Introduction
Historian Paul Tiyambe Zelezaâs quantitative analysis of African history texts demonstrates that African women and issues of gender are rarely a subject of study. He documents that women âare either not present at all, or they are depicted as unnaturally inferior and subordinate, as eternal victims of male oppression.â1 The current authors have noticed that African womenâs history is commonly reduced to a single story characterized by victimization, marginalization, and, most significantly, silence.2 This story and the omissions are upheld both in Western media representations of African women and scholarship. There are occasional powerful though aberrant women, such as Queen Nzinga, Queen Amina, Queen of Sheba and the celebrated military force known as the Dahomey Amazon, who are celebrated for their exceptional status or âimprobableâ feats for African women. The challengers to the critiques of these stereotypes claim that there is no way to know the earlier history of women or gender in Africa. The silences and the circular arguments continue. The role of gender and the history of African women cannot be known; therefore, it is excluded from the histories of Africa, which leads to a continuation of the âAfrican woman as victimâ myth. And since this silence perpetuates the image of African women as powerless, it reinforces yet another widely accepted belief that African men have always held more authority and power than women. This is a problematic starting point for understanding African gender history, because it works within a binary that depends on a hierarchical relationship between African womenâs suppression and menâs domination. It rests on an inherent opposition between women and men with regard to authority and power that is not questioned, not investigated nor verified within historical context. Moreover, a new understanding of the past can transform thinking about the present and possibilities for the future. While there are notable monographs on women and gender relations in African history, these histories are primarily from the colonial era or later. And as Zeleza noted they are rarely cited in the general African history texts or the popular media.3
This chapter presents an alternative to silence and the single story with an introduction to a deeper historical vision of women and gender relations, over 5,000 years, in a region of sub-Saharan Africa that stretches from Angola in the West, through Central Africa to Tanzania, and to Mozambique in the East. Contributing to the aims of Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora, it introduces the concept of the Bantu Matrilineal Belt as a fruitful region for researching and understanding the histories of women and gender in precolonial Africa. While many of the individual histories of African women may be lost to history, much of the bigger picture is recoverable. Additionally, this chapter questions and reframes historical assumption of female subjugation and male dominance, and it proposes that it is worthwhile for scholars to revisit and reinterpret previously published data. At the same time, it recommends that we consider an alternate analytic framework for gender studies in pre- and post-colonial Africa.
Based on our research on precolonial histories of Bantu-speaking communities, we posit that authority and power are best analyzed and understood when they are thought of as heterarchical rather than solely hierarchical concepts. Heterarchy provides an avenue to analyze authority and power in ways that are dynamic and nimble. It acknowledges that multiple historical actors may hold horizontal rather than vertical social, political, economic, religious or other relevant relationships. And they may contest, check and wield authority that influences the decisions and effectual power that leaders might leverage. Recently, historian Kathleen Smythe, among others, has suggested that heterarchy is âabout power and authority across and among social groups, institutions, and people. It implies diffuse, independent sources of power, rather than concentrated, vertical power.â4 Such people can represent independent, shared and sometimes competing interests that can be brought to the attention of and sway the single or collective body of powerbrokers. In this way, historian Holly Hansen explains, â[h]eterarchical strategies become part of a hierarchical polity.â5 Applied to studies of gender, heterarchy requires that scholars pay attention to the nuances of gender status, gender concepts, gender dynamics, gendered lifestages and the transformations of these within their historical contexts. Thus gender, where relevant, is only one variable among many possible social identifiers at play when authority and power holders are interacting and negotiating. Heterarchy suggests that power emerges at intersections of integrated and negotiated social status considered in deciding what is best for the collective. Within systems of heterarchy, social positions related to lineage, ancestors, age, clan, land and maternal/paternal fertility, are each salient. We suggest that one must intentionally set aside accepted narratives that assume authority and power are imbedded in firm hierarchies that require rigid categories and practices of exclusion based primarily on gender.
