the colonial period, the cult of family earlier involvement in resistance movements against the imposition ghosts, bazimu, had been replaced as the basic religion by the cult of of new state systems (see Berger 1981: chaps. 4 and 5). Nonetheless,

Cwezi mbandwa (Beattie 1961: 32, n. 5). Today, the cult of the deciding on the balance between these themes is difficult since the bazimu in these areas either is not practiced at all or is of negligible possibility exists that the latter appears dominant because of its

importance. This trend correlated also with the breakdown of association with militant revolts. Such actions become history, residential organization based on patrilineal descent groups (Beattie whereas the individual- and family-level conflict between the sexes

1964: 143, 150). The mbandwa cults, in this situation, offered goes unrecorded. leadership possibilities to many women in their local cult groups, In conclusion then, regardless of religious or social structure, a which, although loosely associated with patrilineal clans, had their small number of women everywhere emerged in institutionalized own heads and stressed solidarity between initiates rather than positions of religious leadership. Thus, as in most stratified situa-

between kinspeople. tions, a few people were allowed to rise above their customary

In Unyamwezi, the divorce from lineage organization was even status without challenging the dominant ideology or structure of greater, for by the late nineteenth century secret societies (among subordination. In the Ganda pattern of elitist cults, which lacked them the Buswezi) had begun to fulfill many roles of kinship groups mass initiation, women’s leadership positions were limited to these in assisting members in time of need. This trend resulted from few. This may have held true in Unyamwezi as well since the Swezi people’s dispersion through their large-scale participation in long- was only one of numerous secret societies, in others of which distance trade (Roberts 1970: 43). With both family and neighbor- authority and sometimes even active membership were limited to

a Iris Berger/Women as Spirit Mediums in East Africa * 155 men.” Similarly, in the Nyabingi cults only small numbers of Yitzchak Elam, “The Relationships Between Hima and Iru in Ankole.’

women leaders emerged. African Studies. 30, no. 3 (1974). | Only in the democratic cults of the Nyoro-Ha area did large ® I follow here Albert (1963: 179-215). She extends her conclusions to

numbers of women participate actively in religious life. Although Rwanda as well as Burundi, and the scattered materia on. Sunder their exercise of power and authority was restricted to ritual elsewhere seems to sanction the extension to the other societies under ; ; P y .; ve discussion, too. An important recent study is Elam 1973. Unfortunately, situations, they could acquire wealth from their positions and however, he does not deal with precolonial religion. apparently commanded respect at all times because of their religious —_ Speke’s reference to a ‘tax’ probably means the periodic gifts these

powers. And here, as in the elitist cults, smaller numbers of women women demanded. achieved institutionalized high positions either as national figures ° E.g., A. M. Mackay’s letter of March 12, 1882, sent from Buganda to a or, more frequently, as local religious leaders. Yet this religious form Mr. Whiting in London and now in the Archives of the Church

arose largely in the most highly stratified societies of the region.” Missionary Society, London. a, ;

This may explain the occurrence in a precolonial setting of a Chroniques trimestrielles de la Société des Missionaires d’ Afrique (Péres Blancs),

religious usuallythis associated the late with nineteenth early, juy 10, te: pp. 230-31, .. . -—-form . earned in an with interview fourand women in Burasira, Burundi,

on

twentieth centuries; for the oppression of these societies, like that of March 6. 1970 the colonial period, may have drawn together subordinate peoples 3 Wilson (1967: 322, n. 4) suggests that women adopted male symbols in into movements that offered at least occasional and temporary these situations because power and authority in their societies could be prestige as well as an institutionalized outlet for anti-social feelings. expressed only through ‘maleness.’ In this context, the form and function of women’s religious 144 Br. Le Tohic, ‘District Book,’ Mbarara, Section 12, Ankole, Reel 2,

participation corresponded with that of other low-status groups.” Microfilm, Makerere University Library,

5 District Officer Nzega to District Commissioner Tabora, “Baswezi

Not Society,’ Tanzania National Archives, Secretariatp.File otes November 1930, Ref. No. A/2/144, 2. No. 19303, 26 1 In addition to Lewis’s work, see Wilson 1967: 366-78. Edwin Ardener °° Interview with Ambroise Buryeburye, Bujumbura, Burundi, Feb. 27,

(1972) discusses the problem of women and religion generally. [In this 1970.

essay, I use the term ‘cult’ in its dictionary definition of ‘a system of =” It would be interesting to know whether patrons in Burundi, Rwanda, religious worship or ritual’. If I were rewriting this article today, and Buha provided initiation fees for their clients. The terms patron and however, I would avoid this term because of its common negative client here refer to the partners in a feudal-type contract somewhat like association with fringe groups devoted to a charismatic leader. I would that in medieval Western Europe but based on cattle rather than land. also replace the cumbersome ‘interlacustrine’ with Great Lakes to ™ Chroniques Trimestrielles de la Société des Missionnaires d’Afnique (Peres Blancs),

describe this region of east-central Africa. Iris Berger, 2004] S-antoine de mougera, Ouroundi [Burundi], 3d trimestre, 1902. p. 79. 2 In a widely followed series, the Ethnographic Survey of Africa, anthro- _” Letter from George Litchfield to Mr. Wright, Rubaga, Uganda, January pologists have divided the interlacustrine cultures into three groups: (1) 3, 1880 (Archives, Church Missionary Society, Letters of George Litch-

the western group (Nyoro, Toro, Nkore, Kiga, Haya, Zinza); (2) the field, Nyanza Mission, c/A6.0 15/ 1-23). oe

southern group (Rwanda, Rundi, Ha); (3) the eastern group (Ganda, *° ‘Whether this refers to the Swezi or to other political units is not clear. J. Soga). The Shi and Hunde of eastern Zaire are closely related in many W. T. Allen, Administrative Secretary, Lake Province, to District Com-

respects to the peoples of the second group and share some of their missioners in Province, 17 November 1954, Ref, No. s. 13/ 57, Hans religious institutions. The major peoples of ‘greater Umyamwezi’ Cory Collection, University Library, Dar es Salaam, Baswezi No, 45.

: include the Nyamwezi, Sukuma, and Sumbwa. *! A largely female Shi sect, the Benakayange, also had a ‘great chieftain-

> See Iris Berger, Religion and Resistance: East African Kingdoms in the ess,’ but no information is available about the sect’s organization. See

Precolonial Period (Tervuren, Musée royal de l’ Afrique centrale, 1981), Colle 1937: 206-7. .

for a detailed history of these spirit-possession cults. * I am indebted to Catherine Robins for this observation. May Edel,

4 These terms illustrate the principles of word formation in Bantu writing from the perspective of the 1930s, judged that female members languages, with each consisting of a stem and a prefix that indicates were considered subordinate to male members (see Edel 1957: 154). whether the word is singular or plural and to which of a number of = ™ A few references to women’s societies do occur: the Bagota, for people classes of living and nonliving things it belongs. These vary, of course, who officiate in twin ceremonies; Wagoli; and Ba Shingoma. Little is from one language to the next. To take one useful example, Bunyoro is known about them, however.

the name the Nyoro give to their kingdom; Lunyoro is their language; Rukiga is an exception: the emandwa cults spread here from the and the people call themselves Banyoro. The area of the Nyamwezi surrounding kingdoms. But even here their strong association with peoples, however, is Unyamwezi. Since modern scholarly usage tends to women suggests that they took root primarily among a subordinate

drop the prefixes in many cases, this paper will refer, for example, to the group in society.

Nyoro, Nyamwezi, or Rwanda peoples and to the Cwezi or Swezi cults. |” This conclusion is particularly clear for Rwanda and Burundi, the most 5 The separate cult of Nyabingi, a female deity who became particularly oppressive of the interlacustrine societies. The cults’ social composition

prominent in northern Rwanda and southwestern Uganda in the in the north is less clear. In a historical context, however, subordination nineteenth century, also took on this form. I prefer the terms “demo- also might have involved the imposition of a new ruling dynasty.

cratic’ and ‘elitist’ to ‘cults of affliction’ and ‘royal cults’ suggested in T. . O. Ranger and I. Kimambo, eds., The Historical Study of African Religion References

(Berkeley, Calif:, 1972), p. 11. The latter term in particular is too

narrowly defined to cover all interlacustrine cases. Most of these cults Albert, Ethel M. 1963. ‘Women of Burundi: a study of social values’, in

and spirits were known by forms of -band-. Denise Paulme, ed., Women of Tropical Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of

6 Nkore is the name of the traditional kingdom that formed the nucleus of California Press.

the colonial district of Ankole. Ardener, Edwin. 1972. ‘Belief and the problem of women’, in J. S. La

7 Some scholars have suggested recently that the spheres of activity of Fontaine, ed., The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A. I. Hima and Iru in Nkore were too separate to constitute a class system. Richards. London: Tavistock Publications. See Martin R. Doornbos, ‘Images and Reality of Stratification in Pre- Arnoux, Alex. 1912. ‘Le culte de al société secréte des Imandwa au Rwancolonial Nkore,’ Canadian Journal of African Studies, 12, no. 3 (1973); and da’, Anthropos, 7.

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Bamunoba, Y. K. 1965. ’Diviners for the Abagabe’, Uganda Journal, 29,no.1. Speke, John. 1863. Journal of the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile. Edin-

—and F. B. Welbourne. 1965. ‘Emandwa initiation in Ankole’, Uganda burgh: William Blackwood and Sons.

Journal, 29, no. 1. Stenning, Derrick. 1959. ‘Ecology and social structure’. Paper presented at

Beattie, John. 1957. ‘Initiation into the Cwezi Spirit Possession Cult in the Annual Meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists.

Bunyoro’, African Studies, 16, no. 3. : Taylor, Brian K. 1957. “The social structure of the Batoro’. Unpublished Problems in British Central Africa, 30. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

—— 1961. “Group aspects of the Nyoro Spirit Mediumship Cult’, Human MA thesis, University of London.

— 1964. ‘The Ghost Cult in Bunyoro’, Ethnology, 3, no. 2. Van Sambeek, J. 1949. ‘Croyances et coutumes des Baha’. Mimeo. Kabanga, — 1969. ‘Spirit mediumship in Bunyoro’, in J. Beattie and J. Middleton, Belgian Congo. eds. Spirit Mediumship and Society. London: Routledge. Viaene, L. 1952. ‘La religion des Bahunde (Kivu)’, Kongo-Overzee, 18, no. 4. — and J. Middleton, eds. 1969. Spirit Mediumship and Society. London: Williams, Lukyn. 1937. ‘The inauguration of the Omugabe of Ankole to

Congo. TT Routledge. office’, Uganda Journal, 4, no. 4. |

Berger, Iris. 1973. “The Kubandwa religious complex of interlacustrine East Wilson, Peter J. 1967. ‘Status ambiguity and spirit possession’, Man, n.s. 2,

Africa: an historical study, ca. 1500-1800’. Unpublished Ph.D. disserta- no. 3: 366-78.

tion, University of Wisconsin. Zuure, Bernard. 1929. Croyances et Pratiques Religieuses des Barundi. Brussels:

Bessell, M. J. 1938. ‘Nyabingi’, Uganda Journal, 6, no. 2. ed. de I’Essorial. Bosch, Fridolin. 1930. Les Banyamwezi. Miinster: Anthropos Bibliothek.

Colle, P. 1937. ‘Essai de monographie des Bashi’. Mimeo. Kivu, Belgian Cory, H. 1955. “The Buswezi’, American Anthropologist, 57, no. 5.

Kongo-Overzee, 22, nos. 2-3. °

Coupez, A. 1956. ‘Deux texts Rwanda: initiation fu culte de Ryangombe’, B A R B A R A C O O P E R

versity of California Press. . dissertation, Yale University. Sec | USION & Fe Ma | e Labo r

Curley, Richard T. 1973. Elders, Shades, and Women. Berkeley, CA: Uni- Reflections On S | ave ry, Des Forges, Alison. 1972. ‘Defeat is the only bad news’. Unpublished Ph.D.

sty Pres. in the Maradi Region of Niger

Edel, May M. 1957. The Chiga of Western Uganda. London: Oxford Univer- + . ° . Elam, Yitzchak. 1973. The Social and Sexual Roles of Hima Women. Man- _ , . .

chester: Manchester University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1950. ‘Problem and assumption in an anthropological In the 1 9th & 20th Centu ries

study of religion’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 89, no. 2. Oe

Gorju, Julien, et al. 1938. Face au Royaume Hamite du Ruanda: Le Royaume Reference 7 Frére de l’Urundi. Brussels: Vromant & Co. Journal of African History, 1994, Vol. 35 (1): 61-78.

Grant, James. 1864. A Walk Across Africa. London: Blackwood.

Gray, J. M. 1960. ‘A history of Ibanda, Saza of Mitoma, Ankole’, Uganda

Journal, 24, no. 2. The relationship between the incidence of pre-colonial slavery and

Horton, Robin. 1969. “Types of spirit possession in Kalabari Region’, in J.. the degree of contemporary seclusion in Muslim regions of Africa poate and J. Middleton, eds. Spirit Mediumship and Society. London: has become something of a vexed question in the historiography of

outledge. . , pa , West Africa. The Journal of African History recently became the

Kagame, A. 1967. “Description du culte rendu aux trepassés du Rwanda’, gram for a debate on the Y tan of slavery and seclusion in pre-

rom the Bulletin des Séances ofcolonial the Académie Royale des Sciences lonial B t Gina for both relatively hich d’Outre Mer (Belgium). Borno.' Gina Porter accounts for Pboth thethe relatively hig

Lee, S. G. 1969. ‘Spirit possession among the Zulu’, in J. Beattie and J, Participation of women Im agriculture in the Borno region today Middleton, eds. Spirit Mediumship and Society. London: Routledge. and the limited incidence of female seclusion as compared with Lewin, H. B. 1908. ‘Mount Mubende, Bwekula’, Uganda Notes, 9, no. 6. Hausa-speaking regions of northern Nigeria by postulating that Lewis, I. M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Posses- slave ownership was not widespread in pre-colonial Borno; thus

sion and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. female labor in agriculture was not stigmatized as ‘slave’ labor, and

Lubogo, Y. K. 1960. A History of Busoga. Kampala, Uganda. seclusion did not become the mark of a ‘free’ woman. Humphrey Millroth, Berta. 1965. Lyuba: Traditional Religion of the Sukuma. Uppsala: Eicher responds to Porter’s remarks by arguing convincingly that in

Nyakatura, Almqvist and Wilksells. er , fact slave ownership touched all strata of society in Borno and was J. W. 1970. “The customs of Kitara in the old days’, Trans. J. D. il within th ; h of fairl d Besisira. Unpublished handwritten manuscript. Kampala, Uganda. well within the economic reach of even a fairly modest peasant

Roberts, Andrew. 1970. ‘Nyamwezi trade’, in Richard Gray and David household. Fisher insists that differences in female participation in _ Birmingham, eds, Pre-Colonial African Trade. London: Oxford University agriculture and in the degree of seclusion in the region today must

Press. be understood at least in part as resulting from religious and cultural

Rodegem, F. M. 1970. Dictionaire Rundi-Francais. Tervuren: MRAC. differences between the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno.

— 1971. ‘La motivation du culte initiatique au Burundi’, Anthropos, 66. I refer to this debate not to elaborate further on slavery and Rwandusya, Zakayo. 1972. “The origin and settlement of people of seclusion in Borno but rather to point out that the relationship Bufumbira’, in Donald Denoon, ed., A History of Kigezt in Southwest Looween slavery and seclusion is both critical and ambiguous for the

Uganda. Kampala: The National Trust. C 1 Sudan; Exactly h the t lated d

Scherer, J. H. 1959. “The Ha of Tanganyika’, Anthropos, 54, nos 5—6. entral sudanic region. Exactly ow are the two related, and, Schweinfurth, G., et al. 1888. Emin Pasha in Central Africa: Being a Collection historiographically, how did the interest in the relationship between

of His Letters and Journals. London: George Philip & Son. the two emerge? I would suggest that the key text associating

Southall, Aidan. 1969. ‘Spirit possession and mediumship among the Alur’, slavery and seclusion has been anthropologist Michael Smith’s

Routledge. Smith asserts:

in J. Beattie and J. Middleton, eds. Spirit Mediumship and Society. London: ‘Introduction’ to Mary Smith’s Baba of Karo. In a much-cited passage,

Barbara Cooper/Slavery, Seclusion & Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the 19th & 20th Centuries ¢ 157

An important aspect of the Hausa division of labour is the pre-colonial slave holding does not on its own shed a great deal of exclusion of Moslem Hausa women from active farming, in light upon the later relationship between the decline of slavery and contrast to the pagan Hausa women, who participate in farming. the rise of seclusion. I suggest that we need a far clearer picture of Formerly when slavery obtained, free Hausa women and con- the character of slavery in particular locales and of how it figured in cubines neither farmed nor gathered firewood, though women local conceptions of female labor and marriage in order to make of slave status were compelled to do both tasks. With the sense of how the ending of slavery might have affected the labor of abolition of slavery under British rule, women formerly of slave wives. I argue that the broader political, economic and cultural status withdrew from the farms and as far as possible from wood- environment affects how seclusion is understood at various historigathering, as an assertion of their new legal status as free persons, cal moments and therefore influences the rate at which it is adopted.

and in imitation of the traditional role of free Hausa women. ~— Finally, much work has been devoted recently to the question of Linked with this development is the spread of purdah-type how the ending of slavery affected African societies.* This case will marriage throughout the rural areas of Hausaland in recent years, suggest that while the ending of slavery in the Maradi region of for the seclusion of wives is closely connected with their refusal, Niger did not provoke an immediate crisis it nevertheless contriwherever possible, either to farm or to gather sylvan produce, buted to significant restructuring of social and gender relations. For, and their preference for the more rewarding craft and trade as aristocratic men and women sought to retain the prerogatives of activities which they can carry out in their leisure time at home.’ _ their class, they remapped master/slave relations onto the relations of elite men and women to junior women in marriage. Wealthier Smith suggests here that with the end of slavery, ex-slave women women benefited from this redefinition of marriage because it asserted their new free status by refusing to participate in the kinds provided them the leisure to continue to earn income independent of of publicly visible activities which they had been called upon to their husbands. Vulnerable junior women struggled to resist subperform in the past. In other words, in northern Nigeria, the high ordinate status by using ritual to make public their free status and later incidence of female seclusion today can be seen as the result of a by using veiling to state visually their equality with senior aristocratic strategic choice on the part of women claiming a new status. One of women. As economic and cultural ties with northern Nigeria grew the consequences of this choice was that women moved out of and as goods and services evolved which could reduce some of the agriculture and into other crafts and trades that they could pursue labor demands upon urban women, seclusion became more popular from within purdah. Smith’s account explains the absence of jin the region. By acquiescing to the dependency implicit in purdah women from farming among the Muslim Hausa of Nigeria while women of all categories could protect themselves from the labor simultaneously making sense of the unusually high incidence of demands made upon them by senior men and women and could

seclusion in this region. sometimes free themselves up to earn income of their own.

It is striking that a statement which has had such broad and sustained influence upon work on Muslim women in Africa is in Slavery in pre-colonial Maradi and Sokoto fact in the nature of inspired speculation and does not appear to be deduced from evidence. This is not to argue that Smith’s assertion is Let me turn now to the region of Hausaland which interests me false but rather to point out that he does not present evidence directly, namely the Maradi region of Niger, immediately to the sufficient to satisfy a historian of its validity. The passage raises a north of the Hausa-speaking region of northern Nigeria. The town number of important questions. First, if Smith is correct, what was of Maradi itself is a mere 60 miles from the Nigerian city of Katsina. it that enabled women to ‘assert’ their new free status and to ‘refuse’ Yet the history of this region has been quite different from that of to perform certain activities? Were not the power relations which northern Nigeria. Maradi prides itself as the present home of the gave rise to their original subjugation still in place? In the absence of ‘true’ Hausa kings of the kingdom of Katsina, who, after being supporting evidence for his statement it is hard to understand what ousted from power by the forces of Usman ’dan Fodio in the early processes might have made such a striking transformation of intra- nineteenth century, set up camp in the Maradi valley in order to household relations possible. Without the support of a woman’s resist the leaders of the new emirates under Sokoto and Gwandu. husband it would be nearly impossible for her to retreat into Maradi was never conquered by Usman “dan Fodio’s jihadists and seclusion.2 Second, what were the characteristics of slavery defined itself in opposition to the Islamic fundamentalism of the particular to Hausaland that would give rise to such atransformation jihad. Nevertheless Maradi’s rulers have long counted themselves as only there? Fisher’s response to Porter indicates that the widespread Muslims, and the influence of Islam has been important in the incidence of pre-colonial slavery alone is not sufficient to explain Maradi region throughout both the nineteenth and twentieth contemporary patterns of seclusion in Islamic regions. This suggests centuries. Where northern Nigeria was conquered by the British in that, if we are to understand how slavery and seclusion might have the first decade of the twentieth century, Maradi fell under the been related in Hausaland, we must understand how female labor in control of the French, and the rivalry between the two colonial particular was affected by the forms of slavery found there. Third, powers has had its own imprint upon differentiating the character of what kinds of economic circumstances would make such a radical Maradi from the northern Nigeria emirates. redefinition of female duties both desirable and feasible? How was To address the question of how slavery in the Maradi region the redefinition negotiated, what pre-existing social forms and con- might have differed from slavery in the emirates we must consider structs made that redefinition possible and how did freed women the economic boom following consolidation of the Sokoto Cali-

themselves conceptualize their new position? phate after about 1812. Most of Hausaland experienced commercial

In what follows I will illustrate that, although pre-colonial slave- prosperity in the nineteenth century, as the cohesion of the holding patterns and contemporary seclusion are related, their Caliphate created an enlarged internal market. The decline of the relationship is not always as direct or as immediate temporally as European slave trade and growth of agricultural exports led to the much of the work done on this region might suggest. The extent of redirection of slaves into internal activities rather than export. Slaves

158 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

in the Caliphate were used for labor-intensive large scale enterprises hypothesize that because local norms in these regions did not including agricultural production on plantations, mining, crafts and encourage free women’s participation in agriculture, women could commerce. The central regions of the Caliphate in particular not readily be induced to enter the fields to make up the loss of slave experienced dramatic growth in the textile industry, leather manu- labor after the abolition of slavery. Free men had to take over the facturing, iron production and livestock production and benefited majority of the agricultural tasks formerly performed by slaves, and from increased demand outside the Caliphate for Hausa products.’ consequently these men adopted the iler hoe, an efficient technology Where the theocratic emirates promoted the Islamic ideal of that made extensive, low-labor-intensity farming possible. By conseclusion of women in the home, and were able to replace female trast, the limited slave use in agriculture in Maradi, in combination farm labor with the labor of captured peoples, in Maradi the with local norms encouraging free commoner women’s participation majority of the farming population consisted of free non-Muslim or in farm activities, made possible women’s continued (and indeed semi-Muslim Arna, Hausa-speaking peoples whose religion was intensified) role in agriculture after the decline of slavery. Thus the highly localized and was intimately tied to their agricultural and labor-intensive haiwa hoe is more commonly in use in Maradi than hunting activities. The non-Arna immigrants from the kingdoms of _ the iler, and women continue to be highly visible in agriculture. Gobir and Katsina defined themselves in opposition to the emirates The evidently limited incidence of rural slavery in both Adar and were more interested in returning to their lost territories thanin and Maradi suggests that the assumption in much of the literature starting to build a new agricultural base in the Maradi valley. on the Hausa that widespread agricultural slavery and slave villages, Consequently neither agricultural slavery nor female seclusion ever or rimjis, among the Hausa-speaking populations of the pre-jihad

had very wide currency in the pre-colonial Maradi kingdom. kingdoms may be overgeneralized.’* As long as the slave trade Certainly the military of Maradi engaged in slave raiding during continued, some Hausa kingdoms may have found it advantageous their numerous expeditions into emirate territories. However, the to export the majority of the slaves they captured. The aristocratic slaves taken seem not to have been destined for plantation farming class would have retained some concubines and eunuchs for domessuch as that promoted in the ribats (military outposts) and rimjis tic and administrative purposes; slaves procured by the peasant (slave villages) of the Sokoto Caliphate.® Rather, slave raiders from population would have been gradually absorbed into the household Maradi had a reputation for holding the slaves they seized only for or community of their masters. The Sokoto Caliphate, on the other

ransom. Slavery thus served largely as a source of goods for hand, found itself faced with the dual tasks of absorbing and exchange rather than for production.? While sales limited the enculturating a large conquered population while meeting defense incidence of slavery in the kingdom, they also meant that, since the needs. Slave settlements strategically placed along defensive borders nobility did not have a productive base for their income, they relied could be used to answer both needs at once and could be patterned

heavily upon taxes and arbitrary seizures of grain and other goods after the slave villages established by Fulani herders.” , from the farming population in order to subsist.'° The lack of a Without the use of slave labor to replace women in agriculture productive base also meant that continued raids and incursions into in the Maradi region, free women’s contribution to the agricultural enemy territory for booty were necessary for the maintenance of labor force was absolutely critical. In the Caliphate, one way in the aristocratic class, engaging the region in a continuous cycle of which individuals could mark their status as Muslims and loyalists raids and counter-raids that made agricultural settlements at any’ was to remove their wives and daughters from agriculture and

distance from the fortified city of Maradi highly insecure. replace them with slaves. Thus in Nigeria seclusion became associaWhile it was possible for non-aristocrats to obtain slaves, either ted with free-born status and agriculture with slavery. In the Maradi through purchase or as spoils from raids, the slaves retained seem to region, the Katsinawa immigrants insisted upon their Muslim status have been primarily female slaves set to work alongside free women __ prior to the jihad and were disinclined to be bullied into mimicking in local farming households and communities. This form of slavery the behavior of the jihadists with regard to female dress and labor, would have been quite different in character from the plantation just as the Muslim women of Borno described by Humphrey Fisher slavery of the Sokoto Caliphate, as these women could be assimi- were unwilling to adhere to strict seclusion when it was thrust upon lated into the local community over time and were understood to them involuntarily by Muslim reformists.!* As Fisher observes, ‘If be ‘kin’ and neighbors of their owners.'! Thus while slave-holding we are to weigh up, in a balanced and reasonably complete fashion, was possible at all levels of Maradi society (as in Borno), the the various factors determining the subsequent shape of a society, character of slavery there seems to have been quite different from we need to include, alongside secular and environmental elements, that which obtained in much of the Sokoto Caliphate. Because a also religious standards, and the resonance which these call forth (or limited number of slaves lived and worked in the fields alongside do not call forth, as the case may be) in the hearts and minds of local their owners, no exclusive association of agricultural labor with men and women.’ In the Maradi region to use slaves in order to slavery emerged. In the city female slaves were taken widely as con- promote seclusion and the female dress associated with it would cubines and domestic workers, while male slaves seem to have been have been to capitulate to the jihadists whom the residents of the

_ retained only by the wealthiest aristocrats who used them primarily valley had so long resisted. :

to fill administrative positions controlled by the ruling class.” The Arna farmers of the Maradi valley, for their part, initially The Hausa-speaking areas north of the Caliphate differed also took little interest in Islam one way or the other, relying instead

from both the Zerma region to the west and Damagaram to the upon the favors of local divinities associated with the earth, rain and east, both of which relied upon much larger and more conspicuous hunting. Since the Katsinawa immigrants were reliant upon the populations of slaves in farming and industry like those in Sokoto.% good will of the Arna for their security in the valley, wholesale These regions today differ from the Maradi region in the division of enslavement of this local population (even though as ‘pagans’ they labor by sex as women are not active in agriculture in either region,’ were legally enslaveable) was out of the question. In Maradi agriculand in the kinds of technologies adopted since both regions use the tural labor came to be closely associated by both rural and urban iler hoe, which is not commonly used in Maradi.% One might populations with animism and commoner status rather than with

Barbara Cooper/Slavery, Seclusion & Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the 19th & 20th Centuries * 159

slavery.’*? However the frequent and close interaction of the farmers of the burden of heavy chores, such as pounding grain, getting of the valley with the nobles, traders and artisans of the city meant water, bearing crops from the fields to the granary and collecting that over time the Arna assimilated many features of Islam into their wood. With the end of slavery those chores increasingly became the religious practice. Today both urban and rural practices are highly duty of the ‘wife’. In rural areas, where only a limited number of syncretic, rural dwellers invoking Allah and recognizing Muslim slaves had farmed alongside freeborn household members, free spirits and urban dwellers turning to spirits and Arna priests for married women also farmed, and the duties of wives and slaves were intervention in their affairs, particularly those related to love and probably indistinguishable.?” Where the high incidence of relatively

agriculture. exploitative rimji type of slavery in northern Nigeria and in the It is thus entirely possible to be a devout male Muslim farmer in French Soudan seems to account for the exodus of slaves out of

Maradi today while permitting one’s wives to participate in these regions in the aftermath of abolition,” in Maradi abolition agriculture, or to be a devout female while publicly taking part in probably had little immediate effect on most of the rural population, farming. Rural women who disdain agriculture today do so not on whether slave or free, since the conditions of life for commoners religious grounds but because they dislike the arduous labor it and slaves probably did not differ a great deal. Slave women and free entails and its association with low status. Where according to Smith women in the same rural communities would not have been easily newly freed Hausa women in Nigeria emphasized and capitalized distinguished visually, as neither slave nor free women were veiled upon their new status by entering into seclusion in the early decades or secluded. Where in the former Caliphate newly freed rimji slave _ of the century, Hausa women in Niger, as we shall see ina moment, women might choose to mark their equality with their freeborn have been retiring from agriculture in emulation of the merchant masters by taking on the seclusion and veiling of that class, in class much more recently. The abolition of slavery had very little Maradi such visual distinctions did not exist. | immediate effect in this region and did not provide a major water- In the city, however, slave and free women were more readily shed in reducing labor demands upon women or reducing female distinguishable, not because of veiling but because of their different vulnerability to servile status more generally — to the contrary, evi- duties and because of substantial differences in wealth. The leisure dence suggests that abolition and colonial rule may have exacerbated made possible by the use of female slaves enabled aristocratic the demands upon women, whether former slaves or free women. | women to spin cotton thread, a significant source of income and prestige. Aristocratic urban women had to find ways to retain or

Marriage practices, slavery and the state replace the captive domestic labor which in the past had freed them

from onerous household duties. The simplest solution, of course, In the early years of colonial administration, the status of women would have been simply to redefine the slave women as concubines and of domestic slaves was in many ways similar, and arguments for and junior wives, women whose labor could then be controlled by moving cautiously in emancipating slaves were quite similar to senior aristocratic women as senior wives and mothers-in-law. This

those advanced somewhat later advocating caution in promoting strategy was facilitated by the French colonial officers, who the rights of women. This is no coincidence, for as many scholars regarded domestic slavery as a benign form of kinship. have noted, most slaves in Africa were in fact women.”! Like wives, The replacement of unfree labor with that of junior ‘wives’ and farm slaves in Maradi worked four days a week for the ‘master’ in captive concubines depended upon a conceptual fuzziness around

the fields, and like women they did not pay taxes.22 Domestic the distinction between marriage and enslavement, a fuzziness ‘house’ slaves were seen by the French as being well treated ‘family which certainly existed and could be exploited.”” Before the ‘tying members’ and as being able to buy their freedom if they so desired. of the wedding’, the Muslim ceremony in which senior males of The lieutenant governor of the Sudan territories, referring to both the bride’s and the groom’s families met to pray and in which domestic slaves as the ‘unfree’, argued in 1899 that emancipation the bridewealth was publicly given by the groom’s representative to would lead to massive social disorder and that, since the trade in that of the bride, there was a sometimes lengthy period of betrothal. slaves had effectively ended, the government should turn a blind The groom, having made his interest known, and the bride’s family

eye to domestic slavery.’” having accepted his proposal, a ceremonial exchange known as the

The administration by 1901 found it convenient, however, to ba-iko — the giving of power — took place. The groom gave the

tax ‘unfree’ and free individuals alike and in doing so promoted the _ bride’s father a gift to signify the beginning of transfer of power over

erosion of indigenous social categories. The elimination of domes- the bride from the father to the groom.” tic slavery in the Sudan territories was nevertheless hampered by The word baiko was interchangeable with the word baiwa, which promises that had been made to local rulers in various treaties not to meant both ‘gift’ and ‘betrothal’ and differed only slightly in tone disturb local ‘usages and customs’. Furthermore the administration’s from the word for ‘female slave’, baiwa. One might say an yi masa reliance upon local notables (likely slave owners themselves) in the baiwar da ke, meaning ‘they made him a gift of you’ or ‘they made

court systems made it unlikely that the courts would truly ignore him a betrothal of you’. A girl given in marriage without a differences between the free and unfree.* In effect, French legisla- bridewealth payment was known as baiwar Allah, ‘slave of God’.*! tion freed domestic slaves without in any way enforcing their The kinship of language for marriage and for slavery was more than freedom, on the assumption that, with the passage of ttme, domestic merely superficial; for example, the primary image of marriage in slavery would die out with the new generation of free-born Hausaland as in the West is ‘tying the knot’, and the ‘rope’ to tie the children. However as one prescient administrator remarked, ‘The knot of marriage is the igiyar aure (the thread of the marriage) or entire burden of slavery, once abolition is complete, will fall directly bridewealth payment. When a marriage was broken the payment onto the shoulders of indigenous women’, who had no protections had to be returned. But the image of the rope applied equally to

and limited means of supporting themselves.” slavery: a slave woman could (at least in theory) ‘cut the rope of her

The slaves scattered widely through Maradi’s urban families in slavery’ and earn her eventual freedom by bearing her master a child the precolonial period had been numerous enough to assume much __ or by paying her master a redemption fee.”

160 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’ | All of these expressions are consistent with the hypothesis that or beat her and retain her as his wife, and in 1913 the adminiswith the decline of slavery alternative forms of ‘marriage’ could trator Villomé reported from his observations of local practice that become a means whereby men (and through them senior aristo- in general one could avoid any physical punishment by paying a cratic women) could continue to control the labor of junior fine, and that adultery was punished by a fine for the man involved - women, who were now nominally ‘free’ in status. The exchange of and “exposure to public ridicule’ for the woman.** By contrast the

gifts in marriage created ties, ties which linked together the couple 1933 report on Hausa custom claims:

and the two families but also ties intended to control the bride. It ; | ;

v : rer A) Muslims: When a woman betrays her husband a was the transfer ofboth theAmong bridewealth payment which distinguished a ; with we: ; (Co lover are condemned to death. The execution takes place legitimate marriage from a less4:formal and a ‘free’ wife fromareaburied .; in a publicunion place in the following way: the two woman whose labor could be controlled through the idiom oflovers ; , ; stone : alive up to their waists and the children of the village marriage, but there were stages to a marriage, and there wasis ;pregnant. .; . ss them. The many woman’s execution may be delayed if she much room for ambiguity. Both the legitimate wife and the conTq : Cs: ; Then she will be executed after the child is weaned. The child, cubine-were understood to be ‘tied’ in a sense to their ‘husband’. ; ; rer considered a bastard,the is turned over to between the maternal family.... The ambiguity surrounding distinctions wife and a his ;B) ,, : : Among animists: The husband has the right, without taking concubine, and between concubine and slave, made it possible for yee / casehouseholds to court, to kill his early wife’s lover.... He may repudiate his wealthy and sizeable in the colonial rule ae ae mae wife or keep her.... Ifa child is borndecades the loverofmay recognize it

to maintain concubines as extra wives’ tohis perform burdensome ;aser and the child becomes own the legitimate son.

labor of maintaining the household well after slavery had been abolished. As colonial rule continued and access to slaves from What this later document and interviews suggest is that with the elsewhere declined, evidence suggests that issues surrounding the decline of slavery and the rise of the potential influence of the control of women became more acute and were expressed in terms French administration over local practices, senior males claimed for of differences between ‘legitimate’ wives and concubines and themselves powers and sanctions which they had not had in the past between ‘Muslim’ women and non-Muslim women. Thus in 1933 concerning the marriages, labor and sexuality of nominally free a French administrative study setting out local judicial standards in junior women. Men’s right to provide ‘physical correction’ for their

the region of Maradi would report: wives, to beat captive concubines and to seek capital punishment

A legitimate wife must obey her husband. A Muslim [husband] for illicit sexual alliances would serve to limit women’s ability to

aadminister ; ; ; : : resistlight the labor and sexual demands ofiftheir masters and husbands may physical correction, but she is the daughter . and 1 chief a1: aof; and wouldhe make it more difficult for women seek protection off :the the Al’kali may not. Animist men have no right ;the ;to courts. : wr redress with their own kin or with to use corporal punishment,; :however light, upon their wives ...protections A;;; At the same time senior men attempted to secure concubine must also obey the household head. She is considered . ; a ra | ss and powers for senior aristocratic (‘Muslim’) women thatO had; not to be a captive, and he has the nght to beat her ...ofAthelegitimate ;orAf been expressed in any earlier discussions observations of wife must cook, wash clothes and clean the home of her husband. a ,

Butlocal law. The labor duties of senior legitimate wives were clearly her husband may not force her to work the fields or to ; ; .a. ; , ; ; set out (cooking, washing, and cleaning the home), their seniority collect water. A concubine, since she is treated as a captive, may b over childless women and concubines was affirmed and their e required to carry out any labor the household head requires of oy

6): control ofisfood distribution was Where even today her ... A ‘head wife’ the other woman hasestablished. been married . ; rural : --women. Muslim in factifwho frequently called uponlongest by their:;husbands of the married She can women command theare women

her; :husband '. to perform farm labor, thedo 1933 report attempted to protect urban authorizes her to so. She may be in charge of the ; distribut; : Muslim women from such heavy labor in the context of colonial istribution of grain and;food to the other wives ... The captives . ; ae laborare exactionsrequired and the rapid of agriculture. was a or concubines of; the husband toextension obey wives ; family , It; woe 43 | protection whichnot could be enforced only byhis an influential in

other than those who have children. :;

which women had never been called upon to farm in the past. It is difficult to assess the precise nature of the information Senior women, understood as older married women with children, reported here. The unknown author presented it as ‘Hausa custom’, as well as women from aristocratic families more generally, could which seemed to him to be growing in influence in the district even thus control junior female labor, which was to include both junior among the Fulani and which ‘rules the majority of natives in this wives and ‘captive’ concubines: women taken into households in subdivision’.* It is likely that it is information provided by local not- informal marriages who had no male kin to establish and protect ables to the local administrator, and one must be aware that those their marital rights. Thus while the French had a de jure policy of _ notables had an interest in establishing for the record their idealized abolishing slavery, their understanding of local marriage did not sense of how women in a household should be controlled and_ distinguish slave women from wives, and in their efforts to ordered rather than how they in fact were ordered at that time or in minimize the dislocation resulting from the abolition of slavery they the past. The caveat that, although Muslim wives could be beaten, consistently turned a blind eye to domestic servitude so long as it the daughters of the two officials most likely to have contributed to concerned only women — women who could be distinguished

the document could not would seem to underscore that likelihood. from, but at the same time assimilated to, wives.*® /

Other evidence suggests that the 1933 document codifying local With the replacement of slave labor with the labor of junior custom in fact proposed powers over women far in excess of those wives between c. 1920 and 1945, tensions between wives within a actually witnessed in Maradi in the first two decades of French household probably increased as the social order as a whole reformpresence in the region. In 1907 Landeroin (the historian for the ulated what had in the past been a distinction between free and unfree Tilho-O’Shee Mission) reported that a man whose wife committed classes into naturalized intra-household hierarchies of women. The _ adultery could repudiate her and reclaim his bridewealth payment ranking of wives could mask the friction generated by an unequal _

Barbara Cooper/Slavery, Seclusion & Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the 19th & 20th Centuries ¢ 161

division of labor as rivalry between women, seen throughout imported veil.| ~ Hausaland as inherently contentious, deceitful and ‘jealous’.*? While HJ No! No! Only the wives of elderly Muslim scholars, they’d the ranking of wives has had a long history in the Hausa kingdoms, keep them in their houses, their husbands would buy them a wawa in the early decades of this century such intra-household ranking [a large black cloth big enough to cover the body]. It was woven. facilitated the transformation of junior female wives into labor to It would be woven and sewn up, and brought to the house if it was meet the needs of senior women as wives and mothers-in-law.*° a scholar who kept his wife in seclusion. Not all women were Thus, where in Nigeria the abolition of slavery meant among secluded, just the wife of the Limam and Al’kali [Muslim clerics]. other things that some women may have chosen to take on the In the town ... But today it’s very common, albarka [blessings and seclusion of free Muslim women, in Maradi, where slavery had prosperity] has set in. Back then, not at all! Women would farm,

been limited to small-scale holdings in rural areas but could be you'd go out back and kill yourself with work, women did significant in the households of urban families, the loss of access to pounding and they'd do farm work ... and you'd grind things slave women meant in effect that many ‘married’ women found with stones by hand ... you'd get water, and seasonings from the themselves in ambiguous polygynous marriages, subject to the bush. There wasn’t meat. (Interview, 13 Apr. 89) commands of other women and burdened with the tasks of former Hajjiya Jeka herself associates the practice of veiling with slaves. One indirect consequence, therefore, of the abolition of increasing seclusion and reports that when she was a girl both were slavery in this region may have been a climate in which polygyny _ limited to the wives of certain prominent men. She spontaneously became more important to male status. In the times of Sarki Kure moves from speaking about the increase in seclusion to describing and Sarki Kollodo (from 1900 to 1946) the numbers of women in changes in the kind of labor women have been called upon to the royal household approached the hundreds. Sarki Labo of Tibiri perform. When Hajjya Jeka remarks that today veiling and seclusion had 25 wives at the time of his death in 1963.4! With the growth of are common because albarka has ‘set in’, she appeals to a local the economy and the increasing prestige associated with Islamic cultural association which has both encouraged and sanctioned the polygyny, what had in the early decades of the century been inter- growth of seclusion: the perceived blessings upon the Maradi preted as rights to limitless polygyny among the aristocracy shifted region and its newfound prosperity are associated with increased to successive Islamic polygyny among a broader segment of the commerce in the region, a commerce dominated by non-aristopopulation than simply the aristocratic class: many wealthy male cratic merchants with very close ties to traders in Nigeria. With the traders in the city of Maradi from the 1930s to the 1950s reputedly growth of trade and of the new merchant class, both the wealth of began taking numerous wives over their lifetimes in sets of four ina the region as a whole and the potential leisure of women within it

kind of inflated serial polygyny.” , have grown. Wealthy traders have increasingly kept their wives in

‘With the increasing incidence of ambiguous and semi-legitimate seclusion, and women themselves have occasionally preferred a marriages prior to about 1945, women could assert their status as secluded marriage to a marriage leaving them more mobility. legitimate wives rather than concubines or de facto captives through This relatively recent adoption of seclusion in urban areas, a variety of means. As I discuss in detail elsewhere, women could _ particularly since the peanut boom beginning in the 1950s, seems to use the ceremonial gift exchanges around weddings to state the formal have resulted from a combination of economic and cultural factors. marital status of the bride and the wealth of the bride and her mother.* With the growth in the economy the region has been drawn As the century progressed, another means through which women increasingly into the ambit of northern Nigeria because of the could assert their status as legitimate wives was to counter their strength of the Nigerian transport, credit and market infrastructures. reduced status in polygynous marriages by asserting visually their Male traders, influenced by the Islamic practices well documented seniority and authority by donning the clothing of secluded aristocratic for northern Nigeria, have adopted the marriage patterns of their women. This sartorial strategy was inextricably linked to a complex patrons in Kano and Katsina. As Maradi shifted from a military

dynamic promoting the rise of seclusion in the urban center. center to an administrative, trade and agricultural center, the prolonged resistance to the reformed Islam of the Caliphate gradually

. . lost its meaning. In the context of subdued resistance to colonial rule Seclusion and prosperity the cultural and linguistic ties between Hausa speakers on either side Because neither polygyny nor seclusion have been systematically of the Niger—Nigeria border tended to erode the pre-colonial investigated or recorded in this region, it is not possible to provide Opposition between the two regions. Later as non-Hausa speaking statistical figures on the growth of these institutions. Oral evidence ethnic groups threatened the position of Hausa speakers in both the of their expansion gives some indication of the ways in which that independent nations of Nigeria and Niger, again. linguistic and erowth has been understood locally, however. In the course of a cultural commonalities began to overshadow the history of conflict discussion of various kinds of cloth, one elderly aristocratic woman, between the former emirates and Maradi. Thus the religious and Haijjiya Jeka (HJ), suggested to me (BC) that prior to c.1940 veiling cultural resistance to seclusion and veiling characteristic of the

and seclusion were very limited: Maradi region eventually disappeared. ,

In practical terms the seclusion so common in Nigeria became BC When you were a girl did women ‘wrap themselves up’ in _ possible in Maradi partly as a consequence of the transfer of the city

veils? from the valley to the plateau in 1945. Immediately after the city

HJ Oh, no, there weren’t any veils back then. Oh no! You’d was moved, women could no longer simply go to nearby wells just wear a head scarf, if you had some cloth woven and there outside the city walls to obtain water but had a long and strenuous was a little bit left over you’d have it made into a scarf, using the trek down into the valley. Thus one of the first priorities in the re-

little scraps, you’d have them sewn together to make a head located city was to provide neighborhood water pumps. The

scarf. Back then there were no veils, not at all. availability of piped water in the new city after 1950 made the

BC So you didn’t have that kind of veil? [Indicating a sheer seclusion of urban women possible, and as individual households

162 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’ 7 gradually piped water into their homes, more and more households This linkage makes it difficult for women to embrace one portion

could avoid sending married women to obtain water. of albarka without accepting the limitations it seems to imply for

Other conveniences, such as locally produced and marketed them at the same time. Where women in Nigeria, with the benefit peanut oil and gas-powered mills to grind the staple grains, reduced of a longstanding tradition of Islamic education for women and a the workload of women who could afford to pay for them. These sense that seclusion is to be associated with their status as free kinds of products and services, from a flourishing market in cooked’ Muslim women, have at least the foundation for defining the foods, wood, and water to commercial services such as laundering appropriate behavior for Muslim women and the character of and milling, make it possible for women to free up part of their time seclusion from within Islam,‘?7 women in Maradi have taken on for income-generating activities. However, purchasing such goods seclusion as part of a local understanding of prosperity, leisure and and services can be costly, and few women can afford them on their — rank that is little informed by religion. own. By acquiescing to seclusion women place the burden of such costs upon their husbands, who must in principle provide for their Conclusion wives’ needs and make it possible for them to remain inside the

compound. Middle-aged women often remark that the most In this paper I have used the Maradi region as a case study to important difference between their lives and those of their mothers illustrate the complexity of the relationship between the incidence

in the old town is that their mothers had been burdened with and character of indigenous pre-colonial slavery and the rise of ‘work’. Although these women are in fact extremely busy with Islamic seclusion in the colonial and postcolonial periods. I have occupations of their own, they distinguish the laborious tasks their shown that contemporary patterns of female labor in agriculture and

mothers routinely performed (aiki) from the economic activities limited seclusion do not necessarily stem from the absence of (sana’a) they themselves perform, the proceeds from which they agricultural slavery in the pre-colonial period but rather are due to personally retain. Ironically, it is women’s tacit approval of seclusion — the limited incidence of large-scale rimji slavery in the region and to

which frees them up to engage actively in the market on their own. the resistance of the immigrant Katsinawa aristocrats to the Islamic

As the anthropologist Guy Nicolas noted in the late 1960s, reforms of the Sokoto Caliphate. The abolition of slavery under seclusion and polygyny have grown in larger rural agglomerations in colonial rule in itself did not mark a watershed in the rise of the Maradi region as well, particularly those in which trade and seclusion but rather triggered a series of reformulations of marriage

Islamic scholarship flourish. Nicolas remarked that here, too, and the female hierarchy. |

seclusion is often well received by women, as it frees them from The use of slaves in the region to relieve labor demands upon farm labor and provides them (at least in theory) with leisure to set urban aristocratic women meant that with the abolition of slavery up a trade. These secluded women are set apart from other rural women formerly held as slaves became junior wives in new patterns women as extraordinary, as seclusion outside the urban center of of marriage. These semi-legitimate and legitimate polygynous

Maradi is far from the norm: according to Nicolas, marriages permitted wealthier men and women to guarantee that

; ; ae ;see senior of the aristocratic and merchant classes would not If many men in women this new institution keeping :; ave to performa themeans arduous tasksof of pounding grain and h gathering

women from the fields, women themselves take advantage of it d and water. The colonial state. torn between its conflicti

to gain access to :anaeenhanced situation whichand tends imperial to transform vole turned ane ve en 7° aera acer emancipator power, a blind eye to them as a group into aroles kind as of privileged ‘class’. . as .* | these veilin Fl nthe | f maintain; gs of slavery in the interests of maintaining order.

Nicolas exaggerates the benefits of seclusion, neglecting to note that Vulnerable women countered the dangers of ambiguous marriages not all women manage to set up a trade and that for urban women by asserting their worth through wedding gifts to the groom’s seclusion limits the kinds of trade into which they can enter; family and later by adopting the sartorial practices of free Muslim certainly the suggestion that men see seclusion as a means of limit- women in Nigeria. ing women’s access to farmland should give us pause. Female Both men and women have contributed to the relatively recent seclusion has, particularly recently, served as a locus of contestation growth of seclusion in this region. Male traders with ties to between rural men and women over both female labor and northern Nigerian commercial centers have adopted the marital women’s access to land: women may acquiesce to seclusion in order seclusion of their Nigerian patrons, reversing a century and a half of

to limit the demands upon their labor only to find that their resistance to the same practice seen as Islamic reforms of the Sokoto husbands interpret their dependent status as justification for denying Caliphate. Seclusion was made practicable by the availability of them their traditional usufruct rights to land through marriage. piped water and services provided to women in their compounds. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that, as Margaret Saunders Women have acquiesced to seclusion in order to reduce labor has observed elsewhere, ‘despite their air of male dominance, both demands upon them and to gain access to the leisure time which polygyny and seclusion clearly reduce a wife’s workload’ and are enables them to conduct trade from within their homes. Thus the seen as desirable by many women.** Women who do not have rise of seclusion in Maradi did not derive from a unilateral decision access to primary sector employment and state salaries have a strong on the part of newly freed women to adopt seclusion as a sign of interest in the continuation of seclusion and polygyny both to © status, as M. G. Smith’s analysis would predict, but has resulted from alleviate the demands of domestic labor and to facilitate remarriage, a series of redefinitions, contestations and renegotiations of marriage a reality of life in Niger which makes it difficult for women as a in which both men and women have been active. group to come to any consensus about whether and how to reform

marital practice legally. Notes Thus new conveniences such as wells and mills, polygyny, ‘Gina Porter, ‘A note on slavery, seclusion and agrarian change in

seclusion, women’s leisure trades and regional prosperity are all con- Northern Nigeria’, J. Afr. Hist., xxx (1989), 487-9; Humphrey J. Fisher, ceptually linked in the prosperity (albarka) lauded by Hajjiya Jeka. ‘Slavery and seclusion in Northern Nigeria: a further note’, J. Afr. Hist.,

Barbara Cooper/Slavery, Seclusion & Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the 19th & 20th Centuries * 163

xxx1 1 (199 1), 123-35. strates that slaves played a significant role in the administration, military,

2M. G. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Mary F. Smith, Baba of Karo, a Woman of mining, trade and agriculture of nineteenth-century Damagaram; Le the Muslim Hausa (New Haven, 1981), 22-3; first published in 1954 by Damagaram ou le Sultanat de Zinder au XIXe siécle (Niamey, 1971). Captain Faber & Faber. The passage is regularly cited in discussions of seclusion; Landeroin also noted that there seemed to be more slaves in the Kanuri

for example, Porter cites this passage at a key moment in her argument, area of Damagaram than in the Hausa-speaking areas of the Niger ‘Note’, 489; it is cited by Barbara Callaway in her discussion of rural territory; ‘Notice historique’, 522. For a full discussion of slavery in kulle, Muslim Hausa Women in Nigeria (Syracuse, 1987), 59, and by Damagaram, see Roberta Ann Dunbar, ‘Slavery and the evolution of Margaret Strobel in her discussion of the adoption of purdah in East nineteenth-century Damagaram’, in S. Miers and I. Kopytoff (eds.),

Haven, 979), 74. 155-77.

African coastal society, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890-1975 (New Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977),

3 Callaway in fact found that male informants in Kano suggested that ' Women in the Zerma-speaking west may help at planting but do not

newly freed men might have supported their wives’ movement into srow their own millet; they may produce some condiments or seclusion as a sign of their own status; Muslim Hausa Women, 59. vegetables; Fatoumata-Agnes Diarra, Femmes africaines en devenir, les

4 For an excellent review of the state of the literature on this subject, see femmes zarma du Niger (Paris, 1971), 104. Similarly women in the Hausa-

R. Roberts and S. Miers, “The end of slavery in Africa’, in Suzanne Kanuri region of Damagaram do not hoe but may help at planting and Miers and Richard Roberts (eds), The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, harvest and may have small garden plots; however, Margaret Saunders

1988), 3-68. suggests that women may have hoed in the recent past. M. Saunders,

> This work is based upon oral interviews and archival research conducted ‘Marriage and divorce in a Muslim Hausa town (Mirria, Niger)’ (Ph.D.

in Niger and France and funded through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral thesis, Indiana University, 1978), 7-8. Research Abroad Fellowship in Niger and France in 1988-9. Earlier ‘For detailed discussions of the agricultural technologies in use in Niger drafts have been substantially reworked as a result of the remarks and see Raulin, Techniques, 98-9, and H. Raulin, “Techniques agraires et questions of David Geggus, Steve Feierman and Joseph Miller. I am, of instruments aratoires au sud du Sahara’, Cahiers ORSTOM, xx (1984),

course, responsible for any errors which remain. 339-58. For the Maradi region see Claude Raynaut, ‘Outils agricoles de

6 For a discussion of the role of these ‘plantations’ in the Caliphate, see la région de Maradi (Niger)’, Cahiers ORSTOM, xx (1984), 505-36. Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Plantations in the economy of the Sokoto Caliphate’, J. '* Mervyn Hiskett, for example, argues from evidence in the mid-

Afr. Hist., xix (1978), 341-68. nineteenth century and from the poetry of the Fulani reformers that pre-

7 Lovejoy, ‘Plantations’, 347; Mahdi Adamu, The Hausa Factor in West jihad society practiced plantation slavery, despite citing Polly Hill’s

African History (London, 1978), 185-6. objections to the generalization that plantation farming was widespread

8 Informants in Maradi associated slavery with warfare (Hajjiya Rabe, 1 in Hausaland; The Development of Islam in West Africa (London, 1984), 97-

Feb. 1989); although the aristocratic class did have farm slaves (Hajjiya 100. He uses the Kano Chronicle to argue for the existence of slave Jeka, 14 Feb. 1989), most captives seem to have been absorbed into the villages in pre-jihad Hausaland, but this source on its own is not very administration. Commoner women were often seized at will by the compelling evidence as it reflects post-jihad inventions: ‘Enslavement, aristocratic warriors, in their own territories as well as in enemy slavery and attitudes towards the legally enslaveable in Hausa Islamic territories (Hajjiya Indo, 25 Oct. 1989; Fatchima, 5 Feb. 1989). literature’, in Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, 107. ° Thus Baba remarks that, unlike some other slave raiders, the Maradawa 1 The word rimji, which is used in Hausa to refer to slave village/ gave up slaves for ransom. Mary Smith, Baba, 47, see also 38-9, 46-7. plantations, is Fulani in origin, set in contrast to the ruma, or the Fulani Landeroin emphasizes that domestic slaves were better integrated into the master’s cattle encampment, as in the proverb: sai ruga ta kwana lafiya,

household than trade slaves but also notes that prior to the French rimji ke kwana lafiya (Only when the master sleeps well does the slave occupation the court dignitaries who had greatest access to slaves took sleep well); see R. C. Abraham, Dictionary of the Hausa Language, little interest in agriculture or commerce. Captain Landeroin, ‘ Du Tchad (London, 1962), 84, 742. Jan Hogendorn cites a slave song which au Niger: notice historique’, Documents scientifiques de la mission Tilho, reconfirms the association of rimji slavery with the Fulani; “The 1906-1909 (3 vols.) (Paris, 1911), 1, 518, 536. Périé noted the high value economics of slave use on two ‘plantations’ in the Zaria Emirate of the of slaves on the market, especially women; Jean Périé, ‘Notes historiques Sokoto Caliphate’, Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies, x (1977), 382. Polly Hill sur la région de Maradi (Niger)’, Bulletin de PIFAN, 1 (1939), 394-5. emphasizes the difference between the ‘Hausa’ form of farm slavery, in Djibo Hamani suggests that in Adar a similar phenomenon obtained: which private farmers own and work alongside a small number of slaves, slaves were easily ransomed, and the slave population was concentrated and the more ‘Fulani’ system of large plantations owned by absentee among the Tuareg. Some slaves were to be found in the homes of the aristocrat and merchant farmers and shows that the vocabulary of the rimji aristocracy, but in general slaves made up only a small percentage of the form comes primarily from Fulfulde; ‘Slavery systems’, 36, 40. sedentary population. Djibo Hamani, Contribution a Vétude de l’histoire des _'® Fisher, ‘Slavery and seclusion’, 132. '° Fisher, “Slavery and seclusion’, 132-3. états hausa: l’Adar précolonial (République du Niger) (Niamey, 1975), 227-8. 7° Today in Maradi small rural farmers speak of farming as their ‘heritage’

10 M. G. Smith, ‘A Hausa kingdom: Maradi under Dan Baskore 1854— (gado) and may remark with some pride that all they know is farming, 1875’, in D. Forde (ed.), West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century while larger urban farmers see farming as only part of a diversified range

(London, 1967), 118; Landeroin, ‘Notice historique’, 536. of income generating activities. For a comparative discussion of Arna and ‘1 T am here echoing Polly Hill’s discussion of the range of slave use patterns Katsinawa understandings of farming see Nicolas, Dynamique sociale, in Nigeria; see Polly Hill, “Comparative West African farm slavery systems’, 279-99, 413-18. in J. R. Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (2 vols.) (Ottowa, 7! C. Robertson and M. Klein, ‘Women’s importance in African slave 1985), ii, 45. Slave use patterns in Maradi probably resembled those in systems’, in Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds.), Women and

Borno; see Fisher’s citation of Nachtigal, ‘Slavery and seclusion’, 125. Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1983), 3-6. Roberts and Miers, ‘End of

'2 Guy Nicolas reports that among the non-aristocratic farmers of the valley Slavery’, 21. Female slaves were used in production and could also serve

there still exist joking relations between the lineages of former slaves and important reproductive functions.

their former masters; among the ‘dynastic’ urban class the evidence of * Landeroin, ‘Notice historique’, 518. former slave ownership even among commoners persists in the memory ™* Archives d’Outre Mer (Aix-en-Provence, France), microfilm of AOF of female ancestors who had been taken into the homes of urban dwellers documents (hereafter designated AOM) 1191 KI 5 Letter from Lt. Gov. as concubines. Guy Nicolas, Dynamique sociale et appréhension du monde au du Soudan Frangais to the Gouverneur Général de l AOF, 15 Sept. 1899.

sein d’une société hausa (Paris, 1975), 77, 179, 213. The French were not alone in fearing catastrophe if emancipation were

'S Henri Raulin argues that the Zerma used slaves in agriculture to a greater to proceed too quickly. Lugard and his successors in Northern Nigeria

degree than the Hausa of Niger, who were less averse to performing used legal and tax reforms to eliminate slavery gradually rather than

physical labor; Techniques et bases socio-économiques des sociétés rurales du eradicate it immediately; see Jan Hogendorn and Paul Lovejoy, ‘The

Niger occidental et central (Niamey, 1964), 98-9. André Salitou demon- reform of slavery in early colonial Northern Nigeria’, in Miers and

164 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

works in the same volume. ,

Roberts (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa, 391-414, as well as other ~

Cercle, 1 Feb. 1901. ° ° Général de PAOF to the Ministre des Colonies [1903]. _

** AOM 1191 K 15 Circular from Délegué Ponty to Commandants de Vi C TO K | A B E K N A L

Poulet, 1905.

*° AOM 1911 K 16 ‘Rapport sur Vesclavage: enquéte’, from Gouverneur Gender, Cu ltu re & Capital Ism

> AOM 1192 K17 ‘Enquéte sur l’esclavage en AOF’, l’Administrateur VV/omen &F the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ 77 Rural wives were expected to perform all the arduous tasks of a slave, 1M @ Sudanes e Village

and issues of control of labor probably centered less on slave versus free = —

status than upon men’s control of women as wives. Thus on the eve of Reference dignitary to the suggestion that mills would one day reduce the labor of Comparative Studies in Society & History, 1994, Vol. 36, No. 1: women; “La femme qui travaille n’a pas le temps ni le désir de tromper 36-67

colonial rule in the region Landeroin would report the response of a local . oo, ; ; .

son €poux!’; “Notice Historique’, 474 (face).

*® See Richard Roberts, ‘The end of slavery in the French Soudan, | 1905-1914’, in Miers and Roberts (eds), The End of Slavery in Africa,

282-307, and Hogendorn and Lovejoy, ‘Reform’, 396. Have women in Third World societies been made second-class * The conceptual and functional kinship of marriage and enslavement has citizens by colonialism, incorporation into the capitalist world been remarked upon by others and arises in part because men of limited economy, and class formation? Or are women relegated to less means could marry by obtaining a slave as wife and in part because prestigious and less economically rewarding roles by patriarchal captive women and their offspring were often integrated into households ! deoloc; d ., h 7 f which lie in ind; as the wives and children of the owner. See for example, Igor Kopytoff CO'OSles and Pp ractices the origins OF which ile in indigenous and Suzanne Miers, ‘African “slavery” as an institution of marginality’, in cultures? Much of the anthropological scholarship on women can Miers and Kopytoff (eds), Slavery in Africa, 65~7. In Borno slaves served be divided between those who emphasize the relative importance of as wives to men who lacked the social and monetary means to obtain a__ capitalism (for example, Leacock 1981; Nash and Femandez-Kelly

full wife; Fisher, ‘Slavery and seclusion’, 128. 1983; Boserup 1970) and those who emphasize culture (for

* Abraham, Dictionary, 947. ; ; ;

°° Guy Nicolas, Don rituel et échange marchand dans une société sahelienne (Paris, example, Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Schlegel 1990; Rosaldo 1986). * For the words baiko and baiwa, see Abraham, Dictionary, 59-60. 1974) as determinants of gender roles and relations.

33outumes «C ; ; ,;Haoussa 4: In few areas of scholarship hasCoutumier the viewJuridique that culture et Peul (Cercle de Maradi) 1933’, - 5 4: is ; ; the de V’A.O.E. (Paris, 1939), iii, 281-3. overriding determinant of women’s lives so predominated as in the

34 “Coutumes Haoussa et Peul’, 263. °° Landeroin, ‘Notice historique’, 515. Case of North Africa and the Middle East. Islamic culture is often

°° Archives Nationales du Niger (hereafter ANN), 14 Jan. 1912, ‘Mono- perceived as somehow frozen in place where women are congraphie du Lieutenant Villomé,1913’. *7 Coutumes Haoussa et Peul’, 292. cerned. Friedl, for example, sees Iranian women as constrained by

°° Complicity between the colonial administration and the male aristocracy vestigial traditions: : concerning female slavery occurred in northern Nigeria as well. See Paul

Lovejoy, ‘Concubinage and the status of women slaves in early colonial Women have a lot of free time at hand and few acceptable ways

Northern Nigeria’, J. Afr. Hist., xxix (1988), 245-66. of spending it productively because the parameters of good

* The words for ‘co-wife’ and ‘jealous rivalry’ are the same — ’kishiya — and conduct are still defined by the traditional, now dysfunctional,

Hausa folklore depicts co-wives as irrational and violent and women labor-divided mixed agricultural production ethic (1981:16). generally as naturally divisive and cunning. Stories from B. L. Edgar’s

collection of Hausa Folktales echo these beliefs about women: co-wives And Fatima Mernissi (1985:218) asks, “Why is the very dynamic regularly attack one another irrationally, often with magic (i, nos. 10,30); Arab world so static when it comes to sex roles?’! Observers of they are a constant source of trouble between men (i, nos. 40, 67, 148); North African and Middle Eastern societies generally see Islam as the quality of jealousy in a wife is worse than stealing or unbridled jy. primary determinant of women’s status and the obstacle to social

sexuality (i, no. 120). B. L. na Tatsuniyoyi na Hausa (Edind ‘c chbenefit hich michtwomen. benefit Thus. burgh, 1924), vol. i. Edgar, | andLitafi economic changes which might us,f for

© Usman ’dan Fodio’s followers, who had no quarrel with slavery itself, example, the author of a recent review article on women and cited this ranking of wives as evidence of the non-Islamic nature of the development dismisses out of hand the suggestion that institutions Hausa kingdoms. Mervyn Hiskett, ‘Kitab al Farq’, Bulletin of SOAS, xxii be developed to protect the interests of rural Egyptian women, (1960), 567, 578. However, circumstances since the jihad have not asking, ‘But how can they when the Islamic cultural ideal for tended to eliminate it either in northern Nigeria or in Niger. women is now participation in public life?’ (Glazer 1991:14).

. Hajjiya Jeka, 12 Feb. 1989. . This perspective, which I call Islamic determinism, stems largely Where none of my oldest informants mentioned problems concerning ¢.4m the misapprehension of Islam, as well as from the failure to serial polygyny, women married from about 1945 on have often described ] Islami 1 d 1 ‘thin historical and terial marriages which ended because their husbands took on new wives and Place fslamic cultures adequately within historical and materia divorced previous wives to remain within the limits prescribed by Islam. CONtexts. This article aims to enrich our understanding of gender In rural areas serial polygamy following the more familiar pattern of and religion in the Muslim world through identifying connections

successive marriages to only one woman occasionally occurs. among religious transformations, gender relations, and the integra* “Women’s Worth and Wedding Gift Exchange’ (paper presented at tion of Muslim communities into the capitalist world system. The a Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Seattle, Nov. 1992). first part advances general arguments about the cultural construction

One of the features of life in the new town which particularly struck of Islam and the world economy. It argues that the contemporary women informants was the ready availability of water; in the old town Islamic revival should be seen as a facet of modernity, rather than

good water was to be found only in three wells outside the city. See h F tradit; Th d hich. d d

Philippe David, Maradi: ancien état et V’ancienne ville (Niamey, 1964), 144, te Tesurgence of tradition. 1 he second part, which, draws on clata

‘° Nicolas, Dynamique sociale,181. 4 Saunders, ‘Women’s role’, 70. from field work in 1980 to 1982 and in 1988 in a northern Sudan-

47 See Callaway, Muslim Hausa Women, 55-68. ese village (Wad al Abbas), explores the ways in which economic

Victoria Bernal/Women & the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village ¢ 165

development is associated with new understandings of what it traditional patterns and the elimination of alien influences’ (Austin means to be a Muslim as well as with new cultural constructions of 1983:45). This may be the case in some social contexts. In other

gender. contexts, however, Islamic revival is a misnomer that masks the degree to which embracing orthodox? or fundamentalist? Islam

The cultural construction of Islam constitutes a break with tradition for many Muslims.

Understanding Islamic fundamentalism as an expression of If scholarship on women has achieved anything over the last two modernity rather than tradition yields insights into its powerful decades, it is the recognition that gender is not a given but is appeal and draws attention to the social and economic processes historically and socially constructed according to particular local associated with its spread. It is only when Islamic fundamentalism is realities. In the case of Muslim women, Islam generally is seen as the recognized as a facet of modernity that we can understand, for primary agent of their definition. Many scholars of women in instance, why its earliest and strongest proponents, in many societies Islamic society partly define their mission as one of debunking are urban and educated (Mernissi 1987: xviii; Munson 1988: 107; orientalist stereotypes of Muslim women — whether as erotic harem Riad 1990). Modernity, in the era of postmodernism, is itself a girls or as obedient wives. Yet this scholarship itself is shaped by contested, ambiguous term (Turner 1990); here it refers to the orientalist views of Islam as a timeless, monolithic, rigid system. process of incorporation into the nation-state and the capitalist According to the Orientalist view, ‘Islam does not develop, and world economy. These processes are multi-faceted, involving transneither do Muslims; they merely are’ (Said 1978:317). There are formations not only of societal institutions but also of identities. underlying assumptions that Islam is doctrine and that doctrine Central to the individual’s experience of modernity is participation defines people’s lives. Western and Middle Eastern feminists alike in social life, organized to a significant extent by people, instituseem to have fallen unwitting prey to the orientalist truism that tions, and processes based outside the kin group and immediate Islam is about texts, rather than about people (Said 1978:305). Thus, community. Technological developments in transportation, commuch of the debate concerning women in Islamic societies focuses munication, and media (especially forms accessible to non-literates) on interpretations of classical texts such as the Qu’ran, the Hadith, have altered the character of social relations on a global scale and Islamic laws (shari’a) (for example, El Saadawi 1982; Hassan (Giddens 1991). Contemporary Islamic fundamentalism arises out 1987; Smith and Haddad 1982). If textual meanings are situatedina of, and is nurtured by, these conditions. The conditions of historical context at all, too often it is that of early Islam (for modernity, moreover, distinguish contemporary trends within Islam

example, Mernissi 1991; Stowasser 1984). from Islamic movements of past eras.

The ahistorical model of a text-driven society distorts our under- The common assumption that modernity requires westernizastanding of how Muslim women and men actually live and obscures tion and secularization has led scholarly and popular observers to the processes through which Islamic traditions are invented and view Islamic fundamentalism as inherently traditional. Religion,

transformed. Rather than being immutable, Islam continues to be however, is not disappearing even from such post-industrial renegotiated under changing historical circumstances (Gilsenan societies as the United States; and religious fundamentalism is a

1982). As Eickelman and Piscatori point out; global phenomenon not limited to Muslims (Sahliyeh 1990). Eternal religious truths, like other beliefs,aearee perceived, underSec anism not the inexorably supplanting religion. What appears to happening, instead, is isthat content of religious beliefs and the

stood, transmitted by persons historically situated in fIn F the; re “a:and ; : orms of their expression are changing. the ;case

of Islam, the

imagined’ communities, who knowingly or inadvertently con- val is not 7 ; nthe religiosity of Musli

tribute to the reconfiguration or reinterpretation of these hed 8 BO velon of x lie EASE rs © FEMS wal c. hore oF - verities, even as their fixed and unchanging natures are affirmed. in their sed belief °. len ee rat a nin b OFms 0 he. SP ve (1990: 20). : practice and belief,| roots identified as truly Islamic because they have in the holy texts, are gaining ascendancy, while other Islamic Once we recognize the fluidity and malleability of Islam, the practices are on the wane. This reconfiguration of religious practice notion that Islam determines women’s position in society becomes and belief is connected to the socio-economic transformations meaningless. (In fact, Islamic beliefs and practices may themselves be taking place in the Muslim world.*

governed at times by gender relations, as women and men Up to now, much of the Muslim world has not lived solely

understand their faith differently and engage in divergent religious according to text-based understandings of Islam. This is evident in acts.) Just as gender is socially constructed and reconstructed yet the social and religious practices of Muslims in Malaysia (Ong 1990) somehow always appears primordial and constant, Islam is re- and in Madagascar (Lambek 1990), for example. Antoun (1989),

invented to. meet new needs. among others, recognizes this fact when he speaks of the ‘Islami-

cization process’ within Muslim societies. Gellner (1981) sees the

Islamic revival and the world economy tension between urban, literate, orthodox Islam, and ‘tribal hetero-

In many societies around the world, Islam is taking on new mean-_ doxy’ as a major feature of Muslim societies. However, such notions ings as Muslims assert the centrality of Islam in public and private as urban orthodoxy versus tribal heterodoxy, big tradition versus life (Goldberg 1991; Antoun and Heglund 1987; el-Guindi 1981; little tradition, or orthodox versus popular Islam capture neither the Voll 1983; Keddie 1986). This trend has been labelled the revival or syncretic dynamism of Islamic discourse and practice nor the extent resurgence of Islam — terms suggesting that this is essentially a return to which scripturalist interpretations and vernacular understandings to an Islamic way of life, an assertion of tradition. And this is how are socially constructed and contested. That which constitutes most scholars have approached it. As one typically puts it, “The orthodoxy is not fixed and is perceived differently by different resurgence is a genuine movement of ordinary people who in their social actors (Ibrahim 1989; Holy 1991). Many conditions have insecurity turn back to the old religion’ (Watt 1983: 6). Another contributed to diversity within Islam. Throughout much of their writes that Islamic revival means ‘the restoration of original and history, Muslims in different communities were cut off from each

166 © Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’ | other to a considerable extent. Communication between the reaffirmation of national identity ... in the idiom of a revitalized centers of religious learning and believers in the hinterlands was Islam, a rejection of values perceived as “Western” and alien to the much more difficult than it is today, and the holy texts have been nation’s needs.’ Similarly, Antoun (1989: 237) states that Islamic inaccessible to the many illiterate and scmi-literate Muslims. Local fundamentalism is ‘driven by outrage at Western cultural and history and culture thus contribute to the religious practices and economic penetration.’ In this view, Islamic fundamentalism gains beliefs of Muslims around the world. The line between custom and its meaning from what it is not. But, in adopting fundamentalist

Islam often is ambiguous. , beliefs and practices, Muslims are not simply reacting against the As a result, the scripturalist/fundamentalist versions of Islam that West; they are following a course of action with its own inherent

predominate in the current Islamic revival are new to many meaning. Muslims. It is, therefore, a mistake to equate fundamentalism with For Sudanese and for many third-world Muslims, Saudi Arabia unchanging tradition or to assume that fundamentalist Islam repre- (and to a lesser extent the other wealthy Gulf states) are sources of sents the expression of authentic identity for all Muslims. Indeed, as ideological and cultural influence as well as centers of economic and the Sudanese case discussed here illustrates, fundamentalist Islamic political power. Malaysian Muslims, for example, learn much about

influences are as likely to be foreign as they are authentic or Saudi perspectives through the media, and Malay pilgrims are indigenous. Nor do all fundamentalist practices necessarily have ‘predisposed to absorb the symbols, feelings, and ideas prevalent in roots in Islamic texts. Some practices introduced as orthodox in the Arabia’ and to be ‘good Muslims’ by emulating Saudi Arabian context of the revival are essentially novel, contemporary Islamic practice (McDonnell 1990: 117, 118).5 As the home of Mecca, site creations. One notable example is so-called Islamic dress for of the pilgrimage (hajj), Saudi Arabia has long exerted influence women, which entails innovation in both form and use (Keddie over Islamic practice. Today, Saudi influence extends well beyond 1990; MacLeod 1991; Hyab 1988; Cantori 1990; Ahmed 1992). the hajj. Since the oil boom of the 1970s, many Muslims travel to Islamic fundamentalists, thus, are not so much reasserting past Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for other than religious reasons — they go practices as contesting prevailing Islamic traditions and creating new as migrant workers.® Saudi influence also is transmitted through ones. In Sudan, for example, Islam was first spread by Sufi holy men Saudi-owned Islamic banks, private investment, and Saudi govern-

and has flourished there through Sufi orders for the last five ment funding of religious organizations, schools, and mosques centuries (Al Shahi 1983; Kheir 1987). As one Sudanese scholar around the world. In some ways, the incorporation of poorer writes, ‘the intellectual austerity of orthodox teaching has always Muslim populations into the Western-dominated capitalist world paled beside the emotional vigor and vitality of the Sufi orders’ system is mediated through this regional power center. (This may (Riad 1990:40). Ordinary Muslims in Sudan look to the shaykhs be particularly true for Muslims in a poor country, such as Sudan, , (holy men) of their order for help in many matters and pray at the which neighbors the Gulf.) tombs of dead shaykhs. Fundamentalists, however, hold that In this context, the Islamic revival is not a return to tradition nor veneration of holy men, alive or dead, contradicts Islam’s essential simply a rejection of the West. Fundamentalism may, among other monotheism. Fundamentalism, then, is hardly a return to tradition things, express resistance to Western domination. But Islamic funfor Sudanese but, in fact, expresses a rupture in the established social damentalism is much more than a reaction, it embraces a positive

and religious order. identity and, for many Muslims like those I knew in Wad al Abbas, a

In Sudan, fundamentalism also is transforming rather than vision of prosperity and civilization more compatible with their own reinforcing the traditional political order, as the decentralized socio- identities and culture than the West can offer. The rise of Islamic political system of the Islamic shaykhs and political parties rooted in fundamentalism is not a reaction against change, but change itself. the Sufi brotherhoods is challenged by the formation of a central- By recognizing the dynamic nature of Islamic tradition and by ized Islamic state. As Voll (1986: 174) points out, revivalists are pro- situating religious ideology and practice in the context of the world posing radical change in the socio-political order. We, thus, cannot economy, we are able to see the relationship of religion and gender accept at face value the idea that fundamentalists are champions of in Muslim societies in a more revealing light. The following case tradition (even if cultural actors themselves make such claims). study illuminates some of the complex transformations in gender For many Muslims, like the Sudanese, new, scripturalist under- relations and religion taking place in one Muslim community. standings of Islam are part of the process of their incorporation into the world system. The world system gives rise not only to new Gender, culture and capitalism in Wad al Abbas material relations but also to new ideological and symbolic ones. Muslim communities are transformed by their growing integration The village of Wad at Abbas, population 7,500, is located on the into particular nation-states and their increasing responsiveness to bank of the Blue Nile river in the Blue Nile Province of northern the demands of the world economy. Muslims, along with everyone Sudan. Its inhabitants are Muslims whose mother tongue is Arabic. else, are increasingly exposed to global culture(s) and ideologies. The people of Wad at Abbas can be described as Arabized Nubians New notions of what it means to be a Muslim accompany trans- (Holt and Daly 1979; Hasan 1973); most claim Ja’ali ethnicity. formations in the organization of social, economic, and political life. Villagers are part of the sedentary riverain population of northern In this context, embracing Islamic fundamentalism represents a Sudan that has dominated the country since independence. In this move away from local, parochial identities toward perceived _ sense, villagers share in Sudan’s national culture and are among those

conformity with a more universal set of beliefs and practices. who consider themselves the quintessential Sudanese, defining The cosmopolitan aspect of Islamic fundamentalism has been others, such as the Nuer, Dinka Nuba, and Fur, as ethnic minorities. obscured by the common assumption that fundamentalism can best Wad al Abbas was founded by a Sufi holy man (faki) in 1808 (Holt be understood as a rejection of modernity and a reaction against the 1969), and its inhabitants have always practiced Islam. This does not West. Papanek (1988:60) reflects this view when she characterizes mean that villagers’ religion has remained the same, for the spiritual

the adoption of veils and modest dress by Muslim women as ‘a and material life of villagers has changed with the times.

Victoria Bernal/Women & the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village * 167

The contingency of Islamic practice became most evident to me cultivate their staple food crop, sorghum. Cotton offers insignificant when I returned to Wad at Abbas, where I had lived and conducted profits, however; and the sorghum yields of most families are below field work from 1980 to 1982, after a five-and-a-half year absence. subsistence levels (Bernal 1990). Agriculture, thus, is no longer the Not only were practices once exalted now condemned (and vice mainstay of village economy. Starting in the 1960s, villagers intensiversa), but villagers themselves saw no contradictions between their fied their trading activities and sought employment elsewhere.

not so distant past and their present, blithely pronouncing new Since the mid-1970s, growing numbers of village men have standards as if they had always been. (It is important in this context migrated to work in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.’ These to realize that Muslims may have their own reasons for subscribing international labor migrants are part of a national (northern Suda-

to a view of Islam as constant, rather than in process, and nese) exodus. By the mid-1980s, the number of Sudanese working unambiguous rather than contested.) Finally, when pressed by me abroad was estimated at over one million, perhaps exceeding about the past I knew, villagers dismissed it with casual remarks, Sudan’s total urban labor force (ILO/UNHCR 1984). Like their

such as, ‘We were ignorant then.” __ compatriots, the greatest number of villagers working abroad in the

It is significant that in talking about this, more than one villager 1980s were employed in Saudi Arabia. used the term jahliin for ignorant — a term that harkens to the period By 1980, the typical household in Wad al Abbas combined farmbefore Islam was revealed to Mohammed, the Jahiliyya. Thus, a ing in the scheme with wage-employment and commercial activities parallel is implied between fundamentalism and the coming of in order to survive (Bernal 1991). Households depend heavily on Islam; villagers’ past (however recent) is being redefined in light of cash to fulfill their daily needs, and labor migration has become a the emerging orthodoxy as having been outside of Islam. In this condition of villagers’ existence. Farming, trade, and wage-labor are way, practices now seen as deviant and inferior are symbolically almost exclusively male activities. Virtually all labour migrants are removed from lived history and experience. Such linguistic devices male, and most men leave their wives and children behind. Some of allow villagers to talk of change and mask change at the same time the most successful traders have relocated their entire households to by locating change outside Islam. Similarly, when villagers talk the towns in which they trade, but the vast majority of men conabout someone embracing what villagers understand to be more tinue to move between their village homes and their places of busiorthodox beliefs and practices, they say ‘so and so became a_ ness or employment. The village is becoming a labor reserve with Muslim’; and villagers refer to fundamentalists simply as al muslimiin few opportunities for production or means of generating wealth.

(the Muslims), despite the fact that the distinction they are making Many women generate no income of their own; others earn is between Muslims, not between Muslims and non-believers. small amounts of cash through picking cotton, performing such During the course of the 1980s, villagers were moving toward a_ services as braiding hair, engaging in petty trade from their homes more scripturalist construction of Islam; and this movement (usually of household staples such as charcoal or onions provided by brought a new perspective to many social and ceremonial activities. a male relative), or weaving the colorful fiber disks (tabaq) that Funeral practices, marriage rituals, and reverence for holy men (fakis villages and other Sudanese use to cover trays of food before eating. or shaykhs) were particularly singled out for reform. All of these are While men’s lives have taken distinctively new directions, women’s

central traditions, not in the sense that they had heretofore been _ lives and their roles in local and regional economy have changed in impervious to change but in the sense that they form an essential more subtle ways. part of how villagers define themselves — ‘this is who we are,’ ‘this 1s Today the women of Wad at Abbas are primarily engaged in what we do.’ Yet gradually these practices lost their quality of being food preparation, child care, and other domestic tasks. This work taken for granted; their morality and legitimacy were thrown open _ has long been part of women’s contribution to the division of labor to question; and a growing number of villagers began to alter their by sex; so there is considerable continuity in women’s activities.

behavior. However, women have been progressively circumscribed to these

The process of religious change is connected to other upheavals domestic tasks.* The establishment of the irrigated scheme in 1954 in the villagers’ lives. Particularly since the 1950s, the villagers of was a watershed after which the participation of women in family Wad al Abbas have experienced profound economic transforma- farming decreased markedly (Bernal 1988). Few women in Wad al tions involving increased production for the market, dependence Abbas own land or take part in family farming these days. Their on the market for basic consumption goods, and the sale of labor on involvement in agricultural production is limited to that of old national and international markets. Gender roles and the relations women and young girls from poorer households who harvest between women and men have been reordered in complex ways. cotton a few months of the year as paid laborers.

The social relations of kin and community that once structured Despite much continuity in their economic activities, women many aspects of villagers’ lives have been increasingly subordinated have become more economically dependent upon men as the to, or supplanted by, relations with the market and the state. The village has become integrated into the regional and international social map in which villagers locate themselves and others now economy. Men’s incomes are now the major determinant of family includes not only Khartoum and many other Sudanese towns where well-being, overshadowing the importance of women’s domestic sons of the village live and work, but also Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi labor contributions. Women lack an independent economic base

and Yemen, among others; and it is expanding. because their work is based on commodities (food, clothing,

furnishings, and utensils) purchased with men’s money. In fact,

Women and capitalism in Wad al Abbas virtually every item in the household is a commodity. The impor-

tant exception is women’s labor, which is the underpinning of the The lives and livelihoods of the men of Wad al Abbas have changed domestic economy. Women’s labor is almost exclusively available dramatically since the 1950s, when an irrigated agricultural scheme through kin and community relationships, and few women earn was established at the village. Most households grow cotton for wages or regularly produce anything for sale.

export (cotton production is mandatory in the scheme) and Changes in the basis of village economy have further removed

168 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’... =

from women the resources that are vital to the household. And under their towbs, leaving their breasts and torso bare underneath. women have little opportunity to gain the knowledge and skills that (Because the towb is draped, not fastened, it often slips, exposing equip people to compete for and manage resources in the regional whatever is underneath.) Similar changes in women’s dress and in

economy. As men’s horizons and occupational choices widen, housing styles have occurred throughout northern Sudan (see women’s remain comparatively narrow. What has kept women particularly, al-Tayib 1987 on dress; Boddy 1989; El Bakri and from moving into the new activities opened up by the market? Kameir 1990).

, In various ways, new understandings of Islam are being expressed

Women and culture in Wad al Abbas through the redefinition of appropriate feminine behavior. Wedding

celebrations are another example. In the early 1980s, a public dance Villagers cite Islamic norms of sex segregation and female seclusion _ by the bride in a revealing dress and without a towb before a mixed

to explain the division of labor by sex whereby women of child- audience was an indispensable feature of weddings. Along with bearing age generally are excluded from most activities that generate other ritual activities, such as a series of animal sacrifices and feasts,

income. The views of villagers, thus, are in accordance with the the bride’s dance was not simply part of the celebration of a views of those scholars who see Islam as the barrier to women’s marriage but an intrinsic part of concluding the marriage itself. The participation in the market economy or public life. But traditions image of the bride in the special dress and ornaments for this dance and beliefs are not maintained monolithically, nor are they inde- was a symbol of beauty, wealth, and vitality in which villagers took pendent of history and economy. The appearance of continuity great pride. Indeed, the bride in her regalia is a central theme of (and assertions about unchanging tradition by cultural actors them- northern Sudanese art (al Tayib 1987). The marriage of a virgin selves) often mask subtle or not-so-subtle historical adjustments. bride at Wad al Abbas without this dance was virtually unthinkable. Hobsbawm (1989:2) points out that it is precisely the “constant There was, however, one case involving the marriage of a village change and innovation of the modern world’ that gives rise to ‘the girl to an exceptionally orthodox man who had studied at the invention of tradition’ in an attempt ‘to structure at least some parts Islamic University in Omdurman and who set himself (and his wife) of social life ... as unchanging and invariant.’ As the unpredictable apart from other villagers in many ways.’ At his marriage in the forces of the world economy create flux in villagers’ (particularly 1970s, he reportedly had forbidden his bride to dance. Her failure men’s) lives, control over women, made possible by their restriction to perform this dance was often told to me in tones of scandal in the to the domains of home and family, which are less directly organ- early eighties, and some villagers found it so hard to believe that it ized by the market and the state, is assuming new material and _ was rumored that the bride had managed to dance, at least before a

symbolic significance. gathering of women, unbeknownst to her menfolk. By the late

At Wad al Abbas, the seclusion of women increased during the eighties, the pride of some villagers in the marriage ritual of the course of the 1980s. For example, dramatic changes in housing bride’s dance was being eclipsed by doubt; and women as well as construction occurred which produced an unprecedented separa- men expressed the view that it was haram (forbidden and sinful) for tion of domestic and public space within neighborhoods. In the a bride to dance before men. early eighties, few village houses had walled courtyards. Most Traditional rituals such as the bride’s dance are not reproduced achieved some semblance of a domestic enclosure (hosh) with low - statically over generations, however. For example, in one of the mud walls, sticks, or thornbrush fences. Women working or social- dances often performed in the early 1980s, the bride imitated the izing in their domestic space at home, thus, were often in full view movements of a Toyota pick-up truck (then, the vehicle of choice of passersby, even if they were in private space. By the late 1980s, among the Sudanese bourgeoisie) while the chorus of unmarried some villagers had constructed new houses with massive, six-foot girls sang about it. Similarly, one of the zar spirits observed in brick or cement walls (as is common in urban Sudan). Other northern Sudan is a lorry driver (Boddy 1989). It would be, therevillagers had added new walls of this type around older dwellings. fore, a mistake to understand the process of religious change at Wad Villagers who cannot afford such edifices are building their stick or al Abbas as one in which a dynamic Islam overturns static customary mud walls higher or even adding burlap screens on top of the mud rituals and beliefs. walls they have. Such changes are making female seclusion a The examples of housing, dress, and wedding celebrations suggest material reality, where it had been more symbolic in nature. that the notions of Islamic propriety now current in Wad al Abbas Between 1982 and 1988, some women in Wad at Abbas also made could not have given rise to present gender roles nor the division of significant modifications in their attire. In place of the usual short, labor by sex. Rather, new religious sensibilities and traditions are sleeveless smocks (showal) under their towbs (body veils), these emerging to institutionalize new gender relationships that are women began to wear ankle-length robes which conceal most ofa largely the unplanned outcome of economic changes, such as the woman’s body, even underneath the towb. In the words of one agricultural scheme and labor migration. Confronted by pressures young woman: “People became Muslims. They used to go with and opportunities for change arising from their shifting places in the short dresses, and the top [was] naked [underneath their towbs], but world economy, villagers are developing new understandings of

now they have learned better.’ what it means to be a Muslim. This process cannot be reduced to a

_ These new forms of female seclusion and modesty are part of a simple trajectory from ignorance (of Islam) to knowledge. Rather,

long-term process of change that had been unfolding more as the following section reveals, certain kinds of knowledge (and gradually in preceding decades. As recently as the 1950s, villagers expressions of piety) are coming to be valued over others, in lived in mud and straw huts. (Some villages in the area still consist accordance with local and global hierarchies of power and prestige.

largely of such huts.) Women’s clothing also has undergone

successive modifications. Girls in Wad at Abbas once wore the rahad, The world system and Islamic fundamentalism in Wad al Abbas a string skirt that left most of the body uncovered. Even today, some The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Wad at Abbas is part of the older women in Wad at Abbas still wear only baggy shorts (sirwal) process whereby villagers are incorporated into a national and world

Victoria Bernal/Women & the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village * 169

system. Villagers are not simply integrated into this system as the same time. Such acts assert Sudan’s Muslim and Arab identity peasants or workers. They participate in the wider network of rela- while associating Islam with power and nationalism. In 1983, tions beyond their village as Sudanese, as Muslims, as Arabs (or Numeri decreed Islamic law (shari’a) to be the law of the land. Africans), and as men and women, among other identities. Economic Though only selectively implemented, its imposition was repreactivities involve villagers in social transactions that are trans- sented by powerful symbolic acts. For example, much ado was formative, and villagers are affected by the Sudanese state’s efforts to made of banning alcohol and emptying the wares of bars and liquor

create a national culture and by Saudi Arabia’s efforts to extend its stores into the Nile. To this day, shari’a has never been fully ideological influence. Cultural communication takes place through implemented by the Sudanese state and remains a central issue in the extension of bureaucracy and public education to rural areas, the civil war now waging between northern and southern Sudan. labor migration, and the ever increasing role of media in presenting Numeri’s actions were partly in response to Saudi pressures on his

the world to villagers. regime and to pressures from Sudanese fundamentalist organizations,

As they enter into relationships beyond their kin and com- such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The dire economic situation of munity, both in concrete and imagined (Anderson 1991) ways, Sudan, coupled with Numenrt’s political vulnerability, made aid from villagers encounter new perspectives on their religion and way of Saudi Arabia particularly important to the Numeri regime (Warburg life. Beginning in the 1950s, the urban, educated Sudanese personnel 1991). Through the 1980s, political discourse in Sudan took on an of the irrigated scheme, who live with their families in a compound increasingly fundamentalist Islamic character as opposition groups to near the scheme offices, exposed villagers to some new behavioral Numeri and to his successors criticized the government from patterns. Villagers associate the lifestyle of these families with fundamentalist positions. Today, fundamentalists are in power, and positions of authority, a higher standard of living, and with new dissent is treated as an assault on the faith (An-Na’im and Kok understandings of what it means to be Muslim. Some villagers say it 1991).!° Since the early 1980s successive Sudanese regimes have was scheme personnel who first revealed to them how ‘sinful’ and emphasized not only Sudan’s Muslim identity, but its Arab identity, ‘backward’ village life was. One striking example of change is that in efforts to garner support from the oil-rich Arab states, particularly ~ alcoholic drinks were publicly produced and consumed in the for the costly war against southern Sudan (Warburg 1991). village into the 1950s and featured prominently in such key The sources of Sudan’s Islamic revival are as foreign as they are ceremonial activities as weddings, a practice unthinkable today. The domestic. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, was founded in current trend toward fundamentalist Islam is closely tied to national Egypt; and its rise in Sudan in the 1980s is partly attributable to

politics and the labor migration of villagers to the Gulf. financial backing by the Saudis (Riad 1990). Just as Saudi Arabia Neither opposition to change nor nostalgia for a social world once eclipsed Egypt’s influence in Sudan, since the rupture of governed by tradition draw villagers to what they understand as Sudan’s relations with Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, Iran is more orthodox Islamic practices. On the contrary, for the people of emerging as an important new patron (at least of the ruling regime). Wad al Abbas, much of Islamic fundamentalism’s appeal stems from (These most recent developments are, however, beyond the scope

its association with modernity. To adopt more fundamentalist of this essay.) |

practices is to assert a degree of sophistication, urbanity, and material The reconstruction of Islamic identity in Wad al Abbas is linked success. The rising standards of housing and dress at Wad al Abbas, - to national and international politics. But what happens in the village for example, are associated not only with new interpretations of does not simply reflect the successful manipulations of symbols of

Islamic propriety but also with new consumption patterns. The legitimacy by ruling Sudanese regimes or the exercise of Saudi materials and skills for building houses, once shared by all, are now clout. Ordinary Sudanese, such as the villagers of Wad al Abbas, commodities; the most prized (and costly) fowbs are imports from interpret national and foreign forms of Islamic ideology and culture England, and the new robes some women wear are brought back in ways shaped by their personal experiences and positions in the from Khartoum and Saudi Arabia or purchased from local tailors world system. For villagers, much of the attraction of fundamentalist who fashion clothes after imports. Fundamentalist Islam, thus, is Islam stems from its perceived association with elites and with an

identified with economic development and prosperity. emergent vision of the good life — not just the morally good life but The incorporation of villagers into the world system is not only also the good life in its earthy material sense — particularly the life of an economic but a cultural process. Once religion was learned at leisure, technological advancement, and material comfort that Saudi home and in the village khalwa (mosque school); today, children Arabians have come to represent. (The pre-eminence of Saudi study religion in school from govemment text books. Religious Arabia in villagers’ social imaginations in the 1980s was illustrated, programs on the radio, indeed the forms of speech and ceremony among other things, by one woman’s query to me about America’s on the radio, each newscast begins with bismillahi (in the name of location relative to Saudi Arabia, as if America must be a lesser-

Allah), assert a national Islamic identity. Currently, in fact, Sudanese known emirate of some sort.) oo

radio not only broadcasts the call to prayers but actually ceases The spiritual and economic dimensions of villagers’ lives are transmission during an interval to allow for prayer (Abdalla 1991). intertwined in many ways. For example, villagers use the occasion Villagers not only receive new understandings of Islam from travel- of the hajj (and the lesser pilgrimage, al umra) to enter Saudi Arabia

ling holy men who speak at the mosque but from cassette tapes of in order to look for work. Those, who make the pilgrimage, more-

sermons given elsewhere. over, recount in detail not only their experiences at Mecca but also

In the early 1980s, then-President Numeri adopted Islamic dress, their encounters with airplane food, the trays that fold out of the jellabiya (robe) and aimma (turban), for many public appearances, back of the seat in front of you, and the array of goods available in instead of the military uniform he wore in the official presidential Saudi markets (compare Antoun 1989: 166; Metcalf 1990). A greater portraits visible in many public places. Numeri also had new awareness of orthodox Islam is linked in the minds of villagers to a Sudanese currency printed which featured his image in Islamic greater awareness of the modern world and the sophistication attire, thus appropriating and (literally) creating cultural capital at required to operate in it.

170 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

Labor migration and long-distance trade unsettle villagers’ with Muslim identity)'? by embracing Arab cultural forms, such as convictions about proper ways of living and thinking. When they orthodox Islam as practiced in the Gulf. return home, villagers report what they have seen in other places The changing configuration of Islam in Wad al Abbas is thus and, in some cases, alter their own standards of behavior. The hajjis linked in complex ways to the experience of economic developand the even more numerous labor migrants to Saudi Arabia return ment and state building, to the attempts of elites to define a national with new understandings of Islamic culture and Arab identity as_ culture, as well as to the experience of international labor migration well as with new material goods and desires. Wealth and piety are and the resulting importance of such supra-national identities as _ interconnected in the stories villagers tell about Saudi life. For Arab and Muslim. Within the village, however, these world-scale example, to illustrate the absence of theft, one villager recounted transformations are embodied and enacted in microcosm, in terms that he saw gold merchants leave their shops unlocked and un- of local social relations, particularly in terms of gender.

attended when they heard the muezzin’s call to prayer. Such stories are repeated knowingly by migrants’ wives and other Social change as gender difference

villagers who have not themselves been abroad. Thus, even people

who do not leave the village now inhabit a much larger world The economic and cultural changes underway in Wad al Abbas

than ever before."! affect men and women differently. Moreover, these changes have

The association of material comforts with religiosity was particu- themselves come to be represented by villagers in terms of differlarly highlighted for me by one villager’s remark. Looking for stolen ences between women and men.'* As encounters with the world livestock, a search party had gone from Wad al Abbas into the beyond the village highlight and challenge what is distinctive about hinterland away from the Blue Nile. The villagers consider the villagers’ way of life, Wad al Abbas women have come to be seen as nomads and other inhabitants of these areas uncouth rural folk. On _ traditional, both in the sense that women have special responsibility

the villagers’ return, however, a member of the search party, for maintaining the social order and in the sense that women are recounting what they had seen, exclaimed, “There are very religious thought to be resistant to change.'* Examples of the association of people there! The way they live, the televisions they have, and the women with tradition (that which distinguishes and defines local way their houses are fixed up!’ His assumption was that people who ‘identity) are men’s references to colloquial Sudanese Arabic as

possess consumer goods and modern conveniences, who are women’s talk (kallam al niswaan) and to many northern Sudanese civilized, must also be proper Muslims. The association of luxury customs as women’s affairs (haq al niswaan). The warm regard and goods and consumption levels with piety and morality is significant affection so many men and women have for their grandmothers not only in terms of the relation of villagers to national and inter- (habobas) is partly connected to the view of women as guardians of national hierarchies but also in terms of the relations of villagers to local culture. (I felt particularly complimented when a young city one another. Differences in wealth among villagers are growing, dweller responded to my rural Sudanese manners and speech with a and these differences are directly related to the participation of wistful, “You remind me of my grandmother.’) Indeed, the high villagers in work outside the community in Sudan and in the Gulf. status of the haboba has been noted by numerous observers of New consumption pattems in housing and dress are largely made Sudanese culture (Boddy 1985; Cloudsley 1983). Trimingham possible by remittances from Saudi Arabia. Villagers who build high (1965) goes so far as to describe the typical Sudanese household in hosh walls and adopt new forms of dress are making statements the first half of this century as being headed by a grandmother. about their wealth and their piety. Just as Saudi wealth and Saudi Women’s association with tradition, while a source of power in orthodoxy are intertwined from the villagers’ perspective, so is the some contexts, increasingly plays a part in their subordination, economic success of some villagers coming to be seen as linked to however. Women have come to stand for the fading cultural order,

_ their moral superiority. while progress and modernity are male. Wad al Abbas women are

While contestors for state power may assert Sudan’s Islamic and not seen simply as repositories of valued cultural knowledge. As

Arab identity for strategic political and economic reasons, villagers circumstances alter the status and relevance of village customs, social are responding to profound and personal encounters with relations conflicts and moral ambiguities sometimes are expressed as negative

of power in global hierarchies. Their growing participation in the attitudes towards women. Women are regarded by men and world economy confronts villagers not only with new material women alike as ‘backwards,’ ‘ignorant,’ and irreligious (compare needs and wants but also with questions about culture and identity. Bedri 1987). Men are seen as the legitimate possessors of orthodox The process is sometimes a painful one. Labor migrants from Wad al Islamic knowledge and of the worldly knowledge necessary to insure Abbas to the Gulf report humiliating experiences, such as being economic well-being. The knowledge women possess is of declining called abid (slave) by the Arabs there. Sudanese themselves use this spiritual and material significance; it is now being redefined as folk term to refer to the descendents of slaves in Sudan, a stigmatized knowledge or simply regarded as nonsense. group with whom other Sudanese do not intermarry. While Gulf The same process that is highlighting tradition, divorcing the Arabs may call Sudanese abid because of their dark skin and African relations of production and consumption from one another, and ancestry, the term connotes both religious and racial inferiority, dichotomizing periods of work and leisure in time and space, also is since Islam forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslims. The giving rise to a new understanding of religion as distinct from other experiences of villagers in the Gulf reinforce the prestige associated cultural practices. The boundary between custom and religion

with the Arab component of their Sudanese heritage. which once was blurred, if recognized by villagers at all, is becoming Self-identification as Arab takes on new significance in the sharply demarcated (compare Sered 1990). This ‘disenchantment of encounter with Gulf Arabs. Because it is contested, Arab identity is the world,’ whereby religion becomes a specialized, compartnot so much a natural or ascribed status but rather one the Wad al_ mentalized aspect of life, is part of a modernizing process. There is Abbas villager must assert or achieve. Sudanese can assert their Arab some irony in this case, however, since Islamic fundamentalists wish identity (which for villagers, as for many Sudanese, is synonymous _ to assert the all-encompassing breadth of Islam. Yet by juxtaposing

Victoria Bernal/Women & the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village ¢ 171

correct Islam to life as lived by ordinary Muslims, fundamentalists one of the more orthodox village men in 1982. In the early 1980s, actually are helping to effect a break between life and faith. In the funeral customs were the target of criticism by some villagers with village this is reflected in discussions of what is and is not Islam. more fundamentalist views, who wanted to replace the established Through such discussions, which range in topic from the use of hair _ practices of wailing and expressive mourning with restrained prayer dyes to the proper ways of mourning the dead, Islam is being and to limit the length of funerals to three instead of forty days, in reconstructed. Villagers who in the early eighties tended to assume accordance with Qu’ranic prescriptions. (Not incidentally, truncated that to be Muslim was to be like them, now increasingly see their rituals also are more compatible with the capitalist work discipline own way of life partly refracted through the (critical) gaze of others, to which village men are increasingly subject.) such as urban Sudanese, Gulf Arabs, school textbooks, and religious I arrived at this particular funeral to find women wailing, some

authorities on the radio. shrieking. Some chanted poetic outbursts about their feelings of loss As the divide between established practices and the new and praised the dead man, others, moving as if dancing with

orthodoxy grows, women are becoming associated with the former rhythmic, jerky motions, appeared nearly entranced and hysterical. and men with the latter. The Sudanese Islam of the Sufi orders is in Women and girls threw themselves on the ground, rubbing dirt on the process of becoming associated with women who continue to themselves, pulling their hair. All was frenzy, chaos, hysteria. Yet venerate shaykhs, while some men now propound the funda-_ this behavior was, nonetheless, culturally patterned and sanctioned. mentalist view that only God should be worshipped. The spirit Women were carrying out the early stages of mourning behavior possession cult, zar, regarded by both men and women as non-_ which villagers had so often described to me but I had not witnessed Islamic, is almost exclusively a female activity. Women, thus, are firsthand before. seen as less in conformity with what is now defined as true Islam Apart from the women, but within sight of them, as often is the than men. And, in fact, women have much less access to knowledge case in sex-segregated social gatherings at Wad al Abbas, sat the about orthodox Islam than men do. I encountered women who did men. They presented a very different picture in their white-robed not know even the words to the daily prayers but simply performed finery, sitting quietly on mats and occasionally praying.'* Suddenly, the prostrations and other motions. In the early 1980s, moreover, it a group of young men left the men’s gathering and came running was rare for women to perform daily prayers. (Nor did all men do toward the women, shouting angrily. Armed with sticks, the young so by any means, but men generally took the obligation of daily men chased and beat the women mourners who fled some distance prayer more seriously. than did women. Furthermore, men often from the funeral. I was caught in the terrified, terrifying stampede of pray in a group if they happen to be with others at prayer time and women, along with a young village woman who was nine months

generally conduct their Friday midday prayer publicly at the pregnant. The men seemed so heedless and the women so

mosque.) desperate, I feared my friend would be trampled and hurt, but

The ideological construction of women as traditional shapes fortunately no one was injured. Nor are Wad al Abbas women so their definitions or themselves and plays a part in keeping them easily controlled or deterred from acting upon their own beliefs. from readily embracing new ways, thus contributing to a cultural The women simply rushed back to the funeral the minute the men divide between men and women. There are in fact, growing socio- _ had returned to their places. cultural differences between the women and men of Wad al Abbas, This was perhaps a kind of ritual in its own right, albeit a reflecting their increasingly divergent life experiences and circum- spontaneous and novel one.’ In it men expressed their own piety stances. For example, many village women have never even been to and orthodoxy through castigating women, surely knowing that the nearest town, Sennar, or have only gone to the hospital there; their efforts would not really be successful in ending the mourning; while some village men commute daily to Sennar, and many men’ while women expressed their own moral authority and autonomy have travelled widely in Sudan or abroad. Teenage boys are more by persisting in their mourning. While the assertion of male skilled than their mothers at operating in the world beyond the authority may have been immediately prompted by a feeling that village. New patterns of sex segregation and female seclusion not female relatives were undermining the claims of orthodoxy asserted

only mark gender differences but give rise to them. by the men in this family, the action also served to translate the

However, significant disparities also are emerging among the social tensions of change and the controversies over correct practice men of Wad al Abbas based in their divergent experiences and and belief into a conflict between male and female.

| positions in the regional economy. Unlike women, who share By representing the dynamic, open-ended process of social much common experience across families and generations, men are change in terms of static ‘natural’ gender differences and by increasingly differentiated by variation in education, work history, expressing societal conflict in terms of a battle of the sexes, villagers urban and international experience, and income. In particular, men in effect domesticate conflict, rendering it familiar and manageable, who have the skills or luck to obtain employment in the Gulf often perhaps even trivial. To recognize differences between men and enjoy economic and social status far above what their age or place in women is far less threatening to the social order than to acknowkinship networks would accord them. In contrast to the differences ledge that men are being divided by economic inequality and between the sexes, however, which are recognized and represented ideological differences. Inequality among men cannot so easily be symbolically as the contrast between tradition/female and modernity/ represented as part of the natural order in this comparatively male, the growing differences among men are not symbolically egalitarian society. elaborated upon. Villagers primarily experience social and religious

change astensions a gender gap. | _, Why some social women embrace fundamentalist Islam oreover, between the .kin/community-based _ order and social relations increasingly structured by the world Women are neither passive objects nor merely symbols given economy are sometimes expressed in terms of gender conflict. One meaning by men, however. In the shifting, contradictory, and of the most dramatic manifestations of this occurred at the funeral of ambiguous field of values, some women in Wad al Abbas continue

172 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

to command respect on the basis of local knowledge and customary I have suggested that, at a symbolic level, viewing women as practice. Others, however, are reacting against the notion that as_ traditional and thus representing social conflict in terms of gender women they must be traditional. Such women are responding to difference helps to maintain social solidarity among men, despite the devaluation of women’s social and ritual knowledge by seeking the growing inequality among men arising from their different to embrace practices associated with the new orthodoxy. This positions in the regional economy. However, gender is not only a accounts in part for the willingness of some women to adopt new symbol of broad societal changes; the transformations in the Muslim forms of Islamic dress, thereby literally cloaking themselves in world are, in fact, gendered. Our analyses must, therefore, enorthodoxy and modernity. These sources of prestige are particularly compass both the ways in which gender is represented ideologically important to younger women whose honor, modesty, and reputa- and the ways in which material conditions shape women’s and tion remain open to question, whose status and identity have not men’s lives. The seclusion of women in Wad al Abbas and their

yet been clearly established, and for whom the issue of self- restriction to the home and the village are not simply symbolic presentation, and therefore dress, is highly significant. As they statements but serve key functions in the emerging economic mature, women gain status and personal autonomy; they are less system, benefitting local men and, ultimately, those who dominate subject to social surveillance and suspicion. For these reasons, as well the regional economy. as the association of the new Islamic outfits with a trendy kind of Women’s work, like other unpaid subsistence labor, contributes sophistication (seen as frivolous and unbecoming in a senior woman to the larger economy. Their daily domestic labor in cooking, or man), it is mainly women of the younger generation who have cleaning, child-care, and other tasks is essential to every household. adopted Islamic dress. While mature habobas command a certain Ultimately, women’s unpaid work contributes to the viability of the respect, due to their age and their extensive knowledge of village village as a subsistence base; and through their unpaid labor, women social organization, young women have yet to acquire such lived _ subsidize the cost of the labor that is marketed, as well as the laborcultural knowledge or status.. The opportunities to express personal intensive activities of men in the informal sector. identity and assert status through the medium of Islamic practice Women’s social roles in community organization benefit men as thus hold particular appeal for younger women. Younger women, well. Women remain in the village throughout their lives,’* while moreover, who have received part of their religious knowledge men come and go. Women, as de facto representatives of their from formal schooling also have already been exposed to a different families, play pivotal roles in maintaining kin and community

form of Islam than their elders. networks; women act as social place markers. keeping alive the

In addition to dress, women claim space and status in the claims of their often-absent male relatives in these networks.

emerging socio-religious order through more careful observance of Paradoxically, then, in a culture that places much emphasis on patricertain kinds of religious duties. By 1988, it was no longer so ineal ancestry and kinship ties among men, men’s social ties are to a unusual to see individual women saying their prayers athome. The growing extent perpetuated through women. Women’s focus on changing attitudes and behavior of women regarding prayer were the family and their traditional orientation make it possible for the also evident at public gatherings such as a semaya (baby-naming men of Wad al Abbas to focus outward, to migrate and return.

celebration) I attended, in which women interrupted their Kin and community relationships not only give people’s lives

socializing at prayer time for a kind of public ritual of prayer: meaning but also help to provide the material basis for living. Men (although unlike men, the women did not pray in a group but took rely on these non-market ties, particularly in hard times. Women’s turns using a prayer mat in the hosh of the host), something not subordinate, dependent position and their lack of access to resources done at any of the countless celebrations of naming, circumcision, or employment help to insure that women will invest their time and marriage, and so forth I observed in the early eighties. Some labor in family and village social networks, as women are even more women, like some men, also are substituting classical Arabic terms dependent on them than men (compare Maher 1978). for vernacular ones, calling the feast of sacrifice aeed al adha instead The emerging division of labor by sex at Wad al Abbas has of aeed al duhiya, for example. When I first heard this it smacked of institutionalized a dichotomy between the market relationships of affectation, but such attempts by illiterate women (and men) to production and commerce and the non-market relationships of kin claim connection to the kinds of textual religious knowledge (and and community that govern reproduction. These take on gender by implication literacy and education in broader terms) now so associations of male and female. The cultural association of women highly valued clearly have a deeper significance than simply putting with the home and with tradition reinforces this growing dichotoon airs. In these and other ways women are playing their own part my. As the relations of production have become separated from in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Wad al Abbas. Gender and _ those of reproduction, women have lost some of their productive Islam intertwine in complex ways as various discourses about roles and are increasingly restricted to the role of consumers. New power, legitimacy, status, and identity are carried out through the understandings of Islam and new patterns of female seclusion media of Islam and of gender and as women and men manipulate (themselves expressed in part through new consumption patterns)

the material and symbolic resources at their disposal. help to perpetuate and justify these emerging divisions. At the same time, references to Islamic tradition and to the different natures of

Beyond Islamic determinism men and women help to create an appearance of continuity in villagers’ lives, despite the great upheavals in them. If Islam itself is malleable and changing, how can it be the deter-~ In fact, the need to define women’s proper place in society may minant of women’s place? Furthermore. if villagers are willing to be gaining such importance at this juncture precisely because embrace change in their most cherished ritual and social practices, gender roles are changing. While changes so far have tended to why do they remain traditional about women’s place in the home enhance men’s economic power as well as their worldly and or the division of labor by sex? We cannot answer these questions religious knowledge and have reinforced men’s roles as producers

simply by recourse to the tenets of Islam. and women’s as consumers and reproducers, there are counter-

Victoria Bernal/Women & the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village ¢ 173

trends as well. There are processes underway that potentially expansion in shaping gender relations, emphasizing instead threaten male authority in the family and in society. Women in unchanging religious texts and traditions. Studies of women’s Wad al Abbas are receiving education. The early 1980s saw the first integration into the world system, on the other hand, often analyze few female high school graduates from Wad al Abbas. Several the material changes in women’s lives without connecting them to educated village women are now working in white collar (or more processes of religious and cultural transformation. Ong’s study accurately white towb'’) jobs, as teachers in the village schools. By (1987) stands out as an important exception, particularly in the 1988 a handful of women had gone abroad with their husbands, and _ literature on Muslim women. one woman had even been employed overseas with her husband. A The process of religious change and the repudiation of tradition small but growing number of women are thus gaining access to new __ by the villagers of Wad al Abbas are especially interesting because public roles, sources of economic power, and knowledge. At the _ static Islamic beliefs and practices are so often seen as the barriers to same time, men increasingly are absent from the daily functioning the full participation of women in contemporary society. Based on

of their households and extended kin groups because their work this study, the answer to Mernissi’s question, “Why is the very takes them away from the village. Women are the de facto heads of dynamic Arab world so static when it comes to sex roles?,’ is that it

households much of the time, managing the routine economic and is not. Female seclusion and contemporary Islamic dress, for social affairs of the family without relying on their husbands. example, are not traditional but new for many Muslim women. Despite the economic importance of the remittances men send, While the process through which gender and religion are their social roles are being constricted. Indeed, some men are almost culturally constructed in Wad al Abbas is shaped by the particularlike guests in their own houses. Their brief periods of residence at ities of Sudan’s history and geography, reports from around the home are little more than visits, and their presence is a novelty that world suggest that core elements of the Sudanese experience are disrupts the routine, rather than an essential part of the household’s shared by other Muslim societies. The financial influence of the day-to-day operation. While by their own accounts many wives Saudi Arabian government, and its backing of fundamentalist miss their absent husbands, such separations give women a certain regimes and organizations, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, amount of personal autonomy. Women complain about having to have widespread consequences (Hyab 1988; Sanad and Tessler spend more time at home and expend more effort in such chores as_ 1990; Kabeer 1991). As in Sudan, nation-building efforts often

cooking when their mate is in residence. entail attempts to foster or impose notions of cultural homogeneity,

Furthermore, because so many men are away from the village on including ‘efforts to consolidate standardized, controllable creeds a routine basis, many rites of passage and other ceremonial markers and confessions’ (Boon 1987: 314). Leaders who have lost popular

have become largely affairs of women. By the early 1980s, a support, moreover, often seek to bolster their legitimacy through division of ritual labor was emerging in which men (particularly appeals to religion (Hyab 1988). Muslim (and perhaps especially those outside the immediate family) take part mainly in major life Arab) women commonly have been made the preservers of crisis rituals sometimes returning over long distances to do so) and ‘traditional values’ (Hijab 1988: 11-12; Mar’i and Mar’: 1985: 253;

Friday mosque attendance, if they happen to be home, while Haddad 1985; Kandiyoti 1991). At the same time, women have women are the primary participants in many more frequent socio- become key symbols in the Islamic revival. As at Wad al Abbas, ritual events, such as karama (an animal sacrifice and feast to give conflicts between established and emergent social orders are played thanks to Allah for success in an endeavor or recovery from illness). out to a large degree in terms of the personhood of women. In Fundamentalism may be particularly appealing to village men partly Malaysia, for example, ‘struggles between state power and revivalist as a way of reclaiming ritual authority and delegitimizing some of Islam over the changing body politic seem fundamentally to depend

women’s ritual activities. | : on controlling the definition of Malay womanhood and the family’ Gender relations and the role of Islam in defining them can be (Ong 1990: 259). ,

understood only within the wider context of economic and social From the Shah of Iran’s prohibition of the chador to Khomeini’s transformation. Neither the women nor the men of Wad al Abbas prescription of it, to the recent debate over veiling in public schools are carrying out unchanging traditions, and the form Islam takes in in France, women’s dress, in particular, has been invested with the village is itself in the process of being reconfigured. It is not so powerful meaning. And, as Keddie notes (1990: 101), ‘the dress much that villagers have remained traditional regarding gender as adopted by Islamist women is almost as important as a badge of that they have adopted or intensified traditions that emphasize the ideology as it is a means to modesty or seclusion.’ The case of Wad differences between men and women and heighten notions of male al Abbas shows that Islamic dress conveys not only meanings related

cultural and economic superiority. to religiosity, modesty, and support for the fundamentalist cause but messages about personal style, identity, class, and ethnicity. It is

Conclusion | worth noting in this context that Chanel scarves are reported to be

the current veil of choice among women of the Iranian bourgeoisie The divide between the literature on women and development and (New York Times 1992). This study demonstrates that the messages symbolic analyses of gender has left much work to be done to conveyed by Islamic dress (and other symbols of Islamic fundamenunderstand the connections between changes in the material order talism) are just as likely to be statements about change as they are and changes in ideologies and representations of gender. Muslim assertions of tradition. women, 1n particular, often have been simplistically characterized as Clearly, the redefinition by Muslims of what it means to be a victims of their culture and religion (see Ahmed’s powerful critique | Muslim does not mean the same thing for women as for men. This [1992]). Transformations in the lives of Muslim women are over- is partly because men’s and women’s religious lives and religious looked or misunderstood when seen solely in terms of Islam or knowledge differ. There is a growing recognition among scholars religious revival. The focus on Islam as a determinant of women’s that women and men practice Islam differently (Dwyer 1978; place has largely ignored the role of the world system and capitalist Tapper 1990; Mernissi 1989; Holy 1991). Some scholars argue that

174 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

women have special roles within Sufism (al Hibri 1982; Schimmel take the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as evidence of Islam’s 1982). It is not simply that ‘formal religion and old beliefs and mngidity in the face of change, when in fact it reveals the opposite. practices continue to exist side by side in the majority of [Muslim] Profound religious transformations are part of the social, economic, countries’ (Mikhail 1979:1). Indeed this essay suggests the reality is and political developments taking place in Muslim sgcieties. much more complex than that. Women and men, moreover, are Modernity is bringing about cultural change but not necessarily to differently positioned within Islamic traditions and communities. Western cultural forms. Furthermore, as religion is reconfigured by modern states through Some of the misunderstanding of the Islamic revival may stem such means as bureaucratic regulation, attempts at standardization, from the emphasis on its political implications. Many studies focus systems of mass education and law, men’s practices and men’s on contests for state power, legal issues, and unavoidably in the case knowledge often become normative (compare Sered 1990). of Sudan, civil strife. Less attention has been given to the broader The changing notions of what it means to be a Muslim are not, socio-cultural ramifications of Islamic fundamentalism, such as however, predetermined or uni-directional in terms of women’s changing identities, consumption patterns, and values. The multirights. Social change in Islamic societies (as in others) is ambiguous faceted dynamics of Islamic fudamentalism also have been obscured and multi-directional. For example, although female seclusion in the _ by a focus on organized, usually urban and often privileged, political

home limits women’s economic opportunities, Islamic dress may groups rather than on the general population. Detailed community facilitate women’s entry into new public domains, such as the studies that place Islam in a specific, historical, cultural context are university and the office (Hoffman-Ladd 1987). Thus, ‘the veil itself necessary to reveal Muslims as creators of culture, not as rigid may be a vehicle for eventual emancipation of women’ (Bauer 1984: believers, and to make visible the evolution of Islamic traditions. 289). In the Sudan, fundamentalist Islam may help promote a shift Recognizing the diversity and dynamism with Islamic societies, from pharaonic circumcision toward the less injurious sumna form, moreover, reveals Islamic culture as generating change in its own clitoridechtomy (Gruenbaum 1991). Increasing numbers of Muslim right and not simply as reacting to Western impact. As Eickelman women (like the young women of Wad al Abbas) are reaping the and Piscatori (1990: xv) observe:

benefits of mass education and entering the formal paid labor force. h ‘onal wisd £ ‘al scient; Islamic fundamentalist women, moreover, such as the Muslim Sisters contrary to the conventional wisdom Of western social scientists

: eer ; ... highly the encounter the Muslim ‘other’ has been in at -least as in Sudan, are often visiblewith in public be engaged ; ; the : . - important for self-definition asand themay confrontation with ,

y sugg Pp 8

creating new kinds ofsome political (Hale n.d.). E This study suggests that Muslimroles womenfor arewomen experiencin uropean ‘other.

what Rogers (1980) has called ‘the domestication of women,’ The case of Wad al Abbas illustrates that the cultural learning whereby women are increasingly circumscribed to domestic that goes on with capitalist penetration is not just about the capitalist functions, losing their public productive and political roles. This isa discipline or westernization that have received much attention from

global process not unique to Islamic societies. Other Muslim scholars. Such learning is also about exposure to urban national women, however, are moving into new public roles, a movement culture and to such foreign non-Western influences as, in this case, facilitated in some cases by ‘conservative’ Islamic dress. Underlying Saudi religious practice and other sources of global Islamic culture. much of the discussion of purdah and sex segregation as they affect In this sense, modernity may be just as likely to have an Arab, Muslim women is the implicit assumption (going back to Engels Muslim face as a Western, secular one. Studies that do not look [1970]) that women’s involvement in public work is either an index beyond the fact of Western domination of the world system, howof women’s emancipation or a prerequisite for it. This may have ever, may overlook or misconstrue patterns of change influenced by been true for Western women, but we cannot assume that the local or regional level powers (Appadurai 1990). Muslim world either is about to, or ought to, follow the same The transformations taking place in contemporary Islamic beliefs historical trajectory as the West. The assumption that public work and practices challenge the Islamic determinist perspective on promotes gender equality bears questioning in the case of third women in Muslim societies. It is then possible to envision possiworld women (Sacks and Scheper-Hughes 1987), particularly in bilities for change that would empower women within evolving light of recent data from areas of high female employment, such as Islamic traditions which must be recognized as involved in an openthe maquila border industries in Mexico (Fernandez-Kelly 1983) ended, rather than predetermined, process of social construction. and the export processing zones in South Asia (Ong 1987, 1991). Women’s social position is not immutable, nor is Islam intrinsically It should not surprise us, moreover, that rapid social change and _ inimical to women’s economic and political advancement. It 1s economic integration into capitalist relations of production and _ particularly because Islam can be constructed from local underexchange coexist with conservative ideologies and practices regard- standings as well as from transnational sources, that it offers ing women. In fact, the two are interconnected. In the case of Wad ideological resources that can be mobilized to various ends, includal Abbas, the intensification of social restrictions on women and the ing the legitimation of new gender roles. In this respect, it is emergence of new secular and religious notions of gender difference precisely the ambiguous and multiple beliefs and practices within are direct results of the community’s growing integration into the Islam, not its certainty or rigidity, that make Islam an important world economy. This study shows clearly, moreover, that the local arena for articulating gender roles and relations under conditions of pattern of gender roles and the ideologies supporting these do not change.

constitute an autonomous cultural system, reproduced by the

community. Rather, the realities and ideals governing gender roles ,

and relations are responsive to changing economic, political, and Notes

ideological conditions in the world system. Field work for this article was funded by the National Science Foundation, This study also challenges the assumption that to be modern is to the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned be secular. In the case of Islamic societies, this view led scholars to Societies, and the Kirkland Endowment. Much of the analysis was

Victoria Bernal/Women & the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village ¢ 175

conducted while a Rockefeller fellow in Women’s Studies and Religion at such gatherings there is very little interaction or communication of any Harvard Divinity School. I am grateful to the head of that program, Connie kind between the separate groups of men and women who are supposed

Buchanan, for her support. to behave as if sex segregation were complete and avoid looking at or

' Mernissi’s latest book conveys a similar sense of timeless invariability acknowledging the presence of the opposite sex. It is perhaps significant when it asks, ‘How did the tradition succeed in transforming the Muslim that this public confrontation between men and women took place at a woman into that submissive, marginal creature who buries herself and funeral, as funerals are themselves rituals that deal with continuity and only goes out into the world timidly and huddled in her veils? Why does discontinuity in social life and in the social order.

| the Muslim man need such a mutilated companion?’ (1991: 194, emphasis _—_'® This is facilitated by a high rate of village endogamy.

added). Until recently, at least, employed women in Sudan (with the exception

* The whole notion of orthodoxy is itself problematic and contested as of a minority who did not wear towbs) wore white towbs over their other Asad (1986), Ibrahim (1989), Holy (1991), among others, point out. It is clothes. This was recognizable as a kind of uniform since colorful towbs also the case that Islam often is said to have no orthodoxy so much as are preferred for most other social settings. The regime of General Omar orthopraxy. I wonder if this is not simply another example of how Islam Hassan Ahmad al Beshir is apparently promoting or imposing a new is so apart and defined as essentially different from other religions. The form of dress for women modeled on the chador.

distinction between belief and practice is in any case extremely fluid. |

For example, object to praying tombs of saints and oefundamentalists wt ee ~ References

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International Forum, 5:2, 145-51. By at least the turn of the century, African churchwomen across the

Schlegel, Alice. 1990. ‘Gender Meanings: General and Specific,’ 21-42, in denominations and throughout South Africa were becoming active Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender. Peggy in the distinctive, often uniformed, Christian female organisations.