Focused on a region of Bantu-speaking Africa known as the Bantu Matrilineal Belt, a goal is to raise questions, provide examples and suggest ways for thinking about gender, authority and power as robust and dynamic categories and paradigms that might renew our ability to reconstruct African womenâs and gender history. It revisits select published research on twentieth century societies in East and Central Africa to suggest ways that we might pinpoint the heterarchical nature of authority and power that may have gone unrecognized at the time earlier research was conducted. We build on recent works demonstrating that in early Bantu societies a personâs or a collectiveâs power and authority depended on a multitude of socially relevant factors.6 This methodology is also useful for reconsidering unconscious biases that project present-day power relations, categories, practices and situations onto the past. Moreover, it permits us to interrogate the ways in which gender interacted with authority and power in Bantu-speaking Africa. This is a vast area where, today, speakers of more than 450 Bantu-descended languages and dialects comprise diverse communities. Of those, approximately 100 are identified as matrilineal, in a region that extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean through the center of sub-Saharan Africa.7
Linguistic and genetic evidence supports the theory that Bantu-descended people, who migrated and settled across the mentioned regions, historically shared a variety of common elements in their institutions, practices and worldviews. They often traced inheritance and identity through the motherâs lineage.8 In the twentieth century, anthropologists Audrey Richards, Mary Douglas and George Murdock termed the region the âMatrilineal Belt.â We refer to this as the Bantu Matrilineal Belt.9 This large area, though linguistically similar and having matrilineal institutions, is in fact composed of people living in varied environments and with diverse political organizations, religious beliefs and economic systems. While there are societies that are defined as patrilineal in this region, most of them demonstrate features of matrilineal institutions that are seeming retentions from an early time in their history or may be borrowed elements from neighbors. The most important point here is that over time many of these communities upheld matrilineal institutions and forms of organizing, which is a testament to the importance of looking beyond patrilineality. This also brings into question theories about patriarchy and male domination as the only way communities approached their worlds.
It is important to state that authority and power in Bantu societies are not assigned according to gender or sex. Furthermore, matrilineality does not assume that women dominate in all spheres of society nor do patrilineal societies only maintain the rule of men. Exclusion from and inclusion in various social spheres is based on a variety of factors. Karen Brodkin-Sacks argues in her foundational work, Sisters and Wives, that to understand the status or authority of a person is more dependent on variable positions within that society than just their gender. Based on her in-depth study of various ethnographies from patrilineal Bantu-speaking peoples of East and Southern Africa, she shows that young women may have lost power as wives, but maintained authority as sisters within their own patriclan.10 Brodkin-Sacks notes that women have a great deal of status, power and authority within patrilineal societies when there is a nuanced examination of their varied roles.
However, within matrilineal societies mothers and grandmothers are central to social, cultural, economic and political institutions. One should not imagine patrilineal and matrilineal societies as mirror images or polar opposites. Lineage systems are dynamic, complex and varied. What one should contemplate are the ways in which matrilineal and patrilineal systems are embedded in heterarchical networks of simultaneous relationships among historical actors wielding and leveraging coterminous authority and power.11 Studying matrilineality within the context of diverse societies in the Bantu Matrilineal Belt reveals a great deal about gender and the complexity of gender history. The works of scholars Nwando Achebe, Cynthia Brantley, Karen Brodkin-Sacks, Christopher Ehret, Rhonda Gonzales, Kairn Klieman, Onaiwu Ogbomo, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Karla Poewe, Christine Saidi, David Lee Schoenbrun and Rhiannon Stephens on African history reveal that women have not always held less power and status relative to men, even in societies that are patrilineal.
The following section is a discussion centered on matrilineality as an approach to reconstructing the longue durée history of the Bantu Matrilineal Belt. It employs five themes that include concepts that are familiar to readers such as economics, technology, religion, worldview and politics. This chapter also considers key ideas and practices that may be less familiar, including heterarchy, matrilineality, sororal groups, brideservice and life stages. Together, the themes are intended to show by way of select examples useful ways in which scholars might imagine rethinking and reconstructing early African women and gender histories.