Reeves Sanday and Ruth Gallagher Goodenough, eds. Philadelphia: In the 1950s an important sociological study of these church groups,

University of Pennsylvania Press. a, . perhaps somewhat extravagantly, described them as ‘the oldest,

Sered, Susan Starr. 1990. Women, Religion, and Modernization: Tradition largest and most enduring and cohesive not only of all African

and ‘Transformation among Elderly Jews in Israel,’ American : or ‘but of all African organisations in South Anthropologist, 92:2, 306-18. women s organisations, Dut OF a rca oA ou Modern World, Denis MacEoin and Ahmed Al-Shahi, eds. London: On and solidarity in manyanos (unions) — a Xhosa term for the Croom Heim. Methodist groups and frequently used of the phenomenon as a

Al-Shahi, Ahmed. 1983. ‘Sufism in Modern Sudan’, 57—72, in Islam in the Africa (B randel-Syrier, 1962: 97). This early, widesp read mobilisa-

Smith, Jane, and Yvonne Haddad. 1982. ‘Eve: Islamic Image of Woman,’ whole — constitute an important part of the social history of African

Women’s Studies International Forum, 5:2, 135-44. women’s changing ideological, economic and religious roles. Spaulding, Jay. 1982. “The Misfortunes of Some, The Advantages of African churchwomen’s zealous evangelism and fundraising Others: Land Sales by Women in Sinnar,’ 3-18, in African Women and the provided a critical back-up and growth point for local congreLaw: Historical Perspectives, Jean Hay and Marcia Wright, eds. Boston: gations, but by and large the women came together explicitly as Boston University Papers on Africa, VII. th Particularly in th £ missi h

Stowasser, Barbara. 1984. ‘The Status of Women in Early Islam,’ 11—43, in motners. | arucularly An me eyes OF Musslonary SUPeLVISOTs, SUC

Muslim Women, Freda Hussain, ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press. organisations had a vital part to play in safeguarding female chastity, Tapper, Nancy. 1990. ‘Ziyaret: Gender, Movement, and Exchange in a marital fidelity, and maternal and domestic responsibilities. AccordTurkish Community,’ 236-55, in Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration ingly these groups provide a window onto the ideological debates and the Religious Imagination, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds. and economic conflicts that clustered around Christian concepts of

Berkeley: University of California Press. sexuality, marriage and family as they were being imposed and selfal-Tayib, Griselda. 1987. “Women’s Dress in the Northern Sudan,’ 40-66, imposed in the growing Christianised African community. As 7 in The Sudanese Woman, Susan Kenyon, ed. Khartoum: University of already pointed to in earlier chapters, obvious tensions emerge

Trim; pean cr theinindigenous mission sex-gender rimingham, J. ,; S.between 1965. Islam the Sudan.and London: Frank Cass. a systems. In these Turner, Bryan, ed. 1990. Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity. London: OF 8anssations struggles over sexuality between older and younger

Sage. African women can be discerned, together with conflicts over

Voll, John. 1983. ‘The Evolution of Islamic Fundamentalism in Twentieth- family life between the ruling and the dominated classes, mediated Century Sudan,’ 113-42 in Islam, Nationalism, and Radicalism in Egypt through mission and philanthropic activists. and the Sudan, Gabriel Warburg and Uri Kupferschmidt, eds. New York: The evidence strongly suggests, however, that these women’s

Praeger, . —— a organisations, with their entrenched and fervent tradition of

—— 1986. Revivalism and Social Transformation in Islamic History,’ The +eyivalist style praying and preaching, must equally be seen as a

Ww Muslim World, 1991. 76: 3-4.“The 168-80. demonstration the enthusiastic, if necessarily arburg, Gabriel. Sharia in Sudan:ofImplementation and f ; 1 d qdgender-segregated, Afri Repercussions,’ 913-107, in Sudan: State and Society in Crisis, John 0. response of certain, mostly uneducated, rican women to

Voll, ed. Bloomington: Middle East Institute, Indiana University Press. Christianity. Undeniably, of course — and here the spiritual and Watt, W. Montgomery. 1983. ‘Islam and the West,’ 1-8, in Islam in the domestic aspects of manyanos reinforce one another — part of the Modern World, Denis MacEoin and Ahmed al-Shahi, eds. London: appeal of the new message and the community it fostered was the

Croom Helm. priority and support it offered to motherhood in a time of

| economic and social upheaval (see Gaitskell, 1983: 249). , This chapter looks first, briefly, at African women’s response to | the coming of Christianity and some of the ways in which domesticity was enmeshed with conversion in late-nineteenth-

: century rural South Africa. The second section focuses on the srowth of women’s associations in the twentieth century in the very

different urban setting of the Witwatersrand. In the third section, some ways in which Reef manyanos can be seen as subversive of domesticity are then suggested; while the fourth section points to

178 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

the wider historical repercussions of such female mobilisation. The those seeking secular advantage in terms of employment, land, conclusion reasserts the importance of taking manyanos seriously asa homes or material goods, together with outcasts, refugees and

religious phenomenon. misfits on the other. It seems fair to say — though much more investigation 1s needed on this — that the self-improvers were mostly

Female conversions and Christian homemaking: men, while, because of gender-specific life-crises, women featured

some beginnings prominently among the refugees. ee . It was aberrant for a woman in ‘traditional’ African society to Missionaries to southern Africa settled first among the Xhosa and live alone: as already described in earlier chapters, her productive Tswana, in the 1820s; these were groups which eventually delivered labour and reproductive powers as daughter, wife or widow a high proportion of converts. The southern Sotho and the Zulu, to belonged to her father, husband or son. But the mission station whom the mission frontier advanced in the 1830s, likewise in time provided an alternative set of protectors and an alternative

came into the churches in large numbers. From 1850 the economic base which made escape possible. The mission station

Methodists were at work in the Orange Free State, while from 1860 was a magnet for young girls avoiding marriage (perhaps to rich old German Lutherans laboured among the Pedi of the Transvaal (who men, or pagans, or polygynists); for cast-off wives; or for widows remain the least Christianised today). By 1880 the new faith was escaping the levirate. Because on marriage Nguni women moved to

relatively well established in most ‘tribal’ areas and still predomi- live among their husband’s kin, they were more isolated and nantly rurally orientated. Its literate African members were becom-_ vulnerable as strangers there, and mission stations could provide an

ing teachers and, if male, pastors (Pauw, 1974:416—21). escape from the malice of co-wives, accusations of witchcraft or the As regards the progress of different denominations of European shame of barrenness (see Williams, 1959: 275-82 and Etherington, origin, census figures from the twentieth century provide a rough 1978: 95-9). It is important, though, to bear Etherington’s point in guide to trends, although it has been suggested that such figures are mind — that it is often easier to identify why individuals came to a usually inflated by about one-third for actual membership and one- station than why they in due course sought baptism. It is also worth

half for active participation (De Gruchy, 1979: 240). (Churches emphasising that the crucial generation of church expansion vary in their understanding of membership, which makes the com- between the 1880s and the 1920s needs closer study, since school parison of denominational as opposed to census figures unhelpful.) and church attendance spread far more widely then than in the Thus just over a million Africans were reported as Christians in pioneering conversion period (which hitherto has attracted most | 1911, constituting just over a quarter (26.2 per cent) of the African research). population, whereas by 1946, over four million were enumerated as Was it less threatening to African communities to lose their church members, more than half (52.6 per cent) of the total African women, as opposed to their men, to the new faith? It could be said

population. that the conversion of runaway daughters posed a threat to paternal

Whatever the admitted shortcomings of the census figures, the domestic control (and the gaining of bridewealth), male conversion overwhelming importance of Methodists and Anglicans comes — as anti-Christian chiefs well saw — constituted a greater political through: at a combined strength of 1,560,977 (over a million of and military threat to chiefdoms. Further obstacles to male church them Methodist), they embraced well over a third of all African membership were indigenous ideas of manliness associated with war Christians (37.8 per cent) in 1946. The dominance of ‘mission’ and fighting, the herding activities of boys (which prevented them churches of European and American origin also remains striking —- from attending Christian schools), and the strictures against despite the astonishing growth of the African independent churches _ polygyny. In addition, as household and community leaders, men in this century, they still accounted for less than a quarter of all were inevitably more involved in traditional ritual and ceremonial

Africans recorded as Christian in 1946. (Pauw, 1974: 422). So in a number of ways, women’s relative

What, regrettably, is not as easily uncovered is the gender break powerlessness made them more open to conversion — and their down of this church constituency. However, membership figures Christianity might come under threat if it conflicted with traditional recorded by the women’s groups (see below) give some idea of political and social mores and priorities. denominational and regional growth of committed adult women. This was exemplified in the life of one of the few early women What is also known is that with the increase in migrant labour from converts who was not politically obscure and marginal, Emma

the late nineteenth century, laments at the depletion of male Sandile. The daughter of a prominent Xhosa chief, she received membership became a constant refrain from many rural churches. Anglican baptism and education in the 1860s to prepare her for By the inter-war years Transkei Anglican missionaries were marriage to a politically important frontier chief sympathetic to increasingly concerned at the disproportionate numbers of women Christianity, but pressure from his people, who refused to counteand girls, as opposed to men and boys, who were being confirmed: nance his enforced monogamy, resulted in the marriage being called 3,361 to 982 in that diocese in 1931, for example (SPG, Report, off. Sandile was furious that the new religion had stopped the

1932). marriage and eventually forced Emma to return to ‘heathen’ dress The early stages of Christian missionary endeavour in South and marry a polygynist, rather than remain unmarried (Hodgson,

Africa have frequently been characterised as relatively unfruitful, 1987). ,

with evangelists meeting indifference and hostility. Although far As other chapters in Walker (1990) make clear, Victorian Chrismore detailed investigation is needed, in the Cape and Natal early _ tianity offered a contradictory package to African women: a way of converts were often already outcasts from ‘traditional society ‘or escape from some of the constraints of pre-Christian society and yet came to mission stations because they offered a physical refuge or a firm incorporation into the domesticity and patriarchy of source of economic support away from the African community. Christian family life. Nineteenth-century middle-class Christians Before the Cape and Natal Nguni were militarily broken and from Britain and the United States were living through a revolution politically undermined, mission stations attracted, on the one hand, in and re-creation of their own domestic lives as a necessary basis for

! Deborah Gaitskell/A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa * 179 devout living (see Davidoff and Hall, 1987). The private female evangelisation of ‘heathen’ women, and to have been as well a domain of the home, where women were dependent as wives and_ vehicle for the denunciation of ‘native beer’ and exhortations to mothers, became increasingly separated from the public male world _ total abstinence. The women’s help in reporting and visiting the of work and independent citizenship. Viewed from this standpoint, sick has also long been an appreciated feature of such female bands. African women seemed to be ‘beasts of burden’, ‘slaves’ working at So while white supervisors compared these gatherings with their husbands’ behest, because of their predominant role in agricul- ‘Mothers’ Meetings’ back in England, which similarly provided tea tural production. But it could be argued that there was an area of and buns for refreshment after some uplifting home-related talk, — agreement between Victorian Christians and African communities their original rationale appears to have had four aspects: devotionalas to the primacy of women’s reproductive work. Despite the strand ism (the prayer meetings), evangelism, temperance, and visiting the of mission thinking that stressed preparing girls for domestic service _ sick. to settlers, a lifetime of wage labour seems not to have been the desired mission goal for female converts. African girls were seen as Domesticity and prayer unions on the Witwatersrand future spouses of Christian men, mothers of Christian children, makers of Christian homes. While not perfectly continuous with At the turn of the century, African Christianity was still prethe precolonial economic centrality of women’s fertility, as outlined dominantly rural. However, particularly once the Transvaal became by Guy in this volume, the mission emphasis on women as child- a British colony after the South African War, urban centres like the bearers and homemakers overlapped in crucial ways with indige- Witwatersrand, with its large population of African male migrants

nous values. on the mines, came to be seen as strategically important and

Conversion was aimed at transforming the division of labour in potentially vital growth points for the church. By the 1920s, over African homes in order to fulfil these Victorian ideals of devout twenty-six missionary societies were at work in Johannesburg. domesticity. As already described by Meintjes, when missionaries Missionaries soon realised that it was not simply a matter of encouraged the adoption of the plough, the intention was that men reaching male migrants. A few migrants had come with families should do far more of the ‘heavy’ farming seen as inappropriate for while others had been followed to town by their wives; in addition, the more ‘delicate’ sex. This would free women to sew the clothes ‘unattached’ women increasingly came to the Reef seeking a that betokened their new faith, and to create in exclusively monog- livelihood. As a result, by the 1930s the male-female ratio on the amous homes a different, more ‘companionable’ type of conjugal Reef was 4,32:1, whereas back in the 1890s it had been more like relationship, one where the wife was ‘helpmeet’ rather than ‘slave’. 10:1. Of the 106,977 African females on the Witwatersrand in Thus Christian missionaries drew young African girls into theirown 1936, half those over 10 years old were officially returned as domestic life, to learn about Christian womanhood and home- ‘gainfully occupied’. Some 90 per cent of these 42,733 ‘employed’ making, both by hard work in service and by example. They set women were domestic servants (Union of South Africa, Sixth about eagerly encouraging their star pupils to pair off and fashion a Census 1936: IX, xiii, xviii). The importance of this area of work new kind of marital companionship and Westernised home (Bean. for the churches is clear, and through hostels for domestic servants,

and Van Heyningen, 1983:14, 25—7,114,125). which provided housework training and job placement, women But the first women’s prayer unions seem to have evolved not missionaries attempted a Christian input (Gaitskell, 1979).

from explicit educational efforts through the schools but from The two other major income-earning activities for African regular devotional meetings held by missionary women with ‘un- women in Johannesburg, especially in the inter-war years, were not educated’ adult African churchwomen. Sewing schools for adult recorded in the official statistics — though possibly some washerwomen were a weekly feature of mission stations among the women were enumerated as domestic servants. They were laundry Tswana and Zulu, for example, from the 1830s, because to want to work brought home from white suburbs, and illicit liquor-brewing, be ‘dressed’ or ‘clothed’ was synonymous with seeking Christian particularly for sale to male migrants. Married churchwomen seem instruction or baptism. This widespread and significant emphasis on to have done the former and inveighed against the latter, as in this sewing probably acted from the first to bring women together in example: church groups — starting with the weekly sewing class — in a way It’s almost impossible for us to live decently in Johannesburg ....

that never happened to men. In "qe thise way, the gendered temptation to sell thisassumption stuff [beer] isTh too strong. All the that clothes were predominantly a female responsibility served to dh kj lot of - buy: .

create a distinctive Christian female, as opposed to male, group and ova ouhe re d walk ‘4 ns "B. ° nT ney Chrict: P ond From meeting the practical need for clothing, women moved on try to go straight, I have to stand here day after day and kill

solidarity across the denominations. and gramophones and silk dresses. Because I am a Christian an

OUfaith te Prac’ If other washing (quoted in Phillips, to share their both with8:each and with non-churchgoers. myse 8 \d1930: PS»

136).

Already from at least the 1880s in the eastern Cape, missionary The long-entrenched use of Thursday afternoon for manyano wives were bringing groups of baptised African women together in meetings may even have been related to the rhythm of the washing associations that met regularly for the sort of unstructured times of week: bundles were fetched on Monday, washed on Tuesday and

shared ‘testimony’, exposition of biblical verses and extempo- ironed on Wednesday, freeing women for group prayer on raneous prayer that have been the life-blood of church meetings for Thursdays. thousands of African women over the past century. Such gatherings As already discussed elsewhere, the beer trade was central to the

explicitly aimed by the early 1900s to help women in their new social and economic survival of many Reef African women responsibilities as Christian wives and mothers. But they also seem, (Hellmann, 1948). This gave the strong temperance strand in as in the case of meetings conducted by Mrs Waters in Engcobo manyanos a different twist from that in the rural areas. All three from the 1880s on into the 1920s, to have acted from the very churches focused on in this chapter forbade prayer women to beginning as an outlet for energetic and successful female brew, drink or sell ‘native beer’ or other alcohol, and large annual

180 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

interdenominational temperance conventions were held on the 1. To secure the due recognition of the place of a Christian Reef under American Board auspices in the late 1930s. Resolutions home in a people’s life. on liquor legislation were passed by the Methodist manyano, which 2. The inculcation of the moral duties of industry honesty, truth-

government policy. the home.

seems not to have taken a stand on other inter-war questions of fulness, cleanliness and kindness by example and precept in But for both brewers and washers, a major incentive for working 3. The training of the younger women and girls to take their from home in the yards and locations was that they could keep an places as Christian in the national fife. eye on their children at the same time, whereas female domestic 4. The encouragement of individual Missionary effort among workers invariably lived on their employers’ premises and were not women not yet evangelised. allowed to have their children with them. Given the poverty of 5. The consideration of any questions that affect the life of the African families, a middle-class model of economically dependent native home and the morals of the people. (Foreign Field, Christian wifehood was impracticable: without whatever earnings April 1913: 251)

women and children could make, families could not have survived .

on low male wages alone. Many women on the Reef, of course, as Even at this stage, it was probably the fourth aim of evangelism, in urban working-class Britain, moved in and out of various part- along with prayer itself, which was the most meaningful to the time and full-time jobs as family needs permitted. Yet the temper- African members, as accounts below of zestful evangelisation and ance rule of prayer unions certainly worked to reinforce the sexual indefatigable praying at conferences seek to illustrate. Nevertheless, division of labour deemed appropriate in Christian families: no domestic education was a perennial emphasis, exemplified by the devout mother could be a prosperous brewer — rather, husbands _ sessions at the 1923 conference on ‘Health in the Home’ and “Duty provided the main household earnings for wives and children of a Christian Mother to Her Children’ (Transvaal Methodist,

dependent on them. November 1923). As the mission apparatus of schools and churches spread in town, As for the second most important church on the Reef, work

the southern Transvaal began to see the emergence of the kind of among Anglican women was pioneered by Deaconess Julia Gilpin women’s organisations recently started in rural areas, with similar from 1908. (She also started two other key female ventures in concerns for married women’s domestic roles and responsibilities. Johannesburg, St Agnes’ School, Rosettenville, and a hostel for However, for the three most prominent prayer movements in domestic servants.) After some preliminary weekly meetings — a ‘mission’ churches in the Johannesburg area in the first half of this short talk from her followed by some hymns and then prayers in century (Anglican, Methodist and American Board), despite striking which the women joined — she founded a society for communiunderlying continuities, the domestic slant came in slightly different cants, to help them, she said, lead a better life. The stress was on

ways. , building up regular devotional habits and a Christian standard of Mrs S. Gqosho, wife of the African minister in Potchefstroom, life, for conditions in the mine locations rendered it ‘almost

started the Wesleyan Methodist prayer union in the southern Trans- impossible for a decent woman to retain her purity and self-respect’ vaal in 1907. She brought a small group of women together to pray since so many couples living there were in fact not married (USPG, ‘for their families and for the common unity and for their sins’, as WW Reports Africa, Dss Julia, 1908). (It must be remembered that well as for protection for husbands and sons working on the mines, before 1914 at any rate, the Witwatersrand seems to have had a and for the uprooting of witchcraft and superstition. The manyano’s number of relatively loosely controlled mine locations, as opposed basic objects were ‘to cultivate the habits of praying and to con- to compounds proper, where some sort of ‘family life’ was possible: solidate Christianity among the folks’ (Manyano, 1959). But after 53 mines had 3,784 women and nearly as many children in their the wife of the white chairman of the District was brought in from married quarters in 1913-14, according to Moroney (1982: 265). In 1910 as president, the focus on the domestic virtues of the devout fact, with time, branches of the Women’s Help Society’ — they only wife and mother sharpened. Mrs Burnet urged the delegates at the linked up with the Mothers’ Union from 1938 — existed in church 1915 convention to ‘show the power of their religion in the way congregations both on mine locations and in the variety of central they care for their husbands — many of whom are not Christian — town ‘yards’ and urban locations along the Reef as far as Springs, as

and in an increased effort to train their children for the Lord’ well as in southern Transvaal centres like Potchefstroom, (Foreign Field, February 1916: 133). Her concern for simple hygiene Vereeniging and Heidelberg. The majority of the early members

and propriety was reflected in the constitution in such elementary had not been to school, and as the mission staff ended up too

rules, later dropped, as: stretched to do more than visit most groups once every few months,

these groups evolved in their own way under African leadership, — (a) Sweep and clean the house every day. (b) Keep your things replicating the revivalistic style of other churches.

and your family clean and good. (c) If you have children teach As we have seen above, the Anglican women’s society was them the Christian faith. Do not let them run naked. (AP, meant to help married women ‘retain their purity and self-respect’.

‘African Women’s Prayer Union (Manyano) Rules’) The emphasis on ‘purity’, but this time in the sense of premarital chastity of teenagers, surfaced too in the third most important Clearly, more than a gender dimension is involved here — the Protestant church in the Johannesburg area. The American Board patronising tone suggests a marked class and race divide. There are Mission (ABM), which was Congregational, had its heartland in repeated instances in mission work in Johannesburg where the Natal arnong the Zulu. There, in 1912, a women’s revivalist prayer echoes of middle-class church activities and attitudes towards the movement called Isililo (‘wailing’) sprang up after African men at a urban working class in Britain can be heard. Mrs Burnet’s daughter church gathering accused their wives of being lax in supervising set out the Union’s aims more formally in 1913, with a flavour of their children’s courtship practices: gladly accepting gifts from their

Victorian moral self-improvement: daughters’ lovers and giving them ‘opportunities for privacy’ in

Deborah Gaitskell/A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa ¢ 181

return. Women admitted and repented of their shortcomings in this dress). But later a more ‘spiritual’, interpretation of Methodist garb regard and then enlisted others on the new Christian basis that it gained a currency it still retains: black skirts signifying sin, red was mothers who were responsible for their children’s immorality blouses the saving blood of Christ and white hats the women’s (Mbili, 1962). The ABM’s ‘mothers’ meetings on the Reef, how- resultant purity. By the late 1920s, when the Anglican women had ever, seem to have linked up with the Natal Isililo only in the early nearly 50 branches of their women’s society in the Transvaal, they 1920s, and talks on ‘purity’ to Reef Isililo women were given mostly were bound to a uniform of black skirts and headscarves with white

by women missionaries. jackets (TSR, January 1927: 2). This seems to have originated in the The other churches were also wrestling with the question of eastern Cape and was probably influenced by the habits of the nuns control of teenagers in the years before the First World War. Dis- who supervised some early groups there. cussion about children at the 1912 Transvaal Methodist manyano White mission supervisors tried to standardise dress — sometimes, convention, for instance, centred ‘especially on the care of girls, as with the Methodists, in the teeth of opposition — and then found who so often fall into evil ways’ (Foreign Field, April 1913: 253). At themselves vainly criticising the members for ‘over-emphasis[ing] this point the Anglicans were running penitents’ classes for the non-essentials, such as badges, uniform, rules for absentees’ (The unmarried mothers. By the end of the war, their women’s society Watchman, February 1946: 6). A Natal missionary primly observed, was also trying to help mothers guide and direct their unruly in a comment which underlined the domestic aim that was upperdaughters. In all three churches, special associations for unmarried most in white minds, ‘Considering the multiplicity of “uniforms” girls were set up under the protective aegis of the mothers’ seen in Native country, members of the Mothers’ Union would be

organisations, to guard them from ‘moral downfall’. well advised to make their homes distinctive, and keep their clothes

As more research is done on the beginnings of such associations commonplace’ (SWM Journal, April 1936: 8). Just as special church in other regions of South Africa, this issue is bound to surface again. dress, I suggest below, marked out the devout at a stage when In Mothers’ Union records for the Grahamstown diocese, for Western dress per se had lost its spiritual significance, so there were example, there is reference to a conference held in 1910, at the also periodic worries about prayer union sanctimoniousness — about request of African women, to inaugurate the Union in Keiskamma- a sense of superiority over other women which could lead to their

hoek. ‘Very earnest was the Address about two weaknesses in being even stricter on one another than the general church

Native Home Life viz, the lack of obedience among children, and _ disciplinary machinery provided for. :

of purity among the younger people.’ The following year it was Among the first converts, the adoption of Western clothing reported with satisfaction that the ‘native people seem to have signified commitment to new religious beliefs. As such clothing reached so simply and straightly the dominating idea of the became more widely available, however, it could no longer be Mothers’ Union — united, prayerful guidance in the difficult task of assumed to be an outward sign of inward spiritual grace. Categories

~ the up-bringing of our children by precept and by example’ (MU, blurred once more. For this reason church uniforms ought to be

1910, 1911). interpreted, perhaps, as the reassertion of a distinctive Christian

I have argued that, while the ABM women — uniquely, it seems dress, proclaiming the wearer’s spiritual allegiance. Being ‘bloused’ — founded their movement on this issue, adolescent female sexual by the prayer union was a solemn milestone of religious commit- _ mores were not customarily the responsibility of mothers: it was the ment and a reward for upright living. For women it also advertised missionaries who preached that it should be. They themselves came marital respectability: membership and the right to wear the prized from a culture which was laying increasing emphasis on female uniform could be withdrawn for marital infidelity. Hence those chastity and the almost exclusive identification of ‘morality’ with who were seen wending their way in crisply starched uniforms to ‘sexual purity’. There is plenty of evidence that while African Thursday afternoon meetings were proclaiming their conformity to mothers despaired of controlling their daughters and preventing the new ideology of Christian domesticity. premarital sex-play (allowed, even approved, among the non- There is yet another way in which prayer unions and Christian Christian Nguni) and pregnancy in the very changed social and notions of home life interacted. ‘The sociability and mutual support economic circumstances of the early twentieth century, they offered by the prayer group should also be seen as a desired suppleresisted being expected to give their daughters sex education and ment to the isolation and monotony of responsibilities in the

worse — having such matters talked about in church. But the nuclear family that was propagated by the missionaries. The burdensome and painful responsibilities of motherhood were at the Christian idea of domesticity ensured that it was primarily women

heart of manyano spirituality (Gaitskell, 1982). who would face all the difficulties of the home; but with its stress on

The manyanos are also well known for the distinctive uniforms individualism and monogamy, Christianity cut them off from older, members from different denominations wear. Although much more communal supports. Although southern Africa has no tradition of research is needed, the history of these movements makes it clear formal women’s groups of the kind that operated in West Africa, that the choice of outfit and the deep significance given to it, women in precolonial African society did perform many daily tasks together with the complicated gradations of status denoted by small — collecting wood and water, thatching grass, stamping mealies, etc. variations and additions to the official dress, are all traceable back to — ina group with other women and girls. They also came together

the women themselves. in more formalised agricultural work groups and in leisure activities

By the first or second decade of the century each denomination such as dancing or singing (which was sometimes combined with

was evolving its own uniform, which in many cases became the praise poetry that, I suggest below, seems a precursor of the standardised and more formally adopted in the 1920s. Complex manyano style of oral testimony). In Nguni communities cultural borrowings were at work: the Natal Methodist women particularly, where women married out of their lineage and went to from whom Mrs Ggosho of Potchefstroom took her inspiration, live with their husbands away from their families of birth, solidarity allegedly modelled their red, black and white uniform on British with other women was something of a necessity. Now, in changed redcoats (just as the ABM Volunteers aped Boer War Volunteer circumstances, other Christian women substituted for kin at times

182 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

of crisis, such as sickness and death, and provided mutual care. helplessness and submission expected of women at such a time of Hence the request of one manyano woman to her group to ‘give me sorrow (Ngubane, 1977: 84, 93-4). (Men traditionally ended a hand to pick up the burden’, and the resolve of another in trouble: mourning by an aggressive act of ritual hunting.) Throughout black ‘I must get some strength from the mothers in this chain’ (Pauw, Africa, wailing is regarded as typically female, and women are

147-8). ,

1975: 96). invariably the singers of stylised funeral laments (Finnegan, 1970: ae . . But all was not submission and lament at the turn of the century, From domesticity to praying and preaching and it is in this respect that the curious subversiveness of the

But to portray these remarkable, long-lived prayer unions merely in manyanos shows itself. Indigenous male revival movements sprouted

terms of some normative Western family ideology or female group in Natal among Methodists as early as the 1870s, in Edendale therapy is to risk missing the zealous and eloquent spiritual (Unzondelelo), and in the ABM in the 1890s at Umtwalume (the experience at their heart. That at least is what the historical record ‘Volunteers’), and expressed a new, self-confident African Christian suggests. It is true that the accounts from the 1950s stress an atmos- expansionism (Hewson, 1950: 76-80; Christofersen, 1967: 92). The phere of weeping, sighing and mutual loud commiseration as_ desire for greater responsibility and autonomy led to breakaways women spoke about their troubles regarding children, family, sick- into independency among the Cape Presbyterians and Anglicans. ness and death, as well as their struggle for survival. The impression Some 15 to 30 years later, in a delayed echoing (it appears to me) of

created is of a cathartic ‘self-induced frenzy of unpremeditated this demand for more evangelistic opportunity and autonomy, talking’ (Brandel-Syrier, 1962: 15, 34-9; Brandel, 1955: 181-2). laywomen and ministers’ wives held conferences and preached for Insufficient evidence about weekly meetings prior to 1940 makes it converts. In a sense, prayer unions constituted a creative, selfhard to gauge how widespread such a style of lamentation was in confident impulse which generally stopped short of a breakaway

the earlier period. However, reports of conventions convey, in into independence, partly because women could not found

contrast, a sense of vigorous enthusiasm and conscientious organisa- churches themselves if they wished to replicate mission models tional upbuilding, even though women also wanted to be moved (which were heavily male-dominated), and partly because their and inspired — which they frequently were, by each other’s oratory. leadership was generally not thwarted in the fierce way the new The eventual routinised ‘style’ of manyanos across the denomina- African ministry of the 1890s was. Women’s marginality gave them tions seems to have had its roots in late-nineteenth-century pietistic a kind of freedom to experiment and learn from other denominarevivalist preaching, which sought to induce a kind of mourning in _ tions, making Christianity their own, because there was not such a its hearers: they had to bewail and confess their sins, then publicly fixed conception in each denomination of female as opposed to commit themselves to a fresh spiritual start. The African churches male ministry. encountered this emotional type of service — highly participatory, However, there were clashes between 1915 and 1930 with preferably lasting all night — partly through visiting British and white women presidents and with white and black clergy and American evangelists in the Cape and Natal in the 1860s and 1890s_ councils, who sought, with some success, to restrain what the (Mills, 1975: 25-7, 298 n. 6; Christofersen, 1967: 93-4). As leading African women would have liked to make a more unfettered African Christian men translated the revivalist message into the autonomy. On the Reef, for example, white church leaders made vernacular, they picked up the oratorical style in the process. sure they took titular and constitutional control of the unions. In Medium and message took deep root in Nguni communities. Inthe 1915, in one location, Anglican women prayer-meeting members last quarter of the nineteenth century, Scottish missionaries among ‘were reported to be praying that no white priest or white woman the Mfengu found that ‘from time to time a wave of spiritual worker should come to them at all’ (Pilot Letters, 1915: 32). Resentconviction and surrender moved the district and swept considerable ful African Methodist women were repeatedly reminded by their numbers in to the membership of the Church. These occasions white president in the 1920s that each prayer group still came under often followed prayer meetings which were held by the people the control of the local ‘Leaders’ Meeting’ (Manyano, 1959). themselves and were carried on throughout the night’ (Livingstone, The Transvaal Methodist manyano acquired its first African 1918: 42-3). Fifty years ago, D. D. T. Jabavu characterised African woman president by 1937, whereas the Mothers’ Union, which had Christianity in general as ‘devoted to the simplicities of religion: a small number of white members as well (in congregationally prayer meetings, hymn-singing, assimilation of Scripture texts and segregated groups), only obtained an African vice-president in 1948 the constant calling of others unto repentance’ (1932: 112-13). and an African president in 1974. When examining the degree of Whatever its exact diffusion, the all-night revival service-cum- organisational autonomy which African women were able to build prayer meeting spread widely, being reported as far apart as St up and retain despite the long-lasting presidency of white women Cuthbert’s in the Transkei in 1896 and north-west of Pietersburg in missionaries, it is vital to bear in mind the growing number and the Transvaal in 1905. In the 1920s Transkei Anglicans used revival geographical spread of these groups. Mission supervisors frequently services as their main means of attempting to convert the ‘heathen’. commented that they could not possibly attend each weekly But wailing became entrenched in women’s groups, it may not be meeting personally, so in most cases these were left to the women to fanciful to suggest, because weeping was deemed culturally more run themselves, under the leadership of the wives of the African appropriate for women and wailing was how women behaved clergy. In the case of the very active and well-staffed Anglican customarily at Nguni funerals. Isililo (‘wailing’), the striking term ‘settlements’ in Sophiatown and Orlando in the 1930s, the staff of the ABM women chose for their movement (and clung to when white single women concentrated their efforts on children almost the activist American supervisors wanted them to call it the exclusively. In part this was because African wives did not see the ‘Women’s Welfare Group of the American Board’ instead), is used unmarried among ‘overseas’ mission personnel as having much of the protracted ritual keening of women after the burial of the authority in what was still a very family-focused spiritual movedeceased. It is associated, reports an anthropologist, with the ment. Again, this served to reinforce African women’s autonomy.

Deborah Gaitskell/A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa ¢ 183

Considerable enterprise, vitality and self-confidence were spouses, who came to be regarded as ‘ordained’ themselves and involved in spreading the gospel, and the women’s actions do not fit found in manyanos a vital outlet for their new leadership status. (A a cosy image of secluded homemakers. The Isililo grew because a Methodist history singled out and remarked on the ‘uproar’ from group of women, led by a Mrs Gobhozi and a Mrs Kaula (though ministers’ wives when the highest manyano office went to a ‘lay joined for part of the way at least by some men), walked, ‘singing woman’.)

hymns and stopping for the night on the way ... like vagrant This is one of many ways in which relatively high levels of

wanderers because of this great gospel of Isililo’, to six ABM _ female school attendance from the very start of mission education, mission stations in turn (Mbili, 1962). Mrs Gqosho, founder of the plus intermarriage among pupils at elite schools, seem to have Transvaal Methodist manyano, spread it by holding revivals contributed to the scale of manyano formation. Manyanos also had throughout the District, followed by a convention in 1908 arranged committees, secretaries and treasurers, both locally and regionally; (evidently to the admiring surprise of the white male super-_ like church life everywhere for men, they gave women experience intendent) entirely by the women themselves. They brought ‘their of more formal corporate organising and record keeping. own food or money, and many of them slept on the floor of the There are only scattered references to Methodist women want-

church’ (Transvaal Methodist, October 1938: 3-4). ing to preach to the church as a whole, but those who did faced

The Methodist annual conferences continued to be impressively opposition and lack of training until the 1940s; in contrast, organised affairs, lasting a week at a time. They were only kept from thousands of men were able to channel their oratorical eloquence as

erowing beyond their peak of 600 women (at Evaton, in 1920) by ‘local preachers’, a vital arm of Methodist expansion. Manyanos the firm (and resented) hand of white supervisors, who introduced provided a segregated sphere of female spirituality. It is frequently quotas to keep numbers down. Women, some with babies, travelled remarked that Thursday is the women’s day, as Sunday is the hundreds of miles, sometimes taking up to five days and using a__ preacher’s. Women clearly did want to preach. As an Anglican nun variety of forms of transport — though the railways were vital to wrote from the Transkei in 1916: feasibility — to reach these gatherings. Mutual greetings p rovided 7 We have been making great efforts to guide and control the zeal

time of great hilarity, and of joyous, affectionate expression’ (Foreign £ the Christ; h described b f »female SEPte ;,.una a8unattainable ;eh l th for (the work of)themseives preaching’. There is no large assemblies, in small isolated church as thirsty 10 P8 ge female

_ Field, September; 1921: 233). The contagious enthusiasm of the OF fe risian women who were described PY one ©

; 4a need for paid Bible women here, for all the women want to

sroups, the enjoyment of sociability, the sense of pride and freedom h. either to the heath : h other. The; Lj

in setting off for conferences in style, as women together, come Preacd, eriner te ene neaknen OF FO Gach OUNCE ENE Zea"

ee .?. excellent, but theirAs knowledge ismissionary not always; equal to it, and through in the :convention an ABM - 4: oo manydescriptions. of them are possessed by the idea that souls can only be

wrote — somewhat patronisingly — of the Isililo annual gathering in h h no; S’ Cuthbert’s Mission. 1916

Natal in the 1920s: “This is their very first effort at self expression in won through noisy ranting. (5. Cuthbert's Mission, ) the way of an organisation they have ever attempted you know, I And yet even that supposedly safe separate arena of religious am sure a lot of the delicious feelings of Woman’s rights give spice enthusiasm was regarded as unacceptable by African men. The to the occasion. You should see those Officers sitting up front, in fundraising contribution of the women was much prized but their their white caps and blouses and pink ribbon badges ...” (ABC: 15.4 desire for financial and organisational autonomy was frequently

v.48, Amy Cowles to Miss Lamson, 22.4.1926). viewed with ambivalence. In the early 1920s there was a sharp Although Anglican conferences on the Reef were never as big as_ division of opinion among black Anglican clergy on the Reef as to the Transvaal Methodist ones (up to 200 women met for two days), whether women’s all-night prayer meetings should be blessed or in parts of rural Natal and the Transkei gatherings of a hundred or banned. (The men did not like their wives being out all night.) more women (who might walk 30 miles to get there) would meet The impropriety of the hour also perturbed women mission-

in annual conferences for a couple of days. aries, for it did not conform to their view of appropriate female

In 1919 a group of seven Johannesburg Primitive Methodist behaviour. ‘Emotionalism’ was an important bogey too: ‘one women raised £25 and went by train to Aliwal North and Zastron hesitates to quench: and discourage their eagerness to pray ... yet it —a round trip of a thousand miles — to thank the church for its is so much mixed up with a sort of excitement and it is so bad for support and hold revival services. The female secretary zestfully women, mostly mothers of families, to get into the habit of being described the effective female preaching: Mrs Kumalo’s exposition out all night? (USPG, E, “Work amongst the native women in of a text ‘became a very strong sermon’, while Mrs Tsewo’s the Johannesburg and the Reef’, 1920). next day was ‘a piercing sword to the people’. She also counted White Anglicans (male and female) despaired at the African heads of the new members enrolled as enthusiastically as any male preference for praying ‘corporately and vocally, not as we do, church leader with the Methodist obsession with numerical tabula- individually and silently’ (Cape to the Zambezi, May 1937: 27). tion: “Total from Saturday evening to Monday evening we got Activist Americans characteristically lost patience at times with the

33’(MMS 1180, A. A. Kidwell, unsigned letter 24.8.1919). women’s attachment to ‘praying and preaching’, because they It was also crucial to manyano formation in the Transvaal that the wouldn’t ‘get down to business’ and take ‘definite steps for bettering number of ordained African ministers grew substantially among the their home condition’. (ABC: 15.4 v.48, Amy Cowles to Miss Methodists after the South African War (from 17 in 1902 to 35 in Lamson, 22.4.1926). 1908), for prayer unions have long been dominated by ministers’ The appeal of ‘praying and preaching’, I argue, should also be

wives. Interestingly, colonial Rhodesia provides a comparable seen in the light of the vitality of indigenous traditions of oral example of both the role of emotional revivalism and the impor- expression in which women shared — oratory, folk tales and praise tance of ministers’ wives in the foundation of the equivalent female poems vigorously ‘performed’ to a convivially responding group prayer unions there (Muzorewa, 1975). A growing number of (Finnegan, 1970: 184,91; Scheub, 1975; Gunner, 1979) — as well as ministers or clergy invariably meant a commensurate increase in of spoken, corporate, spontaneous prayer (Shorter, 1975: 8), and

184 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

democratic public participation. What is vital to realise is that lively Transvaal Methodist manyano and the Natal Isililo both showed participation in a manyano meeting required no special church — great keenness in collecting funds over several years to advance their training, not even literacy. Women learnt their own hymns off by children’s security, via, respectively, a Domestic Science School at heart, spoke extemporaneously on biblical passages introduced by Kilnerton (nearly £4,000 was given in annual shillings over 25 someone else and prayed spontaneously about immediate and _ years) and a farm, which was bought at Umzinto in 1928 so that if personal needs. They did not need to be able to read or have formal their children became destitute they could live there (Mbili, 1962:

educational qualifications to contribute. Their own eloquence and 5-8).

fervour could give them enough authority (although formal leadership was in later years invariably dominated by clergy wives). The Manyanos in the context of South Africa history Indeed, the first women’s groups began among an older generation which had lost out on school. As a woman testified ata convention By about the middle of the twentieth century, African women’s in the 1920s: ‘I cannot read the Book. I took the red blouse and . prayer unions, particularly in the Anglican and Methodist churches, daily I am out preaching to the heathen’ (AP, Mrs Allcock to her had built up a considerable membership. In 1940 there were at least

family, 15.10.1924). 45,149 women in the Methodist manyano throughout South Africa,

oe ; . ape 369 ; . rahamstown 4,060 | Queenstown 5,453 Meet; ; ‘ as ; ; ; Clarkebury 10,568 . . , ; Kimberley and Bloemfontein 10,278

On account of the customary, authority of grandmothers (and with numbers largest among the Transkei Xhosa (the Clarkebury mothers-in-law, who prevented their young daughters-in-law from District), the Sotho-Tswana of the Orange Free State and northern joining the Mothers’ Union in its early days in the Transkei, for Cape (Kimberley and Bloemfontein District), and the Zulu of Natal.

example), that age-group often dominated women’s groups.

Similarly, the room for acclamation as a good preacher, even if the Table 1: South African manyano members by district, 1940

woman was old and uneducated, helped entrench ‘praying and C | : preaching’, so much so that by the 1950s Anglican disquiet, not Grah , only in Johannesburg as noted by Brandel-Syrier (1962: 92-5) but also in places like the Transkei, came to a head once more.

eetings teaching more ‘practical’ homemaking skills were widely .; ,

introduced ‘more (not without difficulty), in part in the hope of attracting Natal, |’7790 younger, modern’ women to the Mothers’ Union, and

, Transvaal and Swaziland 6,699

uniforms were not to be worn (though in practice they were

retained). Certainly the devotional style which I am enthusiastically From Minutes of Annual Conference, 1940:246-7

characterising as the authentic appropriation of Christianity by African women in the early years of this century was being con- . It is worth noting that the Transvaal Synod Minutes for the same demned by African Mothers’ Union workers in the 1960s: ‘they year give an even higher membership for that District — 9,421 cannot read or write, the only thing they can do is to preach and members, 2,567 of whom were in branches on the Reef. The pray’, read a typical regretful report on one group in the Transkei manyano’s growth in the Transvaal from seven members in 1907 to

(MU, 1962). eight hundred in 1913 to nearly ten thousand by the Second World

Despite the inter-war refrain from white missionaries about the War is impressive — yet was being surpassed elsewhere in the Methodist manyano — “The possibilities are great, but the need for country, as the table shows.

effective and appropriate guidance is also great’ — the response of By the end of the Second World War the estimated African white female Methodist supervisors to the uninhibited spiritual style membership of the (Anglican) Mothers’ Union in the Johannesburg of the movement was invariably enthusiastic, or at least tranquil in diocese was around 3,500. By the beginning of the 1970s, for the the knowledge that Methodism had a history of such emotionalism. continent as a whole, it was South Africa which provided the largest

It is certainly Methodist influence that has permeated the other Mothers’ Union membership, nearly 34,000. The all-African denominations. At the week-long Transvaal Methodist conven- diocese of St John’s (the Transkei) and in Johannesburg (though this _ tions, prayer “was the supreme business for which the delegates did include some white and coloured women) had particularly

came’ (Foreign Field, September 1921: 232). At the regular four thriving branches. ,

services each day (ranging from dawn prayer through evangelistic, temperance and testimony meetings to memorial and communion Table 2: Mothers’ Union membership, South Africa and Africa, c. 1970

, -— ; Branches Members

services), women from more reticent English backgrounds were) =O eee

struck by the African women’s eloquence: “These native women =~

have a wonderful power in prayer and they use it to the full. The Diocese of St John’s ASy 7.644

; ; ; Diocese of Johannesburg 143 5,634 aq: All South Africa 1,746 33,966 ; ; yr: East Africa 19,462

, / West or (: ; Central Africa 11,229 Africa 11,394

meetings for testimony were also very striking’ (Foreign Field, April. | 1913: 253). “Unlike many Christian friends of a lighter hue, there . was no unwillingness to speak. On the contrary, no sooner did one , sister finish her story, than two or three were on their feet’ (ibid., , February 1916: 132). The singing, too, was ‘indescribable’ (Trans- .;

vaal Methodist, November 1923: 30). Rwanda and Burund; Dorothea Lehmann has aptly observed thatUeanda, life in extended ~S8*0C# “wanda 10.753 un ’

family groups has trained African women to find organising social — From New Dimensions, 1972:1,98,216

activities, catering for big festivals, and collecting money, very satisfying duties (1963: 65). All these managerial tasks were the Liban Ngoyi, redoubtable ANC women’s leader in the 1950s, women’s in prayer unions, particularly at convention time. The voiced what remains a standard complaint against the manyanos.

Deborah Gaitskell/A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa ¢ 185

Observing churchwomen weeping at Easter over Christ’s suffering, their concentration upon the small praying community, the she ‘felt there was something very wrong, for after weeping nothing confession of problems and failings, their emotional, even ecstatic

would be done. They all waited for some power from God’ prayer’, was the spirit of the independent churches. Hastings (Joseph, 1963: 165). Part of the argument of this chapter has been suggests that when mission church leadership, preoccupied with that these movements constitute an important and authentic female school management, scientific medicine and printing presses, response to Christianity in their own right — they deserve to be strayed from the ‘central axis’ of prayer, ‘the independent churches assessed in terms of their religious origins and spiritual character. were able time and again to steal their clothes and grow very Nevertheless, historical research is uncovering ways in which effectively as just this and little else: churches of prayer.’ This condemnation of manyano reluctance to mobilise their considerable chapter has in part tried to show how manyanos provide virtually an

power for political or community purposes (Brandel-Syrier, 1962) independent ‘church of prayer’ for women within the mission

may have been premature. churches. The emotional, participatory, expressive culture of the

Julia Wells, for example, has documented how an active manyano was the choice and creation of the women themselves, as Methodist manyano member and the association’s president were was its use as a vehicle of female spiritual leadership and church among the ‘respectable’ middle-class Christian housewives who led expansion. This was what they wanted from and valued in the 1913 female anti-pass demonstrations in Bloemfontein (Wells, Christianity, even in the face of missionary misgivings. African 1980: 22-4). Her description of the mobilisation of Potchefstroom women helped shape the new faith; it did not simply force them women in 1929 for protest against residential permits is strikingly into a stereotypical mould. reminiscent of, and I suspect may well have drawn on, typical What the manyano came to stand for as a whole was meaningful manyano patterns of group revivalism: the women gathered through to many Christian women at the beginning of this century — singing in the streets of the location, ‘moving from street to street spontaneous praying out loud about personal and family needs; until all the women had been collected’ and their meetings would extemporaneous evangelistic preaching to small and large groups; a

last virtually all night (Wells, 1983). leadership role for ministers’ wives and older married women

The fascinating rural protest movement uncovered by William generally; a way of showing concern for one’s children, especially Beinart in Herschel in the 1920s likewise drew its strength from wayward daughters, at a time when old controls were failing; a ‘dressed’ women who had come out of Methodist prayer unions. distinctive identity as devout Christian women, marked out by dress Their programme of defensive communalism came to entail ‘an and expressed in corporate gatherings and fundraising.

African Christianity, separate schools, a fight for “communal” Motherhood was central to African women’s personal and tenure, and support for a restored chieftaincy’ (1987: 262). Beinart cultural identity as well as their social and economic roles long suggests that the women’s independent political action derived in before the advent of Christian missions in South Africa. But church part from an enforced independence, forged by the harsh social and groups served to transform, elevate and entrench the importance of economic circumstances in which they found themselves — alone marriage, wifehood and motherhood for women. They were in charge of homesteads for much of the year and bearing the brunt among the powerful ideological forces contributing to the ongoing

of economic pressures. These pressures were most acute for centrality of the notion of motherhood in African women’s unsalaried ‘progressives’ who were expected to wear Western organisation in the twentieth century — although arguably the state’s clothes and eat a more Western diet. But also important was that onslaught on their children has latterly been an even more powerful women retained separate administrative and financial control of force mobilising mothers (see Beall et al., 1987; Gaitskell and Untertheir religious affairs: ‘It seems to have been the manyano that halter, 1989). provided the initial organisational core for the women’s movement Just as organising on the basis of motherhood 1s a controversial during the boycott. They were not explicitly directing their action area in feminist debate in contemporary South Africa, so is the against men, but increasing political independence was predicated question of the defence of family. Bozzoli has seen it as conservaona challenge to male authority in which the manyano played some tive, in the sense ‘that manyano women seek to conserve and

part’ (ibid.: 239). consolidate the family and the woman’s position within it’ (1983:

Beinart is then able to show that, unlike what we know thus far 165). I would suggest it needs to be put in its wider historical of other areas, by 1925 the potential for religious separatism in the context: who 1s defending the family against what and with what manyano was being realised in Herschel, as Methodist women short-term implications for community solidarity and resistance, deserted to the ranks of a popular religious and political radical in and what long-term effects (such as condemnation of any who fall charge of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church (ibid.: outside of a particular family model)? Certainly defence of family

245-7). can be narrow, exclusive, inward-looking and confining for Those interested in exploring the history of African women’s women; but future investigation of gender relations in South Africa

lives, or indeed social change and religious and political mobilisa- will have to pay sensitive attention to the changing ways in which tion of different African communities, cannot afford to ignore what dominant models of family life have been both valued and resisted

was happening in the supposedly ‘closed’ world of the manyano. by individuals and threatened by the state.

| | Like nineteenth-century maternal associations in America,

Conclusion manyanos were ‘grass-roots responses to the contemporary cultural and religious elevation of the mother’s role’ (Cott, 1977: 149,156).

In his masterly survey of modern African Christianity, Adrian Though likewise restrained in part by the very concerns which Hastings (1979: 114-5, 265—6) remarks on how the ongoing contri- brought women into spiritual association — religious conviction and bution of female Christian associations, rather than the leadership of their family role — they exhibited, in their freedom from male and male catechists, has more often provided a ‘dynamic core’ to African ecclesiastical domination, an eloquent female solidarity and a church life. Furthermore, the spirit of these women’s groups, ‘with fervently African Christianity.

186 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

Notes Etherington, N. 1978. Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835-1880. African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland and Zulu-

I gratefully acknowledge financial support for my research from the land. London: Royal Historical Society

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Former Transvaal Methodist President in South Africa, ed. S. Marks and R. Rathbone. London: Longman

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African Studies, London Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903-1939’. Journal

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— Series E: Original missionary reports Hodgson, J. 1987. Princess Emma. Johannesburg: Ad Donker

—~ WW: Women’s Work Jabavu, D.D.T. 1932. ‘The Fruits of Christianity among the Bantu’. In Report of Proceedings of Eighth General Missionary Conference of South Africa.

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Foreign Field (Methodist Society, London) Contig eee ree Movements, ed. E.W. Hayward. London: mn 6 [Socey a Women Missionaries} Journal (Church of the Province of Livingstone, W.P. 1918. Christina Forsyth of Fingoland: The Story of the

The Watchman (Diocese of Johannesburg) M. Foneliest Woman mn Ap "Col Fondon: Hodder and Stoughton h of South TSR (Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia Missionary Association, London) ars 10- ve ano J 1 ; nd Sy e aed Ds a Af. thoaist —Aurc Pr, out d

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Mbili, T.F. (comp.) 1962. Umlandu Wesililo Samabandla 1912-1962 (‘A Histhe Churches’). Pamphlet

Beall, J. et al. 1987. “African Women in the Durban Struggle, 1985-1986: Mills, WG. 1975. ‘The Role of Afvscan Clergy in the Reorientation of

arwwards a "Obery Johann i“ Roles: In Pouth African Review 4, ed. G. Xhosa Society to the Plural Society in the Cape Colony, 1850-1915’. oss and I. Obery. Johannesburg: Ravan Press Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angel Bean, L. and Van Heyningen, E. (eds). 1983. The Letters of Jane Elizabeth Moroney S. 1982 "Mine Marzied ‘Quarters: The Differential Stabilisation

Waterston 1866-1905. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society of the Witwatersrand Workforce 1900-1920". In Industrialisation and

Beinart, W. 1987. ‘Amafelandawonye (The Die-hards): Popular Protest and Social Change in South Africa, ed. S. Marks and R. Rathbone. London:

Women’s Movements in Herschel District in the 1920s’. In W. Beinart Longman and C. Bundy, Hidden sees in Rural Soult june otis and P opular Muzorewa, E.D. 1975. “Through Prayer to Action: The Rukwadzano C ovements tn Ine Aransrer and lastern “ape - London: James Women of Rhodesia’. In Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa,

urrey . , , i, ed. T. Ranger and J. Weller. London: Heinemann

Bozzoh, B "aff Maris, Pemunism and South African Studies’. Journal of New Dimensions. The Report of the Bishop of Willesden’s Commission on the

OuTIETH L2TICAN OTUaTES, 7, Objects and Policy of the Mothers’ Union. 1972. London: SPCK Brandel-Syrier, M. 1962. Black Woman in Search of God. London: Lutter- Bese , ey SEEN DEAE SE DED LELDNE

. , B.A. , , -speaking oard Mission in Africa. Durban led dK Paul

Brandel, M. 1955. “The Needs of African Women’. Typescript Noub H. 1977. Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine. London: Academi

worth Press Pauw, B.A. 1974. ‘The Influence of Christianity’. In The Bantu-speaki

Christofersen, A.F Affcn Adventuring with God: The Story of the American Peoples of Southern Africa, ed. W.D. Hammond-Tooke. London: RoutCott, N.F. 1977. The Bonds of Womanhood. ‘Woman's Sphere’ in New England Pauw BA. 1978. Christianity and Xhosa Tradition. Cape Town: Oxford

1780-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press University Press

Davidor’ i ang Hall C. 1987. Family F ortunes . Men and Women of the Eng- Phillips, R.E. 1930. The Bantu Are Coming. Lovedale: Lovedale Press

lis Ma le Class hed ) ; London: Hutchinson _, Pilot Letters’ Describing the Work of Women Missionaries of S.P.G. 1915. London

De Philp y> J. 1979. The Church Struggle in South Africa. Cape Town: Davids Cuthbert’s Mission in the Diocese of S. John’s, Kaffraria. 1916. Report for 1916

Stephan F. Miescher/The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Colonial Ghana ¢ 187

Scheub, H. 1975. The Xhosa Ntsomi. Oxford: Clarendon Press wealth behaving like the pre-colonial [bir]mp[n (cf. McCaskie 1995: Shorter, A. 1975. Prayer in the Religious Traditions of Africa. Nairobi and 42ff.).

London: Oxford University Press The Basel Mission and its successor organization, the PresbyInter-war Period’. Africa Perspective, 15 ¢ linitv. An elaborated set of rules. the Gemeindeordnun Wells, J. 1983. “The Day the Town Stood Still”: Women in Resistance in OF “480 inity. fn Claborated’ Sct OF rules, the _ nuns, Wells, J. 1980. Women s Resistance to Passes in Bloemfontein during the terian Church of the Gold Coast (Ghana), promoted a new notion

Potchefstroom 1912-1930’. In Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: regulated every aspect of life within the Salem. In addition to listing Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response, ed. B. Bozzoli. Johannesburg: religious duties, these rules outlined the gendered behavior of male

Ravan Press and female converts, their relations towards children, their work Williams, D. 1959. ‘The Missionaries on the Eastern Frontier of the Cape ethic, and their behavior towards authorities.* These rules also Colony, 1799-1853’. Ph.D. thesis, University of Witwatersrand contained guidelines about the mission’s understandings of mascu-

, linity and femininity. Men were trained to become monogamous husbands who showed primary allegiance to wife and children and

secondarily to their matrilineage. Moreover, contrary to Akan practice, husband and wife were expected to live with their meals, worship together, and plan their children’s Te ducation. For sons, schoolingchildren, wasshare compulsory, for daughters STEPHAN F. MIESCHER optional. A select group of girls received training in domesticity by living with and serving European missionaries, learning about /Cal cooking, needle work, hygiene, and motherhood. Inheritance led to Work tor the among Basel Mission followers was no longer organized along

. / matrilineal lines, as practiced by Akan people, instead favoring wife

Ki ngdom of God | and children at expense of the abusua (Miescher 1997b). Mission

; vs schools, particularly boarding institutions, served as prime sites to

The Challenges of P resby terian Masculinity reshape ‘individual personhood and promote the. Presbyterian

in Colonial Ghana notion of masculinity. The Gemeindeordnung emphasized the importance of a man’s work and his calling. Every man should either practice a craft or toil

the land. Honorable work was considered the best remedy to

Introduction prevent seduction by the ‘vices’ and ‘sins’ of life. Parents should encourage their children (i.e. their sons) to be trained in an In Ghana, along the West African coast, Protestant mission ‘honorable profession’. The mission expected Christian converts to organization like the Basel Mission and the Wesleyan Mission were _ live ‘simply’ and to be ‘moderate’ in their personal behavior. While

well established by the mid-nineteenth century. The Swiss/’ men and women were to cover their bodies with clothing, they German Basel Mission founded stations across the Akan and Ga- should not wear fancy clothes or jewelry. Christians should refrain Adangbe regions of southern Ghana. In rural areas, the Basel from excessive eating, ‘carnal desires’, and abstain from alcoholic Mission created separate communities for converts at the edge of beverages. The participation in, or even observation of drumming existing towns (Smith 1966). In these so-called Salems, or Christian and dance performances — an essential part of Akan religious and Quarters, the missionaries sought not only to bring their followers political celebrations — was strictly forbidden for Christians.* If any closer to the Christian god, but to re-shape individual personhood of these rules were not observed, a system of sanctions was by re-constructing local ideas about masculinity and femininity. established, ranging from admonition, temporary exclusion from Such new gendered ideals frequently conflicted with existing norms the holy communion, to expulsion. Enforcing these rules created and expectations concerning the comportment of men and women. problems, documented in missionary correspondence as extensive In the Akan areas of southern Ghana, not unlike southwestern remarks about ‘fallen’ Christians.°

Nigeria (Lindsay 2003), there were at least three ideal notions of cee

masculinity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: adult masculinity signified by marriage; senior masculinity reflected While there is now a rich literature on women and gender in in the figure of an elder (/paynin); and the status of the big man African studies — the contributions to this volume provide ample ([birJmp[n).! Maintaining adult masculinity, an Akan man of Kwawu _ evidence — scholars interested in gender have only begun to explore

should provide his wife with shelter, food, and cloth, and assist her how shifting meanings of gender have affected African men, and performing heavy farm labor. As a father, he was expected to look how constructions of masculinity have been challenged and after his children and find them suitable marriage partners; he could transformed within the contexts of African history (Morrell 1998, demand that they work for him, even after divorcing their mother. 2001; Lindsay & Miescher 2003). Yet there is a fast growing 2 A man’s responsibilities extended to the well-being of his own literature on masculinity in the humanities and social sciences abusua (matrilineage), since he would be succeeded by a nephew (or drawing most examples from Europe and North America with a niece). Reaching senior masculinity, the position of an [panyin did few studies on colonial and postcolonial settings. These scholars

not depend on a specific age, wealth, number of followers and share the understanding that ideologies of masculinity — as wives, but rather on a person’s comportment, reputation, and ability femininity — are culturally and historically constructed, their to speak well, mediating conflicts and providing advice. The status meanings contested and subject to change, as well as embedded of a big man was reserved for successful traders and cocoa farmers, within power relations. Influential has been R.W. Connell’s (1995) some occupying chiefly office, who fulfilled expectations of sharing formulation that in Western societies there are different forms of

188 © Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

masculinity, structured by hierarchy and power. Among them, one that these men relied on their church positions to construct form of masculinity is dominant, i.e. hegemonic, by gaining most religious and social identities and to pursue avenues of social from patriarchy, the subordination of women; other forms, sub- mobility. In their conduct, as well as in their sense of self, they ordinate variants, have less masculine privilege. Within African incorporated expressions of senior masculinity drawn from Akan societies, particularly in colonial situations with an imposition of culture, while representing and transforming gendered ideals outside gender norms and competing local values, it 1s not always promoted by the mission church. obvious which notions of masculinity were dominant, since understandings of gender depended on specific contexts, power relations, Challenges to Mission authority and actors’ subject positions (Morrell 1998; Miescher & Lindsay 2003). Moreover, Connell’s model fails to acknowledge situations The Basel Mission established a station in the Kwawu town of in which hegemonic notions might co-exist (Cornwall & Abetifi in 1875 after Kwawu chiefs broke away from their Asante Lindisfarne 1994b; Cornwall 2003). In colonial Ghana, the overlords following the British invasion of Kumase (Haenger 1989; gendered programs of the Basel Mission, as well as those promoted Nkansa~-Kyeremateng 1976). Contemporary observers portrayed by indigenous institutions and the colonial state, created situations Kwawus as industrious farmers, hunters, and traders (Crowther with competing forms of masculinity among emerging church 1906). By the end of the nineteenth century, Kwawu traders shifted

congregations. their activities from northern markets to the new commercial

Exploring historical constructions of masculinity, Lisa Lindsay centers in the south. They invested their profits in Kwawu, launchand I have suggested three distinct and overlapping perspectives: a ing a cocoa industry (Garlick 1967). In Abetifi there were frequent focus on discourse, on practice, and on formations of identities and struggles about authority and proper conduct between missionaries subjectivity (Lindsay & Miescher 2003). First, masculinity studies and local people. These conflicts became a site for negotiating need to examine how discourse — produced by institutions and conflicting notions of masculinity, for stipulating gendered behavior individuals — expressed cultural ideals and expectations of those of men towards women and other men, and for articulating ideas of

considered masculine. Such discourse can be identified in juniors’ obligations towards seniors. While there is much evidence normative missionary texts like the Gemeindeordnung, in rulings by about the missionary perspective, there is mainly indirect informaAkan elders concerning disputes about gender issues like marriage, tion about Kwawu understandings of these encounters. Written fatherhood, inheritance, and obligations towards extended families accounts of early converts are filtered through the missionaries’ pen (see Allman & Tashjian 2000: 92ff), or in personal recollections. who tended to emphasize their accomplishments.

Were there hierarchies between different notions of masculinity, In 1882, the Basel Mission dispatched Inspector Hermann and did they change? How was this gender discourse also articulated Praetorius to the Gold Coast to assess progress and to inquire through other social categories like age, seniority, wealth, and ritual whether local congregations might gain some form of self-rule. authority? Second, understandings of masculinity can be explored as__ Presbyters (elders), teachers, catechists, and other mission employees

expressions of social practice to be recognized within specific were invited to express their wishes and grievances. In April 1883, historical contexts. Relevant is the insight that practice does not before visiting Kwawu, Praetorius died in Accra.’ Three senior only reproduce, but has the potential to transform gender systems. members of the Kwawu congregation, Nathanael B]rko, Johannes For examples, how did Basel Mission converts negotiate between Ata, and James Boama, wrote to criticize the leadership of missiondifferent and conflicting ideals of masculinity, and how did their ary Friedrich Ramseyer. actions re-shape these gender ideals? Third, notions of masculinity We are sorry to say about command of the Principal of this are reflected in individual experience, particularly in formations of town:

identities and subjectivity. Among mission converts, how did

gendered ideals and practices become part of self-presentations and I. He makes himself as a King, but not as a Minister.®

self-conceptions? How important are age, class, or generation in II. He commands just the same as Ashante’s King. | delineating gender identities? Are there tensions between subjec- III. He treats us a[s] animals. tivities (how people understood themselves) and gendered practices IV. If one of us does make any work for him, from 6 ock.

and discourses (what they said and did )? [o’clock] in morning to 3 ock. [o’clock] in [the] evening with

Applying this theoretical framework, the following discussion hard labor, then Revd. Mr. F. Ramsey[er], the principal, pays explores how male church officials — elders, teachers, catechist, and him 4d per a day. pastors — from three generations negotiated with competing notions V. If any one of the Christians want[s] to go to Akuapem or of masculinity, encountered challenges around their public roles, other place[s] to find some work, then he did not allow us; And

and constructed their selves. As leading members of the Basel here at our place we get nothing to do; Mission and then Presbyterian congregations, these men operated VI. If one [of] us does mercenary work from here to Accra, and

within various social contexts dominated by missionaries, church back then he pays him 10/. |

superiors, lineage elders, local chiefs, and the colonial state. Taking VII. If any stranger comes here and want|s| to hire one of us; a micro-perspective, I document a shift in struggles over gendered Then [the] principal tells him that he may give us small wages authority among these men’s practices and experiences by first because we are poor; But he did not remember the: ‘Behold the exploring a late nineteenth-century encounter between missionaries hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields; which and male converts, then the conflicts and career paths of officials of you kept back by fraud, crieth,’ James V, 4.’ within an increasingly self-governing church in the interwarperiod, and finally the tensions around senior masculinity and The petitioners presented Ramseyer as an authoritarian missionary

subjectivity among two church leaders, articulated in their who lacked respect towards his congregation. By equating

autobiographical writings and oral recollections. The chapter argues Ramseyer with the Asantehene, they evoked the image of the

Stephan F. Miescher/The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Colonial Ghana ¢ 189

king’s power over life and death. There is a certain irony in com- shortcomings, the petitioners presented themselves as more adept in

paring Ramseyer with the Asantehene, since the latter was spreading the as/mpa (gospel) than those who had written it down, portrayed in missionary writings as the principle obstacle in the as]/mpater|wfo[ (missionaries). They were particularly humiliated spreading of Christianity. Further, the Gemeindeordnung explicitly by Ramseyer looking for counsel from ‘an intimate friend’ outside stipulated that missionaries should ‘not reign over the people’, but the congregation. It appears that Ramseyer refrained from asking

‘put the flock of Christians to pasture’.'° advice from presbyters in order not to undermine his patriarchal

The accusation of treating somebody as an animal, in Twi aboa, position. }

was (and is) a grave insult in Akan culture."' Reflecting on Asante In his response to Praetorius Ramseyer effusively denied any understanding of self and personhood, T.C. McCaskie (1992: 222) wrong-doing. Making James Boama into the instigator, Ramseyer notes that aboa was the ‘expressive core of a cluster of gravely expressed his hurt about the petitioners’ secret action. Although he offensive insults that no person might properly address to another’. considered Africans as ‘children who complain easily’ he did not The expression aboa onipa, the animal (called) man, implied sugges- expect such slander and ‘wicked defamation’. Quite bitter, he added tions of “‘boorish crudeness, of uncivilised status, and of an absolute that ‘after 19 years in Africa, [he] finally learned about the Negro

ignorance of behavioral norms and properties’. Hence, the and his shocking ingratitude.’’© Yet Ramseyer acknowledged his petitioners portrayed Ramseyer as not knowing the most basic impatience and harsh reaction when he considered somebody lazy. norms of proper conduct. Had he been an [hene (chief) or [panyin, When Boama had left his work without notice, Ramseyer scolded he would have jeopardized his status. In his personal comportment, the ‘ringleader of the group’ publicly. All other accusations were Ramseyer hardly qualified for senior masculinity. Addressing labor pure ‘defamation’ of his character. Ramseyer portrayed Boama as condition in Abetifi, the petitioners referred to the fact that meager eloquent and clever, ‘influenced by a bad spirit to write such a salaries had led to strikes while building the station (cf. Haenger letter’. Apparently Boama had composed the petition in Twi, trans1989). Ramseyer’s resistance of allowing Christians to find employ- lated by a itinerant trader’s clerk, a ‘drunkard’ expelled from the ment elsewhere is echoed in his own correspondence where he | station. Ramseyer included an account of Boama who, prior to complained about migrating men spending too much on hunting or conversion, was an umbrella carrier at the Abetifi ahenfie (chief's trading expeditions, or seeking employment as carriers of rubber palace). Following baptism, Boama ‘behaved’ until Ramseyer

and other goods." noticed that he ‘liked to play the boss’, was ‘lazy’ and ‘addicted to

By expressing their concern about the well-being of the congre- alcohol’. After one year, Boama allegedly committed adultery in

gation, the petitioners revealed their own religious identity as town and then entered a sexual relationship with a Christian church leaders. Particularly they worried about Ramseyer’s repre- woman. For these offenses he was excluded from the congregation,

sentation of the congregation. though still living in the Salem. When re-admitted, Boama conHe’s a bad Explanation [example] to the Heathens ducted himself well until his ‘indolence’ and ‘pride’ resurtaced.

Ramseyer admonished him ‘to toil as a true Christian’ on his farm, I. Ifany one of us do any wrong, he did not call him in his house for “work would prevent him from many misfortunes’.’” In this or private; but speak with him on street, where too much crowd portrait Ramseyer outlined the contours of the missionary notion of of heathens are assembling then put him in shame before the masculinity, alluding to modesty, sexual restraint, monogamous

heathens; marriage, respect for authorities, as well as an active embodiment of II. His conduct made bad example to the heathens; and this is the Protestant work ethic.

great offensive for them; it also detain[s] the heathens to come Ramseyer recalled a conversion with Boama that shows how

into Christianity. different understandings of masculinity undergirded their conflict. III. If one of us said to a heathen to be a Christian, then the When reminded of farm work, Boama responded that ‘here it was answer’s, that on account of your master we could not be, to put no custom that a man should toil on a farm, since this was a

us in a shame; woman’s work.’!® Boama resisted the missionaries’ attempts at IV. The second great offensive for the heathens is, ifone of them reversing gendered work patterns by demanding farm labor from all comes into the station, as soon as he see[s] him, then he drives male converts, regardless of their status. This stipulation conflicted him, with a loud voice, and let him go away; But he did not with Boama’s understanding of senior masculinity. His resistance to

remember at Mark 10, 13 farm work could be misread that men did not do any agricultural

V. The principal has some intimate friend who are [is a] heathen; labor in pre-colonial Kwawu. Rather such labor, as in pre-colonial

he obeys him [more] than our Christians; if we hear some Asante, was performed by men and women, although most were matter, and communicate to him he did not believe us except he _ nkoa (slaves).'? Since Boama, as an umbrella carrier, had served as an

hear[d it] from his friend; So we bring this to your Lordship. ahenkwaa (palace attendant), he belonged to the lower ranks of Begging your Lordship to see and make us favour about this officeholders in Abetifi, not expected to toil on the land. Instead, at matter; We are hoping that you will hear your poor people of the ahenfie, numerous slaves and hunters brought ample food and

Abetifi.'% drink.”? Boama strongly objected to the notion that becoming a

Christian would oblige him to do manual labor. This missionary This second sequence of complaints was severe, since mission- expectation conflicted with his sense of status and senior masaries were supposed to be the living ‘example’ of devout culinity. Asked about his discontent, Boama mentioned his lack of Christians. !4 Ramseyer’s lack of hospitality was seen as counter- money to buy meat. He pondered about returning to the ahenfie productive to the mission’s efforts in a society that cherished proper with its supply of meat and no demands of farm labor. For etiquette. Blaming offenders in public, highly offensive in Akan Ramseyer, this was compelling evidence that Boama had not culture with its elaborate forms of linguistic indirection, akutia (cf. succeeded in becoming a different person, a Christian man finding Yankah 2001), was common missionary practice.'> Against such fulfillment in work and worship.”!

190 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

Concluding his reply, Ramseyer listed the ‘true reasons’ for the women of the congregation, and for the care of the poor and the petitioners’ defamations. His observations reflect the encounter sick’. between missionaries and Kwawu people, expressing the former’s A close reading of station records from Kwawu provides insight , expectation of reshaping individual personhood. First, he referred to into the social identities of pastors, expected to set ‘an example to the missionaries’ commercial pursuits. As agents of the Basel the flock,’®° and reveals their practices of masculinity. Pastors kept a Mission Trading Company, they operated stores and sold imported _ station diary, an official log book on behalf of the session. Rev. E.V. commodities, either in exchange for money, or for agricultural Asihene documented his activities as Abetifi district pastor and export products like rubber, palm nuts, and later cocoa.” Ramseyer manager of schools. The 1935-36 volume contains information explained that he no longer granted Christians credit, now only about the congregation’s deaths and births, the pastor’s journey to selling goods for cash. Second, reporting on personal conduct, outstations exercising his authority, and his role in arbitration. It Ramseyer demanded from converts to ‘prove themselves as Chris- shows how the pastor belonged to the social dignitaries of this tians through work and diligence’. He objected when ‘Christians colonial outpost, preparing with the District Commissioner the [men] were loitering’ for days in the ‘heathen’ part of Abetifi. celebrations honoring the ‘King’s Silver Jubilee’.*! Confronting offenders by rebuking them publicly — Ramseyer More detailed are station chronicles like the one for Nkawkaw, admitted — might have caused the claim of treating congregation allowing a reconstruction of how the pastor’s authority conflicted members like animals. Third, addressing ongoing tensions about with other senior congregation members. Nkawkaw, situated sexuality and marriage, Ramseyer noticed the displeasure about his below the Kwawu scarp, became a major commercial center with a refusal to allow Christians to divorce non-Christian wives against fast-growing multi-ethnic population when the Accra-Kumase

their will.% Fourth, addressing religious practice, Ramseyer railway reached this hamlet in 1922 (Gold Coast 1928: 123; reiterated his expectation that all converts attended daily worship Nkansa-Kyeremateng 1976: 49f.). In 1941, reflecting its increased and Sunday service. “Through their deeds and conduct’ they should importance, Nkawkaw’s Presbyterian congregation received its demonstrate ‘they had become the salt among their people.” own resident pastor. Rev. Isaac M. Akoto established himself as a Seven years later, Ramseyer reported that Boama, upon community leader, representing Presbyterian masculinity while also abstaining from alcohol, had adopted an evangelist’s religious embracing features of Akan senior masculinity. Upon arrival, he identity and radically altered his conduct. His ‘improvement’ was acted like an Akan elder in representing the church by paying his hailed in the Basel Mission’s annual report. During a preaching respect to the Obomeng chief (in charge of Nkawkaw) with an journey, Boama received the calling to remain in Patriensa and entourage: Akoto was accompanied by the senior presbyter, E.P. proselytize in this outstation closest to ‘the center of heathenism’ Mi£reku, to serve as his [/kyeame (spokesperson), since a senior Akan

(the Asante capital Kumase). The former rebel turned into a man would not travel or visit by himself. pioneer, evoking Saul’s transformation to Paul.” In 1894 Edmond Akoto’s main goal was to improve the quality of education by Perregaux wrote that this ‘simple Christian’ laboring ‘in the expanding the curriculum and erecting a building also to serve as vineyard of the Lord’ had gained seven converts, despite opposition chapel. In this task, the pastor had to collaborate with the president from the local [dikro’s (headman).*° Boama’s new comportment, as_ of the building committee, Abednego Mensah, a local merchant witnessed in his Apostolic work, made him an example of having . and money lender. Abednego Mensah was not just wealthy but

embraced Basel Mission ideas about masculinity. politically well connected as a member of the Kwawu State Council

and a class mate of J.B. Danquah.*? Mensah had a position as a UAC

Presbyterian Church and senior masculinity credit sales manager in Nkawkaw until heThen was he allegedly discharged or dishonest practices in 1939. started his own, highly By the interwar period, the initial tensions between missionaries profitable money business gaining much influence.* As the big man and local elders no longer dominate the records. During World War of the Nkawkaw Presbyterian congregation, Abednego Mensah I, political changes fundamentally altered the position of senior raised funds to start construction of the school-chapel and later Africans. Replacing the expelled Basel Mission in 1918, the Scottish provided a loan to expand the school.** Rewarding these efforts, the Mission launched major reforms leading to power sharing between Accra church leadership fully ‘recognized’ Nkawkaw’s Presbyterian — senior African pastors and European missionaries (Smith 1966: school and approved to open the first class of a middle school in 159ff.). Yet the Basel Mission’s evangelical work and ideological 1943.°° program had a lasting impact. The constitution of the new Towards the end of Akoto’s tenure, a conflict over power and Presbyterian Church remained remarkably consistent with the seniority erupted between the pastor and Abednego Mensah. When Gemeindeordnung, particularly sections about gendered behavior and_ the Youth Guild presented a pulpit to the congregation, Abednego members’ public life.”” In Presbyterian congregations, elected pres- Mensah made ‘offensive remarks against all future preachers’ byters of ‘blameless character, — married men over 30 years of age, recorded by Akoto: and not new converts’, assisted the pastor and catechist. Together That this pulpit may not be taken as a fortress in which the

they constituted the session in charge of ‘spiritual oversight, h ke ad ¢ ; bus; d insult; maintenance of Christian order and discipline, ... administration of preachers may take advantage OF pouring abusive ane insulung

a > os ; words against their adversaries to satisfy their vengeance.

temporal affairs’, and ‘care of the poor’.” The session served as an

important site for dispute settlement resembling the court of an Akoto responded immediately emphasizing his religious and Akan chief and his elders, so-called Native Tribunals under indirect moral authority by citing scripture, “That the word of God is quick, rule (cf. Miescher 1997b). Session membership became a marker of and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing senior masculinity. Maintaining a gendered division of labor, the even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints of session could appoint as deaconesses ‘God-fearing women of marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart’ irreproachable character, married or unmarried’ attending ‘the (Hebrews 4, 12). This reply, Akoto noted with triumph, ‘satisfied

Stephan F. Miescher/The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Colonial Ghana ¢ 191

most of the hearers’ making them reluctant ‘to form bad opinion _ those ‘called to work for the Kingdom of God and for the good of against future preachers of the pulpit’.*’ In the following mediation, the Church’,* particularly teachers and catechists, negotiated Akoto — only recording his testimony — accused Abednego Mensah between conflicting expectations expressed by their lineages, by of having ‘formed a plot for [his] transfer’ while he was ‘seriously ill their wives and children, as well by their church superiors and at Korle-Bu Hospital’ in Accra. Their dispute about the organiza- employers. Still their sense of self was deeply altered by their tion of the middle school really centered on issues of leadership. identification with the Presbyterian cause. Belonging to colonial Since Abednego Mensa ‘openly insulted’ the pastor and ‘refused to ‘middle figures’ (Hunt 1999), these men developed a multiplicity of understand his faults’,** this local big man not only challenged the masculine identities appropriate to different and changing life pastor’s authority but questioned his social identity. Who had the contexts. For example, they presented themselves as devout Presbydecisive voice in church affairs — the pastor, called ‘to tend the flock _ terians towards church authorities, as dedicated fathers and husbands

of Christ’,*? or senior member Abednego Mensa who had bank- towards wives and children while trying not to neglect their rolled prestige-projects like establishing a middle school? Protecting obligations towards their matrilineage. Yet such broad expectations

the hierarchical structure of the Presbyterian Church, whose and responsibilities could cause tensions. Seeking to represent regulations explicitly placed the pastor with ‘the oversight of all Presbyterian regulations while remaining attentive to wishes of schools in the district’,*° the arbitration sided with Akoto, repri- extended families, these salaried men faced challenges reflected in

manding Abednego Mensah. Still Akoto could not prevent his their subjectivity, here reconstructed through oral and written transfer. He left with bitterness about ‘ungrateful members’ reminiscences. expressed in his ‘touching’ farewell sermon on Isaiah 49, 4: ‘I have Rev. E.K.O. Asante (1911-1997) was born and raised in Abetifi. laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain; In 1920, he enrolled in the local Presbyterian primary, followed by

yet surely my judgement is with the Lord, and work with my admission to the prestigious Abetifi Boys’ Middle School. In this

God.” | boarding school he was not only exposed to the Presbyterian ideals Following Akoto’s departure, Abednego Mensah resumed his of masculinity but converted to Christianity. Asante continued his

prominent position. When the Moderator, the highest official of education at the Presbyterian Training College, Akuropon, the Presbyterian Church, visited Nkawkaw in 1946, he chronicled: graduating as a certified teacher-catechist in 1933. Four years later,

Ww ; ; ; ae he was transferred to his hometown as headmaster of the primary e have noticed a remarkable improvement of this station since 2), 0) (Miescher forthcoming). In Abetifi Asante sought to marry — our last visit would like to put — on record our st 1, hdifferent adul ae i ;values. "2 ‘y av ar er June and 1940) reachand adult masculinity by respecting appreciation of the very good work which is being done by all Following local custom, he had his mother select him an Abetifi concerned. Mr. Mensah our staunch supporter deserves special brid © Il suited b her’s wife. Eelici

mention for his undying zeal in supporting the Church.” mage who was well Suited to Become a reaciers wile. rele

YINS PP 8 Animaa Ntim had proper Presbyterian qualifications: herself raised

Moreover, if we are to believe the confidential government in a teacher’s household, she had recently graduated from the reports, by 1948 Abednego Mensah had further raised his stature as Agogo Girls’s School which sought ‘to educate girls as Christian big man in the Presbyterian congregation, ‘outwardly showing his wives and mothers’.*¢

big heartedness by sending children of no relation to himself to . Soon, this headteacher had to prove himself as a leader of the school’.# Not just displaying his wealth by driving his own car, but local congregation. Following the outbreak of World War II, the spreading it among the congregation Abednego Mensah acted like British government deported all German missionaries, among them

the pre-colonial [birJmpon of nineteenth-century Asante (see school supervisor, Eugen Haegele, stationed in Abetifi. With the McCaskie 1995: 44). Finally according to the Assistant District pastor on leave, Asante took “charge of the congregation’ ,*’ because Commissioner, Abednego Mensa had used his power and financial he was considered most qualified due to his educational backprowess as ‘moneylender’ to create a dependency among ‘a good ground. Presiding over church services and Presbyterian schools, number of the masters’ in the Presbyterian schools.** This conflict Asante suddenly reached the status of senior masculinity at the age ulitmately revolved around practices of senior masculinity between of 28. This created a complex situation since most presbyters had two ‘modern men’. Should an elder’s respect and power be derived authority due to advanced age and experience, all of which Asante through his wealth and network of patronage network — as in the lacked. Asante’s successful performance contributed to his admission

case of Abednego Mensah? Or, should ritual authority and to the Kumase theological seminary in 1945. Two years latter, he participation in a national religious hierarchy be decisive? Akoto was ordained.* won the backing of the Presbyterian Church but was removed from In 1948 the Presbyterian Church decided to expand its activities Nkawkaw. Abednego Mensah, however, continued to increase his to the less developed Northern Territories and appealed for authority and political influence — much to the dismay of colonial volunteers during the synod. Working in the North was unpopular officials and their local supporters among Kwawu chiefs. In his since this area was considered backwards, lacking modern

practices, he successfully fused his Presbyterian identity with the amenities. In print Asante recalled: Akan sense of a big man.

[There] was a long deep silence. I looked around and felt a strong

Subjectivity and senior masculinity urge in me that God was speaking to me. I then asked a friend ...

to give me a piece of paper. I wrote down my name on the paper

Elsewhere I have explored the intersections between notions of and presented it quickly to the Synod Clerk, Rev. C.H. Clerk masculinity and personal recollections by senior members of who in turn passed it on to the Moderator, Rev. S.S. Odonkor. Ghana’s Presbyterian Church (Miescher 1997a, 2001, forthcoming). He rang a bell on his table and announced my name to the big I have argued that in most cases not one form of masculinity became gathering. This was followed by a loud applause. All the fully dominant or hegemonic. Rather, life histories document how delegates were asked to stand up and sing ... After the singing,

192 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’ , the Moderator offered a short prayer asking God’s blessing on pupil teacher, interrupted by military service. At the age of forty, my work. Friends and well wisher[s] came to congratulate me. profiting from increased educational opportunities in the post-war

This was the proudest moment in my life (Asante 1997). years (cf. Foster 1965), did he resume his studies to qualify as a certified teacher and attended the Presbyterian catechist course. As the first ‘missionary pioneer’ in the Northern Territories, Unusual, however, is Boakye Yiadom’s passion for record keeping first in Salaga and then Tamale, Asante gained instant fame and and his devotion to writing. Meticulously he saved his corresname recognition in Ghana and abroad.*° Yet this was a temporary pondence, receipts, and other papers. Moreover he has shared with calling: after “six hectic but glorious years’, Asante relocated to the me his oral recollections and granted me access to his extraordinary South and accepted a less strenuous position as district pastor of archive. Boakye Yiadom authored two autobiographies; a shorter Bekwai. In the early 1960s, he had the opportunity to enroll in a_ one (n.d.b.) presents a streamlined profile of his career as a teacher-

‘one-year post graduate course in Theology at New College, catechist; the other, the two-volume ‘Autobiography: My Own Edinburgh’, joining the illustrious group of pastors who had studied Life’, written like a diary from the 1940s to the 1980s, provides a

abroad (Asante n.d.; Nkansa-Kyeremateng 1976: 22). detailed account about his travels, work stations, relationships with In Bekwai, Asante had supervised the construction of chapel and women, and family obligations (n.d.a.). In these self-presentations, primary school. This focus on leaving a legacy in bricks and cement, Boakye Yiadom tends to re-arrange his life’s markers and crucial renovating existing or erecting new buildings, formed a remarkable experiences like his age, marital status, military service, and pro-

continuity in Asante’s pastoral career, culminating in the com-_ fessional activities into different narratives, depending on the pletion of a ‘magnificent cathedral’ in Koforidua (Asante n.d.). intended audience (Miescher 2001). He treats his life history as an Replying to those who criticized building at the expense of spiritual ‘open text,’ subject to re-arrangements that reflects his shifting

work, Asante noted in his personal memoir: interpretations and objectives (cf. Mbilinyi 1989: 225).

, ar ae in his correspondence, 1s his desire to become an ordained pastor.

Rev. Asante firmly believed, and rightly too, that to be able to. ie domunant theme in Boakye Yiadom’s recollections, as well as

consolidate pastoral activities certain physical infrastructures S; 1963. he had intensively lobbied to reach this coal. After

must necessarily be the provided, henceexam his anxiety to see the pln © pe are S BOS é a4: ailing entrance to Trinity College, he" Oy petitioned his construction of chapels, school buildings, manses, quarters and ors for ‘field ordination’ — th tice of +i

other civil structures in almost all the stations he worked in. He “UPSTOT (Or ee ON roe Prac’ OF promonng a senor was by this commitment able to build a solid foundation for the trainine = In 1967. thouch ly endorsed by hi Church in particular and Christianity in general for which he {778.7 » MOUS! SONS IY eNCOTSEC Dy Aus congregation at

. ; catechist to the position of minister without further academic 1n 8 © Adamsu,® the decisive committee wouldpabetyforever remembered (Asante n.d.). withdrew Stare .; his cw‘eligibility’ 2S ONS for y ordination in ‘in view of past marriage implications’ — an allegation These words sum-up Asante’s convictions about a pastor’s role, he vehemently denied.® Still, accused of having two wives, Boakye revealing crucial parts of his religious and social identity. Moreover, Yiadom was suspended as catechist.°’ For the next four years, he did emphasizing his accomplishments as a builder, Asante placed himself not re-apply. His entries in ‘My Own Life’ (n.d.a) show how he

in a long tradition going back to nineteenth-century Basel struggled to accommodate various arrangements with his polygymissionaries who, wherever they went, erected buildings for church nous relationships adhering to the Akan ideals of adult masculinity service and schools.*! Upon retirement in 1980, Asante returned to of providing for wives and children and to pursue his responsibilities Abetifi and occupied the house he had erected during his sojourn as_ as a teacher-catechist, maintaining at least the appearance of a headmaster. Although away on pastoral duties for 33 years, Asante monogamous Christian marriage so crucial to ideals of Presbyterian never forgot his responsibilities as a successful senior man towards masculinity. During the 1970s, after disentangling all but one his abusua. He allowed relatives to reside in his house and helped to marriage to his ‘lawful Christian wife’, he resumed writing petitions

expand an older family building. In retirement, Asante was for ordinations — without any success.** In his submissions, he instrumental in establishing a vocational training school, financed highlighted educational credentials and professional achievements; by a German development grant, to the economic benefit of many noted trials like the loss of his ‘first’ wife in childbirth; and, at times, in Abetifi.*? In 2001, four years after his death, the small Abetifi altered his age, length of military, and church service. The forechapel, constructed by Ramseyer 125 years earlier, was re-dedicated grounding of some and silencing of other aspects of his life were

as the Rev. E.K.O. Asante Memorial Chapel. conscious attempts to fulfill the ideals of Presbyterian masculinity.

While Asante’s career path, as sketched out in his recollections, is Finally, acknowledging field ordination’s age limit of 54, Boakye almost paradigmatic for a successful and effective life of a senior Pres- Yiadom appealed to the Synod Committee (governing board) to byterian pastor, most of those who ‘worked for the Kingdom of God’. make him an honorary minister, based on his life-long church encountered unsurmountable hurdles. Presbyterian station records, as service and his claim of having established a congregation in the well as those of customary courts (Native Tribunals), tell many stories mining town of Konongo in 1935.”

about teachers, catechists, and presbyters who struggled with Boakye Yiadom’s ongoing quest for ordination, too complex to Presbyterian norms and challenged corresponding ideas of masculin- be fully narrated here, powerfully demonstrates his firm religious ity.°> Such ‘backsliders’ were reprimanded, demoted, or even dis- identity and calling to the Presbyterian Church. He refused to be missed from their positions. Yet there are few who openly addressed discouraged by not following all stipulations of Presbyterian their difficulties in autobiographical accounts, adding such informa- masculinity, particularly the idea of monogamous marriage. This tion to a public historical record. A.K. Boakye Yiadom (born 1910), remained problematic for church officials, since ‘[mlinisters, a retired teacher-catechist from Abetifi, belongs to the exceptions. catechists, teachers, presbyters, and other leading members, because

Boakye Yiadom’s career was not atypical for his generation. of their special influence, should make it a duty to give a good Already 16 when entering school, he initially lacked funds to example in this respect to other members of the Church’.® Instead, continue beyond Standard VII. After a stint as clerk, he worked as Boakye Yiadom has been proud of having fathered 27 children

Stephan F. Miescher/The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Colonial Ghana ¢ 193

born by sixteen different women, documented by comments about dispute between Boama and Ramseyer, moved into the backhis children in his autobiographical writings and in our conversa- ground. Instead, demands for formal education and the ideal of the tions (n.d.a, b; 1993, 1994). This wealth in people is for Boakye krakye (scholar) gained importance (cf. Miescher forthcoming). It is Yiadom one of his major accomplishments, qualifying him for striking that Rev. Akoto in his zealous efforts to improve the senior masculinity and the [panyin title, even if conflicting with conditions of the Nkawkaw Presbyterian congregation sought an Presbyterian norms. There is, however, a crucial tension between expansion of education by creating a boys’ middle school, but was his self-understanding, his subjectivity, of having lived according to no longer interested in reporting about the virtues of farm work. Presbyterian ideals of masculinity and his practice of having main- There was another participant in discussions about gender, formal tained a series of polygynous relationships. Nevertheless in his own education, and the merits of physical labor. Since the 1920s, the discourse (autobiographical writings and oral reminiscences), in colonial government, launching educational initiatives, was very which different marriage arrangements were presented depending critical about fostering ‘bookish learning’ at the expense of vocaon audiences, this divide between subjectivity and practice is tional and agricultural training in government and missionary frequently bridged. This indicates how Boakye Yiadom developed schools (cf. Foster 1965). Although it lies beyond the scope of this masculine multiple identities fitting different contexts and expecta- chapter, an examination of the history around tensions between the tions. He did not, as Franz Fanon (1967) argued for colonial masculine ideal of ‘peasant-farmer,’ in colonial Ghana the engine of subjects, develop a. fragmentated self. Rather, Boakye Yiadom the cocoa industry, and the ‘scholar’ seeking salaried employment remains convinced that he struggled with ‘perseverance’ (the motto removed from physical labor, would reveal important transformaof his ‘My Own Life’) and succeeded in doing the right thing as a__ tions in the constructions of masculinity under colonialism. The man. (cf. Miescher 2001). Despite his ripe age of over 90, he is still impact of gendered practices on the formation of identities and expecting that the Presbyterian authorities will become reconciled subjectivity can also be shown in the example of education. with the discrepancies of his life and grant him the desired honorary Acknowledging the daunting task of accepting responsibility as ministry. This self-assurance is the subtext for his continuing father of 27 children, Boakye Yiadom insisted that he had them all appeals. In 2000, commenting on the beginning of his retirement educated up to Standard VII (1994), hence living up to ideas about

22 years earlier, he wrote: fatherhood according to Presbyterian masculinity. Though it

[I] finally came home, Abetifi, Kwahu, as a staunch Presby (ce P ears ie was mo 1) committed ro those who lived ose s him

communicant after serving the Mother Church, Presby and the Vice nee b t ” Boakve Y: 4 ve calf scent a8 bow Ghana Government for the past forty-two years. ‘BRAVO!’®! havi Ordnung fiir die evangelischen Gemeinden in Ostindien und Westafrika, 1865

194 ¢ Transforming Traditions: Gender, Religion & ‘Culture’

(hereafter Gemeindeordnung 1865), Basel Mission Archives, Switzerland * E. Perregaux, annual report, Abetifi, January 7, 1895, BMA, D-1. 61, (hereafter BMA), D-9.1c, 11a, and Ordnung fiir die evangelischen 114, published as ‘An der Grenze zu Asante’, Heidenbote (1895: 45ff.). Gemeinden der Basler Mission auf der Goldkiiste, revised 1902 (hereafter 7’ Published in 1929: Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast, Regulations,

Gemeindeordnung 1902), D-9.1c, 13b. Practice & Procedure (hereafter Regulations), BMA, D-9.1c, 13d.

+ Gemeindeordnung (1865), part I, para. 114, 121-127. : 8 Regulations, para. 11-12, 16. > Gemeindeordnung (1865), part II, para 6-27. For ‘fallen’ members, see E. *” Regulations, para. 33-34. Perregaux, annual report, Abetifi, January 26, 1898, BMA, D-1.67,135, *° Regulations, para. 140.

and G. Obrecht, annual report, Abetifi, January 22, 1898, D-1.67, 137 31 Abetifi Diary, April 4, May 1 and 6, 1935, Presbyterian Church 6 Inter alia see Brod & Kaufman 1996, Kimmel 1996, Connell 1995, Archives, Accra (hereafter PCA), 10/6. So far, only few record books — Cornwall & Lindisfarne 1994a, Roper & Tosh 1991, and Segal 1990. have been catalogued for Kwawu. Cf. Sinha (1995) for the constructions of colonial masculinities in India. 32 Nkawkaw Chronicles, February 28, 1941, PCA, 6/9. See Yankah’s 7 Schlatter (1916, 3: 160ff.); cf. the discussion in Haenger (1989: 112ff.). (1995) discussion of the [kyeame, acting as a chief’s spokesperson,

8 Emphasis in the original. consultant, and messenger in Akan society.

° ‘Petitionen und Klagschriften,’ January 2, 1883, BMA, D-1.38b, File D °° Danquah was a founder and leader of the first national party, United — among the letters and petitions to Inspector Hermann Praetorius Gold Coast Convention, see Austin 1964: 52f.

during his visit to the Gold Coast; original text in English. 4 During the 1948 riots, colonial officials considered Abednego Mensah as

10 Gemeindeordnung (1865), para. 26. the ‘instigator’ of the anti-government opposition in Nkawkaw and

"For aboa see Christaller (1933: 31) offering the translation ‘a rude, Kwawu; the police and local DC gathered extensive information about ignorant, uncivilized man; fool’. The insult of calling someone an animal him, see ‘Incidents in Kwahu March 1948’, confidential report by was frequently brought to the local courts in Kwawu, among the records Assistant DC Mpraeso, March 21, 1948, and ‘Disturbances — Eastern of the Native Tribunal of the Ad/ntenhene, Abetifi, see Kwawu Tradi- Province, January — March 1948’, Appendix ‘A’ part I, confidential tional Council (hereafter KTC), vol. 7: 346-351, Adjoa Donkor v. Afua report, April 4, 1948, National Archives of Ghana-Koforidua (hereafter Ankoma, August 5, 1932, in which the plaintiff accused the defendant of NAG-K), ADM/KD 29/6/432. calling her an animal, considered ‘contrary to Kwahu Customary Law’. 35 Nkawkaw Chronicles, March 9, 1941, February 13, 1942, and August 2 BF, Ramseyer, annual report, Abetifi, January (?), 1883, BMA, D-1.35, 12, 1943, PCA, 6/9. 101/102, and Ramseyer, annual report, Abetifi, February 4, 1892, D- 36 Nkawkaw Chronicles, August 31, 1942, and September 7, 1943, PCA, 1.55, 113. G. Schmid noted that John Ata left Abetifi for a three-months 6/9. trading expedition to Salaga, Abetifi, September 23, 1886, BMA, D- _*” Nkawkaw Chronicles, October 15, 1943, PCA, 6/9.

1.45, 84, 38. Nkawkaw Chronicles, n.d. (after December 12, 1943), PCA, 6/9.

3 “Petitionen und Klagschriften’, January 2, 1883, BMA, D-1.38b, File D. %° Regulations, para. 140.

4 Gemeindeordnung (1885), para. 6. © Regulations, para. 29.

'5 For example J. Haasis, annual report, Abetifi, February 18, 1896, BMA, = *! Nkawkaw Chronicles, February 13, 1944, PCA, 6/9.

D-1.63, 126. 4 Nkawkaw Chronicles, October 28-29, 1946, PCA, 6/9.

16 This racist perception of the petitioners was passed on by Schlatter * ‘Further Review of March Disturbances’, Assistant DC Mpraeso to

(1916, 3: 161) to a broader audience in his Basel Mission history. Senior DC Kibi, March 31, 1948, confidential report, NAG-K, Commenting on the petitions sent to the dying Inspector, Schlatter ADM/KD. 29/6/433. stated that ‘they provide an insight not only into the suffering of the * Ibid. Inspector, but also of the resident missionaries’, and further, ‘Reading * Regulations, para. 141. these petitions, one is breathing the pest odor of these poisoned heathen * Stated on “Prospectus Presbyterian Girls Middle School, Agogo’, in surroundings, and one feels deeply with the missionary who had to live Rev. Asante personal papers. See the school’s educational goals about

within it’ (my translation). motherhood and Christian domesticity expressed by G. Goetz, annual

'7 F Ramseyer, Abetifi, March 15, 1883, and, February, 26, 1883, both to report, January 23, 1933, BMA, D-11, 3. Cf. Mrs. F. Asante’s (2000)

Inspector Praetorius, Gold Coast, BMA, D-1.38b. own recollection. .

'8 F, Ramseyer, Abetifi, March 15, 1983, to Inspector Praetorius, BMA, * Asante 1993c and 1993b. For Eugen Haegele and the Basel Mission’s

D-1.38b. expulsion at the onset of World War II, see Witschi 1970: 334, 349f.

19 McCaskie (1995: 289f.; 38) suggested that akoa (pl. nkoa) denoted * Asante 1993c. Trinity College at Kumase opened in 1943, cf. Smith

‘subject’ of slave or free status; personhood was not stable in pre-colonial 1966: 184. ,

| Asante (and Kwawu), since a man’s or woman’s status could be reduced “” A. Guggenbiihl, “Einiges aus dem Durcheinander der Akropong (pawing) or improved (appointment to office) several times within one’s Synode’, April 17-24, 1948, BMA, D-11, 10.

life time. 0 After a visit to Europe, J. Eichholzer (Basel Mission) wrote to Asante,

20 For a discussion of the nhenkwaa and their ‘proprietal assumptions. . . “Your name is known all over Switzerland and southern Germany in our

towards food, drink and much else,’ see McCaskie (1995: 36f.). congregations’, letter of May 26, 1953. Cf. Smith: 1966: 203. 21 F, Ramseyer, Abetifi, March 15, 1983, to Inspector Praetorius, BMA, *! Andreas Riis, who founded the first Basel Mission congregation on the

D-1.38b. Gold Coast in 1843, is remembered as [sii adan (he built houses), see

22 The history of the Basel Mission Trading Company in nineteenth- and Reindorf 1895: 225. , twentieth-century Ghana, succeeded by the United Trading Company ~® Asante 1993a, n.d. (UTC), is under-researched. For its beginnings, see now G. Miescher * For Kwawu, see Abetifi Native Tribunals record books, passim e.g. KTC,

(1999). vol. 1-—12, and Nkawkaw Chronicles, 1938-1958, passim, PCA, 6/9.

23 The Basel Mission followed here Cor. 7, 12. Only if the non-Christian 4 For attempts to enter Trinity College, see letters September 13, 1963 spouse agreed to divorce, could the marriage be dissolved, Gemeinde- and June 23, 1967; for petitioning field ordination, see letter to District

. ordnung (1865), para. 100. Pastor, Japekrom, October 7, 1963, Boakye Yiadom personal papers *4 F. Ramseyer, Abetifi, March 15, 1883, to Inspector Praetorius, BMA, (hereafter BYPP).

D-1.38b. Cf. Ramseyer’s report to Basel, Abetifi, May 16, 1883, BMA, * After seven years of service, the Adamsu congregation was ‘fully satisfied

D-1.37, 84. with his church duties and performances’. Petition into the Holy

25 F, Ramseyer, annual report, Abetifi, March 16, 1893, BMA, D-1. 57, Ministry, January 16, 1967, BYPP. 125. Partially published in Jahresbericht der Evangelischen Missions- © Letter from Presbytery Clerk, Japekrom, to Boakye Yiadom April 22,

Gesellschaft zu Basel (1893), 48ff.; cf. Smith 1966: 119. 1968, and his reply, May 7, 1968, BYPP.

Stephan F. Miescher/The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Colonial Ghana ¢ 195

*’ District Pastor Japekrom to Session Adamsu, April 25 1968, and Mav and Mobility in the Congo. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

13, 1968, BYPP. Kimmel, Michael S. 1996. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New

8 Cf. Boakye Yiadom’s ‘Petition into the Holy Ministry’, to District York: Free Press

Pastor Abetifi, Presbyterian Church, September 12, 1972, February 28, Lindsay, Lisa A. 2003. ‘Money, Marriage, and Masculinity on the Colonial 1973; to District Pastor Asiakwa, Presbyterian Church, March 15, 1974; Nigerian Railway.’ In Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. L.A.

to Kwahu Presbytery, March 31, 1976; and to the Synod Committee, Lindsay & S.F. Miescher. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. |

February 7, 1977, BYPP. Lindsay, Lisa A. & Stephan F. Miescher, eds. 2003. Men and Masculinities in

°° See Synod Clerk to Boakye Yiadom, February 15, 1977, and corres- Modern Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. pondence about his appeal, letters to Synod Clerk May 2, 1994, and Mbilinyi, Marjorie. 1989. ‘“I’d Have Been a Man”: Politics and the Labor

August 26, 2000, BYPP. Cf. Miescher 2001. Process in Producing Personal Narratives.’ In Interpreting Women’s Lives:

0 Regulations, para. 192, 183. Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, ed. Personal Narratives Group, 6! Letter to Synod Clerk, August 26, 2000, BYPP. 204-27. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McCaskie, Thomas C. 1992. ‘People and Animals: Constru(ct)ing the

Asante Experience.’ Africa 62, 2: 221-247. References — 1995. State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante. Cambridge: Cambridge

Allman, Jean and Victoria Tashyjian. 2000. ‘I Will Not Eat Stone’: A Women’s University Press.

History of Colonial Asante. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Miescher, Giorgio. 1999. ‘Hermann Ludwig Rottman: Zu den Anfangen Asante, E.K.O. 1993a. Interview with the author. Abetifi, January 26. der Basler Missions-Handels-Gesellschaft in Christiansborg (Ghana).’ In

— 1993b. Interview with the author. Abetifi, February 2. Briicken und Grenzen — Werkschau Afrikastudien 2, ed. L.R. Vischer, A.

—— 1993c. Interview with the author. Abetifi, May 18. Mayor & D. Henrichsen. Miister: Lit Verlag.

—— 1997. “The Missionary Work of the Presbyterian Church in Northern Miescher, Stephan F. 1997a. “Becoming a Man in Kwawu: Gender, Law, Ghana.’ In History of the Presbyterian Church in Northern Ghana, ed. A.A. Personhood, and the Constructions of Masculinities in Colonial Ghana,

Berinyuu. Accra: Asempa Publishers. 1874-1957.’ Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.

August 22. 119.

— n.d [after 1981, rev. 1994]. ‘Rev. E.K.O. Asante — a Profile.’ —— 1997b. ‘Of Documents and Litigants: Disputes on Inheritance in Asante, Felicia. 2000. Interview with the author and Pearl Ofosu. Abetifi, Abetifi — a Town of Colonial Ghana.’ Journal of Legal Pluralism 39: 81Austin, Dennis. 1964. Politics in Ghana, 1946-1960. London: Oxford —— 2001. ‘The Life Histories of Boakye Yiadom (Akasease Kofi of Abetifi,

University Press. Kwawu): Exploring the Subjectivity and ‘Voices’ of a Teacher-Catechist

Boakye Yiadom, Akasease Kofi. 1993. Interview with the author. Abetifi, in Colonial Ghana.’ In African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in

June 27. Oral History, ed. L. White, S.F. Miescher, and D.W. Cohen.

—— 1994. Interview with the author. Abetifi, August 28. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —— n.d.a [1946-81]. “Autobiography: My Own Life.’ 2 vols. — 2003. “The Making of Presbyterian Teachers: Masculinities and — n.d.b [after 1978]. ‘My Life History: The Autobiography of Akasease Programs of Education in Colonial Ghana,’ in Men and Masculinities in

Kofi Boakye Yiadom.’ Modern Africa, ed. L.A. Lindsay & S.F. Miescher. Portsmouth, NH: Thousand Oaks: Sage Miescher, Stephan F. & Lisa A. Lindsay. 2003. ‘Introduction: Men and

Brod, Harry and Michael Kaufman. 1996. Theorizing Masculinities. Heinemann.

Christaller, Johann Gottlieb. 1933. A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Masculinities in Modern African History,’ in Men and Masculinities in Language, Called Tschi (Twi). Second edition, revised and enlarged. Modern Africa, ed. L.A. Lindsay & S.F. Miescher. Portsmouth, NH:

Basel: Basel Evangelical Missionary Society. Heinemann. |

Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of Morrell, Robert. 1998. ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in

California. Southern African Studies.’ Journal of Southern African Studies 24, 4: 605-

Cornwall, Andrea. 2003. “To Be a Man is More than a Day’s Work: Shifting 630.

Ideals of Masculinity in Ado-Odo, Southwestern Nigeria.’ In Men and ——, ed. 2001. Changing Masculinities in a Changing Society. London: Zed.

Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. L.A. Lindsay & S.F. Miescher. Nkansa-Kyeremateng, Kofi. 1976. One Hundred Years of the Presbyterian

Heinemann, NH: Portsmouth. Church in Kwahu. Accra: Presbyterian Press.

Cornwall, Andrea and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds. 1994a. Dislocating Mascu- Reindorf, Carl Christian. 1895. History of the Gold Coast and Asante. Basel:

linity: Comparative Ethnographies. London & New York: Routledge. Missionsbuchhandlung. — 1994b. ‘Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology.’ Roper, Michael and John Tosh, ed. 1991. Manful Assertions: Masculinities in In Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. A. Cornwall and Britain since 1800. London & New York: Routledge

N. Lindisfarne. London & New York: Routledge. Schlatter, Wilhelm. 1916. Geschichte der Basel Mission, 1815-1915. 3 vols.

Crowther, Francis. 1906. ‘Notes on a District of the Gold Coast.’ Quarterly Basel: Missionsbuchhandlung. Journal of the Institute of Commercial Research in the Tropics 3: 168-182. Segal, Lynne. 1990. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. ‘Trans. Charles Lam New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Markmann. Reprint, New York: Grove Press. Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the

Foster, Philip, J. 1965. Education and Social Change in Ghana. Chicago: ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Man-

University of Chicago Press. chester University Press.

Garlick, Peter. 1967. “The Development of Kwahu Business Enterprise in Smith, Noel. 1966. The Presbyterian Church of Ghana, 1835-1960. Accra: Ghana since 1874: An Essay in Recent Oral Tradition.’ Journal of African Ghana University Press. .

History 8, 3: 463-480. Witschi, Hermann. 1970. Geschichte der Basler Mission, 1920-1940, vol. 5.

Gold Coast. 1928. The Gold Coast Handbook, 1928. Third edition, edited by Basel: Basileia.

John Maxwell. London: Crown Agent of the Colonies. Yankah, Kwesi. 1995. Speaking for the Chief: {kyeame and the Politics of Akan Haenger, Peter. 1989. ‘Die Basler Mission im Spannungsbereich afrikan- Royal Oratory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ischer Integrationsversuche und europiischer Kolonialpolitik. Vorberei- ——— 2001. ‘Nana Ampadu, the Sung-Tale Metaphor, and Protest Distung und Anfangszeit der “Asante Mission’ in Abetifi, Kwawu.’ Master’s course in Contemporary Ghana.’ In African Words, African Voices: Critical

thesis, University of Basel. Practices in Oral History, ed. L. White, S.F. Miescher & D.W. Cohen.

Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1999. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

196 ¢ Gender & Governance

charge of external affairs,’ 1.e., in charge of dealings between

Gend er members of the society and outsiders) is a generic term used for the female spokesman and leader of any society, her position is often

& Govern ance confused with that of a club leader (Lebeuf 1963). Indeed, even

| than the head of the market women. BOLANLE AWE A more crucial problem, however, is that of methodology and now some Yoruba scholars (Fadipe 1970) still regard her as no more

. . obtaining source materials. Although most evidence used in this

The lyalode In the Trad ition ql paper is based incumbents on oral traditions collected from the various of the Iyalode and other offices, the investigation is still Yo ru b —q Po| ItiC q| System severely handicapped by some factors. The colonial experience has in unavoidable many ways disrupted the traditional political

Ste+:m and undermined the position andperiod authority of thedomination, traditional Reference a rulers of the people. During this of foreign Alice Schlegel (ed.) 1977, Sexual Stratification: A Cross-Cultural — women seem to have been the most affected. With their Western View, New York: Columbia University Press preconceptions of female inferiority, colonial administrations tended to relegate women to the background in their governments. Consequently, many female titles disappeared while some of their The principle that ensures that every major interest in the society is functions became obsolete through lack of opportunity. In many given some representation in the conduct of government. is instances, it is only the position of the Iyalode and her lieutenants

widespread in most West African societies and has probably been that still exists within the political system and bears close one of the underlying factors in the recognition given to women examination; but even this institution of government has underwithin their political systems. The institutions of the Queen Mother gone many changes that have shorn it of its power and influence, so

of the Ashanti (Ghana) and the Edo (Benin Nigeria), the female that what exists now is not necessarily a true reflection of the chieftains of the Mende (Sierra Leone), the Sagi and the Sonya of Iyalode’s traditional position. For instance, with modern reorganizathe Nupe (Nigeria), and the royal princesses of the Kanuri (Bornu tion of local government administration in southwestern Nigeria,

Nigeria), to mention but a few, are examples of the efforts to she is no longer a member of any of the important councils of associate women with the government of these various ethnic government. Even the market, and therefore the market women, groups. Nor were the highly urbanized Yoruba — who now number have been removed from her jurisdiction, and have been placed several millions 1n southern Nigeria, Benin, and Togo — an_ under the control of the new local government councils in each exception. The component parts of their political structure were town. She has also lost a large part of the traditional means by which primarily the lineages and the council of chiefs whose titles were she maintained her position in the past. The customary tribute and invested in the individual lineages, as well as the age grades and the gifts that were her due have disappeared and have been replaced titled societies. But the two basic institutions around which the with a salary that compares unfavorably with that of her male intense competition for power, position, and material resources was counterparts. Interest in attaining a position that in the past confought were the ruler (Oba) and his hereditary title holders, his ferred great distinction has consequently declined. Modern changes chiefs. Since Yoruba society is mainly patrilineal, women do not in _ have also given her position new accretions. In some towns where normal circumstances become the head of a lineage or the repre- Christianity gained much ground, her position has been converted sentative of that lineage for a chieftaincy title. Oral traditions record from a purely political to a religious one, and she is now known as the existence of a few female rulers in the remote past (see Abiola et the Iyalode of the Christians.? It would therefore be dangerous to al., 1932), but available evidence suggests that the practice has been assume that the position of the Iyalode now can be safely extrapodiscontinued for at least the past 200 years. But while the women _ lated back into the past. were not associated with the political process on the same basis as the In spite of such limitations, however, it 1s still possible to recon-

men, they did have channels of direct participation in it. The struct the position of the Iyalode within the traditional political institution of the Iyalode,' the woman designated as their political system from available evidence. Some of the traditional customs, leader and spokesman in government, therefore represented an practices, and functions — ritual, political, and administrative — attempt to give women a voice in government and was a recognition associated with her position have survived. It has also been possible

of their ability to participate meaningfully in the political process. to supplement such information with some written evidence. Indeed, in the nineteenth century many women were given the European missionaries and other visitors to the Yoruba country in Iyalode title for their contribution to the war efforts of their towns. | the nineteenth century who were impressed by the contribution of

A study of the position of the Iyalode, or indeed of women women to the general development of the towns they visited generally, within the Yoruba traditional political structure is difficult occasionally described the position of the Iyalode (Hinderer 1873). for many reasons. The ubiquity and energy of the Yoruba market Even during the period of British administration, political officers woman, like her sisters in many parts of West Africa, have caused commissioned to write intelligence reports’ on the areas under their scholars to focus primarily on her economic role in society to the control often had to acknowledge the importance of the Iyalode in neglect of her contribution in other spheres (see Mabogunje 1961). the traditional government. Local historians have also collected Thus her political participation has often been regarded as indirect traditional accounts of the Iyalode in some Yoruba towns.‘ and incidental to her economic interest. The tendency has therefore The Iyalode was, like the male chiefs, a chief in her own right

been to dismiss the Iyalode as politically insignificant and to and had her own special insignia of office: the necklace of special miusconstrue her role. Since the title, Iyalode (literally, ‘mother in beads (ogbagbara and iyun), the wide-brimmed straw hats (ate) of the

Bolanle Awe/The lyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political System ¢ 197

Ondo and the Ijesa, the shawl (itagbe) of the jebu, her own personal throughout Yoruba country did not operate within a uniform servants, and her special drummers and bell ringers to call the political system. Although the various Yoruba governments often women to attention. Her title was an all-embracing one that gave shared the same set of titles, their political constitutions were her jurisdiction over all women. This is why in some Yoruba towns different (Lloyd 1954). In most Yoruba communities one of the she was given a more explicit title such as Eiyelo-binrin (“mother of main features of politics was usually intense competition for power, all women’) at Akure and Arise loran obinrin (‘she whose business is authority, and influence between the Oba on the one hand and his with the affairs of women’) in Ilesa. And she was indeed the chosen _ senior, hereditary chiefs on the other.

representative of all women in her town. Unlike the Queen Mother A brief examination of a Yoruba kingdom will illustrate the among the Ashanti (Busia 1951) or the Sagi among the Nupe nature of their politics and provide a background for an under(Nadel 1951), she did not have to belong to a special social class to standing of the Iyalode’s position. The Oyo kingdom before the attain her office. Hers was an achieved rather than an inherited nineteenth century provides a good example (Law 1972). The position: although in a few cases the post was hereditary, the office ruler, the Alaafin, had among his powers the nght to approve was generally elective and had to have the stamp of popular succession to all titles in Oyo. He was the highest judicial authority approval. Her most important qualifications were her proven ability in the land and he alone could order an execution of a convicted as a leader able to articulate the feelings of the women, her control person. He also had control of Sango, the chief religious cult in the of vast economic resources to maintain her new status as chief, and kingdom. His council of senior hereditary chiefs, the Oyomesi, on

her popularity. the other hand, had the final voice in his selection, served as an Once she was appointed, the Iyalode became not only the voice advisory body to him, and could engineer his removal from the

of the women in government but also a kind of queen who throne if he proved unsatisfactory. In the eighteenth century this coordinated all their activities. She settled their quarrels in her court kingdom was the scene of a series of conflicts in which power

and met with them to determine what should be the women’s alternated between the Alaafin and his chiefs. The issues that stand, for instance, on such questions as the declaration of war, the sparked these conflicts have been differently interpreted by different opening of new markets, or the administration of women at the historians. Some see them as centering around the matter of Oyo’s local level. As a spokesman she was given access to all positions of foreign policy — whether it should take a military form or whether power and authority within the state, exercising legislative, judicial, the kingdom should concern itself with commercial expansion.

and executive powers with the chiefs in their council. To make her Others believe a struggle to command the resources of the representation effective there was a clear-cut chain of authority expanding kingdom was taking place. Whatever the issues were, through her by which the government knew the wishes of the they certainly represented the factors that engaged the attention of people and vice versa. To coordinate all women’s interests, she had the ruler and his chiefs. her own council of subordinate chiefs who exercised jurisdiction Each Yoruba constitution was in effect often an indication of the over all women in those particular matters that pertained to women _ stage arrived at in that struggle between the ruler and his chiefs. At alone. Information about what these matters were is scanty. But in least three different constitutional stages are discernible. In some contrast to the council of male chiefs, which would be involved in towns an even balance was maintained. In others the balance had the organization of war, the reception of foreign visitors, and so on, been tilted in favor of the king, and in consequence there was a

it is not unlikely that the women chiefs would be involved in the high degree of centralization of government under him. There settlement of disputes between women, the cleanliness of the were also instances where he had lost the initiative and power had markets, and other female concerns. This council not only deliber- passed into the hands of his chiefs and the powerful secret cults.

ated on women’s affairs; their members also acted as area A clearer picture of the Iyalode’s role and effectiveness, parrepresentatives through whom the Iyalode could feel the pulse of ticularly in this struggle between the conflicting tendencies and women in different parts of the town. Another means of keeping in divergent interests of the Oba and his chiefs (including the Iyalode), touch with the women was through her control of the markets and can only be gleaned by examining her position under different therefore of the large majority of Yoruba women who were traders. constitutional arrangements within the Yoruba country before the In addition, she was a type of honorary president-general for all colonial period.°

women’s societies in the town. | But in spite of the right conferred on her to participate at all ype Oyo-Yoruba

levels of government and the potentially massive support that could be mustered for her cause, the Iyalode’s effectiveness in the political After the constitutional conflicts of the eighteenth century, centralprocess was not necessarily guaranteed. In theory she was acknow- ization of power around the monarchy and the consequent decline

ledged as the representative of all women and in all cases was free to in the power of the chiefs in the nineteenth century was very comment on all policy matters. In practice, however, she suffered apparent among the Oyo-Yoruba of the Oyo kingdom. Under the from one big disadvantage: she was always outnumbered as the only constitution that then operated in their new modern settlement at female in the crucial decision-making body, the council of king- Oyo (Babayemi 1974), the Alaafin had successfully whittled down makers which she had to attend. There was always therefore the the power of his chiefs and transferred most of their political, danger that the social practice of government might not conform to military, and economic functions to the palace officials who were the theoretical expectations that her position might imply (see his personal servants. Inasmuch as the Iyalode was outside this Evans-Pritchard 1965). A great deal of what she could achieve palace organization, her position was of little significance within the would depend on at least two important factors: (1) the qualities of political system. Indeed, the pattern at Oyo as regards the participathe Iyalode — her personality, her dynamism, and her political tion of women in the political process was one of indirect influence, astuteness; and (2) the political milieu within which she operated. through the appointment of women to positions in which they This second factor is particularly important, because the Iyalode could influence the ruler who had the authority.

198 © Gender & Governance

Among the Alaafin’s palace officials were the royal mothers and For no other lyalode in Ibadan was this better borne out than in the royal priestesses. These were very powerful women. They were the famous Iyalode Efunsetan, a very successful trader who had in charge of the different compounds in the large palace of Oyo; acquired extensive riches through her business activities. Like other some of them were also priestesses of the most important cults, such distinguished chiefs in Ibadan, she had three very large farms and as that of Sango, the god of thunder, which was the official religious more than 500 domestic slaves working for her, and had built cult of the kingdom. They were also in a position to wield great around herself a large following of kinsmen and hangers-on. Her influence because they had the most direct access to the king. Even compound in consequence became one of the focal points of power the Iwarefa, his highest and closest officials, had to go through them and influence in the town. It is not surprising that she became a to arrange rituals, festivals, and communal labor. Tributaries of the factor to be reckoned with in Ibadan politics, and that she provided Oyo kingdom could only approach the Alaafin through them, and a rallying point of opposition to the ruler of Ibadan, Are Latosa. She they made it possible for the Alaafin to have effective control on challenged his foreign policy that alienated Ibadan from its neighdifferent communities in his kingdom (Babayemi 1974). Far from bors, and resisted his domestic policy that tended toward the being representatives of the women in Oyo, they constituted part of establishment of sole rule, contrary to Ibadan’s tradition of olithe system used by the Alaafin to strengthen his position vis-d-vis his garchic government. In the struggle that ensued between Are chiefs. But insofar as they were female functionaries in the govern-_ Latosa and his chiefs, Efunsetan was deprived of her title and was ment to whom the Alaafin could always refer when issues affecting eventually assassinated on what appear to be political grounds. The women were to be discussed or when he wished to have the view _ official reasons given for her elimination are of interest because they of the women, they undermined the effectiveness and influence of highlight the obligations and responsibilities of an Iyalode in the Iyalode and made her political role an insignificant one. It is not wartime: (1) she did not accompany the head of state to war; (2) she surprising, therefore, that even when she attended the meeting of never sent him supplies during the campaign; (3) she did not come the council of chiefs, she deferred to the judgement of the males in person to meet him outside the town wall to congratulate him on

(Fadipe 1970). his safe return (Johnson 1937). These were also obligations expected

Other Oyo-Yoruba constitutions reflect a similar weakness in of other members of the council of chiefs. Because of the precethe Iyalode’s position, with a few minor differences depending on dents that Iyaola and her successor Efunsetan had set in Ibadan, the the degree of centralization of government that had already been Iyalode had become so important in the council of chiefs in Ibadan achieved or the antecedents of the Iyalode’s title. In Iwo, where by _ that she was one of the signatories to the crucial agreement of 1893, the end of the nineteenth century the balance of power had been which virtually handed Ibadan administration to the British; and in greatly tilted in favor of the Oba, the fact of the first Iyalode’s being 1912 an Iyalode acted as regent in Ibadan for a few months after the the sister of the reigning Oba and the mother of another made her death of a ruler. position less subservient; but her powers were still circumscribed by a number of female functionaries whose duties had political under- OWwy_-tieby’ tones and who were directly responsible to the ruler. One aberration within this Oyo-Yoruba system is to be found in Among the Ijebu, where the initiative had passed from the Oba to the comparatively new settlement of Ibadan, which in the nine- the Osugbo secret cult, the age grades, and the chiefs, the position teenth century threw overboard the idea of hereditary government of the Iyalode was again different. She participated at all levels of and chose chiefs on merit. This same system of appointment was policy making, including that of the Osugbo secret cult and the extended to the Iyalode’s title.* A candidate would have to prove her council of the Iwarefa chiefs. She also had an effective communicamettle, which was often based on her contribution to the military tion system with all women in the town. But in spite of such powers, success of the town. The first Iyalode, Iyaola, was said to have made her role, particularly in registering dissenting opinion, is not clear. generous contributions to Ibadan war efforts both by giving liberal There is no record of her opposition to the government. What credit facilities to the war chiefs, enabling them to acquire guns and seems to be obvious is that her role tended to be pacificatory, as a

. ; jebu

ammunition, and by making her own direct contribution. woman acting as peacemaker between the women and the other In this regard she established a tradition that her successors as component parts of government, and diplomatic, looking for ways Iyalode followed. Like the male chiefs she contributed her own of arriving at a consensus by conciliation and negotiation. An quota of soldiers to Ibadan’s ad hoc army whenever there was interesting departure from this is the case of the successful trader warfare, out of a corps of domestic slaves trained to fight. She gave Tinubu, who was made Iyalode in 1864 in appreciation of her them equipment and food, and put them under the leadership of contributions to the war efforts by the people of Abeokuta, where a one of her more experienced soldiers, who led them to war as a unit system similar to that of the Ijebu operated. Her role in Abeokuta as of Ibadan’s national army. In recognition of such services to the Iyalode deserves further study. There is no doubt that it gave her, in state, the ruler of Ibadan in the 1850s, Bale Olugbode, made Iyaola_ addition to the influence that she wielded as a wealthy trader, a the Iyalode. Within a short time she so established her presence as_ constitutional base from which she could play an effective role in the representative of the Ibadan women that Anna Hinderer could the government and politics of the period. According to Biobaku describe her as ‘the mother of the town to whom all the women’s (1960), she became involved in the succession struggle in Abeokuta palavers (disputes) are brought before they are taken to the king. She and on a second attempt succeeded in installing her candidate on is in fact a sort of queen, a person of much influence, and looked up _ the throne.

to with much respect’ (1873, p. 110). Her peculiar position in this | ,

society where a man’s following, his popularity, and his economic Ijesa and Ondo! resources virtually determined the amount of influence he could

wield in the body politic, gave her de facto power in defiance of Among the Ijesa and the Ondo, where the balance of power what was customary and traditional among the Oyo-Yoruba. between the Oba and his chiefs was fairly evenly maintained, the

Bolanle Awe/The lyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political System ¢ 199

position of the chief political representative of the women, the Arise her council of chiefs and that of the Oba. If the Oba’s council in [lesa and the Lobun in Ondo, presents another picture. This, in remained adamant there were forms of protest that could be addition, is heightened by the fact that in both towns there had adopted to show disapproval. The women under her leadership been a tradition of women rulers in the past, and women had been could boycott the markets or refuse to play their traditional role in able to gain recognition as in Ibadan by their actual contributions to the Oba’s festival. The organization of all women under these the welfare of the state. For instance, oral traditions (Abiola et al. female chiefs ensured their success in mobilizing female opinion.

1932) in Ilesa relate that Arise helped to devise the strategy by The position of the Arise, who was part of the same decision- _ which her countrymen defeated their Nupe invaders,’ and thus she making process as the male chiefs, was more difficult. She often was invested with the title of Arise in recognition of her contribu- avoided direct confrontation, but if she were unable to carry all the tion to the war efforts. In both kingdoms these offices were women along with her, rather than discredit herself she would as a endowed with a great deal of power, which was given ritual and practical demonstration of disapproval lead a protest march of symbolic recognition. In Ondo, the Lobun alone was responsible women to the Oba’s palace. During this century there have been for the installation of the Oba, and in Ilesa, the Arise was one of the occasions when women in Ilesa rose up to protest in this manner. In kingmakers. Indeed, their offices appeared to be coequal with those the 1940s they did so over arbitrary and high taxation by the

of the rulers in the two towns. They had under them the colonial government, and only recently they boycotted the king’s subordinate chiefs whose titles corresponded to the titles of the market in protest against excessive stall fees and lack of security in senior male chiefs of the ruler, and in rank order their own positions the market. could be equated with that of the ruler.'° In the Ondo polity the There were in addition certain devices built into the position of Oba and the Lobun were regarded as virtually equal rulers of the both these women chiefs whereby pressure could be indirectly two societies which were distinct and separate; the Oba in charge of exerted on the Oba and his chiefs. The position of the Arise offers male society and the Lobun in charge of female society. Neither many examples. In her ritual role as the Oba’s first wife, the Arise participated in the meetings of the other. The Lobun had meetings was his immediate confidante and had direct access to him at all with her own chiefs on matters concerning women, such as the times. She was indeed intimately involved in the affairs of his fixing of market days, the establishment of a new market, the household. For instance, it was one of her duties to settle quarrels organization of their traditional festivals, or of more general interest among his wives. She was also in close communication with all the such as the declaration of war or the imposition of curfews during important chiefs who held the balance of power with the Oba. The wartime. On such matters of common interest, the Oba acted as a_ strategic position of her official residence near the palace ensured link between her council and his own and she acted as a link that all of them stopped to extend her their customary greetings in between his council and her own. They would communicate their their movements to and from the palace. Some of them who were councils’ decisions to each other, relay the same to their own also obliged to render certain services to women usually did so councils, and bring back approval or disapproval of the measures through the Arise, their representative. The Arise herself had, like contemplated. Either council was at liberty to initiate new measures the Oba, certain important religious functions in the state, which

under the leadership of the Oba or Lobun. helped to emphasize the importance and the indispensability of her

As if to emphasize their position within the political system, the position. This is best exemplified in the Obokun Festival, an annual rituals surrounding the installation of these two female chiefs were _ festival in remembrance of Obokun, the legendary warrior founder as elaborate as those for the rulers of both towns; and in both cases, of the Ijesa kingdom. As the Obokun’s ritual daughter and his gift to their persons, like that of the Oba, became sacrosanct thereafter and the Ijesa people, the Arise had a major role to play at each stage of they had to observe a number of taboos. The Arise in Ilesa must not _ the festival activities. Moreover, unlike the Oyo-Yoruba where the leave her head uncovered, she must not be addressed by her real priestesses were outside the Iyalode’s jurisdiction, the priestesses of name but by title, and she must not kneel down as Yoruba do to _ the various religious cults acknowledged her leadership as they did © show respect to elders of both sexes, and women do to honor males that of the Oba and paid their respects and the traditional tribute to of their husbands’ patrilineage. She had to move into an official her. residence specially built for her by the town, of the same opulence Both the Arise and the Lobun also had practical but still indirect and grandeur as those of the more senior chiefs. The Lobun in ways of demonstrating approval or disapproval. In Ilesa it was the Ondo must never again step on the bare floor, must not eat food Arise and her chiefs alone who participated with him when the Oba that was not freshly prepared, and must put on new clothes every performed the ritual dances for certain religious ceremonies, and

day. they alone escorted him back to his palace as an indication of their

But in spite of the tremendous power that their status thus con- solidarity with and support for him. Their failure to do so was ferred on them, they did not see themselves as competitors for certainly a sign of disapproval. In Ondo when communications influence and authority with the Oba and his chiefs. They regarded from the council of male chiefs were acceptable, the female chiefs themselves primarily as part of an establishment that was essentially led all the women in a dance, as it were of approval, from the symmetrical in conception, where if the man was on the right hand, market to the Oba’s palace. the woman must be on the left. Their position, however, was such

that there was bound to be occasional conflict of authorities. Conclusion Unfortunately, the evidence on this important element is very scanty. There is hardly any record of their leading the opposition to From the examples of the various female holders of the highest the government as in Ibadan. The present Lobun, however, political office among the Yoruba that have been examined, it is indicated that any matter of disagreement, for instance on the clear that it is impossible to make sweeping generalizations about opening of a new market, fixing market tolls, or arbitrary use of the position of the Iyalode or of women generally within the power by the male chiefs, would be one for negotiation between Yoruba political system. Nor can this essay claim to have covered all

200 ¢ Gender & Governance

Yoruba country. It has not, for example, examined the position of colonial government was contemplating changes in the local govern-

the Iyalode among at least two important Yoruba subgroups, the , ment administration, = .

Ekiti and the Owo, whose nearness and historical association with sacte ne many loca histories of vorupa towns Pei py the Yoruba the Benin kingdom had modified their political systems and might themselves. Biobaku (1973) gives a fairly comprehensive list.

- 1:the 5 The nineteenth century is a fairly well-documented period :in; "ane Yoruba have affected position the Iyalode them. It has, rather, ; -of history, and there iswithin considerable information on the contribution of concentrated on those areas where there is a strong tradition as women in that period.

regards the institution of the Iyalode. Within these societies, it 1S 6 Information was obtained by interviews with Oluwo Folasade Laboclear that the institution represents an attempt to give women a sinde, head of the Ogboni cult in Ibadan, who was about ninety years of

chance to participate directly in the political process. It is an age. | | example of female power based on recognized authority. But the ’ I am grateful to Professor Oyin Ogunba for introducing me to the

effectiveness of the Iyalode within the political system depended on ; present Iyalode of Owu-ljebu, who granted me a long interview. her personality and the degree of power in the hands of the male The following information comes from two interviews, with the present

; Arise of Ilesa, years Lisa Lisa Lobun, about ruler. Where power was concentrated in the about hands sixty-five of the ruler, she old, ; ld band culthe q ~The Lobun | ffered as much loss in influence as did the male chiefs. Other pinery year’ ooG put very arecurare ane energetic. mane nisa aun is

suit o — acting for the Lobun, since a new Lobun cannot take office while the

variables affecting her position were her own personality and the old king whom the present one installed is still living. :

historical tradition in the particular political system. But whatever ° The Nupe were horsemen and had an advantage over the Ijesa, who the level of her achievement within the political process, she did were mostly infantrymen and fell easy prey to Nupe spears and lances. not, on the whole, see herself as being in competition for power Arise found a way of unmounting the Nupe horsemen and forcing them and influence with the Oba and his male chiefs, but rather as being oe eae In hand-to-hand combat.

in a complementary position. Hence she was often referred to as Ct. Ondo titles: le Li Otun Oba (‘the ruler’s right hand’). This pacificatory, comple- Male Line Female Line

; : ; Osemowe (ruler) Lobun

mentary role is certainly the ideal that the present holders of the Lisa Lisa Lobun

Iyalode title and their male colleagues like to stress. But this is a far Jomo Jomo Lobun ,

cry from those instances where, by virtue of her wealth, ritual Sasere Sasere Lobun position, or her leadership of the female hierarchical order, the Adaja Adaja Lobun

Iyalode was able to challenge male dominance. The cases of Iyalode Odunwe Sama Lobun |

Tinubu and Iyalode Efunsetan, and the potential power of the Arise

and the Lobun, provide good examples of the contribution of the References

Iyalode to the political system. It is, however, important to point . .

out that there are indications that such participation could only be Abiola, J. D. E., J. A. Babafemi, and S. O. S. Ataiyero. 1932. Iwe Itan Ilesa

tolerated within limits and did not often go unchallenged. The fate B cine History or caa), Resa: te authors Administrati Ovo Atiba.’ that befell Iyalode Efunsetan shows only too well that if at any time P@bayem1, S. O. 1974. “The Structure of Administration at Oyo Atiba.

; - ; Paper read at the Twentieth Annual Congress of the Historical Society

an Iyalode tried to lead opposition against the male chiefs, she was of Nigeria, University of Ife

likely to be put down in a most brutal Manner, | Biobaku, S. O, 1960. ‘Iyalode Tinubu.’ In K. O. Dike, ed., Eminent NigeriFinally, it should be noted that the participation of the Iyalode in ans of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 33-41. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

the political process does not exhaust the forms of female political sity Press.

activity within the Yoruba country. It is only evidence of their —— 1973. Sources of Yoruba History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. direct participation. Female participation in government could and Busia, K A. 1951. The Position of the Chief in the Modem Political System of the

-economic ds h ‘dh litical ll nstitute. interests, though their political power has often varied ,

did take other less obvious forms. The evidence available at present, Ashanti. London: Oxford University Press for the International African however, indicates mat women did ave Polical as wen 38 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1965. The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and

dh 1 ken th f F Fall er £ Other Essays in Social Anthropology. London: Faber and Faber. female contribution to the decision-making processes in traditional Press.

and has not always taken the same form. for a full appreciation oO Fadipe, N. A. 1970. The Sociology of the Yorubas. Ibadan: Ibadan University society, we need further investigation. The rapid changes that the Hinderer, Anna. 1873. Seventeen Years in the Yoruba Country. London: See-

Yoruba country has witnessed within the last 100 years make such ley, Jackson, and Halliday. an exercise an urgent one. There is no doubt that British colonial- Johnson, S. 1937. The History of the Yorubas. Lagos: C. M. S. Church Mis-

ism has had an adverse effect on the role of women in the Yoruba sionary Society. a society and that current development processes might sweep 14W, ae C. 1972. The constitutional srouns of Oyo in the Eightoverboard whatever vessiges of her contribution remain, res tan Jug of la i 1228 a Onion tion of African Societies.’ In D. Paulme, ed., Women of Tropical Africa,

Notes pp. 93-119. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lloyd, P. C. 1954. “The Traditional Political System of the Yoruba.’ South' For convenience I have used the title Iyalode for any woman designated western Journal of Anthropology 10: 366-84. as the political leader and charged with the responsibility for articulating Mabogunje, A. L. 1961. ‘The Market Woman.’ Ibadan 11: 14-17. the Views of Yoruba women in government within any Yoruba society. Nadel, S. F. 1951. A Black Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press for In practice, such women have their own titles; for instance, in Tlesa she the International African Institute. 1s called Arise, in Ondo she is known as the Lobun, and in Erin-Ijesa her Onwuejeogwu, Michael. 1969. ‘The Cult of the Bori Spirits among the

, file is Esemure. . Hausa.’ In M. Douglas and P. Kaberry, eds., Man in Africa, pp. 279-305. osnwuejeogwu ene is és, peculiar ; to the Iyalode among the Yoruba: see London: Tavistock.

> Many intelligence reports were written in the 1930s when the British |

Jean Allman/Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante ¢ 201

| resembles the rounding up of unmarried woman can be found in

JEAN ALLMAN our sources for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the colonial period, the primary written sources on the subject are

Rou nding LJ p S pinste rs scanty, at best,| limited to a small collection of colonial correspondence, a Quarterly Report entry and a few customary court

Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women cases. Meyer Fortes made brief mention in his field notes from the

‘ 1945-6 “Ashanti Social Survey’ to the fact that

in Colonial Asante periodically the political authority stepped in and decreed that all

| unmarried women must married; in some cases they were Reference . placed in a cell andbe told to name their choice; theoretically the

Journal of African History, 1996, 37(2): 195-214 men could refuse, but in practice it appears to have been difficult for them to refuse. In order to facilitate marriage in this situation,

marriage by registration was introduced, so that only a small fee

In March of 1933, the District Officer’s “Quarterly Report’ for the (usually 5/-) [was paid]; the tiri nsa was also paid, often such Mampong District in Asante contained a rather strange entry for the small amounts as 6d of palm wine being cited.°

town of Effiduasi. “Becoming alarmed at the amount of venereal disease spread in the town by unattached spinsters’, the officer In the more recent, published literature, there are only two brief wrote, references to the detention of unmarried women in Ghana’s . colonial period - and those in sources not pertaining specifically to the Ohene [chief] published an edict commanding that all Asante. D. D. Vellenga, in her 1983 piece, “Who is a wife?’ made unmarried maidens should forthwith provide themselves with general reference to chiefs’ concerns about the number of women husbands. This shook the Wesleyan Mission somewhat but only not properly married. ‘Some even went to the extreme measure’, _ one complaint was received. In fact, the husband hunt seems to she wrote, ‘of locking up such women until their lovers would pay have been rather enjoyed by the girls than otherwise. The 4 fee to release them, thus legitimising the relationship’.”? P. A. Ohene, however, was warned against the futility of publishing Roberts discovered more detailed information on the arrest of unenforceable orders and against advertising the frailties of his unmarried women in Sefwi Wiawso — an area to the south-west of

maidens. ' Asante which was incorporated into the empire in the early

Although the District Officer cast this so-called ‘husband hunt’ eighteenth century as a tributary state.° She found evidence of a as a minor, isolated incident in the town of Effiduasi, there is 1929 Free Women’s Marriage Proclamation’ which ordered that enough written evidence and ample oral testimony to suggest that it “Such women. ... be arrested, locked up in the outer courtyards of was anything but minor and it was certainly not isolated. Between the omanhene’s palace in Wiawso and held there until they were 1929 and 1933, in a number of villages and towns throughout this claimed by a husband or by any other man who would take charge region of the former Gold Coast, chiefs were ordering the arrest of Of them. The male claimant was required to pay a fine of 5/- tO all women who were over the age of 15 and not married.” As one of — release the woman 2 For the most part, however, husband hunts 5

those who was arrested recently recalled: the ‘capture of spinsters’ or the ‘frailties’ of Asante’s ‘maidens’ have

, escaped historical inquiry.'°

We were arrested and just dumped into a room — all of the That there are these particular lacunae in the historiography women of Effiduasi who were not married... The ahemfie should not be surprising. Despite the wealth and diversity of sources [palace] police [did the arresting]. The women were flirting available for reconstructing Asante’s twentieth-century past, the around and so they became an embarrassment to the King. So, social history of colonial Asante remains largely under-developed. he decided that they should get married ... they announced it Indeed, despite an historiography for the eighteenth and nineteenth that on such a day all women should be able to show a husband centuries unparalleled in sub-Saharan Africa for its richness and _.. When we were sent there, we were put into aroom ...When detail," twentieth-century Asante, as McCaskie lamented in 1986, you mentioned a man’s name, it meant that was the man you does ‘not yet possess even [a] ... skeletal social history ... [W]e find wanted to marry, so they would release you ... You would go ourselves enmeshed in dense thickets of trees where no one as yet home with the man and the man would see your relatives and has defined the topography of the wood.’ This paper seeks to

say, ‘I am getting married to this woman.” contribute to the still neglected task of defining that topography and

of teasing out the continuities, innovations and disjunctures to be The pattern, it seems, was similar in each town. A gong-gong found between Asante’s pre-colonial and colonial past. Certainly, was generally beaten to announce the arrest of unmarried women _ this is a project rendered all the more urgent by the fact that those (asigyafo).* A woman was detained, usually at the chiefs court, until Asantes for whom the first tumultuous decades of colonial rule were she spoke the name of a man whom she would agree to marry. The a lived experience are now passing into the world of their ancestors. man was then summoned to the court where he would affirm his Based upon the personal narratives and reminiscences of women desire to marry the woman and then pay a ‘release fee’ of 5s. Ifthe who were either among the ‘spinsters’ caught or who bore witness man refused to marry the woman, he was fined. In some cases, the to the ‘capture’, the correspondence of British government officials fine was 5s, in others it was as high as £5. After the woman’s and the records of customary courts, this paper explores gender and release, the man was expected to pay a marriage fee of 7s and one social change in colonial Asante by dissecting and then contextual-

bottle of gin to the woman’s family.° izing the round-up of unmarried women in the late 1920s and early

To my knowledge, no one has explored this elusive episode in 1930s. It seeks to understand this unusual episode in direct state Asante’s social past. No references to anything that even remotely intervention into the negotiating of marriage and non-marriage as

202 ¢ Gender & Governance , part of the general chaos in gender relations that shook Asante in _ preserved in a 1929 customary court case from Asokore. In Kwaku

the years between the two World Wars. This chaos, often articu- Afram v. Afuah Buo the plaintiff sought judicial relief for the lated in the language of moral crisis, in terms that spoke of women’s defendant to explain her reasons for refusing to marry him after 5s uncontrollability, of prostitution and venereal disease, was, more had been paid on her behalf ‘during the capture of spinsters in than anything, about shifting power relationships. It was chaos Asokore’. The plaintiff claimed that he saw a ‘certain young man engendered by cash and cocoa, by trade and transformation.'° from Seneajah connecting with the girl ... [and] upon the strength This was not, however, how the arrests were explained in the of that ... found out that the defendant did not like to marry’ him. early 1930s. British government officers in Asante first expressed Afuah Buo’s defence was brief and direct:

_ concern about the detention of unmarried women in 1932. ; : . ; I live at Asokore. I amIn July a farmer.

Some a gong-gong of that year,; the a brief memo his caught. ; yearsI ago, os Chief : wasCommissioner beaten thatwrote spinsters are totobe was among (and

assistant requesting that be made and a report furnished. ‘Ithat ; To ; previous [to] thatenquiries I was told by Plaintiff that Iinmust mention his. am: ;informed’, he wrote, ‘that there is a custom Ashanti : .;girls name he will clear me out). did and came and 5/young of and 15 years of; age aremeIordered tohe marry. ItPlaintiff is ; paid aedoes not os refuse a4 upwards and discharged ... About two weeks afterShortly even alleged that any who are placed in prison’.'* . — ;Assistant ; care forCommissioner, me, nor subsist me. I informed one Attah Biom of the thereafter,;the having soughtheinformation mane ; a treatment and Plaintiff said because was ill hence he did in Bekwai and Mansu Nkwanta, filed his1s response whichPlaintiff includeddid ; eee a carenot ; st do it. What I have to say that because not for lettersé from thenor chiefs of both towns andI from the District Officer . to get my ; . me, subsist me, hence connected with someone, resident in Bekwai. The officer wrote that the Roman Catholic carer , 1

: ; ; oer , ; daily living. That’s all I know.

priest first informed him of the practice and that ‘no complaint was

made ... by any Ashanti or for that matter any african [sic], one or In the end, the Asokore Native Tribunal ruled against Afuah Buo, two africans [sic] rather took it as a joke’. He added that he had fining her £5 9s Od — £3 4s Od of which went to the plaintiff as

heard of similar actions being taken in Adansi, Edweso and even costs and compensation. | Kumasi a few years earlier, although he understood ‘the Kumasi- Although brief, Afuah Buo’s testimony raises a number of hene is not in favour of it’. important issues concerning the arrests of unmarried women. First The chiefs confirmed the detentions of unmarried women and _ and most obviously, that Afuah’s case was brought before the court then justified their actions by arguing that venereal diseases and in 1929 and that the ‘capture’ of spinsters in Asokore had occurred prostitution were prevalent in their division.’ The Bekwaihene and ‘some years’ prior to that time suggests that the problem of his councillors and elders submitted a three-page letter defending unmarried women was not simply a by-product of the ‘financial their actions in terms of a desire ‘to prevent prostitution which we depression’. It requires that we investigate social and economic have notice[d] to bring sterility and incurable venereal diseases’. changes and their impact on gender and conjugal relationships prior

The solution was, they argued, to “encourage conjugal marriages to the depression if we are to understand the meaning and among our womenfolk’. If the chiefs were prepared to offer a magnitude of the crisis. Secondly, Afuah Buo’s testimony points to concrete solution to the ‘problem’ of unmarried women, they were a serious social contest over the very meaning of marriage in the late far more equivocal in explaining why the ‘problem’ of women not 1920s. It suggests that the crisis was not simply about marriage and marrying existed in the first place.'? On the one hand, they argued non-marriage, as the chiefs’ arguments suggest, but about what that ‘the tendency ... is attributable to the prevalent financial constitutes a marriage and what responsibilities are incumbent upon depression which renders the men incapable to conform with ..._ each partner. For the plaintiff and, indeed, for the court, the paythe expenses of our native customary laws concerning marriage’. ment of the release fee constituted ‘marriage’ and entitled Afram to On the other hand, the chiefs betrayed much concern about exclusive sexual rights in his wife. The marriage was a fact, a state of women’s growing uncontrollability, fondly recalling ‘the good old being, recognized by the court as non-negotiable. It either was or it days of our ancestors ... [when] no girl or woman dared to resist was not; there could be no mitigating factors. For Afuah Buo, those when given away 1n marriage to a suitor by her parents and relatives exclusive sexual rights were contingent upon and tied directly to a as is the case now’.'® Yet in their letter to colonial officials, the man’s on-going provision of minimal subsistence or ‘chop money’. customary rulers of Bekwai were less intent on explaining the In her view, marriage was, as Vellenga argued, ‘a process ... tenuous marriage crisis than with exposing its dreadful symptoms -immoral- and fluid in nature’.” Buo’s definition of the marrying process ity, prostitution and disease. They assured British officials that their allowed her to move in and out and between the categories of wife intentions were ‘clean’ and that they would continue the practice of and concubine — a movement easily branded as prostitution by detaining unmarried women ‘unless there is any justifiable reason to Asante’s colonial chiefs.

encourage prostitution and its attendant prevalence of sterility and Although much more research is required into the changing venereal diseases’.'? As for the District Officer, he was not fully meanings of marriage in Asante,” the Asokore court’s vision of convinced by the chiefs’ arguments. The idea of stopping ‘the marriage as ‘state of being’ rather than ‘process’ may have been of spread of venereal disease is a good cloak’, he wrote, ‘behind which more recent origin and Buo’s fluid interpretation more firmly to hide a money making proposition’. The Bekwaihene collected a rooted in Asante’s pre-colonial past. Certainly Rattray’s view of release fee of 5s on every woman caught, the officer noted, and a__ pre-colonial marriage was one of process, of on-going negotiations fine of £5 on every man whose name was called but who refused to between two groups of individuals. Fortes, though he did not

pay the fee and marry.” historicize marriage customs, wrote that the conjugal relationship in

How women viewed these arrests in the late 1920s and early Asante was ‘envisaged as a bundle of separable rights and bonds 1930s is far more difficult to reconstruct than the views of chiefs or rather than as a unitary all-or-none tie’. My readings of customary colonial officers because so few sources recorded women’s voices. court cases involving marriage and divorce in this period lead me to But at least one woman’s experience of being arrested has been conclude that chiefs and elders were articulating a new definition of

Jean Allman/Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante ¢ 203

marriage that upheld the husband’s exclusive sexual rights in his was a disgrace to the town and to the people here in the town’.” As wife, while minimizing or discounting completely the husband’s Yaa Dufie explained, it was ‘because of the fear of contracting the reciprocal obligations toward that wife. This ‘ petrified’ vision of disease [babaso, or venereal disease]. That’s why they locked them marriage as an ‘all-or-none tie’ left women with little or no defence up’.*® Indeed, several of the women to whom I spoke did not in countless numbers of cases heard in Asante’s Native Tribunals hesitate to call those who had been captured ‘prostitutes’. When during the colonial period. More specifically, in the testimony and asked if she were sure these women were prostitutes (atutufo) and judgements of many adultery cases, we see the husband’s obligation not concubines of one sort or another (mpenafo), Beatrice Nyarko to maintain his wife eroding in almost measurable ways. Many responded,

women justified their refusal to reveal the name of a lover or, as an ' tution. If th _ h

alternative, to pay that lover’s adultery fee (ayefare) to their husbands t te Propet P ene ih Cy See han t 4 vee bececte ey by insisting on the mutuality of conjugal obligations, by maintaining hi Teh to you and say the p eh, ued a end . val come that a husband’s exclusive sexual rights in his wife were contingent thing. it sie sees you, you Can give her money and she wi" come upon his provision of subsistence support. Almost without excep- to you. The next time, she may see another man, too, who can

tion in the period under consideration, such arguments were give her money, [and] she can go to him.

rejected by the court.* . . Many women, however, had more difficulty leaping to the

In recalling the capture of those remaining unmarried, Asante assumption that those who had not married were prostitutes. As women certainly do not speak with one voice.* Their recollections Akosya So reflected in a recent interview: | reveal a host of sentiments and reasonings — some echoing the perspective of Afuah Buo, others that of Asante’s chiefs. Still others A: ... some girls don’t want to marry. It’s a personal thing. Some

speak from a singular and personal perspective that defies simple don’t like it. Some don’t want to lead good lives. categorization. Yet these very contradictions and inconsistencies, Q: Were they prostitutes or concubines or...? these multiple truths, help us to appreciate the complexities of the A: They can’t openly declare themselves as prostitutes, but the

colonial experience. They bring the personal to bear on the ones who weren't married, people assumed they were

structural relationship between economic and social change and, for prostitutes.°? the purposes of this particular inquiry, are fundamental to the Perhaps some were: probably most were not. Eponuahemaa process of disentangling charges of prostitution and concerns about Afua Fo P reported that ao th harnarrie d women ant rostitutes ‘spinsterhood’ and morality from women’s assertions of autonomy were arreste < When | asked why some women had “hoe en not to in a rapidly changing colonial economy. Interestingly, none with marry, she replic d, ‘Each person ie d their own reason. Some were whom T have sp oken over recent years points to the economic lazy. They didn’t like to go to farm and to cook for the husband, so epression or to men’s inability to afford marriage payments as a they wouldn’t mar The men wanted to marry. but the women reason for women’s non-marriage. Akosua Atta certainly saw the di in’ want to snare and it’s even worse now’ 3 Tn a subsequent root of the problem as men not proposing marriage to women, but conversation, Afua Fom would inform me that she was amon; the

she could point to no economic reasons for this. ‘I don’t know sixty § «asters caucht in Effiduasi in the early 1930s.24 8 why’, she recently pondered, ‘things were not expensive then as Accordin to ‘Afua Fom and her sister ‘Adwoa Addae both of

; ghties, women were unmarried an

they are now.’”¢ Others, like Mary Oduro and Rosina Boama, both whom are ae in their mid-eicht; tied and

of Effiduasi, saw the problem as a straightforward one of numbers. they were choosing sigyawdi (being unmarried or the state of nonwomen vas feared, Bowen 2 cxplsined “that they [the vomnen| marriage) for reasons that had far more to do with the economics of would contract some venereal disease’.2” From the perspectives of conjugal obligations than with laxity in morals. Adwoa Addae has Oduro, Boama, Atta and a few others, non-marriage was not a choice always lived with her sister in the family house (abusua fi ¢). She ha d that women made, it was something that happened through no fault four husbands, but never any children, and helped her sister raise

; 8 PP Ou her eight children. The first time we spoke, Adwoa Addae of the demography of the times, some women were left unmarried. ee P Most reminiscences of the period, however, are far more willing this way:

of their own. Through men’s refusal to propose or simply because explained the events behind the capture of unmarried women in to underscore women’s agency in this process of non-marriage, to Men were not buying! That is why the women were saying that see the decision not to marry as a choice, though there is little they would not marry. The men were not taking care of them agreement on how to characterize that agency. Even Rosina ... The men were not serving us well. You would serve him, go Boama, who was sure that the main reason women did not marry to the farm with him, cook for him and yet he would not give was that there were not enough men, allowed that some women you anything ... The man and woman may farm together, but might have chosen not to marry. ‘I can’t say’, she recently recalled. the woman would do the greater part of it... [The men] prefer ‘They were just roaming about. Whether they were not having to sit and do nothing.*° husbands] or were not getting [husbands], I can’t say’.28 Other omen were not so torn in Fi veasonings and echoed quite Although Adwoa was not captured, she recalled those days as ones

ey the sentiments expres byuncontrollability. chi inthe aly 1990s aethey Wen women ascred a grew deaf sutonomy and indepen ointed to women’s ‘During that time’, recalle Peatrice Nyarko, who was nearly forty years or during the capture engagement in foodstuffs trade. Adwoa, herself, divorced at least of unmarried women at Effiduasi, ‘young girls were misbehaving’. one of her husbands because he refused to cultivate a cocoa farm for Jean Asare, who was a child at the time, remembered that ‘women eT: were just roaming about, attending dances, sleeping everywhere. I got married to my husband because I had wanted some benefits Some even went as far as Kumasi to sleep with boyfriends, so ... it from [him] ... so that maybe, in the future, I would not suffer ...

204 ¢ Gender & Governance

divorce [him]...°° If the cocoa is there, the proceeds — I will enjoy them. But my ... people got to know which girls were eligible for marriage ...

husband was not prepared to think that far, so I decided to By this they got to know who was married and who was not.” I have not yet come across any written documentation that provides

Adwoa Addae did not consider her actions or attitudes to be details on the registration of girls at puberty in Effiduasi. Nonepersonal and non-representative and her reminiscences, though theless, it does not appear to be outside of the realm of possibility in lengthy, warrant extensive quotation. ‘In those days’, she recalled, a world in which, for the moment, anyway, confusion reigned. women were hard working, so we could live without men. The How can one make sense of these charges and counter-charges only thing we did not get were children, so we were forced to °f prostitution, venereal disease, immorality and ‘bad girls’, of go in for these men. Apart from that, we were independent. We captured ‘spinsters’, wives clothing husbands and chiefs registering could work without the assistance of men. I don’t know, but ##/s at menarche? In short, how does one sort through the chaos that might have accounted for what the chiefs did ... Those days that seemed to engulf the gendered world of colonial Asante in the are better than these days. In those days women could work hard late 1920s and early 1930s? Certainly, It 1s not a question of figuring and get a lot of things they wanted. But today it is not like that. OU% who was telling the ‘truth’ and who was ‘lying’, or of simply Even if you try to assert some form of independence, you will 48certaining the precise number of prostitutes in a town like see that it doesn’t work as it used to work. In those days, even Efhiduasi in 1929 (whose population was estimated as 3,778 in though women wanted to be independent, they still got married 1931) in order to evaluate the veracity of the chiefs charges. Even to men, but it was because they wanted to... In those days, if if it were possible to retrieve those figures, they would tell us you had a wife and you did not look after her well, she would nothing about how prostitution was defined in 1930 or the ways in

just go. If you looked after her well, she would stay.” which its meaning was contested. It is my contention that the

reminiscences of women like Afua Fom and her sister, Adwoa If Adwoa Addae remembered her years as a young woman as_ Addae, point us in the right direction. Their repeated references to years of autonomy, she also remembered them as ones of broader women’s autonomy and independence during this period - whether disorder. It was as though the gendered world of Asante was turned through complaints that men were ‘lazy’ or through matter-of-fact upside down, if only for a few fleeting moments. Not only were — statements like ‘in those days, the women were able to get money unmarried women arrested, she recalled, but women who were faster than the men’ — highlight the importance of economic and

married were instructed by the chief to ‘buy cloths for our social context in framing the critical questions. In this case, we husbands, which we did, and even in some cases sandals and other should not be asking whether or not the streets of Asante towns like things ... We really did not understand why the chief was saying Effiduasi were overrun with prostitutes. Rather, we must ask: why that, but we had to do it’.*R. S. Rattray, in his extensive discussion were women perceived as being prostitutes, as being out of control of marriage in Asante, wrote that one of the main liabilities that a in this period, and why was that ‘uncontrollability’ consistently husband incurred upon marriage was responsibility for his wife’s articulated in terms of a moral crisis?‘ maintenance.” Providing cloth was considered an important aspect These questions are certainly not unique to Asante. In recent of maintenance, and dowries in the precolonial and early colonial | years they have been posed quite dramatically in the growing body periods, he reported, often included provision of large pieces of of comparative literature on gender and colonialism. As Nancy cloth.*° The order by the Effiduasihene that men need no longer Hunt recently reflected: “where women most often appear in the provide cloths for their wives and that those wives should provide colonial record is where moral panic surfaced, settled and festered. cloths for their husbands — an order recalled in detail by Afua Fom, Prostitution, polygamy, adultery, concubinage and infertility are the as well undercut one of the fundamental obligations of marriage, loci of such angst throughout the historical record’.47 Hunt and a that a husband must maintain his wife.*! Afua Fom remembered the umber of other historians concerned with gender issues, particuorder only as a ‘temporary measure that the King took ... It was not larly in areas with sizeable white settler populations, have devoted customary so it did not last long’. She viewed the order more as a much energy to exploring why this has been the case. Most have ritual — something the king had been advised by a diviner to do in come to conclusions similar to Megan Vaughan who has argued that

order to ward off some imminent danger. When asked if she

thought it was related to the capture of unmarried women, she the problem of women’ was shorthand for a number of related replied, “We could not ask because, customarily, when the chief says problems including changes in property rights, in rights in labour

something you cannot ask a question’.” and relations between generations... The real Issue, of course, Although Afua Fom did not offer a direct correlation between was that with far-reaching changes taking place in economic the capture and the order concerning cloth, her recollections point relations, so enormous strains were placed on both gender and to a series of attempts to assert control over women. Not only were generational relations ... these complex changes were described there the arrests of ‘spinsters’ and the recasting, however temporary, in terms of degeneration, of uncontrolled sexuality and of of marital obligations, there was an attempt, according to Fom, to disease.*®

register girls upon passage of their first menses: Asante, I would argue, provides no exception here, except that in The king was also using another means [to determine who was Asante’s equation there were no white settlers and cocoa was unmarried, but eligible for marriage]. When the woman was old absolutely key.”

enough, when she started passing the menses, you will go to a The spread of cocoa farming in Asante, and throughout the registrar who will register that this woman is old enough to forest belt of southern Ghana generally, has been well documented marry ... [Women registered] at the court ... so that theyll have by numerous scholars over the past decades.*° Several among them, a rough idea which people are not marrying but are eligible to most recently G. Austin, B. Grier and G. Mikell, have been marry. There are puberty rites, too. Because of the puberty rites particularly concerned with gender relations and the exploitation of

Jean Allman/Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante ¢ 205

unpaid labour in the initial years of cocoa’s expansion.’ Their through inheritance, gift or direct purchase, would end up as cocoa writings provide material for constructing, at least provisionally, a farmers in their own right.** Mikell, on the other hand, attributes gendered periodization of the development of the cocoa economy the ‘revolutionary high cocoa prices in the 1920s’ as stimulating in Asante — a chronology that can provide a context for under- women’s movement into cocoa farm ownership. Yet the price of standing not just the capture of unmarried women, but the general cocoa peaked quite dramatically in 1920 and then continued a slow chaos, the crisis in morality and sexuality, that appeared to engulf decline throughout that decade.” This trend suggests that a Asante in the years between the two World Wars.** Few would gendered chronology of cocoa in Asante cannot be derived from an dispute Austin’s contention that the labour necessary for the rapid examination of prices alone, but must be grounded in a very specific

spread of cocoa came ‘very largely from established, non-capitalist analysis of land, labour and cash in a given region. sources’. Initially, these sources included the ‘farmowners them- Such a chronology-for Asante would have women, by the third selves, their families, their slaves and pawns, cooperative groups of decade of this century, establishing their own cocoa farms in an neighbours and, in the case of chiefs, corvée labour provided by effort to gain more long-term economic security than was promised their subjects’.*> However, with the abolition of slavery and the from labouring on a husband’s mature farm.*! And the independent prohibition of pawning in Asante in 1908, wives’ labour increas- establishing of a cocoa farm was only one in a series of options that ingly became, for most men, absolutely essential for the establish- opened to women in areas where the cocoa economy was in place. ment of a farm. Few had the means to pay for hired labour. Of “The growth of male cocoa income’, according to Austin’s recent course, when connecting the abolition of pawning to an increase in account, ‘created economic opportunities for women in local the exploitation of wives’ labour, a distinction needs to be drawn markets, both as producers (for example, of food crops and cooked between male and female pawns, for while male pawnage decreased food) and as traders’. Certainly G. Clark’s recent work on Kumasi dramatically after 1908, wives-as-pawns were quite common well market women portrays this era as absolutely pivotal, as the period into the 1940s. Austin’s work in, fact suggests that many of the during which women moved in dramatic numbers into trading, wives whose labour was being exploited in the establishment of especially in previously male-dominated commodities.” That many cocoa farms were undoubtedly pawn-wives. ‘The pawning of women seized such opportunities in the 1920s may have stood women was relatively safe from prosecution by the colonial them in good stead, at least vis-d-vis many subordinate males, when authorities’, he argues, ‘as long as the loan could be presented as a_ the cocoa economy contracted after 1928. While far more research

marriage payment, that is as firi sika’.™ | is needed before any conclusions can be drawn, it is not improbable

Wives’ provision of labour in the creation of cocoa farms flowed that while farming incomes fell, local trading incomes continued to logically from pre-cocoa productive obligations between spouses. expand. In other words, women who had moved into food stuffs

Wives commonly grew food crops on land cleared by their trading may have been better placed to weather the economic husbands - crops which both fed the family and provided a surplus drought of the 1930s than many of the small-scale male cocoa which wives were entitled to sell. Indeed, in the first three to four farmers who had entered the cocoa economy in previous decades. years of a cocoa farm’s existence, the only returns from cocoa farms It is in this confusing period of transition in the development of were the food crops — particularly crops like plantain or cocoyam — _ Asante’s cocoa economy that we must locate the strange episodes in

which were planted to shade the young trees during their first years. which unmarried women were rounded up. It was during the After that point, however, foods crops (that is, the wife’s only period from 1920-35, with cocoa well established in many parts of material and guaranteed return on her labour investment in the Asante, that women’s role in the cash economy was both changing farm) diminished. Any labour invested by a wife after a cocoa farm and diversifying. Many wives were making the move from being became mature was directly compensated ‘only in the continued the most common form of exploitable labour during the initial obligation of her husband’, as Roberts writes, ‘to provide part ofher introduction of cocoa to exploiting, themselves, the new openings subsistence from his own earnings’.*> Obviously, for wives, the for economic autonomy and security presented by the established, investment of labour in a husband’s cocoa farm did not provide for though still expanding, cocoa economy. Their moves are evident future economic autonomy or security. For this reason, as C. Okali not just in the statistics documenting the increasing number of observed, ‘wives working on new and young farms were always women cocoa farm owners or in descriptions of the growing aware that they were not working on joint economic enterprises. markets in foodstuffs, but in the crisis in marriage so well They expected eventually to establish their own separate economic documented in customary court cases and in life histories. Indeed, concerns’.** The historical evidence suggests that this is precisely even when that economy began to contract at the end of the 1920s, what many did after the initial establishment of cocoa in an area. As at least some women were well placed to endure the lean years Austin has recently suggested, women’s ownership of cocoa farms which lay ahead because they had moved into the local markets as in Asante during the first two decades of this century was traders. Perhaps that is the resilience which Afua Fom so succinctly exceedingly rare. After that point, it became far more common and_ captured when she mused that ‘in those days, the women were able was directly correlated to the length of time cocoa had been to get money faster than the men’. And in those days of disorder, cultivated in a given area. “The longer that cocoa-growing had been women like Adwoa Addae were quite prepared to divorce a established in a given district’, he writes, ‘the higher the proportion husband who refused to set up a farm for his wife. Others turned to of women among the growing number of cocoa farmowners and customary courts to challenge matrilineal inheritance, demanding among the increasing number of owners of bearing trees’.5? In portions of a divorced or deceased husband’s cocoa farm in explaining when women moved into cocoa farming, Austin high- recognition of labour invested. Still others sought to avoid lights the gendered division of labour in Asante farming, the varying marriage altogether or, at the very least, like Afuah Buo, to insist on

labour requirements of a cocoa farm as it matures, the ‘propensity its fluidity and the mutuality of conjugal obligations.® Indeed, for most cocoa farmers to make more than one cocoa “farm”’ and Austin explains the decline in frequency and size of tiri sika — a

the increasingly favorable odds that, over time, some women, marriage payment by which the husband paid a debt of the

206 ¢ Gender & Governance

woman’s family — on the grounds that it was ‘less worth paying unmarried women to be legitimate or to have ‘customary’ precebecause the wife felt less obliged in her abusua (lineage) to see the dence. This is not to suggest that the British were unconcerned marriage through on the terms her elders had accepted on her with women’s uncontrollability, but that the ways in which that behalf’.® All of these bits and pieces evidenced a crisis in conjugal control could be articulated was circumscribed by notions of what obligations in Asante, a contest over the meanings and makings of was deemed repugnant to ‘justice, equity and good conscience’, or marriage. They were, more than anything, about the struggle for by a ‘repugnancy test’, as K. Mann and R. Roberts have termed it.”

control over women’s productive and reproductive labour in Thus, in Asante, chiefs’ orders aimed at most other forms of Asante — control at the very moment women were beginning to ‘uncontrollability’ — particularly at adulterous wives, prostitutes or negotiate their own spaces within the colonial economy.®’ That this those who spread venereal disease — were fully supported by the was a struggle articulated in a discourse of ‘bad girls’ and ‘lazy men’ colonial authorities. In short, orders could be aimed at the aberrant or of prostitution, venereal disease and moral degeneration should behaviour in which some unmarried women might engage, but not come as no surprise. Women’s economic alternatives were easily simply at the status of being not-married. represented, as Roberts has argued, ‘as the removal of constraints But perhaps far more important than the absence of British

upon their sexuality’.® support in explaining the long-term failure of the round-ups was

But how could constraints be reasserted? How could a new _ the success of many women in subverting the entire process from moral order be constructed out of the crisis? Indirect rule, | would the outset. Afua Fom, one of those captured, recalls that once argue, was key to the ordering process and must be understood in women entered the room where they were to be kept, some would light of the gender chaos of the inter-war era.” Indeed, it is immediately mention a man’s name - ‘any man’s name’. This was important, particularly in view of events like the capture of so- not necessarily out of fear or desperation, however. She recalls that called ‘spinsters’, that historians explore more carefully indirect some women arranged with men in advance of their arrest: “When rule’s specific implications for mediating gender conflict, shaping I am arrested I will mention your name, so you will come’. At gendered boundaries and reformulating gender subordination.” times, women gave their release fee to a particular man in advance. While it served the obvious ends of providing administration on the Once arrested, the woman named that man, he came, paid the fee cheap and legitimating colonialism, it also facilitated colonization of and she was set free, supposedly to marry this suitor. At other times,

the domestic realm — the world of marriage, divorce, adultery, Afua Fom reported, women even mentioned their brother’s name. childbirth and death. Asante chiefs, as the arbiters of ‘customary The brother paid the fee for his sister’s release. Once the sister law’, through executive order and through native tribunals, were married, the brother would expect to be reimbursed by the empowered by indirect rule to manipulate meanings and redefine husband. “‘He’ll get some money’, she recalled, ‘from whomever relationships. A good portion of their energy, particularly after the wants to get married to you’.”* Afua Fom’s recollections of how

formal commencement of indirect rule restored the Asante women circumvented the aim of the capture is certainly

Confederacy Council in 1935, was focused on women’s roles, corroborated by Afuah Buo’s testimony in the 1929 Asokore trial. women’s sexuality and women’s challenges to definitions of marriage Buo, it will be recalled, testified that the plaintiff had told her, prior

and divorce.”’ But even before the restoration, the British were to her arrest, that he would ‘clear [her] out’ if she were arrested. firmly committed to indirect rule in Asante and chiefs ruled daily on That many women, with the assistance of male accomplices — the meaning of marriage - an institution, as Parpart has argued - so friends, lovers or brothers — were able to circumvent chiefs’ efforts important in ‘regulating sexuality, procreation, labour, and property to regulate women’s productive and reproductive power underrights’.”? The capture of unmarried women in towns like Effiduasi scores women’s ability to shape actively the emerging colonial and Asokore, therefore, simply evidenced pre-restoration efforts by world. There is certainly no shortage of evidence on this score. Asante’s indirect rule chiefs to intervene directly in the negotiation Once the cocoa economy was established, many challenged their of marriage and non-marriage and to regulate women’s productive _ roles as unpaid productive labour and sought economic security and

and reproductive power. autonomy in the rapidly expanding cash economy as cocoa farm

And were those efforts successful? Many women remember the owners in their own right, or as foodstuff producers and traders. capture of ‘spinsters’ as solving momentarily the crisis in marriage. The chaos unleashed by this movement of women into the cash As Beatrice Nyarko recalled, ‘People became afraid. It put fear in economy, combined with a host of other factors — urbanization, them’.”?> Rosina Boama agreed, “When the chiefs did that, they western education, Christianity, and British colonial courts” — started getting married and things became calm’.”* However, in the warranted drastic action by Asante’s chiefs, those empowered to long run, many argue, like Adwoa Addae, that ‘it didn’t help us at restore order out of chaos. But their actions in this particular case — all’,”> that its impact was minimal and short-lived. Certainly, the the wholesale arrests of all unmarried women — appear to have been capture did not serve, as Grier writes of indirect rule generally, to easily circumvented by the women concerned. Granted, chiefs still ‘guarantee girls and women as unpaid sources of labour on the collected 5s for every woman captured, thus making the exercise a farms’. Indeed, nothing in Asante politics from 1900 to the present ‘money-making proposition’, as the District Officer suggested, but has managed to guarantee that exploitation, only to facilitate it in they did not succeed in securing control over women’s productive

the face of consistent and unrelenting challenge.’ and reproductive labour, or, in their own words in encouraging

But this particular form of coercion was unsuccessful in even ‘conjugal marriages among our womenfolk’. At best, considering minimally facilitating the exploitation of women’s unpaid labour the fact that many unmarried women paid their own release fee and one important reason for its failure was that the capture of through a male accomplice, the chiefs had succeeded merely in unmarried women did not get the backing of the colonial govern- implementing, and for a very short time, a kind of ‘non-marriage

ment. In contrast to their support for various changes in the tax’ by making women pay 5s for not marrying. This is not to ‘customary’ meanings of marriage, divorce and adultery during the suggest that women simply walked away from episodes like the colonial period, the British authorities did not consider the arrest of ‘spinster round-ups’ as long-term, uncontested victors in the

Jean Allman/Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante ¢ 207

struggle for control over their labour, particularly their labour as authorities in Asante and other parts of the Gold Coast, particularly as it Wives. Indeed, the spaces women negotiated for themselves in the compared to the limited powers allotted to chiefs by colonial authorities

colonial economy were narrow at best, fleeting at worst and in areas with a substantial white settler population and/or a large African required constant, ever-evolving forms of defence. But it is to argue migrant labour force. See, for example, R. Rathbone’s discussion of the

that women made historv in colonial Asante. thev were not just remarkably indirect Indirect Rule’ which characterized the State ar . *Y » ey J Council in colonial Akyern Abuakwa in Murder and Politics in Colonial victims of it. The story, of the capture of unmarried women thus Ghana (New Haven, 1993), 54-67 and J. Allman, ‘Of “spinsters”, stands as testament not simply to the power of chiefs under indirect “concubines” and “wicked women”: reflections on gender and social

rule, but to the success of at least some Asante women in change in colonial Asante’, Gender and History, 11 (1991), 179-80. Cf. negotiating the terrain of cocoa, cash and colonialism. M. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in

Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985), 25-47 and passim and his ‘Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial

Summary Northern Rhodesia’, in M. J. Hay and M. Wright (eds), African Women Between 1929 and 1932 in a number of villages and towns ; and the Law: Historical Perspectives (Boston, 1982), 53-67. throughout rural Asante. chiefs were ordering the arrest of all To date, I have found written evidence of arrests occurring in the Asante

Us ? 3 , towns of Adansi, Asokore, Bekwai, Edweso, Effiduasi and Mansu

women who were over the age of fifteen and not married. A Nkwanta.

woman was detained until she spoke the name of aman whom she; J, Allman, interview with Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 30 June would agree to marry and the man in question paid a release fee. If 1993. (Hereafter interviews are cited by name, town and date only.) the man refused, he too was imprisoned or fined up to C5. If he Most of the interviews referenced below were conducted by the author agreed, he paid a small marriage fee to the woman’s parents and one with the very able assistance of N. O. Agyeman-Duah. Ivor Agyemanbottle of gin. Based on the correspondence of colonial officials, Duah and Selina Opoku-Agyeman assisted with some of the 1993 inter-

customary court records and the life histories and reminiscences of views. At present, all transcripts of interviews are in the author's

. . . . . ty, atter compietion of the broader project.

h he were spi ht.among this article explorescaught, possession. They be depositedUniversity. in the Melville Herskovits women who the spinsters this art expwill Northwestern af i fJ.the broad Library, gender and social change in colonial Asante by dissecting and 4 Christaller defines osigyani (pl. asigyafo), as ‘an unmarried person, 1.e. a

contextualizing the round-up of unmarried women, It seeks to man or woman who has either not been married at all, or a man who understand this unusual episode in direct state intervention into the has sent away his wite, Or a woman who has forsaken her husband, in negotiating of marriage and nonmarriage as part of the general chaos general one who is not in the state of regular marriage’. See J. G. in gender relations that shook Asante in the years between the two Christaller, Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Basel,

World Wars. This chaos, often articulated in the language of moral 1933), 456. . . .

crisis was, more than anything, about shifting power relationships. It > See NAGK/ARA 1907: Assistant Chief Commussioner, Ashanti to was chaos engendered by cash and cocoa, by trade and transforma- Chief Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Kumasi, 19 July 1932; District Comtion. From 1921 to 1935, with cocoa well-established in many parts missioner, Bekwai to Assistant Chief Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. of Asante, women $ roles in the cash economy were changing and Bekwai, 23 July 1932; Mansu Nkwantahene to District Commissioner,

, - ay P Bekwai, 23 July 1932; Bekwaihene to District Officer, Bekwai, dd.

diversifying. Many wives were making the move from being the Bekwai, dd. Mansu Nkwanta, 26 July 1932; Chief Commissioner to most common form of exploitable labour during the initial Assistant Chief Commissioner, dd. 18 July 1932. The fees involved in introduction of cocoa to themselves exploiting new openings for these arrests, though not exorbitant, were not inconsequential. As economic autonomy. That women were beginning to negotiate Rathbone indicates for the 1930s, a blacksmith earned roughly 3s per their own spaces within the colonial economy precipitated a day, while a day-labourer earned about 1s 6d. One yam could cost as profound crisis in conjugal obligations in Asante — a crisis requiring much as 1s and six plantains about 1d. Rathbone, Murder, 19, n. 50 and

: ; ; N. A. Cox-George, Studies up in Finance and Development: The Gold Coast drastic measures. rounding unmarried women one of ; ae 5The a (Ghana) Experience,of1914-1950 (London, 1973),was 79. For discussions of

several weapons used by Asante s chiefs in the struggle to reassert the variety of marriage rites in Asante during the colonial period, see R.

control over women’s productive and reproductive labour. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford, 1929), 22-31 and

Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford, 1927), 76-86. See, also, M. Fortes,

Notes ‘Kinship and marriage among the Ashanti’, in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown | and D. Forde (eds), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London, * As part of a broader study of gender and social change in Asante, 1950), 278-83. research for this paper was supported by the National Endowment for °® Meyer Fortes Papers, “Marriage prestations’, [no date], Centre for the Humanities, the Fulbright-Hays Research Program, the Social African Studies, Cambridge University. Unfortunately, Fortes gave no Science Research Council, the Institute of African Studies, University indication of the sources upon which his description is based. This of Ghana and the University of Missouri Research Council. I wish to makes it particularly difficult, for example, to ascertain how much the gratefully acknowledge this support and the generous assistance of the fees involved in ‘captured spinster’ marriages differed from those paid in

staffs of the National Archives of Ghana, Manhyia Record Office and other circumstances. Rattray wrote in the 1920s that the tiri aseda the Centre for African Studies at Cambridge. An earlier version of this (money and wine payments) marking the marriage of commoners was

article was presented at the 1993 meeting of the African Studies usually 10s, with an additional 6d for rum or wine. Fortes, presumably Association in Boston. I wish to thank Susan Porter Benson, Robin with reference to the 1940s, remarked that firi nsa (as aseda was Law, Takyiwaa Manuh, Tom McCaskie, Richard Rathbone, David increasingly termed) “was said to have been as much as £3 at one time, Roediger and the members of the Comparative Women’s History but in most of the descriptions spirits and a few shillings are referred to’. Workshop at the University of Minnesota for their comments and Fortes, ‘Marriage prestations’, and Rattray, Religion, 81.

suggestions for revision. 7 D. D. Vellenga, ‘Who is a wife?’ in Christine Oppong (ed.), Female and

' National Archives of Ghana, Kumasi [NAGK], Ashanti Regional Male in West Africa (London, 1983), 150. Vellenga’s reference was a subAdministration Files [ARA]/1286: Report on Native Affairs: Mampong file in the ‘Ghanaian archives’ entitled, ‘Forced marriage of African girls,

District for Two Quarters ending the 31 March 1933. It is worth prevention of, 12 June 1939’ and a letter to the editor, Gold Coast underscoring here the wide-ranging autonomy enjoyed by native Independent, 15 Jan. 1930. Unfortunately, Vellenga did not name the

208 ¢ Gender & Governance

| archive in which the sub-file was located and I have not come across it that during this same period numerous Asante chiefs faced destoolment

in the national archive collections in Accra or in Kumasi. charges, often for impotence or sterility. Included among them was the

® P. A. Roberts, “The State and the regulation of marriage: Sefwi Wiawso chief responsible for the rounding up of unmarried women in Effiduase, (Ghana), 1900-40’, in H. Afshar (ed.), Women, State, and Ideology: Kwame Owusu. See Manhyia Record Office: ‘Mampong native affairs’, Studies from Africa and Asia (Binghamton, 1987), 61. Roberts’ pioneering Queen Mother, Kwami Asreh and Loyal Elders to DC Mampong, dd.

work on gender, colonialism and indirect rule in Sefwi Wiawso has 15 May 1931. (I am grateful to T. C. McCaskie for this reference.) It is,

shaped the discussion which follows here in profound ways. of course, exceedingly difficult to ascertain whether there was any direct ? Tbid. connection between the destoolment charges and the actions taken '© Professor Kofi Glover, University of South Florida, recently informed against unmarried women in the town. me of a 1950s incident in Nyageo, Volta Region, which bears striking 7! Fortes Papers, Kwaku Afrarn v. Afuah Buo, Native Tribunal of similarities to the cases cited here. Unfortunately, I have no further Asokore, 13 Aug. 1929, mimeo.

information on this episode. 2 Vellenga, ‘Who is a wife?’, 145. M. Lovett has discussed the fluidity of

41 A comprehensive listing of pre-colonial sources is obviously not possible marriage arrangements in the urban townships of the Copperbelt during here. A representative sample for the nineteenth century might include: the same period, noting how these arrangements ‘posed an especially K. Arhin, “Rank and wealth among the Akan’, Africa, Lim (1983), 2-22; powerful threat to the authority of the elders and to the maintenance of Lewin, Asante Before the British (Lawrence, KS, 1978); T. C. McCaskie, rural social relations. They also increased women’s autonomy’. See, M. ‘Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history’, Africa, Lin (1983), Lovett, “Gender relations, class formation and the colonial state’, in J. 23-43; ‘Ahyiamu — “A place of meeting”: an essay on process and event Parpart and K. Staudt (eds.), Women and the State in Africa (Boulder,

in the history of the Asante State’, J. Afr. Hist., xxv (1984), 169-88; 1989), 31. For a fascinating discussion of the dynamics of marriage in State and Society in Precolonial Asante (Cambridge, 1995); E. Schildkrout Asante today, see Gracia Clark, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and (ed.), The Golden Stool: Studies of the Asante Center and Periphery, Vol. LXV Accumulation by West African Market Women (Chicago, 11994), ch. 9, but

of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural esp. 344-8. | |

History (New York, 1987); I. Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The * 'T. C. McCaskie set the parameters of the discussion for the nineteenth

Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge, 1975); Forests of century in his ‘State and society, marriage and adultery: some Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens, OH, 1993). considerations towards a social history of pre-colonial Asante’, J. Afr. 2 'T. C. McCaskie, ‘Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history, II: —-Hist., xx (1981), 477-94. Recently, Clark’s Onions and T. E. Kyei’s

the twentieth century’, Africa, LvI (1986), 2 and n. 14. Marriage and Divorce Among the Asante: A Study Undertaken in the Course of 3 T am not alone in associating ‘chaos’ with ‘cocoa’. G. Mikell has used the ‘Ashanti Social Survey (1945)’ (Cambridge, 1992) have made ‘chaos’ to describe the broader economic, political and social turmoil important contributions to our understanding of marriage in colonial associated with the spread of cocoa production throughout Ghana in her and in present-day Asante. Finally, many of the specific questions raised book, Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana (New York, 1989). That Mikell and I by this paper promise to be addressed in V. Tashjian, ‘It’s mine and it’s came to use the term independently may underscore its appropriateness ours are not the same thing: a history of marriage in rural Asante, for highlighting the general disorder of this era. (It may also simply 1900-1957’ (Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1995). reflect a shared fondness for alliteration.) Certainly, my use of ‘chaos’ 4 Rattray, Ashanti Law, 26 and Fortes, ‘Kinship’, 280. The wealth of cases here is more circumscribed than Mikell’s, for it is meant to capture the heard by Asante’s Native Tribunals and Courts provide ample material specific disorder in gender relations that occurred in Asante as a result of for probing changing views of marriage during this period. Many of

the expanding cash economy. Finally, it is worth noting here the these records are held at the Manhyia Record Office, Kumasi. See, for fascinating body of literature on ‘chaos’ and history which seeks to apply example, Asantehene’s Appam Court D, Civil Record Book 3, Kwaku

the mathematical theory of chaos (‘the science of physical systems Boaki v. Yaa Mansah, 23 Dec. 1935, 370; Gyasehene’s Native Tribunal, governed by nonlinear dynamical laws’) to historical narrative. See, for Civil Record Book 1, Yaw Buoh v. Atta Ya, 12 Mar. 1928, 124 and example, G. Reisch, ‘Chaos, history, and narrative’, History and Theory, Asantehene’s Native Court B, Civil Record Book 20, Ama Manu v. Kwasi

Xxx (1991), 1-20; D. N. McCloskey, “History, differential equations, Buo, 25 Sept. 1940, 180, See, also, J. Allman, ‘Adultery and the State in and the problem of narration’, History and Theory, Xxx (1991), 21-36; Asante: reflections on gender, class and power from 1800 to 1950’, in J. ‘Forum: chaos theory and history revisited’, History and Theory, XXXIV O. Hunwick and N. Lawler (eds), The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: (1995), 3-89. This paper makes no pretence of contributing to the Papers on History and Society (Evanston, 1997).

development of this theoretical model, though the literature has con- * Over the past three years, I have been collecting life histories and vinced me of the appropriateness of using ‘chaos’ to describe this reminiscences from older Asante women as part of a broader project on

particular moment in Asante’s gendered past. gender and social change in the colonial period. These efforts have

'4 K/ARA 1907: Chief Commissioner, Ashanti to Assistant Chief focused on the Ashanti Newtown district of Kumasi, on sub-urban Tafo

Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Kumasi, 18 July 1932. and on the rural towns of Effiduasi and Asokore. While none of the

'5 NAGK/ARA 1907: District Commissioner, Bekwai to Assistant Chief women with whom I spoke in Kumasi and Tafo recalled the capture of

Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Bekwai, 23 July 1932. unmarried women, many in Effiduasi and Asokore could remember the

‘6 The Mansu Nkwantahene reported that ‘the object of beaten gong- episode in some detail. Of those, nearly all were willing to talk about it

gong is to prevent venereal diseases and etc. prevalent within the generally or as something that happened to certain other women. In Division’. NAGK/ARA 1907: Mansu Nkwantahene to District Com- some cases, however, it was fairly obvious that the reminiscences were

missioner, Bekwai, dd. Mansu Nkwanta, 26 July 1932. those of someone who had been captured, even though the story was

17 While the chiefs spoke of a new tendency for women not to marry, it is told in the third person. Because of the stigma attached to being from virtually impossible to ascertain, via quantitative data, whether it was ‘among those caught’, however, I did not ask women directly whether

actually the case that women were not marrying at rates far greater than they had been arrested or not. Only Eponuahemaa Afua Fom before. Unfortunately, sources simply are not available to judge whether volunteered that information and she did so nearly a year after our first

the chiefs’ fears were well grounded or simply articulated a general discussions. concern over women’s ‘uncontrollability’ during this period. 76 Akosua Atta (a.k.a. Sarah Obeng), Asokore, 26 Aug. 1992. '8 NAGK/ARA 1907: Bekwaihene to District Officer, Bekwai, dd. ”? Mary Oduro, Effiduasi, 25 Aug. 1992 and Rosina Boama, Effiduasi, 24

Bekwai, 23 July, 132. Aug. 1992. Rosina Boama, Effiduasi, 24 Aug. 1992. Again, we are

19 [bid. hampered by the dearth of demographic information for this period. 20 NAGK/ARA 1907: District Commissioner, Bekwai to Assistant Chief Certainly, no such imbalance appears in the 1948 Census, and the Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Bekwai, 23 July 1932. It is worth noting Census for 1921 and for 1931, although admittedly unreliable, in fact

Jean Allman/Gender Chaos & Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante ¢ 209

suggest that the male population in Asante was growing faster than the “8 M. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford,

female population during this period as a result of immigration from the 1991), 144. Jeater’s recent work on Southern Rhodesia provides one of Northern Territories. See Gold Coast, Census of Population, 1948 (Accra, the more thorough explorations of ‘the problem with women’. See 1948). For an excellent overview of population trends and census data in Jeater, Marriage, esp. 119-40. Ghana from the mid-nineteenth century to the post-independence era, “ An earlier version of the cocoa discussion that follows appears in J. see E. V. T. Engman, Population of Ghana, 1850-1960 (Accra, 1986), Allman, ‘Making mothers: missionaries, medical officers and women’s esp. 92 and 100—5 for data on sex ratios. It is far more likely that work in colonial Asante, 1924-1945’, History Workshop Journal, XXXVI Boama’s assertion of men outnumbering women reflected the fact that (1994), 27-9. young men were delaying marriage longer than they had before. Thatis, °° Among the more easily accessible sources are: G. Austin, “The

women outnumbered men in terms of availability, if not in statistical emergence of capitalist relations in south Asante cocoa-farming, c.

terms. Why this may have been the case is open to speculation. 1916-33’, J. Afr. Hist., xxx (1987), 259-79; J. Dunn and A. F.

Although far more local research is required before any conclusions can Robertson, Dependence and Opportunity: Political Change in Ahafo be drawn, it is not improbable that, during the late 1920s and early (Cambridge, 1973); Grier, ‘Pawns’, 304-28; P. Hill, The Migrant Cocoa1930s, young men were finding it far more difficult than their fathers or Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge, 1963); C. Okali, ‘Kinship and

uncles to enter successfully the colonial cash economy. The cocoa farming in Ghana’, in Oppong (ed.), Female and Male, 169-78;

Bekwaihene’s assertion that men could not afford the marriage pay- Mikell, Cocoa; and D. D. Vellenga, ‘Matriliny, patriliny and class ments certainly substantiates such an hypothesis, as does Afua Fom’s formation among women cocoa farmers in two rural areas of Ghana’, in recollection that ‘in those days, the women were able to get money C. Robertson and I. Berger (eds), Women and Class in Africa (New York, faster than the men’. Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 30 June 1993. 1986), 62-77. Beatrice Nyarko, Effiduasi, 24 Aug. 1992; Jean Asare, Effiduasi, 30 June °°! Each of these authors draws from a very different research base. While

1993. Mikell’s book concerns the impact of cocoa on Ghana generally, it

%° “Yaa Dufie, Effiduasi, 25 Aug. 1992. draws very heavily from fieldwork in the Sunyani District in the early 3! Beatrice Nyarko, Effiduasi, 24 Aug. 1992. 1970s. Grier’s recent analysis of gender, cocoa and colonialism in Ghana

2 Akosua So, Effiduasi, 28 Aug. 1992. is based on existing secondary literature and on several published

33 Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 1 Sept. 1992. government reports from throughout the colony. While it provides a

4 It is difficult to retrieve the numbers involved in these arrests. Most of new reading of some of this literature, its conclusions largely echo the women whose reminiscences I have recorded talked of ‘many’ or Mikell’s. Austin’s work, by contrast, is located in Asante specifically, ‘not many’. The written sources provide no statistics. Afua Fom recalled with much of the fieldwork drawing on the experiences of cocoa

that there were “maybe sixty ... But there may be more than that farmers in the Amansie (Bekwai) District of Asante. In the discussion because they were going to the farms. The sixty is what I saw. But we which follows, I draw most heavily from Austin’s contributions to our

were more than sixty because they went far’. I am accepting Fom’s understanding because of their grounding in the specific dynamics of figure, for the time being, because she is the only woman I have cocoa farming in Asante and because of the careful attention paid to encountered who has identified herself as among those captured. organization of labour and to the subtle changes in that organization

Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 30 June 1993. over time.

> Adwoa Addae, Effiduasi, 28 Aug. 1992. °° Implicit in Roberts’ discussion of cocoa in Sefwi Wiawso is such a 6 Ibid. 30 June 1993. Adwoa subsequently established her own farm on ‘gendered chronology’, though it differs in important respects from the land given to her bv her grandfather and reported, ‘right now I am chronology proposed here for Asante. See Roberts, ‘State’, 53-5.

enjoying from the fruits of that cocoa farm’. > Austin, “Cocoa-farming’, 260-2 and Grier, ‘Pawns’, 34. Mikell, Cocoa,

7 Ibid. 107. See, also, G. Austin, ‘Human pawning in Asante, 1800~—1950: 38 Ibid. market and coercion, gender and cocoa’, in T. Falola and P. E. Lovejoy *° Rattray, Ashanti Law, 25-6. (eds.), Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder,

© Rattray, Religion, 81-2. 1994), 119-60.

! Certainly, this incident must be understood in the light of broader ** Austin’s earlier work is concerned with tying the abolition of slavery and contest within Asante over the meaning of marriage and the reciprocity pawnage to the initial use of hired labour on Asante cocoa farms, but not

of conjugal obligations. See n. 24 above. with changes in the gender division of labour. His recent discussions

* Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 30 June 1993. I have found no demonstrate quite convincingly that pawnage was not simply abolished,

evidence of this order. ] but declined in uneven, ambiguous and very gendered ways that 3**written Ibid. profoundly impacted upon conjugal relationships. See his “CocoaSee National Archive of Ghana, Accra: ADM.52/5/3, Mampong District farming’, 264-5 and ‘Human pawning’, 137-43.

Record Book, 1931-1946. 55 “Roberts, ‘State’, 54. 6 Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 30 June 1993. °° Okali, ‘Kinship’, 170. | “© Obviously, terms like ‘prostitute’ must be handled quite carefully. When %* Austin, ‘Human pawning’, 141-2. Women’s entry into cocoa farming colonial and chiefly concerns over growing numbers of ‘prostitutes’ — so occurred later and in important ways did not parallel men’s entry. Most pervasive in the written documentation — are not situated in a precise significantly, women’s plots were generally smaller than men’s, their size social/historical juncture or are not weighed against the testimony of being limited, as Grier recently argued, ‘by the labour [a woman] ...

women and/or subordinate men, there is a very real danger of mis- could spare, by the willingness of her kin members to help her out, and interpreting women’s agency for women’s victimization. For example, by her ability to acquire a pawn or hire a laborer’. Grier, ‘Pawns’, 322. see B. Grier, ‘Pawns, porters and petty traders: women in the transition °* Austin, ‘Human pawning’, 141-2. to cash crop agriculture in colonial Ghana’, Signs, xvi (1992), 322.D. °° Mikell, Cocoa, 102. Jeater’s recent study, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of | © See Cox-George, Finance, 66-8. Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894-1930 (Oxford, 1993) under- _—*!_ Austin notes the special case of pawn-wives who had to share some of

scores the importance of disentangling women’s economic agency and their proceeds with their ‘creditor-husbands’ and thus had less incentive independence from moral discourses regarding promiscuity and perver- to acquire farms in their own right as a means of security and autonomy.

sion. See Austin, ‘Human pawning’, 142.

* N. Hunt, ‘Noise over camouflaged polygamy, colonial morality © Austin, ‘Human pawning’, 142-3; Clark, Onions, esp. 316-18. taxation, and a woman-naming crisis in Belgian Africa’, J. Afr. Hist., °° Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 1 Sept. 1992.

Xxx (1991), 471. ** Countless numbers of such cases can be found in the record books

210 ¢ Gender & Governance , stored at Manhyia Record Office. See, particularly, the records of the see J. N. Matson, A Digest of the Minutes of the Ashanti Confederacy Council Kumasihene’s Native Tribunal, 1926-35, the Asantehene’s Divisional from 1935-1949 Inclusive and a Revised Edition of Warrington’s Notes on Native Court B, 1935-60 and the Kumasi Divisional (‘Clan’) Courts, Ashanti Custom (Cape Coast: Prospect Printing, c. 1951), 26-48.

1928-45 (consisting of Kyidom, Kronti, Gyasi, Ankobia, Oyoko, 7” Parpart, ‘“Your mother?”’, 270.

Benkum, Akwamu and Adonten). 3 Beatrice Nyarko, Effiduasi, 24 Aug. 1992.

6 Roberts noted a similar pattern in Sefwi Wiawso. See her ‘State’, 54—5. ™ Rosina Boama, Effiduasi, 24 Aug. 1992. ‘6 Austin, ‘Human pawning’, 143. Gnier suggests that the payment of tii ” Adwoa Addae, Effiduasi, 28 Aug. 1992. sika was a colonial invention. Grier, ‘Pawns’, 327-8. Austin counters 7” Grier, ‘Pawns’, 323-8. While few would disagree with her notion that that interpretation in ‘Human pawning’, 125-6 and 149, n. 44, rightly © indirect rule reinforced the legal and coercive power of chiefs and male pointing out that nothing in Fortes’ unpublished papers suggests that tiri elders over their historic dependents’, most would insist that the ‘whys

sika was of recent origin. Much of Fortes’ information on marriage for and hows’ of that broad observation cannot be addressed by simply the ‘Ashanti Social Survey’ of the mid 1940s was gathered by T. E. Kyei casting indirect rule as the obvious, invented and uncontested response

and Kyei’s work certainly confirms Austin’s interpretation. See T. E. of a colonial government intent on guaranteeing ‘girls and women as

Kyei, Marriage. unpaid sources of labor’. One of the first casualties of such an equation is

67 Asante women were not unique in this regard. As Lovett has written on women’s historical agency in the making of the colonial world. the Copperbelt, “Women seized new avenues of power and agency, such 7” Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, “Law in colonial Africa’, in their as the creation of colonial courts, and also actively constructed other (eds), Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 1991), 13-14 and 21. opportunities, such as prostitution and fluid urban marital arrangements, 7 Eponuahemaa Afua Fom, Effiduasi, 30 June 1993.

in order to accumulate surplus, gain autonomy, and exercise control ” For an important discussion of the ways in which women to the south over their own labor power, fertility and sexuality’. Lovett, ‘Gender of Asante used the British justice system during this period, see R.

relations’, 24. Gocking, ‘British justice and the Native Tribunals of the southern Gold

6 Roberts, ‘State’, 49. See, also, Allman, ‘“Spinsters”’, 176-89. Percep- Coast Colony’, J. Afr. Hist., XxxIv (1993), 93-113, but esp. 108-10. tions of a ‘moral crisis’ were not unique to Asante. Women’s economic

or social autonomy was often interpreted as sexual uncontrollability.

See, for example, Hunt, “‘Camouflaged polygamy’, 471-94 and | ‘Domesticity and colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social,

1946-1960’, in J. O’Barr, D. Pope and M. Wyer (eds), Ties That Bind

149-77, esp. 155-6; C. Summers, ‘Intimate colonialism: the imperial —@—-—————TTSTOTT "WH roduction of reproduction in Uganda, 1907-1925’, Signs, xvi (1991),

587-807: E. Schmidt. Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the S U S A N G E | G E R

History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Portsmouth, N 992), esp. 98-106 and ° ° . most recently Jeater, Marriage, esp. 119-69. Ta Nn 2d Nyt ka N N atl On ql ISM aS

6 JT discuss the role of missionaries and medical officers in this ordering , , rocess in ‘Making mothers’. Jeater argues that the very concept of / ‘moral realm’ is a

that several party members had recently been seen ‘wearing The TANU central leadership did not create the various

distinctive dress signifying association with TANU’ and referring performances and significations of nationalist political culture put to ‘particularly ... to the green dresses worn by lady members at the the service of party mobilization and membership; yet performance Kigoma Railway Station on the 15th November’. Reminding the and signification produced nationalism in Tanzania as surely as TANU district Chairman of the order prohibiting uniforms, he Nyerere’s speeches. Moreover TANU, and later, TANU’s successor, went on to point out lamely that the station catered to the general Chama Cha Mapunduzi (CCM) leaders understood its importance,

public and that and Nyerere came to rely on its reproduction throughout his career. the assembly of large crowds interferes with the right of free Like many popular expressions of nationalism, performance and

. thepublic wearing of also identical dressobstruction to signify membership and support access of; the and causes to the traffic. ; were appropriated by Nyerere and post-independence TANU : farewell Would you please in future confine your reception : government bureaucracy and put to theor service of the one-party committees; .to between 20 or 30 Should so ; : a state. One of Nyerere’s firstpersons. acts as president wasyou to establish desire, a larger demonstration of or affection or loyalty can easily be Min; ; ; the . inistry of National Culture and Youth; but .._ instead of noting arranged at some pre-arranged more suitable venue on ; : leat this of significance of popular nationalist culture to his own success and application to this . ; that of TANU, took the progressive intellectuals’ I believe it OLLICe. to be correct that a Nyerere similar point was recently putposition: a5;

; colonialism had destroyed Tanganyika’s cultural forms and practices.

mittee and they accepted it.°’ P y 8 ; , , ; ; ; Of all the crimes of colonialism there is nothing worse than the This particularly polite assistant superintendent of police was 4. to your president and other Members of your Central Com- yy. oy nressed it this wav in his inaucural address:

Lo ee . ; attempt to make us believe we had no indigenous culture of our Government Notice No. 20 Of 11 January 1957 and pointing out price.

quite right: the Commission of Police, Dar es Salaam, had written own. or that what we did have was worthless — something of to the TANU President on 19 March 1958, drawing his attention to which we should be ashamed. instead of a source of pride.” 8

that the sashes bearing reference to TANUYL worn by youth TANU women, and many men and women in the countryside, league stewards at a TANU meeting held at the airport on Sunday, would have been surprised to learn that colonialism had alienated 16 February 1958, could well be ‘interpreted as a breach of that them from their cultural practices. Yet this view was understandable

, : Susan Geiger/Tanganyikan Nationalism as ‘Women’s Work’ ¢ 215 coming from a westernand mission-educated man. Nyerere clearly documentation, still another that argues, explains or criticizes as it had his fellow educated Tanganyikans in mind when in the same unfolds the context of other narratives’.” My focus, in contrast, is

address, he asked: on the ‘culture of politics’ constituted by TANU women’s shared

political actions and activities. Without that any one How many of us were taught the songs of ;the Wanyamwezi Ee. hh: - insisting aeof all/other : ; TANU activist’s life historyoris ee ‘representative’ women

of Many of us have that learnt to offering dance the ‘rumba’, the - ae ; ;of ; ;waltz’ ;the < ;Wahehe? activists, I maintain the narratives and the ‘foxtrot’. But how many ofinuscollective can dance, or have ; ; ; biography of many is constituted.

some, a

even heard the Gombe Sugu, the Mangala, the Konge, . ; ; 4:women ; ; nI amof, not arguing that self-identified Swahili or those Muslim Nyang’umumi, Kiduo or Lele Mama? ... [and how often do : ; ; ; ; wereus singularly responsible for Tanganyikan nationalism western dances] really give the sort of thrill we getconsciousness’; from Ceaor;that >, . they alone expressed something called ‘nationalist dancing the mganda or the gombe sugu — even though the music : ; .; ; but I am arguing that greater attention to their narrative presence, may be no more than the shaking of pebbles in a tin? It is hard d vo; hall d di € the relat; for any man to get much real excitement from dances and music actions anc voices challenges Our uncerstancing OF tne relaive

any ane mnare importance western and of ;a ‘few good :men which notof1n hisnationalist ownideology blood. ; oo:

in the construction of nationalism in Tanganyika, and requires us to

Had the government not soon become preoccupied with question the master narrative that traces Tanganyikan nationalist attempts to promote and control the integration of ‘ethnic cultures’ history from the acts of ‘proto-nationalist’ men through TANU

into a ‘national culture’, Nyerere might have acknowledged that modernizers to the ideological importance of Nyerere to he owed his own awareness of Gombe Sugu and Lelemama and independence.*° Meganda to TANU women. As it was, he would continue to express his gratitude to TANU stalwarts for this support throughout his Summary

career, but without clearly and forcefully articulating their place in . a . .

the construction of nationalism. Although nationalism in Tanzania, as elsewhere in Africa, has been Forty years have passed since the women I spoke with first came criticized for its shortcomings, and a ‘Dar es Salaam School’ has together to listen, discuss TANU, march, organize and gather again been charged with succumbing to its ideological biases, few with dedicated regularity. Nevertheless, these activists of the 1950s historians have revisited or questioned Tanzania’s dominant clearly constituted in the 1980s, during the time I was recording nationalist narrative — a narrative created over 25 years ago. their life history narratives, what Halbwachs has called ‘affective Biographies written in aid of this narrative depict nationalism in community’,*° that is, a group that aids each other’s memories the former Trust Territory of Tanganyika as primarily the work of a because its members remain in harmony with each other. few good men, including ‘proto-nationalists’ whose anti-colonial

Th 5 h po} ¢ h actions set the stage and provided historical continuity for the later

b ete hee © “i rome of contact so i at any remem- western -oriented ideological work of nationalist modernizers. feands they Thel ve CAT DE Toft cues on a cost from The life history narratives of women who became activists in the

fore | ote [The] ne sotions. Shay lo , ast events] must start from Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in the 1950s disrupt

Snake av cee. " are ia rn ca eee “e “he this view of progressive stages toward an emerging nationalist

present ... because all have been and sul are members OF the consciousness which reflected and borrowed heavily from western

same group. forms and ideals. They suggest that Tanganyikan nationalism was

Time after time, women’s narratives included a litany of relational also and significantly the work of thousands of women, whose lives ties and networks formed through dance, rotating credit and other and associations reflected trans-tribal ties and affiliations, and whose

women’s groups, and of the names of remembered women work for TANU served to both construct and perform what including the names of those deceased. Shared information and nationalism came to signify for many Tanzanian women and men, conceptions — what Halbwachs might call collective memory — Women activists did not simply respond to TANU's nationalist characterized the activists’ recollections of their nationalist activities thetoric; they shaped, informed and spread a nationalist conscious-

as expressed and reconstituted in their life histories. From these, itis ess for which TANU was the vehicle. . therefore possible to employ a collective biographical narrative, or __ Neither “extraordinary individuals (the usual subjects of male construct a ‘collective biography’ of the larger whole — including biography) nor representative of ordinary people (often the the 5,000 women who, by October 1955, had become card- subjects of life histories), TANU women activists’ lives reveal the carrying TANU members. In their constructions of the present, as Severe limitations of the dichotomous characterizations of tradiwell as in their reconstructions of their political involvement of the tional biographical forms. Together, their narratives constitute a 1950s, women offered social narratives about a ‘large cultural collective biographical narrative of great significance for our undersystem’ in which ‘ordinary’ (illiterate, frequently self-identified as standing of nationalism and nationalist movement in the former

Swahili, Muslim) women played a critical role. Tanganyika. The term ‘collective biography’ shares with Richard Werbner’s

term ‘social biography’ a desire to place personal narratives ‘at the Notes .

very centre of the description, interpretation and analysis’ and to Th ce pay “close attention not only to the said but also the suppressed and This article began as a paper prepared for the Workshop on Biography the implicit, the taken for granted yet unsaid’.** Because his interest in Eastern African Historical Writing at Oxford University in July 1995,

‘s in ‘the 5 nifican f ch ‘na the i f b £ and was subsequently presented to a Politics Department seminar at the

Afri f Fi mead aa ore ted hi e vial. bi ah ers Of an Flinders University in Adelaide, and History Department seminar at the rican famuly , Werbner intends his ‘social biography’ to be a University of Western Australia in Perth later the same month. narrative of different kinds of narratives: one that documents moral ‘1D. Denoon and A. A. Kuper, ‘Nationalist historians in search of a sentiment and passion; another that examines or analyzes such nation: the “ New Historiography” in Dar es Salaam’, Afr. Affairs, LIX

216 © Gender & Governance

(1970), 329-49. '8 Tbid. 486.

2 J. N. Kimambo, Three Decades of Production of Historical Knowledge at Dar '° Margaret R. Somers, ‘Narrativity, narrative identity, and social action:

es Salaam (Dar es Salaam, 1994). rethinking English working-class formation’, Social Science History, XV1

> An exception to this generalization is Steven Feierman’s thoughtful (1992), 591-629.

history of the changing discursive and practical relationships among and * Pearl T. Robinson, ‘Democratization: understanding the relationship between peasant intellectuals and chiefs of Shambaai, colonial adminis- between regime change and the culture of politics’, Afr. Studies Rev.,

trators and the leadership of the Tanganyika National African Union: XxXxvil 0994), 40. |

Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in 7! An exception to this generalization occurred in Bagamoyo in 1936, Tanzania (Madison, 1990). More recently, Thaddeus Sunseri has when antagonism between two opposing women’s dance groups, one challenged the ‘nationalist’ interpretation of the Maji Maji Rebellion of associated with Arabs and the other with Shomvi-Shirazi and African 1905, which seeks and finds the origins of 1950s nationalism in this populations in the town became ‘so intense that the district officer uprising in what was then German East Africa: Thaddeus Sunseri, restricted their public activities’. See August H. Nimtz, Islam and Politics ‘Gender struggles, famine and the Majimaji war in Uzaramo’ (Paper in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania (Minneapolis, 1980), 98. Sheryl presented to the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Orlando, McCurdy also provides evidence of the role of women’s dance groups in

Nov. 1995). the 1932 conflict in Ujiji and administrative ignorance of the same in

* Tanganyika receives mention on five pages, Julius Nyerere on four ‘Ngomas, court disputes, and the “war” of 1932: colonial ignorance of

pages, in Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of Ujij1 women’s social roles in urban organizations’ (Paper presented at the Nation-State (New York, 1992). In his review of the book, Pieter the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Nov. 1994). Boele van Hensbroek, calls it Davidson’s magnum opus. See Pieter Boele ™~ Early male dance societies were equally open. See Jonathon Glassman, van Hensbroek, ‘Cursing the nation-state’, Transition, Lx1 (1993), Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili

114-32. Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth NH, 1995), 76.

> For a critique of the use of the prophet Kinjikitile as a nationalist hero, §™ For details on Dar es Salaam, see Susan Geiger, ‘Women in nationalist and for the search for male heroes more generally see Sunseri, ‘Gender struggle: TANU activists in Dar es Salaam’, Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies, Xx

struggles’, 3-8. | (1987), 1-26.

6 John Iliffe (ed.), Modern Tanzanians (Nairobi, 1973). 4 Ibid. 14—15.

’ Mohamed Said, ‘Founder of a political movement: Abdulwahid K. * Interview with Bibi Titi Mohamed, Temeke, Sept. 1984. Sykes (1964-1968)’, Africa Events (Sept. 1988); and an unpublished 7% Henry Bienen, Tanzania, Party Transformation and Economic Development

manuscript, “Ally K. Sykes Remembers’. (Princeton, 1970), 43.

8 For a survey of this work see Susan Geiger, “Women and African 7’ Amory, ‘Waswahili ni nani?’, 22. nationalism’, Journal of Women’s History, 1 (1990), 227-44. 8 Interview with Tatu Mzee, Kinondoni, Oct. 1984, and many others. ° In Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-Stories From East/Central Africa * Interview with Tatu Mzee, Kinondoni, Oct. 1984. (New York, 1993), Marcia Wright presents several previously published °° Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Unity/Uhuru Na Umoja (Dar es Salaam,

life history studies along with two new essays. 1967); Hansard, 10 Dec. 1962, ‘President’s inaugural address’, 180.

'0 For a comprehensive review of scholarship on Yoruba women, which ~* Interviews with Halima Selengia Kinabo, Mwamvita Salim, Zainabu includes the studies of Nigerian women involved in nationalist politics, Hatibu, Elizabeth Gupta, Kanasia Mtenga, Moshi, Oct. 1988; Pili Juma, see LaRay Denzer, ‘Yoruba women: a historiographical study’, Int. J. Mwajuma Msafiri, Agnes Sahani, Mwanza, Nov. 1988.

Afr. Hist. Studies, xxvut (1994), 1-39. 32 Mwamvita Salim’s narrative, Mwanza, Oct. 1988.

4 There is a short pamphlet in Swahili of popular biographical sketches of * R.W. Smith, D.C., Kigoma, to Dist. Sec., TANU, Ujiji, 20 Mar. 1958,

TANU women and UWT activists; there is a life history volume, Ref. No. A6/5/32, Tanzania National Archives (TNA); Tanganyika Magdalene K. Ngaiza and Bertha Koda (eds), Unsung Heroines: Women’s African Association (TAA), Kigoma, citing Government Notice No. 20 Life Histories from Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, 1991); the journal Sauti ya siti on 11 Jan. 1957, ‘Political uniforms prohibition’, Sections 2 and 3,

frequently offers profiles or brief sketches, usually of ‘exceptional’ A6/5, TNA. |

women; Laura Fair’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Pastimes and politics: a social * Interview with Halima Hamisi, Dar es Salaam, Oct. 1984. history of Zanzibar’s Ng’ambo community 1890-1950’, (University of * Iliffe, Modern History, 532.

Minnesota, 1994) has substantial biographical information on the ~* R.W. Smith, D.C., Kigoma, to Dist. Sec., TANU, Ujiji, 20 Mar. 1958, famous Zanzibari taarab singer, Siti binti Saad; Marcia Wright’s studies; Ref. No. A6/5/32, TNA; N. D. Morant, Commanding Officer, Police, and several biographical profiles in Marja-Liisa Swantz, Women in Kigoma District, to R. H. Missozi, Branch Sec., TANU, Mwangongo, Development: A Creative Role Denied? (New York, 1985). Laeticia 1 July 1958, Ref. No. A. 24/9/84, A6/5 Kigoma, TNA. Mukurasi’s Post Abolished (New York, 1991) about her struggle against °*” Asst. Superindent of Police, Kigoma District, to Dist. Chairman, — sex discrimination is, I believe, the first published autobiography written TANU, Ujiji, 21 Nov. 1958, Ref: No. S/14, A6/5, Kigoma, TNA.

by a Tanzanian African woman. 38 Commissioner of Police, Dar es Salaam, to President, TANU, Dar es

2 John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979), 572. Salaam, 19 Mar. 1958. Ref. No. S/15/3/185, A6/5 Kigoma, TNA. '5 Kambona to Fabian Society, 18 Oct. 1955, Fabian Colonial Bureau *” Officer I/C Police, Kigoma District, to Dist. Chairman, TANU, Vii, 5

(FCB) papers 121, Rhodes House (RH) Oxford. -Jan. 1959, Ref. No. S/14, A6/5, Kigoma, TNA. .

4 At the first meeting of the TANU women’s section held in Dar es “* S. G. Pierce to Kashindye, Dist. Sec., TANU, Ref. No. KIS/A.24/ Salaam on 8 July 1955, 400 women joined. See D. Z. Mwaga, B. F. 24/41, 25 June 1959, re TANU meeting to be held at Usagara ground, Mrina and E. FP. Lyimo, Historia ya Chama cha TANU 1954 Hadi 1977 Uji, Kigoma District, 29 June 1959. A6/5 Kigoma, TNA. (Dar es Salaam, 1981), 113, and Kambona to Fabian Society, 18 Oct. 41 Notes of a meeting wth TANU Committee, 9 Sept. 1959, A6/5, TNA.

1955, FCB papers, 121, RH. W. J. Bowering, D.C., Kigoma, to Dist. Chairman, TANU, 23 Sept.

5 The question, ‘who are the Swahili?’ has long been debated and 1959, re 9 Sept. 1959 meeting and police officer’s reply concerning frequently racialized by interested scholars. For a useful analysis of this Youth League songs, copy No. KIG/A/8/2. S. G. Pierce, Officer I/C debate, see Deborah P. Amory, ‘Waswahili ni nani?: the politics of Police, Kigoma District, to D.C., Kigoma, 18 Sept. 1959, A6/5, TINA. | Swahili identity and culture’ (Paper presented to the African Studies * Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, 186.

Association Annual Meeting, Boston, Nov. 1990). “4 Tbid. 186. Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), 12. Tanzanian’, Suomen Antropologi, 11 (1993), 31-41. 7 Thiffe, Modern History, 486. “6 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York, 1980), 31.

'© Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and * For a recent exploration, see Helena Jerman, ‘How I feel to be a

LaRay Denzer/Gender & Decolonization: A Study of Three Women in West African Public Life * 217

47 Tbid. 31. War, the downfall (for two short years) of the Alake of Abeokuta, * Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African the March on Grand Bassam. Even Nina Mba, who has analyzed

«0 Family (Washington DC, 1991), 4-5. the contribution of women to Nigerian politics, selected for detailed 50 Th " Eormal _ lv followed ational biographical case studies two notable eccentric failures — Adunni © jOrmal associations generally rowowec western Organizanona’ Oluwole, an individualist who opposed self-government, and

models. As the immediate precursor to TANU, the most fully studied 1 . PP 8 5

and described is the Tanganyika African Association; others include the Funmilayo Ransome-Kut, the famous Abeokuta women s leader Tanganyika African Welfare and Commercial Association and the Who failed in all her attempts to gain regional and national office — African Commercial Employees Association. A variety of worker rather than the several successful women who appear throughout organizations, co-operative societies, and tribal unions are also identified her work.°

for their (usually proto-nationalist) role. Failure was not the whole story. That male leaders did not , succeed in their attempt to erase women’s influence is due to the

, emergence of strong-minded, diplomatic and independent women

leaders who survived political chicanery and corruption to win

eee Se electiions or to gain appointments to high office. They learnt to play LARAY DENZER the game of politics. In protect and out of the office they worked hard to women’s interests, improve the structure of opportunity ° ° available to them, and to raise women’s status and civic awareness.

Ge nder & De CO | onization This study focusses on the careers of three such exceptional and largely successful women: Mabel Dove of Ghana, the first woman AS tudy of Three Women in West Africa to be elected to a national legislature; Aoua Keita of ' ms ‘cl Mali, the first woman to be elected a deputy to a national assembl iH West Afr ican Public Life C in a French-speaking West African territory as well, as one of the

Reference | Wuraola first to beAdepeju elected Esan, to a national political bureau of as thea RDA; and i. oo, the first woman appointed senator in J -F. Ade Ajayi & J.D.Y. Peel (eds) 1992, Peop le & Empires in the federal legislature of Nigeria and the fist to be on the federal African History: Essays in Memory of Michael Crowder, executive committee of the Action Group. These women have

London: Longman been selected for three reasons. First, their careers illustrate the type

, of political careers women pursued in three quite different national

political arenas: the Gold Coast, the French Sudan (now Mali), and Women played an important role in the politics of decolonization Nigeria. Second, they were in the mainstream of national political of West Africa after the Second World War.” All mass-based political life, in the decision-making bodies of their respective political parties formed parallel women’s sections in order to mobilize the parties and national legislatures. Thus they succeeded in rising support of women at the grassroots. Among the most militant of above the female ghetto of women’s organizations and political these women’s organizations were those founded by the Rassemble- auxiliaries, although they remained a part of these activities. Third, ment démocratique Africain (RDA) in French West Africa and the among the sources available for the study of these three women are Convention People’s Party (CPP) in Ghana, both developed along speeches, interviews with colleagues, and two autobiographies, so Marxist-Leninist lines of political organization. Slightly less far an extremely rare occurrence in the source material for the study militant, but nevertheless very active in setting up women’s organ- of African women, which provide very frank and detailed accounts izations were those parties, like the Action Group (AG) and the of the genesis of women’s political interest, political ideas and goals, National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in personal opponents and interactions with other party members. The

Nigeria, which advocated ideologies based in part on African main areas in the life histories of these women which will be

socialism.* Everywhere women campaigned vigorously, developed examined here are: their social background; the development of a network for the distribution of propaganda, supported boycotts their political careers; and their role in the national legislature.

and strikes, and sometimes took part in running political parties

when the male leaders were imprisoned. When it came time for the gg cial ba ckground _ distribution of rewards for loyalty, sacrifice and hard work, however, women found their male colleagues surprisingly obdurate. and An examination of the social backgrounds of these three women chauvinistic. Women obtained almost nothing. Few were nominated reveals the very different colonial situations and cultural milieux as party candidates, few were appointed to public office or boards, which shaped their personalities and opportunities tor leadership. few received government contracts. The constraints of European Mabel Dove (1905-84) came from an old coastal family of Sierra patriarchal policy reinforced the patriarchal structures of traditional, Leonean origin which had been deeply involved in commerce, and Muslim, African societies, with the result that the wide variety colonial politics and law since the late nineteenth century.’ Her of women’s indigenous political institutions were rapidly stripped of father was Francis Thomas Dove, a prominent lawyer resident in their former authority and status.5 During the phase of decoloniza- Accra, a very wealthy man who enjoyed luxurious living, and tion, African male political leaders adopted policies which accelerated although a Christian Krio, maintained many wives in customary

this decline. marriage. Dove’s mother was Eva Buckman, a Ga businesswoman, So far feminist scholars have dwelt on this aspect of the decline who lost her wealth speculating in cocoa during the 1920s. of female political influence and authority. In their search for an At the age of six, Dove’s father took her to Freetown where she understanding of the female predicament in the world at large, they received her primary and secondary school education. She attended have emphasized the grand, dynamic failures: the Aba Women’s the private school run by her paternal aunt, Mrs Lydia Rice (née

218 ¢ Gender & Governance

Dove), a widow who was an influential social leader in the colony.’ wives, distrusted European institutions and ideas, preferring to live When Mrs Rice’s school closed, Dove enrolled as a pupil in Annie according to the traditions of her people. Walsh Memorial School, the oldest girls’ school in Sierra Leone, Keita’s father enrolled her in the newly-founded girls’ school in and still highly regarded. After she obtained her school-leaving Bamako in 1923 which catered mostly for the mulatto daughters of certificate from Annie Walsh, her father took her to England for French officials. In doing this he confronted the total opposition of

further education, first at the Anglican Convent in Bury St. his daughter’s mother and the other members of his household, Edmunds, a school for clergymen’s daughters, and then at St. both male and female. Nevertheless he persevered in his decision, Michael’s College in Hurstpierpoint (near Brighton). Towards the _ partly influenced by his work in the French African civil service and

end of her training at St. Michael’s, she braved her father’s partly because of his concern for the future of Keita’s mother who displeasure by taking a four-month secretarial course at Gregg at that time had four daughters but no son to look after her when he Commercial College. For her disobedience she was immediately died. Keita excelled in elementary school, after which she was sent sent back to Freetown. Moreover, her father refused to allow her to _ to the school for midwifery in Dakar. Upon graduation she accepted

seek employment until she was twenty-one. Reflecting on this in a post to establish a maternity centre in Gao, again facing much her old age, she wryly observed, *...My father was not interested in family opposition, but eventually received the blessing of her proud the higher education for women or something useful, as nursing, he father who had no desire to curb her adventurous spirit. wanted us to acquire what is known as “polish”, no doubt to be Exhilarated by her new independence, she quickly proved her charming and well-bred and be able to play a good game of tennis.” professional competence as a midwife and developed a great popuWhile in Freetown she was involved in founding a girls’ cricket larity among the women in the town and surrounding villages which club, taking part in a local dramatic society, and reading extensively. she visited on horseback or a bicycle. Later these families became an

When she was twenty-one, in 1926, she returned to Accra. Free important source of political support. At the end of her first year, now to take wage employment, she found a position as a_ she petitioned the government for the establishment of a modern shorthand-typist for Elder Dempster at £7 a month, the only maternity hospital, repeating the demand for two more years until woman typist in the office. Work was for her a liberating and _ one was built in 1934. Aside from her professional activities, she was exhilarating experience. After eight years, she transferred to G. B. a member of the local Association des Jeunes du Quartier, Ollivant, and in the 1940s to Leventis, where she held the position composed of junior civil servants, businessmen and students. Soon

of manager of the goods and fabrics section. her house became a lively gathering place where conversation Simultaneously, she developed a career as a freelance journalist. ranged over a wide variety of topics.

Some West African newspapers were just beginning to publish a In 1935 she married Dr Daouda Diawara, a physician from column devoted to women’s interests in order to attract a female Gorée, whom she had met while in a midwifery school in Dakar. clientele among the slowly growing group of educated women. J. Keenly interested in local political issues, he introduced his wife to B. Danquah, charmed by her style of writing letters, asked her in _ politics, first with regard to the election campaign of Galamsou the early 1930s to write a ladies’ column for his newly-established Diouf in Senegal for election as the overseas delegate to the French Times of West Africa, the first daily in the Gold Coast, Hesitant at National Assembly, and then to colonial politics in general. Like first, she finally agreed to try her hand. Her column, written under many African intellectuals at the time, her political consciousness the pen-name Marjorie Mensah, was devoted to women’s affairs, was further heightened by a sense of the injustice of the Italian male-female relationships, children and morals. It was very popular invasion and conquest of Ethiopia. She began to read avidly, with readers. After the Times of West Africa folded, her columns especially the Paris newspapers and books of all kinds which were much in demand by other West African papers. She wrote exposed her to new ideas. During the Second World War she under a series of pen-names — Eben Alakija (Nigerian Daily Times), continued to develop her political ideas as she observed the hardship Dama Dumas (African Morning Post), and Akosuah Dzatsui (Accra forced on the people by the Vichy regime. Evening News). Then she wrote only occasionally about politics, but In many respects the background of Wuraola Adepeju Esan (née by the 1950s politics had become her major concern. She was one Ojo) (1909-85)? was similar to that of both Dove and Keita. She

of the principal journalists writing on behalf of the Convention received the best education available at a time when it was

People’s Party (CPP). uncommon to educate girls beyond the first few years of elementary In 1933 Dove married J. B. Danquah, soon to become a major — school; she undertook a modern profession; she was in the vanguard

figure in Gold Coast political and legal circles. They had ason,'° but of young female leaders who developed an early and abiding it was not a happy marriage, and did not survive Danquah’s interest in politics. Unlike either Dove or Keita, she came from a prolonged absence during the period 1934-36 when he was in respected traditional family of the local elite in her town, Ibadan.

England as secretary of the Gold Coast delegation. Despite her Esan was born into the well-known Ojo ‘Badan family, a married status, Dove (now Mrs Danquah) received and rejected a prominent Yoruba family in Ibadan which played an important role

proposal of marriage from Nnamdi Azikiwe, then editor of the in town politics. Her mother, the second of eight wives, was African Morning Post in Accra. Shortly after Danquah’s return to Madam Ajitie Ojo (alias lya Gbogbo, “Mother of All’), a prosperous Accra, the couple separated and neither made any serious effort to trader in kola and alligator pepper, who travelled extensively in seek reconciliation. They were finally divorced in the mid-1940s. southern Nigeria. Esan’s father was Chief Thomas Adeogun Ojo While Mabel Dove came from an established elite family, Aoua (alias Ojo “Badan), a former Sergeant Major in the Royal West

Keita (c. 1908-1984?), her sister nationalist in the French Sudan, African Frontier Force (WAFF) who had served in the Asante came from the new elite which emerged under French colonial campaign and in the Cameroons during the First World War. After rule.!' Her father, originally from Kouroussa in Guinea, settled in his retirement from the army, he took a post in the civil service as Bamako after his discharge from the French army, where he took a_ chief manager of the forest reserve in Ibadan. In 1935 he entered post as a government health agent. Her mother, one of several the Balogun line of Ibadan chiefs, rising to the position of Ekarun

LaRay Denzer/Gender & Decolonization: A Study of Three Women in West African Public Life * 219

Balogun, fifth in line to the Olubadan. A member of one of considerable time away from their family home: Keita, and Esan in Ibadan’s earliest Christian families, a devout Baptist, he had no boarding schools; and Dove, removed first to her relatives in formal education himself, but encouraged his children to get an Freetown, and then to boarding school in England. This encouraged education. Among his sons was a teacher, a lawyer, and an architect. the development of independence, self-confidence and courage. Beginning her elementary schooling at Sacred Heart (Calabar) in Dove received a higher level of education than either Keita or Esan 1920, she transferred twice before she obtained her Standard VI because of her family’s greater wealth. The determining factor in certificate from Idi Aba Baptist Girls’ School (Abeokuta) in 1927. the education of these three women was the attitude of their fathers. She wanted to become a teacher, the usual career choice then of In those days it was very rare for a girl to go to school without the young elite women. Because of her excellent performance, she was consent and active encouragement of her father. These particular admitted in 1928 to the foundation class of United Missionary fathers had a western profession or occupation which influenced College (UMC), the first women’s training college in Nigeria, new ideas about the role and status of women, and two of them established by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and Methodist were from Christian families already committed to educational missions in order to meet the growing demand for qualified attainment. The education the three women received enabled them teachers.'° In the year of her admission there were only fifty-three to take up the ‘modern’ professions of secretary, journalist, midgirls enrolled in secondary school and forty-three in teacher training wife and teacher in which they displayed qualities of professional courses in the whole of southern Nigeria, about double the number competence and leadership very early in their careers. for the previous year.'* While at UMC she was made prefect of her Dove, Keita and Esan enjoyed great popularity. Later this class, a sign of early leadership qualities.'!* One of her schoolmates popularity aided their entry into politics and formed a significant recalls an incident when Esan confronted her European teachers to component in their base of political support — newspaper readers, protest a matter which her fellow students felt was unjust. The exact patients, pupils and their families. issue has been forgotten, but Esan’s audaciousness in taking up the All married talented men of good families who were to lead matter made an indelible impression on her school-mates. distinguished professional and political careers in their respective Completing her two-year course in 1929, she was appointed asa _ countries. Of the three women, however, only Esan’s marriage third class certificated teacher, at a salary of about £30 a year, to the flourished, the others ending in separation and divorce. For Dove staff of the Girls’ Training Centre (Akure), a type of establishment and Keita this was hardly a tragedy. Freed from the demands of which would today be called an ‘alternative’ school.'* It offered family obligations, they could devote their time to pursuing careers domestic science training for girls who were soon to marry and in writing and/or politics, and although Esan’s career amply tried as much as possible to replicate local household conditions. demonstrates that a dedicated politician need not let family demands Three years later she was transferred to the staff of UMC where hamper her activities unduly, they made it more difficult to follow a Miss Gladys Plummer," just beginning her long career in Nigeria as__ political career. a lady education officer, noted her competence: “Miss Ojo has an

attractive personality; with added experience and the confidence 1s

which is borne of experience she should do well.’!® Political careers In 1934 she married Victor Owolabi Esan, a member of an _ In the above examination of the social backgrounds of Dove, Keita influential Christian family in Ibadan, then on the staff of the Public and Esan, we have seen that the political ideas of these women Works Department. The couple moved to Lagos where she taught began to take shape during the 1930s, and probably before then in for a while before the birth of her first child. During this period it the case of Dove and Esan, who came from homes in which local seems likely that she continued her involvement with the Nigerian politics was a subject of everyday discussion. Their marriages to Youth Movement in which she had taken an interest during school men involved in community or national politics may have contridays, but as a young mother, she devoted most of her attention to buted to their thinking — how much 1s open to debate. Only Keita her household.'!? When her husband went to England in 1944 to provides us with a detailed account of her husband’s tutelage and study law, she returned with her children to Ibadan. Here, in order encouragement, but it is also clear that he did not so easily accept it to help maintain her family, she founded the Ibadan People’s Girls’ when he discovered the extent of her militant organizational School, initially a primary school designed to meet the growing activities and when she began to participate actively in political demand for girls’ education among the ordinary people in Ibadan.” debates.”? Dove’s interest in politics coincided with the time of her The curriculum was somewhat innovative as it offered stenography marriage, but she does not mention Danquah as being particularly as well as the usual literary and domestic science subjects. This influential in her thinking.” Indeed it appears that his progressivism showed that Esan was among the first to discern the changing contributed a lot to her decision to marry him in the first place. In structure of opportunities opening to young women. Soundly the case of Esan, she once confessed to a correspondent in West conceived and financed, the school enrollment rose from 60 to 200 Africa magazine, ‘I can’t remember any time when I was not in just two years; today the school is run by the government and has_ interested in politics’, which indicates how early her awareness

an enrollment of 1,026.7! developed and why she opposed her husband’s wish that she not

This account of the formative years of the three leaders under participate in politics. discussion demonstrates that their social backgrounds had many Dove, the first West African woman to be elected by popular vote similarities, but there were also notable differences reflecting toa colonial legislature, did not become active in party politics until variations in wealth, family background and individual personality. 1950 when she joined the Convention People’s Party (CPP), All three women came from elite families, but the category of elite although she had followed the activities and debates of the United differed. All received the highest education then available to girls Gold Coast Convention from its establishment in 1947.*° She was according to the geographic location and the category of elite that attracted to the CPP because of its radical platform and the they belonged to. Usually this also meant that they had spent dynamism of Nkrumah’s leadership, Later she explained, ‘I was

220 ¢ Gender & Governance |

always for action, as against mere words. And I said to myself, this is Dove attributed the party’s decision to a promise made to her by

it — action’. Unlike Keita and Esan who were efficient and Nkrumah while he was in prison, ‘Carry on the fight, I know what dedicated organizers at the grassroots level, Dove does not seem to I will do for you when I return.”* While this may have been a have been involved in organizational work. Her contribution to factor (Nkrumah was well-known for his personal commitment to party work was through promoting CPP ideology through her certain friends), there were other reasons. Nkrumah’s Marxistcolumns in the Accra Evening News, the party newspaper, often Leninist beliefs required building political networks within all writing under the pen-name Akosua Dzatsui. No longer did she sectors of society, including, of course, the women. Dove was write short, witty pieces on women’s concerns. Now her writing, perhaps the best-educated and articulate among the female party sharply worded and full of Biblical allusions, focussed on the need members and capable of holding her own against her opponents, for, “Self-Government Now’, the injustices of colonial rule, the Nii Amaa Ollenu, a barrister and vice-chairman of the CCP and heroism of Nkrumah, and the importance of CPP activities. I.M. Peregrino-Brimah ot the Muslim Association Party (MAP), to Nkrumah admired the forcefulness of the Akosua Dzatsui whom she had earlier lost the Town Council election. Furthercolumns which he read while in detention from where he sent her more, the psychological opportunity represented by running as its little notes of encouragement on scraps of prison toilet paper.”’ After candidate the former wife of Danquah, Nkrumah’s main opponent, his release, he confided to her that her writing style had at first may have been irresistible.

convinced him the writer of the columns was a man. Her loyalty, Once nominated, Dove directed an energetic and thoughtful verve and perseverance convinced Nkrumah to appoint her as the campaign in her constituency of 137 farming and fishing villages. editor of the Evening News in 1951, one of the first West African The party provided only a small part of the financing, but her women to take complete charge of the publication of a newspaper.” Lebanese brother-in-law and her constituents contributed money She did not remain in the position for long. Independence of mind and maintenance. She met with constituents and identified the was another of her qualities and soon she clashed with Nkrumah _ issues they were most concerned about: clean drinking water, good over editorial policy, resulting in her dismissal after five months. roads, maternity clinics, and the legalization of the production of Later she served as a sub-editor of the Daily Graphic and continued akpeteshie (local gin). Anxious that their sole woman candidate to contribute to the Evening News. Nevertheless Dove remained should win, Nkrumah and other CPP leaders campaigned in the loyal to the CPP and Nkrumah. Her columns continued to call for area on her behalf. Nkrumah urged the people to vote for her, wholehearted support and dedication to party objectives, and maintaining that as a woman, she had access to some places that

unstinting support of its leaders. men could not go. Occasionally men would object to a woman

Women in the Gold Coast had the right to vote at least by 1951. candidate on the grounds that women should be subordinate to Shortly thereafter the first women candidates began to stand in men, but there was always someone within the meeting, sometimes municipal elections. Early in 1953 the Gold Coast newspapers an elder, who silenced such objections by reminding the people that began debating the question of a woman representative in the they all had once depended on their mothers, that their candidate legislative assembly.” It was generally felt that the time had come would be their mother in the National Assembly.*”? She won a for women’s viewpoints to be heard in debates. In September of the resounding victory at the polls: 3,331 votes to 417 for Ollenu and same year there were three female candidates standing in the Accra 266 for Peregrino-Brimah.* Town Council election: Mrs H. Evans Lutterodt and Stella Dorothy In comparison to Dove’s experience, Keita’s career as a ‘femme Lokko for the Ghana Congress Party (GCP) and Dove for the CPP militante’ in politics in the French Sudan (now Mali) was far more in ward 16.°° None succeeded. Dove lost to I. M. Peregrino- difficult and strenuous. She voted for the first time in 1946 in the Braimah, a popular Muslim leader. The experience, however, metropolitan elections held in Senegal. Female citizens had received convinced Dove that she could stand for national election in the the franchise throughout francophone Africa after the reforms 1954 elections and she asked the party to consider her nomination. instituted by the Brazzaville Conference, partly as a reward for the According to her autobiography, she made no other effort to gain role they played in the resistance movement during the war.*? The support and somewhat to her surprise she was nominated as the militant political party, the RDA, was rounded shortly thereafter party’s candidate in Ga Rural constituency, the only woman on the and established branches in all the French West African colonies.

national CPP slate.*! The GCP also named a woman candidate, From the beginning, Keita took part in RDA organizational Nancy Tsiboe, billed as ‘the housewife’s choice’, standing in activities in the Sudan. When the Bamako branch was established,

Kumasi South.” of the Union Soudanaise Rassemblement Démocratique Africain

_ In several respects Dove’s nomination seemed very cavalier. The (USRDA), in October 1946, she and her husband were among the Oshiuman CPP branch in Ga Rural protested against her selection, founder members. They campaigned in the elections for the three complaining that she was a foreigner, that they did not know her, RDA Sudanese representatives to the French National Assembly, that she could not speak Ga.*? Some important women members, among them Mamadou Konaté, the leader of the RDA. To show particularly Mary Ardua (alias Mrs Nkrumah) also protested for the their solidarity with ordinary party members, the Diawaras same reasons.** Everything taken into consideration, Hannah renounced their French citizenship in the canton elections which Cudjoe would have seemed the more logical choice for nomina- took place in January 1947, and voted as ordinary colonial subjects.*°

tion. An Nkrumah loyalist since the time he took over the While stationed in Niono, Daouda Diawara became secretarysecretaryship of the UGCC, and the party’s indefatigable national general of the branch political bureau of the RDA. All its meetings

propaganda secretary, she had for many years criss-crossed the took place in their house. Her husband did not allow her to country disseminating party instructions, organizing women’s participate in the debates, declaring his position as follows:

sections, directing literacy campaigns, and holding child welfare , classes. What accounted then for the selection of Dove over You observe [what is going on]. You should be busy in the Cudjoe? | kitchen with your colleagues from Segu preparing food ...

LaRay Denzer/Gender & Decolonization: A Study of Three Women in West African Public Life ¢ 221

Already you represent us in the office and you also vote. That I think that the function of deputy is solely reserved for men. It already is a great contribution. Avoid in particular talking is too heavy work for a woman. How can you accept it? Your

politics.” brothers simply: want to test you. In your place I would have refused.“

Going against his advice, she secretly undertook extensive , , .

organizational work among the women, talking to them during her Husbands feared her independence and tried to undermine her house calls and holding meetings in her maternity clinic in the organizational work among their wives. The wife of Modibo Keita afternoons and evenings. Very likely her independent politicking, as Was extremely jealous and used every opportunity to spread well as her inability to have children, contributed much to his dissension and distrust among the leaders of the women’s bureaux.

decision to divorce her in 1949. : Many male leaders, inside and out of the party, bitterly resented her

Thereafter Keita concentrated on her professional and political Poston within the p arty and her campaign for the office of deputy. activities. Her activities came to the attention of the government A notable instance of this occurred during her campaign in the small

authorities who tried to curb them by transferring her from Niono twn of Fado where the chief refused to let her campaign, to Gao, considered a punishment posting. This action, however, declaring: had the opposite effect. Gao turned out to be highly satisfactory for Get out of my village, audacious woman! It must be that you are political mobilization among workers, former slaves and women. not only daring but full of effrontery to try to measure up to Her former p atients and their families — a good many of the men in accepting a man’s place. But you have done nothing. It is teenagers between thirteen and eighteen years had been assisted into the fault of the crazy leaders of the RDA who are insulting the the world by her — welcomed her enthusiastically. Helped by young men of our country in making you their equal. Ha! People of villages, distributed RDA propaganda, contacted the nomads in the Singne, you see this! Koutiala, a country of valiant warriors, desert, and mobilized voters whenever elections were held. She was great hunters, brave old combatants of the French army, to have selected as one of the RDA observers at the polling stations in order a little worthless woman at your head. No’ Not possible! If you to ensure that electoral laws were enforced So reat was her success men of the RDA are mocking us, we know how to make that the government transferred her awa ‘from the Sudan to Big- ourselves respected. Myself, Master Sergeant of the French army, y S who fought the Germans! Am I going to accept being controlled nona (Casamance), much to the anger of her women supporters.” by a woman? Never!

educated people, she organized women’s groups which cut across eo : oy ; ;

No amount of transfers could stop Keita from taking part in y

politics wherever she was. Each town, each village had its own Both Dove and Keita have provided us with detailed accounts of special problems which interested her. A natural anthropologist, she their political careers and ideas. For the career of Esan, their countermade extensive notes of childbirth practices and marriage customs.* part in Nigeria, such richness of detail is sadly lacking although Each area provided new opportunities to test her ideas for newspaper accounts and a few short biographical accounts provide improving women’s and children’s conditions as well as for political an outline of the high points of her career. organization. With every transfer, she left behind a network of Esan and her husband were members of the Ibadan Progressive organizations and a heightened awareness of colonial politics. She Union and the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the cultural nationalist rose to influential positions within the local and national RDA organization which spawned the political party, the Action Group

hierarchy. (AG). When her husband became the president of the Ibadan

In 1957 she was transferred to Bamako. By this time Konaté had Progressive Union in the early 1950s, Esan organized 4 women’s died and her relative, Modibo Keita, had become the leader of the section of that body. Under its auspices, she chaired a reception for USRDA, which helped to consolidate her position in the party, but Mrs James Aggrey and Mrs Crystal Faucet, two American women created other problems which impeded her organizational work. visiting Ibadan for the formal opening of the University College. While working at the maternity hospital at Kati in the vicinity of Faucet, a member of the National Association for the AdvanceBamako, she established a women’s union in the face of fierce ment of Coloured People, urged Ibadan women to take part in Opposition from their husbands and promoted the establishment of politics.*° By that time Esan was interested in the development branches of the union in other parts of the country. During the fifth programme of the Action Group, particularly in the field of congress of the party in September 1958 she was the only woman education, but she deliberated for a while before she joined its elected to the central political bureau. Shortly thereafter, she was women’s wing. Not long after she was one of its main leaders. She appointed as a full member of the constitutional committee of the conducted tours to organize branches in the western provinces,

Sudanese Republic and attached to the staff of the Ministry of served on committees, campaigned, earning 4 reputation for

Labour and Social Affairs. The following year she was nominated as dedication and hard work.

one of the RDA candidates, the only woman to stand for election Meanwhile she entered the Iyalode’s line of Ibadan chiefs in for the National Assembly which would usher in independence. 1955 when she was made Balogun Iyalode, third in line to the She won, but it was not an easy victory; in hostile areas she had Iyalode, the leader of the women. From the beginning of her career campaigned with a loaded pistol in her handbag, and almost had to in public life Esan combined traditional and modern roles to create

use 1t On One occasion. a solid base of support. She was the proprietor of People’s School,

Keita had to work against tremendous opposition. Social an AG women’s leader, a traditional chief, an office-holder, member attitudes among the mostly Muslim population did not readily Or matron in many organizations, including the Independent

accept the changes she advocated in women’s roles and status. Her Schools Proprietors’ Association, the Young Women’s Christian mother, never easy about the lifestyle of her educated daughter, Association, the Red Cross, the Ibile Ibadan Irepodun, the Farmers’ advised her not to accept the party’s nomination as electoral Council, the Ibadan Descendants’ Union, the Oluyole Ladies Club,

candidate, maintaining that: and several more bodies in the Anglican Church.”

222 ¢« Gender & Governance , The first time that Esan was a candidate for elective office wasin there is every reason to believe that there she would have continued

1958 when she was elected to the Ibadan Urban District Council. to voice the beliefs, based on the USRDA interpretation of One of the difficulties faced by Nigerian women interested in Marxism-Leninism developed in her campaigns and organizational politics was that the nght to vote devolved in a piecemeal fashion, work among women. These included the need to reform marriage gained in different places at different times.** Port Harcourt women and divorce laws, improve health facilities, promote more in 1949 and Lagos women in 1950 voted for the first time in their education for girls and women, improve the conditions of workers, respective Town Council elections. Universal suffrage applied for and to do everything possible to counteract those traditional and the first time in the eastern regional elections in 1954, but not in Islamic customs which kept the status of women low. From Keita’s the Western Regional elections until 1959. In the Western Region, account of the period 1959-60, it is clear that her main concerns only women tax-payers had the night to vote from 1954 to 1958: were not those of her constituents, but with broad party policy. She thus the success of women’s earlier protests against taxes (in eastern was much more interested in the process of drafting the new Nigeria, Lagos, Abeokuta, etc.), so much romanticized in the litera- constitution and following developments connected with the illture on Nigerian women’s history, had serious repercussions in fated Mali Federation. Indeed she believed her position in the delaying women’s entry into national politics on anything but an ad__ political bureau to be fundamentally more important than that of

hoc basis. deputy.°*°

Also in 1958 the AG, appointed Esan as one of its female advisers While a member of the National Assembly, Dove divided her to the constitutional talks taking place in London.” That same year attention between the concerns of her constituency — clean water, she was nominated as a candidate for SW9 ward in Ibadan in the _ the legalization of distilling akpeteshie, good roads and dispensaries, Western Regional election, although the AG knew that she had little banning of immoral movies, better care for beggars and the insane, hope of winning and nominated her because the party could find no better housing, more electricity, more education — and those other candidate willing to stand. In the general election of 1959 the — specifically pertaining to women. Girls’ education was one of her AG again nominated her as a candidate in one of the wards of Ibadan, main concerns and she pointed out that there were few women making her the second woman to stand for national election in graduates and only six women in the professions.*4 In 1954 there Nigeria. As in the Sudan, the campaign was characterized by under- were no women graduating from the University College: total hand methods and much violence was employed, but unlike Keita, college enrollment was 418 men and 14 women. ‘What is needed’, she avoided trouble.*° Later she explained how she managed this: she maintained, “is a systematic propaganda campaign for mothers to

their daughters school.’who Furthermore felt; Sas that ;one wa I have the power; send of combating thosetopeople want to she fight © Wey of improving male attitudes towards women would be to have more me better than men,teachers because when you smile sweetly “That when your oe - create respect and ; : . women primary schools: would enemy is coming thereinwill not be any fight. Whenever we have

: ; for regard forto achallenge woman which change the present attitude of occasion our opponent us, I just advise mywould ; Gold Coast men to Gold Coast women. the moment people to leave me tomee him. I will go forward andAtsay him,the ; ;average 56 ., man thinks a woman is solely created for histo particular need. Oh, my dear brother, do you also stay in this village?’ We will A si . : Ce icand ;ational single termiswas all thatthree Dove served in the Gold Coast smile the battle won. After or four visits they will Nat; ;in : Assembly and when the country became independent call me ‘sister’ and even prepare food for me, though I know 3 eer 5 . 1957, there was no woman sitting in the legislature.°”? The CPP did very4well some ofher them not vote for certain : ;of; 1956. : notthat renominate as awill candidate infor theme general election

reasons. Th; : _

This was partly because of the growing suspicion among the Despite her defeat at the polls, 7,169 votes to her opponent’s leadership about her loyalty; not only was she the former wife of (Oyewole) 9,355, she was pleased because her performance was Danquah, but her sister, Muriel Odamtten, was married to one of much better than that of Ransome-Kuti, running as an independent the main opposition leaders, the chairman of the United Party. But in Abeokuta (she had broken with the NCNC on the issue of her more importantly, Dove was naive about political gamesmanship.

nomination), who received only 4,665 votes.*? Having gained the nomination so easily the first time, she ignored Tactful and diplomatic, Esan’s continued loyalty and hard work Nkrumah’s pointed advice not to leave Ghana for a long trip to the on behalf of the party convinced the central leadership of the need United States sponsored by the United States Information Service to reward her services by appointing her a special women’s repre- (USIS) in 1956. In the midst of her journey she learned that sentative in the federal senate to protect women’s interests in the Nkrumah had called a general election and that a man, C. T. government formed to preside over independence. In 1960 she Nylander, had been nominated for her seat. Reflecting on this in became the only woman senator as well as the only woman to serve _ later life, she wrote. ‘I felt if I were in Jericho and my Party wanted on the federal executive committee of the AG, a post she held until me to stand, they would send for me, and if I were in Accra and she resigned from the party. There was no other woman legislator at they wanted to throw me out of the Assembly, they would.’ Had the time. The following year, however, Margaret Ekpo and Janet she been home, however, she might have been able to counteract

Mokelu won seats in the Eastern Regional Assembly. her opposition. Furthermore, candidates were required to submit

: The truth appears to be that she had The voice of the women PPbecome disillusioned with their nomination papers in person.

party politics which were hedged with corrupt and unfair practices,

Dove, Keita and Esan, token women in their respective country’s even requiring candidates to purchase constituencies, which was legislatures, represented ‘the voice of the women’. Their original way beyond her means. Out of politics she remained loyal to candidacy was the result of their articulateness, their party work, Nkrumah and the CPP, continuing to write political commentary and their social prominence in the era of decolonization. More for the party newspapers. However, she was also critical about some research must be done on Keita’s role in the Malian legislature, but of the party’s policies and practices, particularly the detention and

LaRay Denzer/Gender & Decolonization: A Study of Three Women in West African Public Life * 223

imprisonment of Danquah, on whose behalf she spoke several times delegations attending international commissions and conferences,

to Nkrumah, but to no avail.*? she bitterly retorted to a senator’s attempt to trivialize the idea, ‘I do

Like Dove, Esan also represented the women’s voice in the not see any need for a Senator to turn my contributions in this legislature. She used every opportunity to promote and protect debate into humour.’ Sexual harassment was also a potential women’s interests, but also spoke on matters of general national hazard.* The only woman on a five-member delegation to the concern such as the development of policies concerning unemploy- Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference in Cairo, Dove was shocked by ment, better conditions for workers, agricultural research, educa- the aggressive and unwelcome overtures of one of her colleagues.®

tion, smuggling, bribery, corruption and tax evasion. In her maiden |

speech, she declared that women deserved a place in the Senate Epilogue because of their role as the ‘mothers of all those who fought for independence’. As a teacher and a school proprietor, she urged the Few of the West African political regimes that took their countries government to provide more scholarships for girls to study abroad into independence succeeded in creating a stable government. The for careers in nursing, pottery, dairy farming, canteen management, post-independence record of struggles for leadership, internal strife, and housekeeping.® In addition, she called for more instruction in coups d’état, and counter-coups is well known. Naturally those domestic science in the schools. A major concern was the improve- women who succeeded in entering mainstream politics suffered the ment of conditions for market women: the construction of more same fate as their male colleagues. Although Dove’s career as a comfortable markets, better conditions for trading, and equal access parliamentarian did not last long, she continued to write on politics

with men to loans. in the Accra papers until her eyesight began to fail. She rushed One of the founders of the National Council of Women’s through the writing of her memoirs against the knowledge that she

Societies, Esan used her position in the Senate in order to campaign was going blind. Coups d’état in Nigeria in 1966 and in Mali in 1968

for equal rights and raising the status of women. She urged the interrupted the promising political careers of Esan and Keita. government to appoint more women to public office, national Although Esan had resigned from the AG in 1964 in protest against boards and corporations on merit, noting that ‘One or two women _ the party’s alliance with the NCNC, she continued to serve in the are placed on certain statutory boards and corporations because they Senate and supported the Nigerian National Democratic Party want us to go and lend colour there, and not because they think us government set up by S. L. Akintola. She became an important capable of contributing something substantial to the talks being figure in Ibadan community politics and in 1975 was installed as the

held...’ Concerning the necessity for female contribution to lIyalode, a traditional office which still possesses considerable decision-making, she emphasized how much closer women were to influence in the city. Keita continued to be a prominent figure in

everyday reality: international meetings, especially those held in Eastern Europe. She

; was a major figure in the Women’s International Democratic

They [the women] may not be able to say much but little Federation in French-speaking Africa. Notwithstanding the forced suggestions may come from the experience gathered from the retirement from active politics of Dove, Keita and Esan, they ordinary folks in the streets. Women have ways of finding out achieved notable success as pioneers in opening the way for women

things that men cannot do, and, it will be profitab le to the iy their societies to enter the mainstream of political life. Their country if they use this ability. Women have got ability that is careers provided models of courage, independence and profesme cca unique in them and no man can trespass on this ionalism that young women could admire and seek to emulate. Equal rights for women was an issue that Esan constantly raised Notes in the Senate. Of particular concern to her was the fact that This chapter © LaRay Denzer 1992 northern women did not possess the right to vote. In her maiden 1 I would like to thank the following: the niece of Mabel Dove, also speech she pointedly remarked that she hoped that northern named Mabel Dove, for permission to use her aunt’s manuscript autowomen would soon have full civic rights.°* Time and again she biography; Philip Allsworth-Jones and Joyce Kwamena-Poh for their returned to this issue. During the debate on the subject in August help in translating Aoua Keita’s autobiography; and Oluwatoyin Kalifat

1962, she replied to one of her Northern colleagues: Alli-Balogun for permission to use the interviews she conducted while , doing her B.A. Honours project on Wuraola Esan; and Michael A statement was made by both the N.P.C. [Northern People’s Kwamena-Poh, Glenn Webb and Benson Mojuetan for their comments Congress] in the North and the Northern Region Government on an earlier version of this chapter. to the effect that women would be given the franchise in God’s 2 For an early overview, see LaRay Denzer, ‘Towards a Study of the good time. When is the time to come? These women are not History of the West African Women’s Participation in Nationalist given the opportunity to get more experience. So I daresay jones The ay Phase, 1935-1950", Africana Research Bulletin, VI (4), Koo Be none. aie as far as franchise for women in the 3 Thornes Hodgkin, African Political Parties (London: Penguin, 1961), pp.

| 120-1; Ruth S. Morgenthau, Politics in French-speaking West Africa

Northern Politicians, however, were adamant that the franchise for (Oxford, 1964), pp. 94, 222, 238. - a

women went against religious and cultural customs. Northern women * Nina E. Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in

finally received the vote from the military government in 1979. Southern Nigeria, 1960-1965 (Berkeley, California: Institute of Inter-

; ; g Jean Hay an

Being the onl f male legislators in their national Affairs, University of California, 1982), pp. 235-76. 18 omy women among scores O 3} ; > Jean O’Barr, “African Women in Politics’, in Margaret Jean d

respective legislatures, Dove and Esan shared the experience of Sharon Stichter, (eds). African Women South of the Sahara (London, ridicule from their male colleagues. Male legislators found any 1984), pp. 140-55; and LeBeuf, Annie M. D., ‘The Role of Women in mention at all of women’s affairs trivial or a joke or even absurd. the Political Organization of African Societies’, in Denise Paulme (ed.), Once when Esan was speaking on the need to appoint women to Women of Tropical Africa (Berkeley, California, 1971), pp. 93-120.

224 « Gender & Governance

© Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized, pp. 280-9. 4 Tbid., 386-387. ’ This brief biography is based primarily on Mabel Dove’s unpublished * Ibid., 389-390. autobiography. Other sources are K. A . B. Jones-Quartey, ‘First Lady of *° Nigerian Tribune, 20 November 1952. Pen and Parliament — A Portrait’, in Ghana Association of Writers, 100 “ ‘A Brief History of Chief (Mrs) Esan’, Funeral Programme. Years International Centenary Evenings with Agerey of Africa (Accra: Ghana“ Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized, p. 240n.

Association of Writers, 1975); ‘Gold Coast’s First Assembly Woman’, “* The other two AG women advisers were Mallama Ina Nusa from Zaria

West African Review, September 1954, p. 829; and ‘Voice of the and Hannah Otudor from Calabar. Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized,

Women’, West Africa, 24 July 1954, p. 679. 262.

® Obituary of Lydia Marion Rice, Sierra Leone Weekly News, 14 July 1951. >! Nigeria, Senate Debates, 23 August 1962, col. 777.

° M. Dove, Autobiography, Mss., 25, °° Daily Times, 9 January 1960; ‘And Politics, Too’, West Africa, 6 April

'° For a brief biography of Danquah, see L. H. Ofosu-Appiah, ‘Danquah, 1963,

J. B.’, The Encyclopaedia Africana Dictionary of African Biography, vol. 1, ™ Keita, Femme d’Afrique, 387.

Ethiopia-Ghana (New York, 1977), pp. 230-33. “4 Dove, Autobiography, p. 169.

"' The following account is based on Keita’s extensive autobiography, A. °° Ibid.

Keita, Femme d’Afrique: La vie de Aoua Keita raconté par elle-méme, (Paris, °° Ibid., 163-4. . .

1975). *’ The CPP rectified this in 1960 when it appointed ten women as special

_ ” This biographical account is based on Oluwatoyin Kafilat Alli-Balogun, representatives to the National Assembly. ‘A Biography of Chief (Mrs) Wuraola Adepeju Esan (The lyalode of °° Dove, Autobiography, p. 215.

Ibadan)’, B.A. Honours Essay, Department of History, University of |» Ibid., ch. 57. |

Ibadan, June 1987; and ‘A Brief History of Chief (Mrs) Wuraola © Daily Service, 26 January 1960.

Adepeju Esan Iyalode Ibadan’, Eto Isin Isinku Fun Oloogbe Wuraola © Nigeria, Senate Debates,.2 April 1960, cols. 197-8. Adepeju Esan, Mfr. J. P., Iyalode Ibadan, Funeral programme, St James © Ibid., 29 April 1960, col. 344.

Cathedral, Oke-Bola, Ibadan, 19 July 1985. 6 [bid., 29 April 1960, col. 344. .

8 National Archives, Ibadan (hereafter NAI), IBMINED 1/6 LEO 7: list 4 Daily Service, 26 January 1960. | of students in the foundation class. ® Nigeria, Senate Debates, 20 August 1962, col. 656.

'* Annual Report, Education Department of Southern Nigeria, 1928, 27. °° In recent series of interviews, Margaret Ekpo, appointed for a brief '° Interview with Mrs E. A. Aboderin, Bodya, Ibadan, 5 January 1987 period to the Eastern Nigerian House of Chiefs in 1954 and in 1961.

(conducted by O. K. Alli-Balogun). elected to the Eastern House of Assembly, was very frank about this '© NAI, IBMINED 1/2 CIW 1109. problem. According to her, some of her colleagues ‘tried to molest me’

'7 Gladys Plummer served in the Education Department of Nigeria from and that ‘I wouldn’t say that I had no trouble. I had lots and lots of them.

1931 to 1950. \ But I was very firm! I was very, very firm!’ “Conversations with Bisi

- October 1932. October 1989.

*® NAI, IBMINED 1/1 DDW 539 vol. 1: Inspection report of UMC, 3-5 Lawrence. Chief (Mrs) Margaret Ekpo’, Episode 3, Sunday Vanguard, 8 .

‘9 “And Politics, Too’, West Africa, 6 April 1963, 393. * Dove, Autobiography, pp. 225-6.

20 NAI, Oyo Prof 1/4 161. ® University of Ibadan Library Manuscript Collection, Funmilayo

1 “Parents Day by Girls School’, Western Echo, 11 December 1947; M. A. Ransome-Kuti papers, Box 1 (WIDF): Report by Mrs. M. M. Rossi on Adeyemi, ‘Foreword’, Peoples; A Souvenir Magazine, 21 Years, 1965— her trip to Africa, April 18-May 7, 1963, presented to WIDF Bureau

1986, 1. Meeting, Moscow, June 18-19, 1963.

2 Keita, Femme d’Afrique, p. 45.

*3 Dove, Autobiography, p. ch. 14. 4 “And Politics, Too’, West Africa, 6 April 1963, 373; and Mba, Nigerian

Women Mobilized, p. 240n. ‘ 1946-1960 (London, 1970). A N N E MARIE G O ETZ

*° For background on Ghanaian politics, see D. Austin, Politics in Ghana,

677Jones-Quartey, “First Lady of Pen and Parliament’. Dove, Autobiography, p. 119. N O S h O|

rtc uts to Powe l

*8 The first West African woman proprietor and editor was E. Ronke a

Ajayi who in 1931 founded the Nigerian Herald in Lagos. The paper Constraints on Women’s Political Effectiveness folded after two years of publication. 2 “Women M.L.As’, editorial, Daily Graphic, 20 February 1953;5 October IN Uganda

1953, and Daily Echo, 2 February 1954. SSSSsSeSsSSeSssSSsSSSSSSSSsSSSSSSeeeseseseseseseseee TT

°° Daily Echo, 27 August and 2 September 1953; Daily Graphic, 1 Reference

31 " O ee Actoblography, p. 142. Journal of Modern African Studies, 2002, 40 (4): 549-75

33 Ashanti Pioneer, 12 May 1954. Introduction 3* Daily Echo, 12 May 1954. . | % “Election Round-up’, West Africa, 26 June 1954, p. 588.

35 ‘Nkrumah Changed Her Career’ (profile of Hannah Cudjoe), West One of the many achievements for which Yoweri Kaguta

Africa, 8 August 1953, p. 725. Museveni’s government in Uganda has been applauded inter-

°° Dove, Autobiography, p. 142. nationally is the increase in the numbers of women in representative . Ibid., 146-147. politics, from the national legislature (nearly 25 per cent of MPs are 9 Ashanti Pioneer, 17 June 1954. i women as of the June 2001 parliamentary elections) down through Politics inch.French-speaking Africa, pp. 38-40. ll five ti Flocal (wh ©Morganthau, Keita, Femme d’Afrique, 3. all five tiers of local government (where women averaget30 per30 cent

41 Thid.. 65. of local councillors). High-profile appointments of women to senior 42 Ibid. ch. 4. civil service positions have also significantly enhanced women’s ® See, for example, ibid., ch. 6. presence in the administration. These increases in women’s public

Anne Marie Goetz/Constraints on Women’s Political Effectiveness in Uganda ¢ 225

presence have been accomplished through the creation and reserva- record of mainstream political parties in representing women’s tion of new seats in national and local government for women, and interests or fronting women candidates has produced a tradition of through a principle of affirmative action in administrative appoint- antipathy to political parties by women’s movements the world ments. This paper considers how the means of women’s access to over. As Marion Sawer (2000: 6), an Australian political scientist, politics has affected their legitimacy and effectiveness in policy- observes:

making. Particular attention paid to extent to which women Th ; ;to have benefited or lost from the suspension of partyis competition in €the question of the relevance of parliamentary representation

— ; women isP ”linked to the historic ambivalence of wommoveove party comp , linked to the hist bivalence of women’s

‘no-party’ democracy. The relatively non-democratic ; |Uganda’s f to power through access reservations and ments concerning representative democracy and the party means of women’s to p g ; ——_ system on which it rests. This ambivalence manifested itself in

affirmative action has been effective in ensuring their created rapid promo, a aftermath ; ; ; ,through re *s the ‘non-party’ organisations in the tion the many relatively ‘benevolent autocracy’ which Museveni’s erenener ; of ; - suffrage to encourage women’s active citizenship without oS being government represents. But this has been at the cost of politically q ‘ato th sed world of d lit

internalised safeguards on these gains. Without institutionalised Fawn Ino Che COMPFOMUSed WOFG OF Man-mace party POMUcs.

parties, and without a democratic decision-making structure within In developing-country politics, this feminist antipathy to parties Museveni’s ‘Movement’, women have no means of asserting their has become pronounced in the aftermath of liberation and rights to be fronted as candidates in open elections, of bringing democracy struggles in which women who have contributed to membership pressure to bear on party executives to introduce independence and democratisation have often been disappointed by gender sensitivity in the staffing of party posts, or of using the relegation to a feminised and marginalised ‘women’s wing’ of dynamic of multiparty competition to develop political clout parties (Basu 1995; Hale 1997; Mariam 1994; Waylen 1994; Zerai around a gendered voting gap. Instead, they have been recruited to 1994). Alternatively, parties may be too weakly institutionalised to the project of legitimising the Movement’s no-party state, risking be perceived by women as the right place to start with feminist

the discrediting of the entire project of representing women’s democratisation projects. They may be such blatantly hollow interests in the political arena should the present system collapse. vehicles for powerful kleptocratic families or ethnic groups, lacking

The association of party competition with ethnic violence in any but the flimsiest organisational structures, decision-making Uganda, and the historical lack of interest that parties showed in _ processes, and ideologies, that they simply offer no purchase for an promoting women’s interests, led many women and feminists inside internal democratisation project designed to promote gender and outside Uganda to give a cautiously positive reception to the equity. There may be no discernible party platform, if politics is a National Resistance Movement’s ‘temporary’ suspension of party matter of appealing to ascriptive loyalties rather than broader competition when it came to power in 1986. This freed women _ interests. In other words, party systems, and the ruling party, may be from the near impossible task of getting party backing for their insufficiently institutionalised for women to challenge rules which candidacies. New reserved seats for women in Parliament and local exclude women — simply because there are no firm rules and rights, government freed some women politicians from competing with only patronage systems and favours. Alternatively, where a military men, and Museveni’s willingness to appoint women to important or theocratic power structure bolsters ruling parties, there is little posts in the public administration and the judiciary seemed to make scope for women’s engagement because the rules of these institua major crack in the ‘glass ceiling’ which so often holds able tions explicitly deny women’s full right of participation.

professional women back. This paper begins by explaining the The association of party competition in Uganda with politicised initial relative enthusiasm of women and other social groups for ethnicity and religion, and with ghastly civil conflict, encouraged Museveni’s ‘no-party’ democracy in the context of Uganda’s history the antipathy to parties of many women and other social groups. of ethnic conflict. It then describes the ‘no-party’ political system in No single party was able to transcend limited constituencies based Uganda, and goes on to detail the measures taken to bring greater on religion, ethnicity, language, or region. The two most significant numbers of women into politics. It reviews the record of women parties, in terms of size of membership and role in post-colonial politicians in promoting gender equity in important new legislation Ugandan politics, are the Democratic Party (DP), founded in 1956, on property rights and domestic relations, and finally considers how and the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC), founded in 1958. The women’s presence and interests have been institutionalised in the DP is a party of Catholics with its power base in the South. It has National Resistance Movement (NRM) itself, and the longer-term never been in office. The UPC is supported by the Protestant

prospects for women’s influence on policy-making. church and 1s strongest in the: North, though it has been in and out

of alliances with the people of Buganda — the largest and most

Antipathy to political parties in Uganda powerful ethnic group, based in the centre of the country. The

interests of the Baganda people, who still dominate the adminisThere is a strong tradition in feminist political science and activism tration but have never captured power, have been represented which has been sceptical about the capacity of liberal or bourgeois variously by the Kabaka Yekka (Kabaka [King] Alone) party at the democracy to either include women amongst decision-makers, or time of independence, and the Conservative Party now. to admit meaningful representation of their interests. This has led to Uganda’s first independent government was formed by the UPC an interest in alternatives to liberal representative democracy, in alliance with the Kabaka Yekka, in opposition to the Catholic

particularly any measures that support the principle of group DP. But the UPC clashed with Buganda, and in 1966 Obote

representation for women in politics, through for instance affirma- suspended the constitution, declared a one-party state, and banished tive action measures to put some minimum number of women into _ the political kingdoms, sending the Kabaka into exile. Amin’s 1971 political and bureaucratic positions, or to give representative groups coup installed people of his Western Nile region in power. This of social and political minorities some powers of review over paradigmatic homicidal military phallocrat did not of course bother policies that affect their interests (Young 1990). The dismal track with parties, vesting all executive and legislative powers in his own

226 « Gender & Governance | person. In the elections held after the 1980 Tanzanian invasion — secretariat. Membership in the local Movement Councils is manwhich put an end to Amin’s regime, it is thought that victory was datory for all Ugandans, and all members of Parliament are obliged. stolen from the DP by UPC election fraud (Human Rights Watch to be members of the National Conference. The Movement [HRW] 1999: 34). Also failing badly in that election was a small Secretariat, located across the street from the national Parliament,

new party, the Ugandan Patriotic Movement, formed by the has a budget vote, and indeed the entire Movement structure is defence minister in the transitional government, Yoweri Kaguta_ directly funded by the Ugandan state, making it a bureaucracy Museveni. He promptly turned to armed rebellion against the supported by taxpayers, not by its own membership’s contributions.

increasingly despotic Obote regime. Though obviously inspired by other one-party states in Africa,

Neither the UPC nor the DP had a commitment to advance Museveni has been at pains to distinguish the NRM’s regime from women’s interests in politics, though the UPC did support a them. David Apter (1997: Ixvii) describes the system as a ‘consultanumber of “Women in Development’ initiatives which were tive democracy’, in which various measures are used to share beginning to attract foreign funding in the first half of the 1980s. opportunities for the enjoyment of political office with excluded Neither party challenged conservative ethnic and religious conven- groups or with potential opposition groups. The NRM has another tions about women’s social, economic or political rights and roles. name for this consultative spirit: ‘broad-based’ governance - the Both parties had women’s wings through which women party notion of embracing as many different interests within the NRM as members were expected to provide a hostessing service for leaders. possible. However, the mechanics of achieving this ‘broad-based’ There were some prominent women politicians prior to 1986, such character have never been clearly spelled out, and it seems that it is as Cecilia Ogwal and Mary Okwa Okol in the UPC. After 1986 _ left to the discretion of Museveni to decide who or what groups are other women made an impact in the ‘old’ parties, like Maria included (Besigye 2000). Mutagamba and Juliet Rainer Kafire in the DP. These were not ‘Broad-based’ government was initially approached through the ‘token’ representatives of women, but hard-core party activists who formation of a highly inclusive coalition government in which had made it up through the ranks. While these women did not see important representatives of all active political parties were given themselves as representing women’s interests in politics and never significant Cabinet positions. This coalition has narrowed over took a feminist stance in policy debates, it is perhaps not surprising time, both because of disaffection by opposition members with that frustration with sclerotic leadership and the slavish sycophancy corruption and government complicity in human rights violations, of the middle ranks prompted women such as Ogwal in the UPC and because of a narrowing and tightening of the army and and Maria Mutagamba in the DP to struggle for internal party southern-based clique around the president (HRW 1999). Pains are reform in the post 1986 period, and eventually either form break- _ still taken to assign political and administrative positions to people away factions, or leave their parties altogether and join the NRM. across the spectrum of sectarian and other affiliations, but the result is now not so much reconciliation as intrigue and clientelism. The

The ‘no-party’ system representation of socialpalliating differences is approached as a strategy for the ambitions of other parties to have access to power and The very first official act of the NRM government after the military economic resources, not as a way of building accountability. triumph of the NRA was the suspension of party politics.! From the start, Museveni promoted an alternative and, he argues, particularly Women’s engagement with the national resistance movement Uganda-appropriate version of democratic politics. It is based on the notion that all Ugandans can compete for office without party Women’s professional organisations, religious associations, nonbacking, but on the basis of their ‘individual merit’. The democratic governmental development organisations, rural self-help groups, content of this ‘no-party’ system is grounded in the multiplication and feminist policy advocacy groups have thrived under the NRM,

of opportunities for ordinary people to participate in decision- constituting, according to Aili Mari Tripp’s (2000: 23) detailed making through the local government Resistance Council system. study of the Ugandan women’s movement, ‘one of the strongest Museveni justifies the continued suppression of party competition mobilised societal forces in Uganda’, and indeed, ‘one of the strongon the grounds that parties exacerbate ethnic conflict in Uganda est women’s movements in Africa’ (ibid.: 25). This was not the case

(Kasfir 1998: 60; Museveni 1997: 187). | at the moment of the NRA’s victory in 1986, when autonomous

The system has evolved through various self-imposed moments women’s associations had atrophied or been driven underground by of reckoning, each of which has stiffened the executive’s resistance the efforts of Uganda’s authoritarian rulers to co-opt and control the to political competition, and provided occasions for winnowing out country’s female constituency. It is thus testimony to the resilience more democratically minded members of the NRM. These moments and energy of women in civil society in Uganda that a small group of include the extended process of national consultation over a new urban women’s organisations mobilised to lobby Museveni soon

constitution (1989-94), the Constituent Assembly debates to after his take-over. They demanded that women be appointed to finalise the new Constitution (1994—95), and the Referendum over leadership positions, arguing that women’s support for the NRA political systems of 29 June 2000. Since the passing of the during the 1981-86 guerrilla war justified this. Later that year, one

Movement Act in 1997, the ‘no-party’ system has been known as new urban feminist association, Action for Development the ‘Movement’ system. This Act gives the ‘Movement’ privileged (ACFODE), a small group of professional women, conferred with Constitutional status, where it is described as the country’s political other women’s organisations to generate a list of demands to present

system, a system that prohibits parties from campaigning in to the new government (ibid.: 70). This hastily compiled women’s elections, and will do so until a national majority recalls the system manifesto called for the creation of a women’s ministry, for every through a referendum. The 1997 Movement Act creates a new set ministry to have a women’s desk, for women’s representation in of local council structures paralleling the existing system, and local government at all levels, and for the repeal of the 1978 law culminating in a National Movement Conference and a permanent linking the National Council of Women to the government.

Anne Marie Goetz/Constraints on Women’s Political Effectiveness in Uganda ¢ 227

Museveni made quick political capital with urban women. In advantage in compensation for a history of disadvantage. The response to their initial submission, he appointed women who were practical methods of operationalising affirmative action in politics strong NRM supporters to very prominent positions: Gertrude do not involve giving women advantages in political contests with

Njuba, a high-level combatant in the NRA, was appointed deputy men, but rather, the creation of new public space reserved minister of industry, Betty Bigombe was given the vital task of exclusively for women: new bureaucracies for women, new parlialeading the project of pacification of the North, and Victoria mentary and local government seats for women-only competition, Sekitoleko became minister of agriculture. Two years later, Museveni new ministerial positions. This ‘add-on’ mechanism of incorporatappointed two women lawyers (Miria Matembe and Mary Maitum) ing women into public life has negative implications for the to the Constitutional Commission, and also created a Ministry of perceived legitimacy, and ultimately the political effectiveness, of

Women in Development. women politicians, as is evident from a closer look at the impact of He conceded to the demand to create a seat for a woman at all the 30 per cent reservation for women in local government. levels of the now five-tier (village to district level) Resistance | Council system. This was put into practice in the 1989 local council Implications of reserved seats for women’s legitimacy as

elections. And, in a gesture which laid the foundation for the politicians

pattern of patronage appointments which was to follow, Museveni went one step beyond women’s demands for political representa- The way the one-third reservation for women was implemented in tion. They had asked for seats for women in local councils, but he the 1997 Local Government Act creates ambiguities about the

added thirty-four dedicated seats for women in the national constituencies they are supposed to represent. The one-third assembly (the National Resistance Council), one for each of the reservation has not been applied to existing seats in local governcountry’s Districts. Election to this position was to be determined ment councils. Rather, the number of seats on all local councils not by popular suffrage, but by an electoral college composed of (LCs — previously Resistance Councils) save at the village level have leaders (mostly male) of the five levels of the RC system. been expanded by a third to accommodate women. The “women’s A critical opportunity for the women’s movement to insert its seats’ therefore do not disturb established competitions for ward concerns into the institutions and politics of the country was seats. Instead, new ‘women’s seats’ are cobbled together out of presented by the extended period of preparing a new (the fourth) clusters of two to three wards, in effect at least doubling the conconstitution for the country between 1989 and 1995. The two _ stituency that women are meant to represent, compared to regular women lawyers on the constitutional commission (which prepared ward representatives. The ‘after-thought’ nature of these seats 1s drafts between 1989 and 1993) introduced clauses on matters of emphasised by the fact that elections for the women’s seats are held importance to women, and the women’s ministry organised a_ separately, a good two weeks after the ward elections. And the nation-wide consultation exercise to compile a memorandum for mechanics of voting are different: instead of a secret ballot, voters the Commission which set out women’s interest in seeing the repeal indicate their choice through the old bush war system of physically of legislation which discriminates on the basis of sex, particularly in queuing up behind the candidate in question (this was changed to a

relation to marriage, divorce, and property ownership. secret ballot for district-level women’s councillor seats in 2001, in Fifty-two women, or 18 per cent of delegates, participated in the _ time for the 2002 local council elections). In the 1998 local governConstituent Assembly (CA) constitutional debates of 1994-95. ment elections, irritation with this unwieldy system, as well as voter Most of these were occupying the seats reserved for women repre- fatigue, resulted in failure to achieve quora for the women’s sentatives from the Districts, but nine had won in open contests to elections all over the country. Eventually, after several attempts to be county representatives. The large number of women in the CA rerun these ballots, the results from sub-optimal voter turn-outs enabled women to act as a distinct negotiating and voting block. were accepted, with obvious implications for the perceived legitiMost of them joined a non-partisan Women’s Caucus, which was macy of the women who won the seats. Women now in these seats very strongly supported by the women’s movement, particularly profess confusion over who or what they are supposed to represent: when it came to lobbying for gender equity clauses in the Constitu- women in their wards, or all of the population in their wards. Either tion. The Women’s Caucus was instrumental in ensuring that a_ way, they are very often sidelined by the ‘real’ ward representatives, number of key provisions were included in the Constitution, such to whom locals go first with their problems (Ahikire 2001).

as: a principle of non-discrimination on the basis of sex; equal Similar ambiguities and constraints afflict the women in the Opportunities for women; preferential treatment or affirmative fifty-three reserved district-level parliamentary seats. As detailed by action to redress past inequalities; provision for the establishment of Sylvia Tamale (1999), it has never been clear whether these women an Equal Opportunities Commission; and rights in relation to district representatives are supposed to represent women’s interests.

employment, property, and the family. The Constitution makes a subtle distinction between these women

One of the most contentious issues defended by the Women’s representatives and other categories of special representatives (for Caucus at that time was the use of the principle of affirmative action whom there are simply a few national seats, not district seats), such to reserve one third of local government seats for women. Many as youth, workers, and disabled people. Representatives of other male CA members objected to this on the grounds that it violated special interest groups are elected directly by their national organisathe principle of equal rights in the Constitution. Women delegates tions, but women are elected through an electoral college comcountered that participatory democracy did not deliver equal posed of local government politicians from the district. Affirmative

participation of women without specific instruments to enable action seats for youth, the disabled, the army, and workers, are women to attain representative office, particularly at the local level described as being for people who will be ‘representatives of these (Ahikire 2001: 13). The measures proposed by the Women’s _ special interests. Women district representatives, in contrast, are not Caucus to promote women’s presence in policy-making arenas rely described as representatives of women in the Constitution, but as on the mechanism of affirmative action: giving women a special representatives for each district (bid.: 74). Women running for

228 ¢ Gender & Governance

these seats must therefore appeal to a narrow electorate of mostly women, 7 will be favourable. He reached them by demonstrating male district elites, not a broader electorate, and inevitably this that he could put women in the leadership. (Interview, February favours elite and socially conservative candidates. Indeed, in many 2000, name withheld on request)

districts, professing a commitment to women’s rights might well , , . constitute a disqualification in the eyes of the electoral college. This notion of women as a vote bank reserved for Museveni was

However, it should not be assumed that affirmative action women invoked in a series of advertisements appearing 1n the newsp apets In MPs are necessarily diffident about the gender-equity agenda. One January 2001 before the presidential elections. Entitled “Message of the most outspoken feminists in Parliament, Miria Matembe, has from the Women Movement for the Return of Yower! K. repeatedly run for and won the affirmative action seat for her district. Musevent (WORK), the mysterious organisation "WORK, speakThe ‘add-on’ mechanism of incorporating women to politics has 8 for the entire women's movement, €ny oined women to vote for been based on a principle of extending patronage to a new clientele, Museveni on the grounds of ‘what he has done for them’. It and indeed of ‘extending the state’ — creating new representative elaborated: seats, new political offices, and where possible, new political Museveni’s administration has made women visible, given them resources. Women are not the only beneficiaries of this approach. It hope for themselves and their children together with power to: is the principle behind the reinstatement of traditional kingdoms in participate in nationbuilding and decision-making; access educa-

1995, and behind the creation of new districts prior to each tion and microfinance; express themselves at all levels. (New

presidential election.? In the capital city, one of the most visible Vision 9.1.2001)4 ,

examples of this has been the continuous creation of new Ministries, a .

and ‘minister of state’ positions which have bloated the Cabinet. This vision of grateful sycophancy is unrepresentative of the One third of these new ‘minister of state’ positions are held by women’s movement's position on the NRM and Museveni, which women. Young parliamentarians are the other chief beneficiary of has not been uncritical of the NRMv’s instrumental interest in Museveni’s ingenuity in fabricating new positions. A sudden women as a constituency. But the women’s movement has someexpansion in these positions in 1999 scotched an incipient rebellion times been in a reactive, rather than pro-active, position in the by young parliamentarians and women NIPS who were expressing Competition to establish the authoritative discourse on the purpose

concern about corruption in high places.3 and means of women’s inclusion in politics. Up to the June 2001 The ‘add-on’ method influences the relationship between elections, the women’s movement had not put pressure on the

women in office and those in the women’s movement. The reser- NRM to institutionalise women’s political gains and secure them vations for women-only competition mean that women are treated from a future loss of patronage. Such institutionalisation would as a social group whose disadvantage justifies protected access to the involve revising the electoral system to enable women to compete state. But this recognition is not accompanied by an acknowledge- more effectively against men for ‘mainstream’ seats. This would ment that women as a group may have specific interests which need require a review of means of articulating and promoting women’s to be identified through a process of public debate involving interests in politics, which would include a review of the regulawomen in civil society. Thus it is their gender, not their politics, tions on political parties, starting with the NRM itself, and with the. that is their admission ticket. The implicit assumption is that gender perpetually stalled Political Organisations Bill that is intended to acts as a proxy for the political and social values held by an establish just how limited the freedom of association will be until individual (Tamale 1999: 77). Moreover, it is assumed that these the next referendum on political systems.°

values are shared by all women. There are no further screening There were a number of occasions when it would have been processes beyond ascertaining the candidate’s gender, no process of possible for the women’s movement to reflect upon the implicawinnowing out likely candidates according to their effectiveness in tions of the country’s political system for women’s political promoting any particular party platform or social programme, and_ effectiveness. During the 1994-95 Constituent Assembly debates, no process to enable the women’s movement to review candidates. the Women’s Caucus did not take a stand on the debate over the The efforts to include women do not threaten incumbent politicians country’s political system. As the Caucus was deliberately nonor male aspirants. They do not challenge entrenched interests by Partisan, it did not enter into a relationship with the multiparty suggesting that women as a group may have a set of interests to caucus, the National Caucus for Democracy, made up of most of represent which may change the policy orientation and bene- the 66 delegates known to be associated with opposition parties.

ficiaries of these institutions. | Article 69 of the new Constitution provided for the continued

suppression of political party activity and freedom of association in

Women’s resistance to patronage order to entrench the no-party ‘Movement’ system of government, subject to review after five years by a nationwide referendum. A The pay-off for the NRM of its patronage of women is a large vote motion moved in the Constituent Assembly by the multipartyist bank. Moreover, the NRM has made efforts to construct women as_ delegates to repeal this article was defeated by 199 to 68 votes, and a non-sectarian political constituency, a model of the non-ethnic — this resulted in a dramatic walk-out by sixty-four multipartyists and vision of citizenship and political participation promoted in the ‘no- sympathisers. The six women who joined were already associated party’ political system, and therefore key to Museven1’s legitimation with a pre-1986 political party. project. In the view of one opposition candidate for the presidential The Women’s Caucus’s positions on key debates in the CA was elections of 2001, one of Museveni’s greatest successes has been to in part informed by the nation-wide consultation process which the

capture this female voting constituency: women’s ministry had conducted in the preceding years in order to collect women’s perspectives on important areas for legal change. Museveni has tremendous hold, especially in rural areas. Women The training materials for this consultation and the final recommen-

have been exposed to change possibilities. Out of 10 rural dations to the Constitutional Commission contain little reflection

Anne Marie Goetz/Constraints on Women’s Political Effectiveness in Uganda ¢ 229

on the implications of different party and electoral systems, or There is an exception to this. In the run-up to the 2001 parliadifferent ways of controlling executive power, for women’s mentary elections one umbrella women’s organisation, the Uganda electoral prospects or for their capacity to influence policymaking. Women’s Network (UWONET), spearheaded an initiative which The concern at the time was with the (admittedly important) issues took public steps towards challenging the lack of internal democracy of extending all basic human rights to women, entrenching the in the Movement. UWONET’s (2000) ‘People’s Manifesto’, principle of affirmative action to compensate for historical discrimi- backed by like-minded NGOs, broached the issue of internal nation, and the repeal of legislation which discriminates against reform in the Movement, raising the need to develop means of inwomen. In the women’s ministry summary of the advantages of the corporating women’s concerns to the National Executive new constitution for women, no mention is made of the constraints Committee and the Movement Secretariat. Although a UWONET on political parties. A passing reference is made to the fact that representative admitted that there had been little uptake of this gender equity provisions in the constitution mean that no women- manifesto amongst women’s organisations or electoral candidates at or men-only party can be formed, and that the national executive of the time,’ there is evidence of a sea-change in the relationship of the any political party must have representation of women. However, women’s movement to the NRM since the 2001 elections. For a what this might mean in a ‘no-party’ context is not discussed start, more women than ever before were elected to the open seats,

(Ministry of Gender 1995: 8-9). making up nearly a quarter of the women in Parliament (seventeen There was a similar lack of discussion of the implications of a out of seventy-five). The marked sense of female political

lack of pluralism for women’s policy ambitions or for their prospects assertiveness this represents is underwritten by current efforts to as politicians on the occasion of the June 2000 referendum. The _ revitalise the Women’s Caucus in Parliament (it had met only twice engagement of political parties in the referendum was highly between 1996 and 2001). Meanwhile, many women’s associations,

controlled by the Movement, which appointed a movement- badly bruised by losing important legislative battles over the Land sympathetic “multipartyist’ to head the campaign for pluralism. The Act in 1998 and the much-postponed Domestic Relations Bill use of government resources by Movement organs throughout the (both discussed in the next section), are reassessing the value of the country to support the government’s position also undermined the NNRMv’s patronage, considering its failure to follow its Constitucapacity of opposition parties to participate, and in consequence tional commitments to gender equity through to legislative change. they observed a boycott, hoping to challenge the legitimacy of the A new association, the Coalition for Political Accountability to

results by discouraging participation in the vote. Women’s Women, was formed in March 2001 to act as a lobby to support organisations did not step in to protest the suppression of engage- women politicians in taking a more independent stance in advancment by opposition parties, or to review whether the NRMv’s ing gender equity issues in Parliament.

achievements merited a vote for an indefinite continuation of no- |

party rule. . __, . Women in politics and gender-friendly legislation The restraint shown by the women’s movement in engaging in debates on pluralism should not be taken as collusion with the One measure of the institutional security of women politicians, and deepening authoritarianism of the Movement. It is testimony, of their relative autonomy from male or party interests which are instead, to the growing risks associated with opposing the Move- hostile to a gender equity agenda, is their capacity to promote ment, and to the fact that the malingering old parties do not offera gender-equity legislation. Women in Parliament started out well on credible alternative arena for women’s political activism. The this score, passing an amendment to the penal code in 1990 that women’s movement diffidence in debates on pluralism is also about made rape a capital offence.* A few years later, women Constituent

its enduring scepticism about the value of engaging with the state. Assembly delegates were effective in writing gender-equity just before the 2000 Referendum, the feminist lawyer Sylvia provisions into the new constitution. But between the CA debates Tamale explained women’s neutral stance on the Movement versus and the run-up to the 2001 parliamentary elections, there was a

multiparty debate: notable flagging of energy around a gender-equity agenda, or

| oo around efforts to act in concert on other issues. The Women’s

Yes, one state machinery may offer a better opportunity for Caucus in Parliament was largely inactive between 1996 and 2001. women to advance their cause than the next. But women Women politicians did not use their valuable positions on parliaunderstand that at the end of the day, they have to fend for mentary committees to promote a united policy agenda, and, as will themselv es. The state, by its patriarchal nature, 1s not a Promiust 28 be shown in the discussion of the 1998 Land Act, there is consider-

or consistent ally of women. (Sunday Monitor 9.4.2000) able disagreement between them on key pieces of legislation which This statement invokes the importance of autonomy for the have related to women’s rights in the past few years. A major women’s movement, and contains a reminder about the reasons for stumbling block is that it is impossible to pass new legislation which women in Uganda have for so long avoided engaging with without the endorsement of the top leadership of the Movement, the state. But the failure to keep a critical eye on the undermining yet, as will be shown in the next section, there are no means of of democracy in the country — risky as it is to challenge the NRM-—_ debating new legislation within the Movement, even if women has contributed not only to a deepening stagnation and paralysis in politicians within the Movement were to coordinate efforts. At least the old political parties, but to an erosion of democracy within the two important recent efforts to promote women’s rights have quite NRM itself. By neglecting questions of party development, the clearly lacked this essential Movement endorsement. women’s movement has failed to scrutinise the position of women The most dramatic example of Movement hostility to women’s within the NRM, and, as will be shown below, has done little to concerns, and indeed, direct presidential sabotage, was the underpromote the institutionalisation of gender equity concerns within mining of efforts to include a clause in the 1998 Land Bill to give

the party: in its recruitment, candidate promotion, policies, or women equal rights with men over joint property, such as the

leadership. | homestead. Women in civil society first took up this issue in 1997,

230 © Gender & Governance

joining the Uganda Land Alliance (a civil society coalition), and for the minister of justice to stomach. A politician from the old conducting research nation-wide into women’s land ownership Buganda party, he exhibited marked indifference to gender-equity patterns. They demonstrated the prevalence of the tragedy of legislation, and admitted to members of the women’s movement widows being forced off their homesteads by their husband’s that he had trouble in presenting this Bill to Cabinet because he families. They also argued in favour of what became known as the simply could not understand the concept of marital rape. ‘spousal co-ownership’ amendment, since without wives’ right to The minister of justice has done more than foot-dragging to homestead land, husbands could sell family land without their wives hobble another important piece of legislation: the Sexual Offences either consenting, or gaining any financial benefit from the Bill. This draft legislation, which raises the age of consent to 18, is transaction (UWONET 1997; UWONET & AWOPA 1998). very popular among Ugandan women because of the deep outrage Assiduous lobbying by women’s groups generated support from about what is called ‘defilement’ of young girls, particularly in the many women MPs (but not three of the then five women in context of the rapid spread of AIDS. However, when the minister Cabinet, who remained strongly opposed). Particularly important of justice presented it to Cabinet in 1999, it was referred back to the was the fact that Miria Matembe championed the amendment on Law Reform Commission because of the poorly prepared principles spousal co-ownership of the marital home, and land used for daily and missing background documentation justifying the law. The sustenance of the family, tabling and passing it in Parliament on 25 Commission was mystified, given that the principles and documenJune 1998.° But when the Land Act was published a week later, tation had been prepared in full. It transpired that the Minister of there was no trace of this amendment. It took months for women Justice, personally objecting to setting the age of consent at 18, had MPs and women in civil society to trace this ‘lost amendment’. taken it upon himself to revise the draft legislation and lowered the They were told that there had been procedural irregularities in the age to 16, re-drafting the legislation in great haste.'° This cavalier way they had tabled the amendment which then disqualified it. In disregard for the views of the women’s movement as expressed in the end, the President admitted that he had intervened personally to the Commission’s work shows contempt for the expression and delete the amendment (Tripp 2002). He had already made his pursuit of women’s interests through political processes. opposition to the notion of women having nights in their husband’s Another sign of a lack of a women’s rights agenda in politics is property known, partly through allegations that women would the non-appearance of the Equal Opportunities Commission. All of make a capital accumulation strategy out of serial marriage and the other government commissions provided for in the Constitudivorce. His justification for the move was that the amendment tion have been created (e.g. commissions on human rights, law belonged more appropriately to the pending Domestic Relations reform, elections, and judicial service). It is the responsibility of the

Bill. Ministry of Gender to ensure that the Equal Opportunities ComThe president’s suggestion to append the co-ownership amend- mission is set up. But after an initial costing exercise in 1998, no ment to the Domestic Relations Bill (DRB) as good as extinguished further effort was made by the ministry. The issue has no particular

the amendment altogether, because of the political near champions in Parliament.

impossibility of passing the DRB. Various drafts of the DRB have There is, however, one noticeable contribution which women been debated since 1964. Since 1995 the need for legislation to MPs have made: some of them are beginning to constitute an antibring family laws in Uganda into conformity with the guarantee of corruption lobby. Winnie Byanyima is the most outspoken critic of sexual equality in the Constitution has become urgent, but the DRB_ government corruption, spearheading the first censure motion in has not even been tabled in Parliament. The Bill aims to protect Parliament against the MP Brigadier-General Muhwezi, and women’s rights in relation to polygamy, bride-wealth, child custody, subsequently Sam Kutesa. Other MPs such as Salaamu Proscovia divorce, inheritance, consent in sexual relations, and property Musumba have joined efforts to pass a Budget Bill which would ownership. This kind of legislation, which challenges men’s rights to impose much greater transparency and disaggregation in the control women and children in the family, is deeply controversial in presentation of budgets for ministries and also for districts. In the a sexually conservative society. The item in the Bill which has Méinistry for Ethics and Integrity, which is the focal point for all aroused the most ferocious objections from many men relates to anti-corruption bureaucracies and campaigns, the minister is the criminalising marital rape. In addition, the Muslim community has important woman’s rights activist, Miria Matembe. Opposition objected to the Bill’s restrictions on polygamous unions. Already MPs such as Cecilia Ogwal (UPC) and Juliet Rainer Kafire (DP) burdened with these ‘unpassable’ clauses, the DRB can hardly actas have been much more eager to join in efforts to challenge a vehicle for pushing through the spousal co-ownership clause. corruption than in women’s rights legislation, for the obvious The Bill has no champion amongst women MPs. Rebecca _ reason that this gives them a means of exposing the Movement Kadaga, whose background as a women’s rights lawyer makes her a government. likely supporter of the DRB, and whose position as a cabinet For women within the Movement, it may be that raising issues minister in charge of Parliamentary Affairs would enable her to of corruption is the only way in which to make an implicit critique smooth the passage of the Bill, has not offered any support. Other of the lack of internal democracy in the Movement. Figures who prominent women MPs who are vocal on women’s rights, notably have been targeted in Byanyima’s censure motions are in fact key Winnie Byanyima, Miria Matembe, Winnie Babihuga, or Proscovia members of the privileged clique around Museveni. Women MPs Salaamu Musumba (who extended, then withdrew, an offer to table have concentrated more closely on corruption than any other group the DRB as a private member’s bill), have also not wanted to risk in Parliament, save for the group of new/young parliamentarians their political careers on such unpopular legislation. The objections between 1996 and 1999, after which key leaders amongst them of the Muslim community made the last minister of gender, labour, were neutralised by absorbing them to Cabinet, by making them and community development, Janat Mukwaya, herself a Muslim, ministers of state. Byanyima’s crusade is beginning to bite, in the deeply ambivalent about the Bill. She has refused to be associated sense that she has come under increasingly personal attack from the with it. The criminalisation of marital rape has made the Bill hard president himself: Her relationship with him worsened drastically

Anne Marie Goetz/Constraints on Women’s Political Effectiveness in Uganda ¢ 231

following her husband Colonel Kiiza Besigye’s outspoken state- However, women in combat areas in'the centre and south of the ments on corruption in the government and the army in early country did give marked support to the bush war by acting as 2000, and his campaign running against Museveni for president in couriers, providing nursing skills and caring for orphans. A few early 2001. Amazingly, Besigye’s presidential aspirations, combined women were prominent as fighters in the NRA and activists in the with Byanyima’s unpopularity within the Movement, did not NRM, but they did not form themselves as a distinct constituency. prevent her from being re-elected in 2001, when her Mbarara There was no women’s wing, and senior women such as Gertrude constituency rallied behind her. However, ostracism by the Move- Nyjuba did not identify themselves with women’s issues. The NRM ment now profoundly undermines her capacity to continue to work _ thus differed from liberation movements in other African countries for internal democracy in the Movement. Her crusade also such as South Africa, Ethiopia or Eritrea in the sense that it was not demonstrates the tremendous risks of challenging vested interests in a broad-based social movement. Women supporters and combatants a semi-authoritarian system: she has been subject to severe threats to had not had a chance to articulate a position on internal represenher physical security, and has had to fight trumped-up charges of tation of women, or on gender equity in party policy. In the post-

sedition. 1986 period, senior women within the NRM have diverged according to their interest in gender-equity in politics. Some, such The non-party movement: problems of institutionalisation and 28. Gertrude Njuba, Betty Bigombe, Vice-President Specioza

consequences for women Kazibwe, and Janat Mukwaya, have not taken a feminist stance on policy debates. Others, such as Miria Matembe, Winnie Byanyima,

The preceding discussions about the means of promoting women in and Rebecca Kadaga, have been much more critical in relation to

politics, and their effectiveness as representatives of women’s government foot-dragging on gender-equity. Some of these interests while there, beg questions about how women have been women (Matembe,'! Kadaga) appear to have been neutralised by incorporated to decision-making within the Movement itself. Is inclusion in the Cabinet, and an attempt was made to bring Musveni’s promotion of women a personal project, or does it stem Byanyima into the solidarity of the “High Command’ by making from a decision taken by the Movement, perhaps as a result of her — for a short period — Director for Information in the Movepressure from women within the Movement? Does the Movement ment Secretariat in 1997. have a vision of gender equity and women’s rights which it hopes to There has been no structured approach to encourage women’s promote politically? Does it have measures to support women engagement in setting policy priorities within the NRM. Senior Movement supporters who stand for open seats? Answers to these women in the Movement appear to have focused upon the politics questions reveal the extremely limited extent to which the Move- of national reconstruction in the post-1986 period, rather than ment is institutionalised as a political organisation, and reveal, upon internal democratisation. The Movement has one official therefore, the severity of the obstacles which women face to system for articulating and aggregating interests, and that is through institutionalising gender equity in political competition in Uganda. the ‘Movement Councils’ parallel to all local councils — in effect a This section discusses the consequences for women — and indeed rural party branch system, intended to act as a caucus for movement any Movement member unconnected to significant patronage members in the Local Councils. The chair of every Local Council is systems — of the following features of Movement organisation (or automatically the chair of the parallel Movement Council. There lack of organisation): organisation of the local ‘Movement Councils’ are no measures to ensure parity in the participation of women in selection and role of the National Executive, role of the Movement these Movement Councils, nor to ensure their representation in the Secretariat, support to candidates for local and national elections, leadership of these councils. In any case, the automatic leadership of

and the lack of a Movement policy statement. these councils by the LC chairperson ensures almost completely

In the first half of the 1980s, no efforts were put into constituting male leadership, since most elected LC chairs at all levels are men. the NRM into a political party — it was merely the public negotiator One possible reason why little attention was paid to women’s for the National Resistance Army (NRA). At the time of coming to engagement in the Movement Councils is because a parallel power in 1986, the NRM/A was primarily a guerrilla army, given structure exclusively for women was set up earlier: the National coherence by its overwhelming loyalty to the person of Museveni Women’s Council system. No provision for a structured input of and its one priority of seizing power. Apart from presiding over the policy concerns from the Women’s Councils to the Movement Resistance Council system in liberated areas, the NRM/A had no Councils (or even the Local Councils) exists. This underlines formal internal structures for electing leaders or debating policies. It women’s separateness, and strengthens the notion that women’s was also not a ‘movement’ in any sensible use of the term. It started participation in politics is constructed around notions of their

out as a fighting force of a little over thirty men, and by the 1986 difference from men, rather than equality. |

victory controlled just 20,000 soldiers, with no real branch There are other organs for policy-making in the Movement: the structure, and no political base beyond the army and the ethnic National Executive Committee of the Movement, elected at the group of the Banyankore in the South, and the allies it had gained Movement’s National Conference, and the Movement’s Parliaamong the Baganda people in the Luwero triangle. Between 1986 mentary Caucus. More important still are the decision-making and 1997 the NRM set up shop in an office block in Kampala and arenas in government: the Cabinet, and the informal and shifting established directorates to perform some functions associated with a_ collection of friends and advisers around the president. Elections for

party: political mobilisation, organising Resistance Council the first Movement National Executive Committee took place in elections, supporting the NRM representatives in the districts, July 1998 at the first National Movement Conference, composed of supporting a caucus of NRM MPs in government, and organising 1,600 delegates, almost all of whom, with the exception of the political education and self-defence for villagers (chaka muchaka). directly elected local government representatives, were from a The women’s movement, like most other sectors of civil society, range of NRM-created political positions — such as representatives

was not centrally engaged in Museveni’s liberation struggle. from the National Councils for Women, and councils for youth,

232 ¢ Gender & Governance

workers, persons with disabilities, and so on. Elections to the top _ stalwarts in the Cabinet. This is popularly known as the ‘Movement three posts: chair, vice-chair, and national political commissar, were Political High Command’. There are no women in this inner circle.

unopposed, going to Museveni, Alhaji Moses Kigongo (vice-chair Because membership in the Movement is mandatory and of the NRM since the days of the bush war), and James Wapakha- universal, it does not have policies on recruitment, and hence bulo (the parliamentary speaker). There was no discussion of women have not had the opportunity to push for focused recruitwhether a woman ought to take one of these positions, and indeed, ment of women members. There has been no structured approach Vice-President Kazibwe had to suffer the indignity of not being to improving women’s chances as Movement candidates in open awarded a sinecure parallel position in the NEC in the way that contests. The ‘no-party’ principle of electoral competition on the Museveni and Wapakhabulo had been (in her case, she could have grounds of ‘individual merit’ means that the Movement has always been the Movement vice-chair). There are 150 people on the claimed that it neither cultivates nor promotes particular candidates NEC. This includes a few seats for representatives of special interest in local and national elections. It does not put a limit on the groups (five are for women), while the rest are filled by the forty- numbers of people who can compete on the basis of ‘individual five district chairpersons (all men), and one MP chosen from each merit’. There is no official system for deciding between the many district (most of whom are men). According to one of the few people who may put themselves forward as ‘Movementists’.° This women MPs on the NEC, there has been no discussion since 1998 means that there is no way for women to insist that the Movement of gender issues, no mention of any need for the Movement to offer provide backing to a quota of women candidates in the way that women special support in elections, or to create a quota to ensure their South African sisters so successfully did in the African National that a certain proportion of Movement candidates are women. The Congress (ANC). NEC has never functioned as an effective policy-setting body. Prior However, the absence of a formal candidate selection system to 1997 it was supposed to meet at least once every three months, does not mean that there is not in fact one in place. Ever since the but it had not met for three years prior to the promulgation of the CA elections of 1994, the NRM Secretariat has unofficially spon1995 Constitution (Besigye 2000), and has met rarely since 1998. sored district-level committees to recommend ‘NRM candidates’

Obviously important policy positions are established elsewhere. for support. At the time, the objective was mainly to eliminate | There is no comprehensive statement of Movement policy, and- candidates supportive of pluralism (Besigye 2000: 32). Nevertheless,

it would be difficult to put a single label on the Movement’s most of the women politicians interviewed for this study who had ideology. Its values are summarised in a thin 1999 document that come to Parliament through competition for an open county seat updates the NRM’s 1986 10-point programme into a 15-point (as opposed to an affirmative action seat) claimed they had received programme. Gender is mentioned at point 14, which endorses no support from the NRM in the 1996 parliamentary elections. By affirmative action as a means to encourage political, social and keeping the candidate selection system unofficial and informal, economic participation of marginalised groups (Movement personal preferences can be muscled through by local strong-men. Secretariat 1999: 46). The justification for this is instrumental: ‘the Women politicians who wish to recerve Movement backing must policy of fending for the oppressed and marginalised has clearly buy into these local power structures. Since the informal district shown that there is a lot of potential which can be tapped if gender election committees are not acknowledged to exist, there is no and marginalised group-responsive programmes are emphasised’ internal Movement directive to oblige these committees to encour(ibid.). The terms ‘gender-equity’ or ‘equality’ are never used, nor age women to stand for open contests with men, to receive priority are any measurable goals mentioned, in terms of aiming for parity in support from the local election committees, or to get priority access women’s and men’s political or economic engagement. According to campaign resources.

to a member of the four-person committee in the Directorate that There have occasionally been efforts to democratise the movewrote the 15-point programme, this ‘gender’ point was not raised ment from within, but each individual who has dared to challenge by the one woman on the committee, nor was it promoted or abuses of power has lost her position within the Movement.’ For supported by the Secretariat’s gender sub-directorate. Instead, it was instance, Byanyima lost her post as director of information at the put there by other directors conscious of the importance of con- Movement Secretariat in early 1998 when it became clear that this solidating the Movement’s success with the female constituency. appointment had failed to silence her protests at official corruption. The Cabinet is an important forum for debating policy. But Two years later she was roundly booed at the Movement’s National

although there were six women ministers in the 1996-2001 Conference when she pointed out that the endorsement of Cabinet, none of them was close to real decision-making. Research Museveni as the Movement’s sole presidential candidate was in by the Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE 2000: 10) has contravention of the policy of allowing anyone to stand for any

shown that these women control small budgets, in low-visibility position on the grounds of individual merit (Sunday Vision ministries, with few staff. The vice-president has been sidelined, 26.11.2000).

described by one woman MP as ‘just an errand girl for the The ‘no-party’ system allows the Movement to resist defining }

President’ .!2 She used to be the leader of government business in the itself as a party, while its constitutional status as the country’s Parliament, but was forced to surrender this power to the new political system allows it to enjoy the privileges of a monopoly on prime minister when the president made the important patronage state power — in effect a one-party state without the party. The appointment of Apolo Nsibambi, a prominent Muganda, to this absence of a party structure condemns women’s engagement in position. She is ostensibly the chair of Cabinet but this function is politics to remain at the level of special pleading, and success in usually usurped by the president. But, in any case, not even the gaining patronage appointments, not at a more institutionally secure Cabinet is the true locus of decision-making for the Movement. level of sustainable change in party structures, candidate support Insiders say that most decisions are debated by a very tight circle of systems, and party policy. close army comrades of the president: friends on the Army Council,

the president’s brother Salim Saleh, and a few senior Movement eee

Anne Marie Goetz/Constraints on Women’s Political Effectiveness in Uganda ¢ 233

Feminist political scientists are increasingly sensitive to the fact that Josephine Ahikire, Aaron Griffiths, and an anonymous reader. The research

choices made in the design of political institutions — the powers of 01 which this article was based was funded by the UK Department for the executive in relation to the legislature, the design of the electoral internation’! meveropment. tS arcs based on in-depth interviews

system, the nature and degree of party institutionalisation — CORCUCTE? between an nw, With fen Vis, ten local government

det a ; ts in electoral competitions. and their councillors (both MPs and councillors were a mix of women and men,

..59.1‘

Clerimine vvotlacr s peice S In erecto (F ie G ”? ; from across the political spectrum), six activists from political parties, six capacity to influence policy once in office. fs \seorgina Waylen women’s rights activists, and six representatives of development (2000: 791) argues, “the focus of analysis then becomes the nature of organisations, as well as a number of academics. This article also draws on

the institutional measures proposed by women activists and the ways group discussions held with women local government councillors in in which variations in political systems, for example in terms of party December 2000 organised by the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala. structures and electoral systems, affect both the goals and strategies of

those activists’. Ugandan women’s arguments and strategies for Through the Legal Notice No 1 of 1986. ed

admission to representative politics and to policy-making are all The creation of ever more new districts channels development resources

ee of andthe political status institutional to smaller ethnic sub-groups, and is: seen as a strategy framed one keyMfeature current framework: h ; Fr, es,by B fF lural; h of responding to the demands for recognition and resources made by the suppression Of parties. Dy ruling out pluralism, iviusevent Nas ethnic groups. Six new districts were created just before the 1996 emasculated the development of accountability mechanisms, and by presidential elections (Muhereza & Otim 1997: 5), and eleven, some extending an ever-widening net of patronage, he has neutralised absurdly tiny, were created in late 2000, just in time for the 2001

oppositional energies, including those of women pushing for a presidential elections. |

legislative agenda which would challenge male rights within gender °* In the 1997-2001 Parliament, 97 MPs were either young or new to

relations. As summarised by a Ugandan feminist lawyer: national politics or both. They formed a ‘young parliamentarians’ group

and worked closely with the more active and critical women MPs. They

If there was pluralism here, there would be space for women to registered their concerns about corruption through their activities on influence political structures. Raght now, no political organisa- key parliamentary committees, particularly the Select Committee on tion has affirmative action internally. That would give women Railways, which was dominated by new MPs, the Privatisation Com-

leverage. Women are captive to the Movement now." mittee, which investigated a corruption scandal involving Uganda

Commercial Bank (illegally purchased through Malaysian brokers by the

The problem, however, 1s not just the absence of pluralism, but president’s brother, Salim Saleh), and the Legal Committee, through also the way affirmative action has worked as a tool for accommo- which a young parliamentarian, Nathan Byanyima, mobilised support

dation and control of women in politics. Ugandan women have not for a soos motion for nara against MP Sam putes. In 1999 -

been able to use the competitive dynamic of a pluralist system in young parhamentarians, many of them women, were made ministers O order to build leverage around their political demands, and neither state for newly created ministries (of sports, disability, children). As one

th th 1 d ati . th; 1 member of this group says: ‘the flood of new ministries was an effort to

can macy ois © Files ane representa Se; efi cms WI Nile “le 7 break up our group. It has worked. Others have been promised

_ Anstitutiona ised parties to press for equitab e inclusion at all levels. It Ministries, and are on the waiting list.’ She felt that this had divided is Important to remember that liberal multiparty systems in Africa people critical of the Movement by coopting some to the Movement

and elsewhere do not automatically promote women’s rights. ‘high command’, where they were expected to inform on critics

Women have made gains in terms of their numerical presence in (interview with woman MP, 25.2.2000, name withheld on request). political arenas, and their feminist influence on policy, only where * Lam grateful for Josephine Akihire from the Centre for Basic Research

the women’s movement is strong and autonomous, political parties for bringing this to lee meee . tL which should have b

are sympathetic to feminist goals, and electoral systems and other Debate on the Political Organisations Bill, which should have been

os - ee . institutions : ; wrapped up before 2001 has continued well into political give the voice toelections, socially excluded groups. ; , ; the The < ; held ; f d currentcan Parliament. The president continues to push for a containment € no-party system Neid many attractions Or wollen an of party activity to the capital city, while the previous Parliament signed

other social sroups who supported Museveniss project of neutral- off on an agreement to allow some party activity at the district level. ising ethnicity (Muhereza & Otim 1997: 5) by suspending socially 6 I am grateful to the anonymous reader of this article for drawing my destructive party competition. But the current compromised status attention to this article and passage. of women in politics in Uganda offers an important lesson: though 7 Interview, Sheila Kawamara Muishambi, Coordinator, UWONET

women can benefit enormously from direct presidential patronage, . 6.12.2000. . oe

their effectiveness in promoting a gender-equity agenda is low if euestions ich be posed, of Trane about me wisdom of epee on so they have not institutionalised a presence for themselves as legiti- =, 24759 @ Punishment tor rape. It appears to Dave Ciscouraged sentencing.

; . The government newspaper on the mate competitors for the popular vote, and for theirreported policies aspassing otiatof:the amendment leoit f blic._ deb It is hard h hij the next day: New Vision, “Spouses to co-own land’, 26.6.1998. legitimate matters for public debate. it is hard to see how t 1S 1 Interview with an ex-member of the Uganda Law Reform Com-

institutionalisation can be accomplished without regularising women’s mission, 21.2.2000. participation as decision-makers and candidates in political parties. 1‘ Matembe was later demoted from minister to ‘minister of state’. Even in a pluralist system, this cannot be accomplished if parties are _” Interview with a woman MP, 23.2.2000.

overly personalised, secretive in decision-making, and lacking clear _'*° Increasing opposition to Movement candidates has, however, prompted

rules for supporting electoral candidates and debating policy — and the beginnings of a concern to set in place candidate selection prothese, unfortunately, are characteristics of parties in many new cedures. ‘The most spectacular challenge to the policy of not screening

democracies and selecting candidates came when, during the late 2000 National | Conference, Colonel Kiiza Besigye, a veteran of the bush struggle, announced his candidature for presidency alongside the predictably

Notes unanimous call for Museveni to stand for a second time as presidential candidate. The National Executive Committee promptly declared that * Anne Marie Goetz (Email: [email protected]) gratefully acknowledges Museveni was the sole Movement candidate, making policy on the spot

the comments on this paper made by Aili Mari Tripp, Shireen Hassim, about formal endorsement of a sole candidate: “Where a constituency is

234 ¢ Gender & Governance

under threat from multipartyism, full support should be given to one relations in transition politics’, World Politics 46, 3: 327-54. Movement candidate that would have to be identified’ (The Monitor Waylen, G. 2000. ‘Gender and democratic politics: a comparative analysis

25.11 .2000). of consolidation in Argentina and Chile’, Journal of Latin American Studies

'* These include Sam Njuba, a government minister who objected to the 32, 3: 765-94.

NRM‘’s pressure on the constitutional commission to write the ‘no- Young, I. M. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Prince-

party’ system into the draft constitution, Onyango Odongo, an early ton University Press. director of information and mass mobilisation in the NRM Secretariat, Zerai, W. 1994. ‘Organising women within a national liberation struggle: who proposed procedures for electing the NRM’s top leaders and case of Eritrea’, Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), 29 Oct: 63-8. limiting their terms of office (Onyango Odongo 2000: 77-8), and Dr Kiiza Besigye, who was threatened with court martial for an open letter Newspapers he published in the opposition paper in November 1999 discussing the The Monitor (Kampala) Movement’s lack of internal democracy and the corruption of high New Vision (Kampala)

officials. . Sunday Monitor (Kampala)

'S Interview, December 2000, name cannot be cited due to promised Sunday Vision (Kampala) anonymity.

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Research. _ , AILI MARI TRIPP local government’, Working Paper 58. Kampala: Centre for Basic

Apter, D. 1997. The Political Kingdom in Uganda: a study in bureaucratic . nationalism. London: Frank Cass (3rd edition). Basu, A. ed. 1995. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: women’s movements in Women in Movement

global perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview. we

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Besigye, K 2000. ‘An insider’s view of how NRM lost the “broad-base”’, — Transfc ormations in Afr ican Political Landscap es FOWODE (Forum for Women in Democracy) 2000. ‘From strength to Reference strength: Ugandan women in public office’. Kampala: FOWODE. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2003, 5 (2): 233-55

Hale, S. 1997. “The soldier and the state — post-liberation women: the case of Eritrea’, draft monograph, Anthropology Department, University of

California, Los Angeles. WwW. 5 ‘vat h d tially th hout

Human Rights Watch (HRW) 1999. Hostile to Democracy: the Movement Omens OFganiZaltons Have increased exponentially tnrougnou

system and political repression in Uganda. London: HRW. Africa since the early 1990s as have the arenas in which women

Kasfir, N. 1998. ‘“No-Party Democracy” in Uganda’, Journal of Democracy have been able to assert their varied concerns. Today women are

9, 2: 49-63. organizing locally and nationally and are networking across the

Mariam, Y. H. 1994. ‘Ethiopian women in the period of socialist trans- continent on an unprecedented scale. They have been aggressively formation’, Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), 29 Oct: 57-62. using the media to demand their rights in a way not as evident in Ministry of Gender and Community Development. 1995. Women and the the early 1980s. In some countries they are taking their claims to 1995 Constitution of Uganda. Kampala: A WID-DANIDA Constituent Jand, inheritance and associational autonomy to court in ways not

Assembly Project. | | seen in the past. Women are challenging laws and constitutions that

Movement Secretariat. Movement Fifteenequality. Point Programme. Kampala: dthey hold dare litv. moving In addit h arinto pamphlet. o not1999. uphold gender In addition, Muhereza, F. E. & P. O. Otim. 1997. ‘Neutralising ethnicity under the 80OVeTnment, legislative, party, NGO and other leadership positions

NRM Government in Uganda’, mimeo, Kampala: Centre for Basic previously the exclusive domain of men. They are fighting for a

Research. female presence in areas where women were previously marginal-

Museveni, Y. K. 1997. Sowing the Mustard Seed. London: Macmillan. ized such as the leadership of religious institutions, sports clubs and Onyango Odongo 2000. A Political History of Uganda: the origin of Yoweri boards of private and public institutions.

Musevent’s Referendum 2000. Kampala: Monitor Publications. i, In these and other ways women have taken advantage of the Sawer, M. 2000. “Representation of women: questions of accountability, jaw political openings that occurred in the 1990s, even if the

paper presented to the 18th World Congress, International Political limited and precarious. The expansion of women’s:

Science Association, Quebec City, 1-6 Aug. openings Were anc P 1 Lif " i ed he

Press. ; ? ‘tobi

Tamale, S. 1999. When Hens Begin to Crow: gender and parliamentary politics in OF SANIZations and associational lite more generally accompanied the

Ueanda. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. move away from the older single party systems toward multi-party

Tripp, A. M. 2000. Women and Politics in Uganda. Oxford: James Currey. politics and the demise of military regimes in favor of civilian rule.

Tripp, A. M. 2002. ‘Conflicting visions of community and citizenship: The expansion of freedom of speech and of association, although women’s rights and cultural diversity in Uganda’, in M. Molyneux & S.__ usually constrained, also increased possibilities for new forms of Razavi, eds., Gender, Justice, Development, and Rights. Oxford University mobilization. The international women’s movement and, in

a, eae particular the 1985 and 1995 UN Women’s conferences in Nairobi

bors ; une. Women and Land Rights in Uganda. Kampala: Friedrich 444 Beijing respectively, gave added impetus to women’s mobilizaUWONET. 2000. ‘The People’s Manifesto’. mimeo, Kampala: UWONET. "0. Moreover, shifting donor strategies gave greater emphasis to UWONET & Association of Women Parliamentarians (AWOPA). 1998. non-governmental organizations 1n the 1990s, and women’s Proposed Amendments on the Land Bill 1998. Kampala: UDWONET. organizations were among the main beneficiaries of the new Waylen, G. 1994. ‘Women and democratisation: conceptualising gender funding orientations. The expansion of the use of the cell phone,

Aili Mari Tripp/Women in Movement: Transformations in African Political Landscapes ¢ 235

e-mail and the Internet in the late 1990s, although primarily among For example, Maendeleo Ya Wanawake (MYW), which has had the urban organizations, enhanced networking exponentially, not the largest membership of any organization in Kenya, was confined only Africa-wide and internationally but also domestically. These to improving childcare, domestic care, handicrafts, agricultural new conditions, coupled with a significant increase in secondary techniques, literacy and engaging in sports (Wipper 1975: 100). The and university educated women since independence, set the stage conservative stance of this organization, which persists to this day, is

for new forms of women’s mobilization. reflected in the thinking of its president at the time, Jane Kiano,

This article first summarizes the patterns of women’s mobiliza- who claimed in 1972 that “women in this country do not need a tion in the period after independence in the early 1960s up to the liberation movement because all doors are open to us’ (Sahle 1998: late 1980s, when new forms of women’s mobilization began to 178). Hussaina Abdullah (1993: 27) argued that the key stateemerge. It then explores some of the main factors that account for sponsored women’s institutions in Nigeria, i.e. Better Life Prothese changes. In the next section it looks at some of the charac- gramme, National Commission for Women and National Council teristics of women’s new mobilization strategies, including the of Women’s societies, were primarily concerned with keeping

diversity in the types of organizations created, the autonomy of women in their roles as mothers. Ngugi says of the Nigerian these new associations from the regime and/or ruling party in terms National Council of Women’s Societies, which was formed in of leadership, financing and agendas. The article examines the ways 1959: ‘Unlike the human rights organizations like FIDA [Women in which autonomy was challenged by the authorities and defended Lawyers], it has not ruffled the feathers of the male dominated state by women’s organizations. It shows how in this period women’s _ by taking up issues on women’s rights vis-d-vis men, such as equality associations expanded their focus from developmental issues to the and equal representation’ (c. 2001: 6).

inclusion of more explicitly political concerns through legislative At the national level, the mass women’s organizations had been and constitutional changes, advocacy and demands for female tied to the single party or regime. Some were formed after 1975 in leadership and representation. The article then identifies ways in response to the UN Resolution calling on member states “establish which women’s collective action is distinct from that of other the appropriate government machinery to accelerate the integration

interest groups. of women in development and the elimination of discrimination

These differences lie not only in its goals, but also in the size of against women on grounds of ‘sex’. In response to this resolution, the movements, their inclusiveness, the unique ways they link the some countries set up ministries of women (Cote d’Ivoire), others personal and political and the use of motherhood as a political established woman bureaus, departments or divisions within a resource. Finally, the article examines the diversity of debates within ministry of community development or some other non-gender the women’s movements and concludes with reasons for the specific rubric (Kenya). Yet others established commissions, com-

transformations in women’s mobilization after the late 1980s. mittees or councils like the National Council on Women and The article outlines some of the main changes that have Development formed by the ruling National Redemption Council occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. It recognizes that even though in Ghana or the National Council of Women in Uganda formed by Africa is a continent of enormous diversity based on culture, Idi Amin that was situated inside the Prime Minister’s office. In language, colonial legacy, history, political orientation and other creating the Council, Amin simultaneously banned all other dimensions, some general patterns and trends have emerged in women’s organizations. By 1985 almost all African countries had set women’s mobilization in the context of political liberalization. This up a national machinery of some kind and the mass organizations article is thus one of the first attempts to begin to identify a set of were generally under the auspices of these machineries. The success

commonalities shared by a growing number of women’s move- of the machineries was limited by the extent to which their ments in Africa. Because of this intended focus, it does not explore respective governments funded them (Tsikata 1989: 81; Mama

many of the differences that will need to be further interrogated. 1995: 40). |

The article is, however, limited by the lack of country-specific Where the national machineries were not in and of themselves literature in several parts of Africa, especially in several of the an umbrella organization for local women’s groups, umbrella francophone and lusophone countries. As more research is pub- organizations were sometimes formed by the ruling authorities, like lished on these parts of Africa, the conclusions will no doubt become the Nigerian National Council of Women’s Societies (NCWS),.

more nuanced. Other such politically inspired organizations catered to particular constituencies like the Better Life for Rural Women in Nigeria. Still

Women’s mobilization after independence others were aimed at mobilizing all women under one mass

organization, for example, the 31st December Women’s Movement In the earlier post-independence period, women’s organizations in Ghana, Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania, Women’s League in

tended to be focused around religious, welfare and domestic Zambia and Association des Femmes de Niger (AFN). These concerns. Local handicrafts, savings, farming, income-generating, organizations were generally run along patronage lines by wives, religious and cultural clubs dominated the associational landscape of daughters and relatives of male leaders in the regime. For example,

women. The discourse was primarily one of ‘developmentalism’ in Nigeria until the 1990s, wives of prominent state officials

(Ngugi c. 2001). Women’s organizations adopted a Women in Deve- dominated the leadership of NCWS. }

lopment approach, which was generally divorced from political First ladies frequently headed up the larger national women’s concerns. They did focus on research into discriminatory practices organizations: Nana Ageman Rawlings chaired the 31st December

and laws and on consciousness raising, referred to in English- Women’s Movement in Ghana; Maryam Babangida headed the speaking Africa as “gender sensitization’ or ‘conscientization’ (Geisler Better Life Programme for Rural Women in Nigeria; while Betty 1995: 546). However, in general they were reluctant to engage in Kaunda was affiliated with Women’s League in Zambia. In the advocacy and push for changes in laws, if it put them at odds with 1990s first ladies started becoming patrons of the new independent

the government authorities. NGOs as the large mass organizations lost their appeal. For example,

236 ¢ Gender & Governance

Janet Museveni, wife of Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, is thousands of affiliates throughout the country, remained until 2002 patron of the popular Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans linked to the dominant party in Kenya, the Kenya African National (UWESO). However, even these NGOs have been used politically Union, but was officially an independent organization. as in the Zambian case, where the former president’s wife, Vera There are still countries where this old model persists, that have Chiluba, used her Hope Foundation to attack the political opposition. not embraced new autonomous organizations. For example in In the past, as in the case of mass party-affiliated organizations Eritrea today, there is basically only one national women’s organizalike Maendeleo Ya Wanawake (MYW) in Kenya, nominees for tion, the National Union of Eritrean Women (NUEW), which was leadership elections typically had to be approved by the ruling party. founded by the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front in 1979, when it Their funding generally came from the party or government. Their was fighting for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia. After party-dictated agendas were limited and basically did not challenge independence was achieved in 1991, the 200,000-member organthe status quo when it came to pushing for women’s advancement. ization became semi-autonomous and shifted to educate women for This is not to say there were no instances of political mobilization involvement in service provision and project management, but did for women. However, generally it was limited. For example, little in the way of advocacy. It did succeed in making a few modest NCWS in Nigeria lobbied the Government to amend its discrimi- changes in the old Ethiopian civil code. For example, marriage natory population control policies that targeted only women and_ contracts had to be made with the full consent of both parties; the not men. It also got the state commission for women upgraded into _ eligible age for marriage for girls was raised from 15 years old to 18 a fully-fledged Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development. years old to match that of men; and the sentence for rape was But for the most part, these structures did not tackle the difficult extended to fifteen years. But NUEW did little to concretely address laws, policies and practices that discriminated against women. the backlash against women that occurred after independence from Another case in point is Ghana under Jerry Rawlings, who came Ethiopia. Many felt that there was a need for a multiplicity of to power through a military takeover and headed up a populist organizations to work on the most pressing issues, but the few government under the Provisional National Defence Council organizations that attempted to work as autonomous organizations (PNDC) from 1981 to 2000. The PNDC reformed laws affecting were closed down by the Government on various pretexts (Connell women, including inheritance laws and the banning of degrading 1998).

widowhood rites. The national machinery charged with co-

ordinating women’s activities, the National Council for Women _ peacons for the transformations in mobilization and Development (NCWD), was active in promoting such legislation. However, during these years, Ghana women’s movement What then gave rise to these new women’s movements in the 1980s was constrained by the Government both in terms of growth, and especially in the 1990s? There is no one explanation but some vitality, breadth of its agenda and capacity to bring about major of the most important reasons for women’s heightened activism in changes in the status of women. By trying to subsume the entire Africa would include the following:

women’s movement within the PNDC by creating the 31st As mentioned earlier, the move toward multi-partyism in most December Women’s Movement (31DWM) in 1981 as one of its African countries in the 1990s diminished the need for mass ‘revolutionary organizations’, the regime crippled the women’s organizations linked and directed by the single ruling party. Where movement and limited it to publicizing and promoting government _ the state opened up to women’s independent mobilization, the new policies. As Tsikata put it: the relationship between women’s groups organizations flourished. Thus, the opening of political space that and the regime ‘has been maintained at the expense of the women’s occurred in the early 1990s allowed for the formation of many new struggle. ... In so doing women’s issues have been shelved; or at autonomous organizations. In addition to these changing opporbest, they have received very casual attention’ (1989: 89). The close tunity structures, women also found that they had new resources at ties between the 31DWM and the government ruling party have _ their disposal. Much of formal politics in Africa is underwritten and

basically kept the organization from exerting pressure on the controlled by informal patronage politics. Economic crisis forced Government to adopt policies that would promote the welfare and many women into formal and informal economic associations and interests of women (Mikell 1984; Dei 1994: 140). As 31DWM into heightened entrepreneurial activity, giving them the resources absorbed many independent women’s organizations at the grass- with which to operate autonomously of state leaders. Increased

roots level, women were left with muted representation. donor funding of women’s associations also helped break the ties Even though these organizations claimed to represent the with patronage networks. In addition, with the increase in interests of all women in their respective countries, especially rural educational opportunities for girls and women in Africa, a larger women, they often served as mechanisms for generating votes and pool of capable women who were in a position to lead organizasupport for the country’s single party, getting women to attend tions emerged, especially at the national level. party rallies and meetings, and sing, dance and cook for visiting Women in many countries frequently had longer experiences dignitaries. Beyond these functions they were kept apolitical. They than men in creating and sustaining associations, having been were, in fact, used to contain women’s political activity within these involved in church-related activities, savings clubs, incomedesignated women’s organizations, which meant that few women _ generating groups, self-help associations, community improvement ever worked outside the bounds of these organizations to involve groups and many other informal and local organizations and themselves in the actual parties (Geisler 1995: 553). This further networks. Thus, they often found it easier to take advantage of new reinforced women’s political marginalization. In a multi-party _ political spaces afforded by liberalizing regimes. Women in Mali, for context, these state-affiliated mass unions, leagues, women’s wings of example, brought to NGOs their well-developed organizational parties and umbrella organizations decreased in importance as a __ skills, drawing on a long history of maintaining social and economic plurality of new independent associations emerged. In some cases, networks. As a result, women claimed a strong presence in the women’s organizations like Maendeleo Ya Wanawake, which had NGO movement both in terms of making sure development

Aili Mari Tripp/Women in Movement: Transformations in African Political Landscapes * 237

associations include programs that address women’s issues, but also the use of information and communication technologies.

in their own organizations that range from legal to health, educa- Finally, the expansion of media coverage of women’s issues, tion, credit and enterprise development associations (Kante and _ especially promoted by members of new women’s media associaHobgood 1994). Similarly, in Tanzania, it is no accident that the tions in various parts of Africa, provided the mainstream media main NGO networking body, Tanzania Association of Non- outlets and women’s own media houses an alternate coverage of Governmental Organizations (TANGO), was started by women’s women to counter the often demeaning and sexist portrayal of organizations and has had strong female representation in its leader- women in the media. Information on the activities of women’s

ship. organizations and their leaders has also helped publicize and give Donors placed greater emphasis on funding NGO activities in further impetus to the movements (Ojiambo Ochieng 1998: 33). the 1990s. For example, by the late 1990s, almost 40 percent of

USAID program funds in Africa were going to Private Voluntary ae ’ “le ae

Organizations and NGOs. Part of this aid was directed at NGOs Characteristics of new women’s mobilization because it was easier to ensure accountability from them than from A new generation of autonomous organizations emerged primarily the state, but also, as Owiti (2000) has pointed out, because of the after the 1985 UN Nairobi women’s conference, although a few had role they could play as counterweights to the state, as monitors of started earlier. The earliest of the new generation of organizations the state and as sources of reform and pressure for social justice and included Women in Nigeria, formed in 1982, Uganda Action for

democratization. Development, formed in 1986 and Tanzania Media Women’s For women’s organizations and movements, the 1990s saw a_ Association, formed in 1987. These associations became pioneers in shift in donor strategies from a sole emphasis on funding activities the new push to advance women’s rights. They were characterized

related to economic development, education, health and welfare by their autonomy from the state, which meant that they were concerns to an added interest in advocacy around women’s rights, heterogeneous in the kinds of issues they took up. and promoting women’s political leadership and political participation. In Africa, parties were generally weak and did not play much Heterogeneity of organizations of a role in advocacy, leaving associations to carry out many of the In the new context, the heterogeneity of organizations was striking. interest aggregation functions often associated with parties. Donors At the national level women formed myriad organizations, began to fund organizations involved in advocacy around equality including professional associations of women doctors, engineers, clauses in constitutions undergoing revision. They supported non- bankers, lawyers, accountants, market traders, entrepreneurs and partisan activities around legislation regarding women’s land owner- media workers. There were national women’s rights groups; ship, marriage and inheritance, female genital cutting, rape, domestic organizations focusing on specific issues like reproductive rights, violence and many other such issues. Other donors helped support violence against women and rape; groups catering to particular women’s caucuses of parliamentarians or members of constituent sections of the population, including disabled women and widows. assemblies. As the decade progressed, funding for national and Some provided services to women in areas of health, transportation,

regional networking also increased. banking, protection, legal aid, publishing and education to respond

Although the driving forces for these changes were internal, to the neglect of women in the mainstream institutions (Olojede international pressures and norms gave added impetus to these new 1999). New forms of developmentally oriented organizations demands. The international women’s movement played a significant became especially popular in the 1990s such as women’s credit and role in influencing women’s mobilization and encouraging women finance associations as well as hometown and development associain Africa to think how their struggles related to an emerging tions. Women also formed social and cultural organizations. Some globalization of women’s concern for equality (Mbire Barungi 1999: occupational and political institutions like trade unions and parties 435). The UN Beiying Conference on Women in 1995, for often had a wing devoted to women. example, encouraged women’s organizations to hold their govern- Most organizations, both at the local and national level, were in ments accountable to their various commitments to improving some way concerned with advancing women’s political, economic,

women’s status. legal or social status. Women’s advancement was being pushed on

Women’s organizations also learned considerably from sharing many perhaps unexpected fronts. The Uganda Women’s Football experiences and strategies with activists from other parts of Africa Association successfully worked to introduce women’s soccer and the world. As in Latin America, the Beying conference legiti- throughout the country. They sought corporate and government mized key elements of feminist discourse in African NGOs, parties, sponsorship for games, equipment, training and uniforms, all of states, international development agencies and other fora (Alvarez which have been difficult to come by (Zziwa 1996:15). Second

1998: 295). wives in polygamous relationships have been mobilizing in Uganda,

Networking carried out domestically, throughout Africa and Kenya and Tanzania and have been meeting on both a national and internationally, was greatly facilitated by the use of the Internet and regional basis. Women parliamentarians have national caucuses and

e-mail. Many regionally based organizations focused on making are also meeting regionally, for example the Union of Women information available to activists and policy makers on women’s Parliamentarians in East Africa. _ experiences, realities and organizational strategies. The use of cell Women even began to claim leadership of organizations that had phones especially, starting in the late 1990s, exponentially increased primarily a male-membership base, allowing them to introduce

the level of communications both within urban areas but also women’s concerns into new arenas. There were many firsts: a between rural and urban areas. This had a dramatic impact on the woman, Constantia Pandeni, was elected for the first time to head

ability of groups to mount campaigns and build political support the Mineworkers Union of Namibia in 2001; Olive Zaitun around various issues. New organizations like Gender in Africa Kigongo was the first woman elected president of Uganda National Information Network and Sangonet became involved in promoting Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 2002; and Solomy Balungi

238 ¢ Gender & Governance

Bossa was the first woman to head the Uganda Law Society in and political leanings. They came together in coalitions and

1993. networked around land issues, violence against women, women’s In war-torn areas, women organized across enemy lines (ethnic, political participation, constitutional reform and other such con-

clan, religious, regional) to find bases for peace. We saw bold efforts cerns, rather than attempting to form all-encompassing structures.

of this kind in Congo, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, The new autonomous organizations were also financially Sudan, Rwanda and other countries. Often they formed coalitions independent of the state or ruling party. Women in Nigeria (WIN), and networks for peace and/or collaborated in joint, mutually one of the earliest of these new organizations, had primarily funded beneficial activities that help build new bases for solidarity. its activities through membership fees, sale of publications, T-shirts, At the local level there were numerous multi-purpose clubs that levies, grants and donations from individuals, organizations and engaged in savings, farming, income-generating projects, handi- agencies with similar objectives. Members also provided skills free crafts, sports, cultural events and other functions, depending on the of charge or parts of their houses for office space. Changing donor needs and priorities of members (Strobel 1979; Feldman 1983: 68; strategies to assist organizations were evident as WIN gained

Mwaniki 1986: 215). external donor support for specific projects after 1991 (Olojede

Even many older organizational forms were revived or modified, 1999). including location-based development associations and dual sex Financial independence meant that the new organizations were organizations. One type of organization tied to a cultural gender outside the patronage networks that the ruling party and/or state division was the dual sex societies. There has been a revival of the used to build loyalty. Their very existence challenged the legitimacy dual sex governance structures in Igbo as well as other West African of state patronage, which had been on the decline throughout the societies. A dual sex political system is one in which representatives 1990s. This made these autonomous associations potentially of each gender govern their own members through a Council. In _ threatening to the state, especially if they involved large numbers of much of former Eastern Nigeria most communities had a broad- rural women, as was the case with the tree planting Green Belt based Women’s Governing Council that had sole jurisdiction over Movement in Kenya, that had been increasingly repressed by the wide ranging political, economic and cultural affairs of women, Government. The ruling party’s (Kenya African National Union from market issues, to relations with men, and to morality. These (KANU)) fight for the political loyalty of autonomous rural organizations, according to Nzegwu (1995), were autonomous of women’s groups was particularly fierce as their numbers increased the state, yet their decisions were binding regardless of social status, and economic resources grew. KANU politicians courted and education or income level. Moreover, the local councils could manipulated local women’s groups and made promises of patronage represent women living as far apart as Lagos, Kano or New York. in order to win their votes (Sahle 1998: 175, 182-4). Some male Their leaders serviced a wide range of associations and therefore politicians even formed women’s groups through their female were multifaceted in their approach, since they were concerned relatives in order to garner votes (Kabira and Nzioki 1993: 70). with social, cultural, religious, economic and political issues simul- Thus, many have concluded, as Kabira and Nzioki did in Kenya,

taneously (Nzegwu 1995). that the ‘first and most important issue to resolve is the question of

Some organizations had branches throughout Africa, including autonomy’ (1993: 73). the Forum for African Women’s Educationalists (FAWE) that Associational autonomy was critical to the success and legitimacy worked on issues having to do with girls’ education; Women in of this new generation of organizations. When the 12 June 1993 Law and Development (WILDAF); Society for Women and AIDS Nigerian presidential elections were annulled, this led to a serious in Africa; Akina Mama wa Africa; and many others. Others were human rights crisis. WIN and other human rights and proregionally based, including Women and Law in East Africa and democracy activists launched a media campaign and demonstrated Southern Africa and Association de Lutte Contre les Violences against the human rights abuses under the military administration, Faites aux Femmes. Still others were part of international including the planting of explosives; disappearances of opposition associations, for example, the International Federation of Women politicians as well as human nghts and pro-democracy activists; and Lawyers (FIDA), Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), destruction of public property (Olojede 1999). These efforts and

Girl Guides and Zonta International. others eventually culminated in the restoration of an elected civilian

Most organizations in which women have involved themselves government in May 1999, after which the most blatant human were gender specfic, partly as an outgrowth of cultural divisions of rights violations diminished considerably (Obiorah 2001). But labor and a historic preference for gender specific organization. clearly the organizations tied to the regime did not respond to the Women have often shared an implicit understanding based on past annulment of the elections in the same way that the autonomous experiences that by cooperating with men in mixed organizations, ones did. As the National Council of Women’s Societies (NCWS) they run the risk that men might hijack the organizations and their benefitted from government largesse, it was ‘very unlikely for

finances. NCWS to pursue autonomous positions or present strong opposition to government on significant political issues such as political Autonomy accountability and human rights’, Olojede (1999: 33) argues. The new generation of organizations tended to be independent of More than at any time in Africa’s post-independence period, the regime and of ruling political parties both in terms of their women’s organizations found themselves challenging their

leadership and agendas. Perhaps in reaction to the dominance of governments’ gender policies, pushing for changes in legislation and single women’s organizations and umbrella organizations under policy regarding inheritance and property ownership, land ownerauthoritarian rule, there was little interest in creating large over- ship, women’s political leadership and many other issues. But in arching organizations and no attempt to create organizations that Africa, where the majority of regimes today are semi-authoritarian, could speak for all women’s interests, as there had been in the past. power is still thought of in zero-sum terms, even in a multi-party Instead, the new organizations represented a diversity of interests context. Any manifestation of opposition to government policy,

Aili Mari Tripp/Women in Movement: Transformations in African Political Landscapes * 239

even basic advocacy around a policy change, could be interpreted ordered women District Commissioners to discourage women from by the authorities as a sign of adopting an anti-governmental participating in BAWATA because it was being managed by women position. NGO mobilization, especially where it is active, is seen who were allegedly too ‘independent-minded’. frequently as ‘political’, hence ‘anti-governmental’ and threatening. BAWATA took the matter to the High Court on the grounds As a result, some organizations came under attack by their govern-__ that the government action was unconstitutional and in violation of ments, which tried to revoke their registration, co-opt their leader- international human rights conventions, to which Tanzania is a ship, buy off the organizations and harass and manipulate their signatory. The Court issued an injunction against the Government

leaders. prohibiting it from deregistering BAWATA. In the meantime,

A case in point is a struggle that erupted after the 1995 formation members of BAWATA faced death threats, harassment and of the Tanzanian Women’s Council (BAWATA), which had been intimidation, sometimes even from security officers. Husbands of launched by the ruling party’s women’s wing, Umoja wa Wana- BAWATA leaders were demoted or lost their government jobs, wake wa Tanzania (UWT). Initially, elements within the leadership while members of the organization’s branches faced intimidation of the UWT had wanted to make the wing independent of the from local authorities. Local chapters found themselves unable to party, but the top party and the UWT leadership opposed this meet and run their nursery schools and day care centers. Although strategy. Instead, they decided to form an independent non- BAWATA eventually won its case against the Government, in the governmental umbrella organization that could access donor funds process the organization was destroyed and the intimidation of its yet remain under UWT’s thumb. One top official in the ministry leadership left local chapters in disarray. explained that women’s NGOs did not feel “comfortable with the The deregistration of BAWATA was widely condemned by Ministry’ and so the thinking was that the Ministry would find it other NGOs who were disturbed and demoralized by the implicaeasier to monitor, regulate and collaborate with women’s groups _ tions of this action on the freedom of association. As one lawyer and

through a separate council. journalist, Robert Rweyemamu put it:

BAWATAs leadership envisioned a broad-based autonomous Can an NGO geared to the development of the people be comorganization was to push forfrom women’s advancement on a } 7 ae of ;that ; ws pletely cut off political life? It leader[the deregistration number of fronts, including strengthening women’s political ; devoted to ; or :for . ;legislative BAWATA] is aconducting test forcivic those who we claim to be ship, pushing change and education. . ; : uplifting the social, economic and cultural standards of TanIt claimed a membership of 150,000 in 3,000 groups, although its zanians. (Rweyemamu 1997: 9)

actual strength at the grassroots level is disputed. BAWATA became y

involved in policy advocacy on issues such as violence against In Tanzania, which has been a multi-party state since 1992, the women, sexual abuse of children, improved social services delivery, BAWATA case illustrates the limits of freedom of association and inheritance laws, land ownership and girls’ access to education. speech, even in a fairly tolerant country. The fate of BAWATA is BAWATA drew up a document evaluating each of the presidential indicative of the prevalent view that equates autonomous noncandidates and their parties in the 1995 elections regarding women. governmental activities with an anti-governmental stance, making In doing so, they had overstepped their bounds in a society where any kind of advocacy difficult.

the female electorate was critical to the ruling party’s continued In Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa the most active women’s

success. organizations with the most far-reaching agendas often had As Chris Peter explained: difficulty registering, or had their registration delayed indefinitely.

Every sensible State knows that women are faithful voters. They They faced external manipulations and pressures to keep opposition party members from leadership of the organizations, even though

normally register andactivities actually were go tonon-partisan vote. Unlike mencontext who talk a .association. C ae —e :They ; their in the of the lot and do little. might even register only toinforget to vote ;NGOs : In the late 1980s and especially the 1990s, found on the elections day. Thus women are regarded as agovernmental safe and sure ; er efforts to create anthem: selves opposing legislative agency

constituency and whoever controls them is guaranteed victory. © & rer ;

, forthis the monitoring andBAWATA control of NGO activities By touching sensitive area was seen as a ;in Tanzania, mischievous lot. (Peter 1999: 11) Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Uganda. Uganda has some of the best NGO-government relations in Africa, but in The Ministry of Home Affairs banned BAWATA on the grounds 2001 even Ugandan NGOs were forced to protest stepped-up

that it was operating as a political party and was not holding meetings government efforts to increase scrutiny of NGOs and threaten their or submitting annual financial accounts to the Registrar of Societies. autonomy. In particular they rejected government efforts to create a

The Minister of Home Affairs warned in July 1997 that NGOs _ board that would be based in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, giving engaging in hostile exchanges of words with the Government the board a focus on security rather than developmental concerns. would risk losing their registration as would NGOs that confronted All these examples of repression or efforts to control and monitor

the Government through forums that created confusion and NGOs exposed the limits of freedom of association even in insecurity. An NGO policy drafted by the Office of the Vice liberalizing countries.

President (1997: 5) stated that ‘NGOs as legal entities are restricted | from engaging in any activity that will be construed to be political Emphasis on political strategies in nature’ but are allowed to ‘engage in debate on development Although the older welfare and domestic agendas persisted into the issues’. The charges against BAWATA, which by all accounts were 1990s in women’s organizations, a new emphasis on political parfabricated, indicated that the party and the Government were not ticipation emerged. New women’s organizations formed to improve interested in permitting the formation of independent organizations leadership skills, encourage women’s political involvement on a with a bold agenda that might diverge from the party interests. One non-partisan basis, lobby for women’s political leadership, press for top UWT leader, who was also the Minister of Local Government, legislative changes and conduct civic education. Groups mobilized

240 ¢ Gender & Governance | around issues like domestic violence, rape, reproductive rights, sex women’s organizations when it came to making a concerted effort education in the school curriculum, female genital cutting, sexual to influence the constitution-writing process. Women’s organizaharassment, disparaging representation of women in the media, tions wrote more memoranda submitted to the Constitutional Comcorruption and other concerns that had rarely been addressed by the mission than any other sector of society (Bainomugisha 1999: 93). women’s movements in the past and often were considered taboo The number of women’s networks, coalitions and ad hoc issue-

by the Government. oriented alliances was multiplying throughout Africa, also suggest-

Kabira and Nzioki underscored the need for women to assert ing a strengthening of the non-governmental sector. Given the

themselves politically in a 1993 statement that was indicative of the weakness of existing political parties, women’s NGO coalitions and change in thinking that had occurred in the early 1990s, that is, a networks represented a more stable coalescing of interests. In a shift from a previous emphasis strictly on developmental approaches country like Uganda, coalitions of NGOs formed in the 1990s

to a new adoption of political strategies. As they explained: around national debt, domestic violence, the common property

oi. criticize , Lo, , . clause within the Land Act, the domestic relations bill and to The as being elitist, :were : weer ; ; - state . ae may . change thewomen’s way in organisations which women politicians elected through

ineffective, politically motivated,: anmisguided orwasforeign. : | ; Also more electoral college that susceptible toBut manipulation. women have to go where power and resources are by being - ' incidents. mor ; ad hoc and short-term coalitions formed around particular powerful and resourceful themselves. Since groups know formed, and 5 or Such coalitions for example, when a male member of express this desire, weslapped suggest athat women’s organisations and They parliament almost female member of parliament. political leaders focus; .their attention on the long term changes ¢ _- the : Buganda ee ormed to abolish customary practicethat in which touch on the root causes of women inequality and subordination ,. ; ing was to have had sexual relations with a virgin prior to his in society. This approach will advance the women’s cause _ kei , oar

. , oe wedding ceremony in as 1998; to protest the Italian court’s ruling in towards meaningful transformation opposed to individual 1999 oO . a. that a woman wearing jeans could not be raped; and to advancement. (Kabira and Nzioki 1993: 73) :protest 7 what they saw as racist statements of a top US Agency for Development officer in 2001.

Distinctiveness of women’s collectiveBuilding action ds ae cross-cutting ties

Women’s mobilization, while sharing much in common with other A related characteristic of women’s mobilization that set it apart interest groups, also stood apart from them in important ways. They from other forms of mobilization was the keen interest in building often represented the largest organized group within society. Their ties across ethnic, clan and religious lines, especially where relations new organizations were not only pluralistic in the kinds of issues in the broader society had been conflictual. As women’s organizathey took up, they were also internally pluralistic in their make-up. tions were trying to influence opinion, practice and policy affecting The demise of the single party and its affiliated women’s organiza-__ over half of society, the movements generally sought to be as broad tion often meant a decline in ethnically based mobilization in which as possible and saw their goal as influencing society at large. Unlike the ethnic group in political power dominated women’s associations. other movements, women who identified with aspects of the Similarly expanded educational opportunities also helped break the women’s movement could be found in government, in the media, past dominance of specific ethnic or religious groups in the leader- in trade unions, in environmental and human rights groups, in their

ship of women’s groups, who had come from regions where own organizations, in grassroots organizations and throughout missionary education had been concentrated. Women’s mobilization society. In other words, the movement permeated society in a way also drew in particular ways on women’s identification with that other societal interests did not. Even environmental and human motherhood and the private sphere to make claims on participation rights activists hardly claimed the kind of popular support the in the public sphere. But it also worked the other way around as women’s movements enjoyed in many countries. Other societal women saw that participation in the public sphere gave them organizations were focused around catering to the interests of their entitlements to make claims for greater decision making within the _ particular constituencies such as labor, cooperatives, vendors and

home. therefore did not aspire to build a popular base. For example, in South Africa, no other group united as broad a

Largest organized sector spectrum of individuals as the Women’s National Coalition

Women’s associations often constituted the largest organized sector (WNC), which was formed in 1991. It brought together eighty-

in many countries. They made up the majority of NGOs in one organizational affiliates and thirteen regional alliances of countries like Tanzania and Mali. In Kenya they were the fastest women’s organizations, including organizations affiliated with the srowing sector of civil society (Ngugi c. 2001). Other sectors may African National Congress, the Inkatha Freedom Party, the have even ended up numerically dominated by women’s organiza- National Party, Pan Africanist Congress, Azanian Peoples Organiza-

tions. The largest proportion of human rights organizations in tion and the Democratic Party. WNC also brought together Africa, for example, were women’s rights organizations. In Kenya _ interests as diverse as the Rural Women’s Movement, Union of | AO per cent of all human rights groups operating in 1992-7 were Jewish Women and the South African Domestic Workers Union. women’s organizations. The majority of lay organizations in both Over three million women participated in focus groups organized Protestant and Catholic churches were women’s groups and by WNC to voice their opinions on women’s concerns. Regional women in general were more active than men in church activities. and national conferences were held and a Woman’s Charter was Although men participated in savings and credit associations, by far drafted and endorsed by the national parliament and all nine the majority of participants in such organizations in most African regional parliaments in 1994. The Charter addressed a broad range countries were women. In Uganda, it was widely acknowledged of concerns, including equality, legal rights, economic issues, that no other societal group was as organized and cohesive as_ education, health, politics and violence against women (Kemp et al.

Aili Mari Tripp/Women in Movement: Transformations in African Political Landscapes ¢ 241

1995: 151). The new constitution allows for the Charter to be used Motherhood as a basis of political authority , as a basis for reforming government policy regarding gender The public and private spheres are connected in other ways as well.

concerns. Women have different resources from men with which to fight for The inclusiveness could be found along many dimensions. change in the context of political movements. Due to the

Women’s oganizations, unlike most civil society actors (with some historically cultural separation between women’s and men’s important exceptions like hometown and development associa- mobilization, women have often used their position as ‘mothers’ as tions), were usually also very concerned with how to build rural- a basis of moral authority from which to argue for their inclusion in urban linkages and bridge some of the gaps that divided better politics. They have used it as a resource with which to demand educated women involved in national organizations from rural political changes not only in practice, but also in political culture,

women in local groups. demanding that the values of nurturing, caring and justice be Due to the limited resources of NGOs and the monetary included in political practice and that corruption be rejected. As

weakness of their constituent base, they relied heavily on donors to Winnie Byanyima, Ugandan Member of Parliament and leader of fund their activities. This has resulted in what some might call the the women’s rights group Forum for Women in Development,

‘NGO-ization’ of feminism, which refers to the evolution of a explained in a reference to ‘eating’ (a metaphor with multiple feminist movement of professionals that since the 1995 UN Beying meanings but often connoting personal appropriation of state conference has come to rely heavily on urban-educated women. In _ resources):

the Latin American these professionals were divorced from ;;; ; women’s or Valuescontext which we women care1998: about such as NGOs caring, serving, grassroots organizations (Alvarez 306-8). ye 4: ,. ; : ; building, reconciling, healing and sheer decency are becoming

were important to the women’s movements in Africa and eating were very 7 . oe self| absent from our political culture. This is crude, much a part of them, but they were not the only arena of women’s ar ; whiner ar ; : ;There centered, shallow, narrow and ignorant. mobilization. didegoistic, not exist in Africa the same kindWe of should rift a ;ban a

; , : women’s eating from our politicaland language. Madam Chairman,ae ... it is a between NGOs the ‘movement’. Although there were gaps between the rural and urban groups culture which we must denounce and do away with if we are to

: oy start a new nation. (Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly

and between educated and poorer women’s organizations, the aim 1994: 1490)

was always explicitly to bridge those gaps and cooperate as much as resources and time permitted. It was not just national organizations The use of motherhood is not the only basis for women’s that sought these linkages. In Uganda, even educated women in authority, nor is it the only resource used by women, but neither is

_ rural towns sought to share their income-generating skills and it considered controversial nor problematic in the way that it is know-how regarding nutrition, child-rearing, prenatal care and regarded by many western feminist academics and activists. Judith preventative health measures with poorer rural women. Others Van Allen (2000) has shown that the public/private divide in encouraged rural women to get into business or to save money. For Tswana society, but even more generally in Africa, does not example, A Stitch in Time Women’s Association was formed in correspond to western perceptions, which draw a sharp divide Kabale in 1989 for women involved in tailoring, crocheting and between domestic/household/child-rearing activities and work/

2000). ; . ; i, Making the political personal a

making carpets. But it also had as an objective to help poorer less _ politics/warfare. In Africa, women’s labor, whether it is in the fields,

educated women’s groups get involved in income-generating in a factory or as a professional is generally seen as an extension of activities and savings clubs with the understanding that women’s her reproductive activities, as part of caring for her children, and - economic clout was a key to their empowerment. I found many feeding and clothing them. In politics, as in other public ‘spaces’ such examples of rural-urban linkages in my study of the political women generally want equality but they do not aspire to be impact of women’s associations in Uganda 1992-2000 (Tripp considered in the same way as men. As Van Allen explains: Women’s rights discourse itself reflects the continuing construc-

. a: tion of ‘woman’ as ‘mother’, and the assertion of the nurturing,

ae - ; provisioning, suckling motheraction as a modelto of do female One of the“a4: reasons have prioritized osslogans arleadership, ; Serena bothwomen in its goals and in its political language ... Inhas campaign and

with indignities and difficulties they face on the domesticisfront. 5 a OF. ; . the campaign in general, this assumption carried into a Unlike other sectors discourse of society, there is no way to address women’s vs ; , . positive statement about women: they are better fitted than men advancement in the public realm; without also tackling tg ic ; to be caretakers. to be in government because ittheir is in their nature obstacles on the domestic front and vice versa. In African move- 8) i (Van Allen 2000:

ments, women have not only made the personal political, but they have also sought political power and influence in order to make the One women’s rights organization, Emang Basadi, even has had political personal (Geiger 1998). The battle in the two spheres is as its slogan: “Vote a Woman! Suckle the Nation! inseparable. For example, in the 2001 Ugandan presidential elec- Women sometimes draw on their domestic experiences to create

tions, women’s organizations, including the Uganda Women’s a new kind of political imagery that defies the paternal one that Network (UWONET), made appeals to the Electoral Commission evolved with the colonial state and has remained in the postcolonial

and the media to warn against intimidation and harassment by context. For example, in Kenya during the 1992 elections, one husbands of wives over differing political opinions. In the 1996 delegate argued at a meeting of the National Committee on the elections there were numerous reports of women killed, beaten, Status of Women that since women carry the responsibility for the thrown out of homes and some had their voters’ card grabbed from _ security and stability of the family and community ‘let it be underthem or destroyed as a result of these differing views. As a result of stood that women are already minister of culture in their own official and media warnings, there were no reported incidents of homes’ and now they want to take charge of key portfolios (Inter

politically related domestic violence in the 2001 elections. Press Service online 1992).

242 « Gender & Governance

Alexandra Tibbetts (1994) shows how elderly rural mothers of There have been debates over the utility of women’s ministries pro-democracy political prisoners in Kenya drew on their position in ensuring the adoption of feminist demands in government (South

of being mothers in 1992 to claim a public political identity in Africa) given that so many ministries were underfunded, underprotesting the imprisonment of their sons, who had been staffed and focused on women’s domestic roles (Seidman 1999). incarcerated since October 1990 for demanding multi-partyism and Others have debated the utility of working within political parties, who were still imprisoned long after multi-partyism had been given their weakness and lack of interest in women’s concerns. In

adopted in December 1991. The moral authority of older mothers some movements, there were debates over how to regard sex made their protest a particularly powerful one in demanding justice, workers and whether to incorporate their demands into the especially when they stripped themselves naked in a confrontation women’s movement. The spread of AIDS made these debates all the with police, who were trying to end their hunger strike in Uhuru more contentious. Some have discussed the extent to which NGOs Park in the center of Nairobi. They drew on the prevalent cultural should be primarily accountable to the people they work with or to imagery and symbolism to give added potency to their protest, donors (Tsikata 1995: 11). Poor and educated professional women drawing attention to the maternal body, which in Kenyan society is have differed over the need to tax women, the latter seeing tax a symbol of the life-generating potential of women. In the Kenyan payment as an obligation of equal citizenship, while poorer women context, and also more generally in Africa, the public nakedness of resenting the additional burden. Women’s right to land inheritance women, especially older women, is the ultimate curse, in this has also divided women. For some, their loyalties lay with their clan particular case, aimed at the Government. The women, who had _ and the customary patrilineal practice in which properties of the never been involved in politics, launched their protest in February deceased husband are claimed by his kin. Others see the right to 1992. As one of the women, Gladys Thiitu wa Kariuki, put it “The own and inherit property as one that needs to be extended to pain of bearing a child does not allow me to let my son continue women. suffering in prison.’ Not only did the women speak bravely against The expansion of educational opportunities since independence the injustices of the Government, but hundreds of Kenyans came to meant that there was a larger pool of university educated profeswhere the women were staging their hunger strike and set up sional women in the new organizations. It was not uncommon to

microphones for anyone who wished to speak. find tensions between the new professional women and the women

Although the maternal symbolism is still powerful, Van Allen in the women’s wing of the ruling party, who tended to have had argues that in Botswana and other parts of Africa, there is a gradual less formal education. Professional women often felt that the ruling shift taking place as a result of the expansion of market forces from party women did little to advance women’s equality, while the the system of authority based on kinship to a gender-based system as_ leaders of the party organizations feared competition posed by the in the West. In other words, people had been relating to each other NGOs run by professional women, which manifested itself in

primarily in the context of the kin categories such as ‘father’, conflicts over access to donor funds as well as other issues. Even ‘mother’, ‘son’ and ‘daughter’. Increasingly, however, they are among the professional women, there appeared to be emerging adopting a gender system based on the categories, male and female, differences between an older generation of activists and the younger in which social relations are not defined by custom but are being more radical activists who, while mindful and respectful of the older negotiated within the context of changing urban capitalist societies activists, would have liked to see a faster pace of change in the new

(Van Allen 2000). organizations and were not afraid to embrace issues that had been virtually taboo among the older generations such as abortion and

Debates within women’s movements lesbian nights. All these debates nevertheless fell along many lines ,

based on levels of education, class, generation and urban vs. rural Given the pluralism seen in types of organizations found in African residence. Many of the debates reflected the transitions societies women’s movements and given the inclusiveness of their member- were undergoing with respect to gender relations. ships, it comes as no surprise that women’s movements encompass.a

plurality of views regarding how women’s interests should best be Conclusion

conceived, prioritized and pursued. The debates have varied depending on the country and organization. I will highlight a few The most important change that occurred in the late 1980s and

issues that have been evident in multiple contexts. 1990s was the creation of autonomous organizations that began to

In some countries, there were debates over the utility of reserved challenge the stranglehold clientelism and state patronage had on seats and quotas for women in legislatures (e.g. Cameroon, Tanzania, women’s mobilization in the post-independence period. The new

Nigeria, Kenya) and how women occupying those seats should be autonomy allowed women to create organizations and forge selected (Uganda) (Koda and Shayo 1994: 11; Killian 2000). Others alliances across ethnic, religious, clan, racial, rural-urban, generahave disagreed over which women’s interests should be prioritized. tional and other divides. Associational autonomy made it possible The South African Commission on Gender Equality, formed in for women’s organizations to challenge corruption, injustice and 1996, found itself by 2000 embroiled in internal conflicts over how _ their roots in clientelistic and patronage practices. It meant that they feminist concerns ought to be raised in the context of addressing could freely select their own leaders, create their own agendas and racial and economic inequalities. Some wanted to privilege the pursue their own sources of funding. It helped women’s organizainterests of poor rural women, for whom issues like child support, tions to expand their agendas from a focus on income-generating job creation and access to water were paramount. Others, mindful and welfare concerns to a more politicized agenda. It allowed

of their urban-educated feminist constituency, thought that the women to broaden their demands to challenge the fundamental commission should be a site for ‘theoretically informed feminist laws, structures, and practices that constrained them. Many for the challenges to gender hierarchy’ and should not shy away from first time took on issues like domestic violence, female genital taking up important yet controversial issues (Seidman 2001: 18). cutting and rape that had been considered taboo in the past.

Aili Mari Tripp/Women in Movement: Transformations in African Political Landscapes ¢ 243

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244 ¢ Index

TO BG Qbakuy, S.O., 198 59, 66, 238 Index Bledsoe, Caroline, v, 6, 8, 80-9 — Connell, R.W., 187-8

Boakye Yiadom, A.K., 192-3 Conseil Colonial, 54, 55, 56 Boama, James, 188-9, 190, 193 Constituent Assembly (CA)

Boama, Rosina, 203, 206 (Uganda), 226, 227, 228,

AAWORD (Association of Apostolic churches, 11 Bohannan, Paul, 134 229, 232 African Women for Ardener, Shirley, 11, 41 Borno, 156, 158 Constitutional Commission

42 220 104, 106 Conservative Party (Uganda),

Research and Development), Ardua, Mary (Mrs Nkrumah), Boserup, Ester, 3, 7, 26, 103, (Uganda), 227, 228-9, 240

Aba Women’s War, 217 Asante (Ashanti), 12, 26, 28, Botswana, 239, 242 225 Abdullah, Hussaina, 235 188, 189, 191, 196, 197, Bozzoli, Belinda, 9, 12, 185 Convention People’s Party Abeokuta, 143, 198, 217, 222 201-9 Britain/the British, 20, 23, 24, (CPP) (Ghana), 217, 218, Abetifi, 188, 189, 190, 191, Asante, Rev. E.K.O., 191-2, 82, 88, 125, 142, 145, 157, 219-20, 222

192, 193 193 178-9, 196, 200, 202, 206, Cooper, Barbara, v, 10, 12,

ABM (American Board of Asante Confederacy Council, 212 156-64

Mission), 180-1, 182, 183 206 Buganda, 128, 133-4, 148, 150, | Cornwall, Andrea, v, 1-19, 91

Accra, 9, 217, 218, 223 Asians, 125, 127 153, 225, 240 CPP (Convention People’s Acholonu, Catherine Obianuju, Asokore, 202, 206 Bujra, Janet M., v, 9, 123-32 Party) (Ghana), 217, 218, 4 Association de Lutte Contre les © Bujumbura, 53, 57— 219-20, 222 Action for Development Violences Faites aux Bunyoro, 75, 148, 150, 152, Cwezi, 148, 149, 153, 154

(ACFODE), 226 Femmes, 238 153, 154

Action Group (AG), 217, 221, Association des Femmes de Buo, Afuah, 202, 203, 205, 206 Dakar, 218

222, 223 Niger (AFN), 235 Burke, Timothy, v, 6, 64-71, Danquah, J.B., 190, 218, 219, Addae, Adwoa, 203-4, 205, 206 Association of African Women 90-1 220, 222 .

AEN (Association des Femmes for Research and Burundi, 6, 148, 149, 150,153 Dares Salaam, 127, 211, 212,

de Niger), 235 Development (AAWORD), — Busia, Abena, 2 213, 214 African Diaspora, 31, 37, 39 42 . Butler, Judith, 49, 50 ‘Dar es Salaam School’, 210, African Methodist Episcopal Awe, Bolanle, v, 3, 11, 196-200 Buyenzi, 57-8, 59, 60 215

Church, 185 Azanian Peoples Organization, = Bwiza see Belge Democratic Party (South

African National Congress 240 Byanyima, Winnie, 230-1, 232, Africa), 240

(ANC), 232, 240 . Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 218 241 Democratic Party (DP) Afro-Asian Solidarity (Uganda), 225, 226 Conference, 223 Babangida, Maryam, 235 CA see Constituent Assembly Denzer, LaRay, v-vi, 12, 217-

AG (Action Group), 217,221, | Baganda/Ganda, 2, 9, 129, 132- (CA) (Uganda) 24

222, 223 40, 153, 154, 225, 231 Cameroon, 41, 104, 105, 109, Diaspora, 31, 37, 39

Aidoo, Ama Ata, 34, 35 Bamako, 218, 220, 221 242 Diawara, Dr Daouda, 218, 220AIDS, 6, 91, 94, 96, 136, 230, Barth, Heinrich, 20, 21 Cape, the, 178, 179, 181, 182, 1

242 Basadi, Emang, 241 184 Domestic Relations Bill (ORB)

Aina, Olabisi, 31, 34, 35, 36,38 Basel Mission, 187, 188-90, Cape Town, 96, 101 (Uganda), 229, 230

Akan, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193 Catholics/Catholicism, 53, 55, Dove, Mabel, 12, 217-18, 219-

192, 193 BAWATA (Tanzanian Women’s 106, 225 20, 222, 223 -_

Akina Mama wa Africa, 238 Council), 239 Central Africa, 1, 105 DP (Democratic Party)

Akoto, Rev. Isaac M., 190-1, Bay, Edna G., 3, 81 Chanock, Martin, 12,78 - (Uganda), 225, 226

193 Beattie, John, 150, 152, 153 Chege, Mama, 130 DRB see Domestic Relations

Akuropon: Presbyterian Beauvoir, Simone de, 26, 103 Christianity, 5-6, 10-11, 45, 66, Bill (DRB) (Uganda)

Training College, 191 Beying conference, 234, 237, 129, 177-95, 196 Dryden, John, 143

Allman, Jean, v, 12, 201-10 241 Church Missionary Society Durban, 96 Amadiume, Ifi, 5 Beinart, William, 121, 185 (CMS), 150, 219

Amaury Talbot, Denise, 2, 23-4 Belge (Bwiza), 57, 58, 59 Clark, Gracia, 9, 205 East Africa, 1, 10, 124, 126,

American Board Mission Belgian Africa, 53-64 CMS (Church Missionary 128, 129, 130, 148-55, 237

(ABM), 180-1, 182, 183 Bemba, 104 Society), 150, 219 Eastern Cape, 95

Americans, 21, 183 Benin, 196, 200 Coalition for Political Eastern Regional Assembly, 222 African, 29-30 Beoku-Betts, Josephine, v, 2, Accountability to Women Effiduasi, 201, 203, 204, 206

see also United States 20-5 (Uganda), 229 Efunsetan, Iyalode, 198, 200

Amin, Idi, 133, 134-5, 225-6, Berger, Iris, v, 10, 148-55 Colonial Office, 142, 145 Egbe Omo Oduduwa, 221

235 Bernal, Victoria, v, 10, 164-77 Commission pour la Protection Egypt, 164, 169

ANC see African National Beti, 104, 105-9 des Indigénes, 59 Eickelman, Dale, 165, 174 Congress Better Life Programme for Rural Committee of Assistance to the Ekejiuba, Felicia I., vi, 4, 41-6 Anglicans, 178, 180, 181, 182, Women in Nigeria, 235 Needy, 58 Ekiti, 200 183, 184 Bigombe, Betty, 227, 231 Congo, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, Ekpo, Margaret, 222

Index ¢ 245

El Saadawi, Nawal; 10 Gold Coast, 217, 218, 220, 222 Jewkes, Rachel, vi, 7, 95-102 Léopoldville, 57 Engels, Friedrich, 26, 103 Gqosho, Mrs S., 180, 181, 183 Johannesburg, 179, 180, 183, Lesotho, 8

Eritrea, 231, 236 Green, Reginald, 133, 135 184 Lewis, Desiree, 4

Eritrean Peoples Liberation Green Belt Movement, 238 Joyce, Athol, 23 Lewis, I.M., 148, 150, 151, 154

Front, 236 Greenberg, David, 48, 49 Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, 11 Liberia, 2, 9, 23, 238

Esan, Wuraola Adepeju, 12, Grier, B., 204, 206 Lindsay, Lisa, vi, 9, 141-7, 188 217, 218-19, 221-2, 223 Guinea, 21, 105, 211 Kabale, 241 Little, Kenneth, 23

Ethiopia, 150, 218, 231, 236 Guinea-Bissau, 31 Kaberry, Phyllis, 103 Lobun, the, 199, 200

Europeans, 20, 21, 23, 24, 66, Gulf, the, 166, 167, 169, 170, Kabira, W.M., 238, 240 Local Councils (LCs) (Uganda),

67, 121, 125, 126, 141, 142, 171 Kadaga, Rebecca, 230, 231 227, 231

144, 145, 154 Guyer, Jane, vi, 7, 42, 81, 90, Kafire, Juliet Rainer, 226, 230 Lorde, Audre, 38

103-11, 117, 119, 121 Kagai, John, 77-8 Lovedu, 25 Fanon, F., 123-4, 193 Kalenjin, 124, 125 Luhya, 124, 125 Fauzia, 125, 126, 130 Hafkin, Nancy J., 3, 81 Kamba, 125, 128 Luo, 75 FAWE (Forum for African Handwerker, W. Penn, 9 Kampala, 7, 8, 9, 73, 90-5, 127, Lutherans, 178

Women’s Educationalists), Harrell-Bond, Barbara, 6 132-40, 231 Lyangombe (Ryangombe), 148,

238 Hausa, 5, 21, 47-52, 156, 157, Kano, 21, 47, 161 150, 151

Federation of African Women’s 158, 159, 160, 161 KANU see Kenya African

Clubs, 67 Hausaland, 47, 48, 156, 157, National Union McCaskie, T.C., 189, 201

Fester, Gertrude, 38-9 159, 160 Kanuri, 196 MacGaffey, Janet, 8, 133 FIDA (International Federation Hay, Margaret Jean, 3 Kaplan, Flora, 3 Madagascar, 165 ~ of Women Lawyers), 238 HIV, 6, 7, 90, 94, 96 Kasente, Deborah, 38 Maendeleo Ya Wanawake

Fisher, Humphrey, 156, 158 Hoffer, Carol, 23 Katsina, 157, 161 (MYW), 72-3, 235, 236

Fom, Afua, 203, 204, 205, 206 Horton, Robin 152 Kazibwe, Specioza, 231, 232 Makerere, 90, 91, 92, 93-4 Forde, Daryll, 104 Hudson-Weems, Clenora, 37 Keita, Aoua, 12, 217, 218, 219, Malawi, 8, 119-23, 239

Fortes, Meyer, 201, 202 Hunt, Nancy Rose, vi, 3, 6, 220-1, 222, 223 Malaysia, 165, 166, 173 Forum for African Women’s 53-64, 66, 204 , Kenya, 6, 9, 66, 71-80, 122-32, Mali, 217, 223, 236-7, 240 Educationalists (FAWE), 238 Hutu, 148, 152 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, Maloka, Tschidi, 8-9

Forum for Women in 240, 241, 242 Mama, Amina, 3 Democracy (FOWODE), Ibadan, 127, 141, 198, 199, Kenya African National Union Mampong District, 201

232 218, 219, 221, 222 (KANU), 236, 238 Mandinka, 111,113,116 .

Forum for Women in Ifeka-Moller, Caroline, 11 Kericho, 130, 131 Manicom, Linsi, 12

Development, 241 Igbo, 22, 26, 28, 33, 34, 238 Khartoum, 167, 169 Mann, Kristen, 6, 206 Freetown, 87, 217, 218 Igbo Women’s War (1929), 32, Khayelitsha, 96 Maradi, 10, 156-64

French, the, 142, 157, 158, 35 Kiga/Bakiga, 148, 150, 153-4 Maragoli, 71-80 159, 160 | llifte, John, 211, 212 Kikuyu, 124, 125, 126, 127, Marx, Karl, 90, 91

Fulani, 21, 158, 160 Imam, Ayesha, 4, 13 130 Marxists, 1, 3, 123 IMF (International Monetary Kileleshwa, 124, 126 Masai, 125, 213

Ga, 9, 187, 220 Fund), 111, 133 Kipsigis, 124, 129, 130, 131 Matembe, Miria, 227, 228, 230, Gabon, 105 Inkatha Freedom Party, 240 Kiranga, 148, 150, 151, 153 231 Gaitskell, Deborah, vi, 10-11, International Decade of Kisangani, 9 Mba, Nina, 217

177-87 Women, 112 Kisumu, 75, 125, 130 Mbale, 76, 77, 78

Gambia, The, 8, 111-22 International Federation of Konaté, Momadou, 220, 221 Mead, Margaret, 103

Gaudio, Rudolf P., vi, 5, 47-52 Women Lawyers (FIDA), Konongo, 192 Mende, 23, 80-9, 196

GCP (Ghana Congress Party), 238 Kpa Mende, 23 Mernissi, Fatima, 10, 164, 173 220 International Monetary Fund Kumase, 188, 190, 191 Meru, 130 Geiger, Susan, vi, 12, 210-17 (IMF), 111, 133 Kumasi, 202, 203, 205 Methodists, 10, 177, 178, 180,

Gender and Development Iran, 164, 169, 173 Kuper, Adam, 210 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 219 (GAD), 37 Islam/Muslims, 10, 20, 47, 51, Kuper, Hilda, 53 Miescher, Stephan F., vi, 11, Gender in Africa Information 59, 127, 128-9, 130, 156, Kwawu, 187, 188, 189, 190, 187-95

Network, 237 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 191 Mikell, 3, 204, 205

Ghana, 9, 11, 104, 187-95, 196, 162, 164-77, 230 Mills, David, vi, 6-7, 90-5

201, 204, 211, 217, 222, | Ivory Coast, 211 Lagos, 6, 141, 143, 219, 222 Ministry for Ethics and Integrity

235, 236, 239 Iyalode, 11, 196-200 Lake Victoria, 148, 150, 153 (Uganda), 230 } Ghana Congress Party (GCP), Land Act (1998) (Uganda), Ministry of Home Affairs 220 Jamal, Vali, 133, 134 229-30, 240 (Tanzania), 239 Girl Guides, 238 Jebba, 143 Law Reform Commission Ministry of Women Affairs and Gluckman, Max, 81, 152 Jeka Hajjiya, 160-1 (Uganda), 230 Social Development Goetz, Anne Marie, vi, 12, Jell-Bahlsen, Sabine, 34, 35 Lebeuf, Annie, 3, 26, 28 (Nigeria), 236

224-34 Jesuits, 53 Leith-Ross, Sylvia, 2, 3 Ministry of Women in

246 ¢ Index

Development (Uganda), 227 and the Cameroons Nnaemeka, Obioma, vii, 4, 13, Defence Council) (Ghana),

Myji wa Mombasa, 124, 125, (NCNC), 217, 222, 223 31-41 236

126, 130, 131 National Council of Women North America, 37, 47, 50 see Port Harcourt, 222 Mkele, Nimrod, 64, 67, 69 (Uganda), 226, 231, 235 also Americans; United Posel, Ros, 37-8

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 1, National Council for Women States Potchefstroom, 180, 181, 185 2, 8, 37 and Development (NCWD) North Bank, Gambia, 111,114, Praetorius, Hermann, 188

Mombasa, 73, 127, 130, 131 (Ghana), 235, 236 115, 116, 117 Presbyterian Church of the

Moodie, IT. Dunbar, 9 National Council of Women’s North Kavirondo, 72, 75 Gold Coast (Ghana), 187, Moore, Henrietta, 99-100 Societies (NCWS) (Nigeria), Northern Territories, 191, 192 190-1, 193

Moore, Sally, 108 36, 223, 235, 236, 238 NRA (National Resistance Presbyterians, 11, 182, 187-95

Moshi, 211, 212, 213 National Executive Committee Army ) (Uganda), 226, 227, — Protestants, 53, 187, 225 see also

Mothers’ Union, 180, 181, 182, (NEC) (Uganda), 229, 231- 231 names of Protestant groups

184 2 NRM (National Resistance Provisional National Defence Movement Act (1997) 231-2 232 Pumwani, 123, 124, 126, 127, (Uganda), 226 National Party (South Africa), Nubians, 166 129, 130, 131 ‘Movement’ (Uganda), 225, National Movement Movement) (Uganda), 133, Council (PNDC) (Ghana), 228, 229, 230, 231-2 Conference (Uganda), 226, 225, 226-7, 228, 229, 231, 236

Movement Councils, 226, 231 240 Nuer, 166 229, 231, 232 (Ghana), 235 Eritrean Women), 236

Movement Secretariat, 226, National Redemption Council NUEW (National Union of Qunta, Christine, 1

Mukwaya, Janat, 230, 231 National Resistance Army see Numeri, President, 169 Railway Workers’ Union, 144

Mulago, 127, 135 NRA Nupe, 22, 26, 28, 196, 197, Ramseyer, Friedrich, 188-90,

Mungore, Respah, 77-8 National Resistance Council 199 193

Muntemba, Maud Shimwaayi, (Uganda), 227 Nwapa, Flora, 34 Ranger, Professor T.O., 210 8 National Resistance Movement Nyabingi, 150, 151, 153, 154, Ransome-Kuti, Funmilayo,

Museveni, Janet, 235-6 see NRM 155 217, 222 Museveni, Yoweri Kaguta, 224, National Union of Eritrean Nyabuzana, 152, 153 Rassemblement démocratique 225, 226, 227, 228, 230-1, Women (NUEW), 236 Nyakisheyiyi revolt (1917), 154 Africain see RDA

232, 233 NCNC (National Council of Nyamwezi, 124, 148, 149,150, Rattray, R.S., 202, 204 9, 132-41 Cameroons), 217, 222, 223 Nyarko, Beatrice, 203, 206 Rawlings, Nana Ageman, 235

Musisi, Nakanyike, vi-vii, 2, 6, Nigeria and the 151, 152, 154 Rawlings, Jerry, 236 Muslim Brotherhood, 169,173 NCWD (National Council for § Nyerere, Julius, 211, 212, 213, RDA (Rassemblement

Muslim Sisters, 174 Women and Development) 214-15 démocratique Africain), 217, Muslims see Islam/Muslims (Ghana), 235, 236 Nyoro, 150, 152, 153, 155 220, 221

Mutongi, Kenda, vu, 6, 71-80 NCWS see National Council Nzioki, E.A., 238, 240 Resistance Councils, 226, 227,

Mwanza, 211, 212, 213 of Women’s Societies 231 MYW see Maendeleo Ya (Nigeria) Obbo, Christine, 6, 8, 91-2, Rhodesia, 6, 22, 66, 67, 68, 69, Wanawake Ndahura (Ndaula), 152-3 133, 134 183 NEC see National Executive Obote, Milton, 133, 225, 226 Rice (née Dove), Lydia, 217-18 Nadel, S.F., 127 Council (Uganda) Oegwal, Cecilia, 226, 230 Richards, Audrey, 2-3, 104

Nairobi, 9, 73, 122-32, 242 Negangelizwe, 95-102 Ojo, Madam Ajitie, 218 Roberts, P.A., 201, 205, 206 Nairobi conference, 234, 237 Ngoyi, Lian, 184-5 Ojo, Chief Thomas Adeogun, Robertson, Clare, 9

Nakulabye, 135, 138, 139 Negugi, M., 235 218-19 Rogers, Barbara, 174

Nandi, 124, 125, 126, 130 Neuni, 178, 181, 182 Okonjo, Kamene, 3, 34, 35 Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, 7 Natal, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, Niger, 10, 12, 21, 156-64 Ogundipe-Leslie, “Molara, 4 Ruanda-Urundi, 57, 58, 59

184 Nigeria, 5, 6,9, 11, 21, 22, 23- Ondo, 198-9 Rubin, Gayle, 5

National Association for the 4,25, 34, 35, 36, 41, 42, 44, Orange Free State, 178, 184 Rukara, Hadidja (Mama

Advancement of Coloured 45, 47, 104, 141-7, 152, Owino, 137, 138, 139 Sanura), 57-8

People, 221 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, Oyewumi, Oyeronke, 4, 5 Rukiga, 153, 154

National Caucus for , 161, 162, 196, 211, 217, Oyo, 197-8 Rundi, 148, 151-2, 153 , Democracy (Uganda), 228 219, 222, 223, 235, 236, Rural Women’s Movement, National Coalition for the 238, 242 Pan Africanist Congress, 240 240 Women’s Charter (South Nigerian National Democratic Pangani, 124, 126, 127, 129, Rutajirakyuna, 151, 153-4

Africa), 38 Party, 223 130 Rwanda, 6, 148, 150, 152, 153,

National Commission for Nigerian Youth Movement, 219 Parpart, Jane, 206 154, 238

Women (Nigeria), 235 Njuba, Gertrude, 227, 231 Parry, Jonathan, 90, 91 Ryangombe see Lyangombe National Committee on the Nkawkaw, 190, 191, 193 Paulme, Denise, 3, 28

Status of Women (Kenya), Nkore, 148, 152, 153 Perham, Margery, 2 Sacks, Karen, 26

241 Nkrumah, Kwame, 219, 220, Phillips, A, 54, 76 Sahel, 112

National Council of Nigeria 222 PNDC (Provisional National Sande, 11, 23, 82, 84, 85, 86

Index ¢ 247

Sango, 197, 198 Youth League (TANUYL), Union Soudanaise Wichwezi, 149, 150 Sanura, Mama (Hadidja 214 Rassemblement WID see Women in Rukara), 57-8 Tanzania, 91, 148, 150, 151, Démocratique Africain Development

Saudi Arabia, 166, 167, 169, 210-17, 237, 239, 240, 242 (USRDA), 220, 221 WILDAF (Women in Law and

170, 173 Tanzania Association of Non- United Gold Coast Development), 238

Schmidt, Elizabeth, 12, 78 Governmental Organizations Convention, 219 WIN see Women in Nigeria Schroeder, Richard A., vii, 8, (TANGO), 236 United Nations (UN), 42,112, |Win, Everjoice, 2

111-19 Tanzania Media Women’s 234, 235, 237, 241 Winterbottom, Thomas, 20, 21

Senegal, 218, 220 Association, 237 United States, 36, 65, 178-9, Witwatersrand, 177, 179-82 Senegambia, 21 Tanzanian Women’s Council 222 see also Americans; WNC (Women’s National Sexual Offences Bill (Uganda), (BAWATA), 239 North America Coalition) (South Africa), 230 31st December Women’s University College (Gold 240 Sierra Leone, 2, 6, 8, 11, 21, Movement (31 DWM) Coast), 222 Woman’s Charter, 240-1 23, 80-9, 196, 217, 218, (Ghana), 235, 236 Unyamwezi, 148, 151, 153, Women and Law, 238

238 Timbuctoo, 127 154 Women in Development

Smith, Mary, 156, 157, 211 Tinubu, Iyalode, 198, 200 UPC (Uganda People’s (WID), 37, 112, 226, 235 Smith, Michael G., 156, 158, Titt Mohamed, Bibi, 211, 212- Congress), 225, 226 Women in Law and

162 13 Urdang, Stephanie, 31 Development (WILDAF),

Society for Women and AIDS Togo, 196 , Urhobo, 45 238 in Africa, 238 Toro, 136, 153, 154 Usman ’dan Fodio, 157 Women in Nigeria (WIN), 237, Sofola, ‘Zulu, 2, 33, 34, 35, Transkei, 100, 121, 178, 182, USRDA (Union Soudanaise 238

38 183, 184 Rassemblement Women’s Caucus (Uganda), 162 | 182, 183, 184 220, 221 Women’s Governing Councils Somalia, 238 Tripp, Ail Mari, vu, 13, 226, Usukuma, 148, 153 (Nigeria), 238 Sokoto, 10, 156, 157-9, 161, Transvaal, 178, 179, 180, 181, Démocratique Africain), 227, 228, 229

Sotho, 178, 184 234-43 Usumbura, 57, 58, 59 Women’s Help Society, 180

South Africa, 7, 9, 10, 12, 36, Truth, Sojourner, 29 UWESO (Uganda Women’s Women’s International 38, 64, 66, 67, 68, 95-102, Tswana, 178, 179, 184 Effort to Save Orphans), 236 Democratic Federation, 223 150, 177-87, 231, 232, 240- ‘Tubman, Harriet, 29 UWONET (Uganda Women’s Women’s League (Zambia), 235

1, 242 Tutsi, 148 Network), 229, 241 Women’s Movement for the

South African Commission on UWT see Umoja wa Wanawake Return of Yoweri K. Gender Equality, 242 Uganda, 6-7, 12, 38, 75, 90-5, wa Tanzania Museveni (WORK), 228 South African Domestic 132-40, 148, 150, 151, 153, | Women’s National Coalition

Workers Union, 240 154, 224-34, 235, 237, 239, Van Allen, Judith, 11, 41, 59, (WNC) (South Africa), 240

Southall, A., 127, 150 240, 241, 242 241, 242 Wood, Katherine, vii, 7, 95-

Southern Africa, 1, 64, 65, 66, Uganda Action for Van der Burgt, J.M.M., 153 102 67, 68, 69, 78, 105 Development, 237 Vaughan, Megan, vi, 8, 119- WORK (Women’s Movement Ssewakiryanga, Richard, vu, 6- Uganda Land Alhance, 230 23, 204 for the Return of Yoweri K.

7, 90-5 Uganda National Chamber of Vellenga, D.D., 201, 202 Museveni), 228 Steady, Filomena Chioma, 34 237 WAAD conference, 37

Stanleyville, 57, 58 Commerce and Industry, Wright, Marcia, 211

Sudan, 10, 164-77, 221, 238 (UPC), 225, 226 174 French, 158, 159, 217, 218, © Uganda Women’s Effort to Walker, Alice, 4 Yaoundé, 106, 108 Strobel, Margaret, 211 Uganda People’s Congress Wad al Abbas, 164-5, 166-73, Xhosa, 95-102, 178, 184

220 Save Orphans (UWESO), Wambui, Maryam, 127 Yemen, 167

Sudarkasa, Niara, vu, 3, 4, 9, 236 Wandegeya, 136, 138, 139. Yoko, Madam, 23 25-31 Uganda Women’s Football Waylen, Georgina, 233 Yoruba, 9, 10, 21, 22, 25, 26, Sufis/Sufism, 166, 171, 174 Association, 237 Wells, Julia, 36, 185 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 141, Swahili, 53, 58, 59, 212, 213 Uganda Women’s Network Wesleyan Mission, 187, 201 142, 143, 144, 145, 146,

(UWONET), 229, 241 West/Western ideas, 1, 2, 3-4, 196-200

Tamale, Sylvia, 227, 229 Ugandan Patriotic Movement, 5, 7,9, 11, 20-5, 27, 32, 33, © Young Women’s Christian

Tanganyika, 12, 210-17 226 35, 36, 37, 47, 50, 65, 166, Association (YWCA), 238 Tanganyika African National UGCC, 220 187-8 Union see TANU Uji (TANU District West Africa, 1, 9, 12, 20, 21, Zaire, 8, 91, 150, 152

TANGO (Tanzania Association Chairman), 214 22, 23, 25, 26-7, 28, 41-6, Zambia, 2, 8, 12, 235, 236 of Non-Governmental Umoja wa Wanawake wa 48, 104, 156, 196, 217-24, Zimbabwe, 64-71, 90-1, 239

Organizations), 237 Tanzania (UWT), 235, 239 238 Zita, Jacquelyn, 50

TANU (Tanganyika African UN see United Nations White, Luise, 9 Zomba, 119-20

National Union), 211, 212- Union of Women Whitehead, Ann, 8, 111 Zulu, 150, 178, 179, 180

15 Parliamentarians, 237 Whyte, Martin K., 26, 27

Readings in Popular Culture G | Edi Edited byAfrican Karin Barber enera tors ‘. likely to become the main source book for African culture studies during arin Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the the next decade ... the enormous value of Readings in African Popular Centre of West Aftican Studies at the University of Birmingham. Culture in bringing together such a heterogeneous selection of nuanced, She has published widely in the field of Yoruba, oral literature and well-researched, thought-provoking articles from the emerging field of popular culture. Her most recent book The Generation of Plays:

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