Before European Patriarchy: Women in West and Central Africa
- Calvin Stevens
- Feb 28
- 12 min read
What were the highly-regarded and important roles of women in African societies pre-1900?
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When European powers began frequenting African civilisations along the continent’s West and Central regions, they also started writing about and documenting their encounters.
From the early Portuguese merchants (15–16thth century) to the Dutch East India Company (17th century) and finally to the British and French colonialists (18th-19th century), Africa has not only been subject to outside invasion, but it has also been robbed of its own history.
The continent has, ever since, suffered a distinct lack of identity due to its history and people being viewed (and no less recounted) through a colonial perspective, forcing it to seem more Eurocentric in its identity.
One key area that has suffered greatly in this regard pertains to the lives and roles of women in West and Central African society prior to European colonialism.
European accounts impart their own set of biases unto the nature of gender and its functionality in the African context; the “western” understanding of patriarchy and such have, hence, misrepresented and misconstrued the nature of the African woman to match the limited epistemic reach of the coloniser.
The reality is that women were not, in fact, as economically exploited, oppressed and excluded from political institutions as the Eurocentric view held. It was only once European powers brought the more rigid construct of the patriarchy with them that the political and social landscape of Africa largely morphed into what it is today.
But first, in order to better understand what happened, we need to travel back in time to before the Europeans established a tight grip on the continent.
(A)gender hierarchies in West and Central Africa
While Africa has been, in many cases, comprised of a patrilineage majority, the role of women in the social sphere was characteristically equal to that of their male counterparts.
Schools of European explorers, historians, and scholars have oftentimes held that the African woman was “savagely oppressed” by the “barbaric nature” of African men — one of the justifications for colonialism was that it would bring civilisation to Africa; and part of that civilisation (ironically) included “freeing [these] women”.
But these views hinge on what Niara Sudarkasa surmises to be a misguided focus on the conjugal roles of African women at the expense of their consanguineal roles, deriving “from the obsession of Western scholars with analyses of the nuclear family.”
African families and households, unlike those in Europe, were not nucleated, and neither were they generally structured around gender hierarchies. Instead, more important to many African cultures, the social hierarchy was determined by way of seniority; the eldest member, irrespective of gender, would outrank the youth. Age commanded respect and, likewise, a senior sister could overrule a junior brother just as a senior brother could a junior sister.
Furthermore, although patrilineage was dominant across the continent, Africa exhibited a far greater flexibility to allow for the formation of matrilineages than most other global regions.
The case of the Asante Empire (1701–1901)
One of the most famous examples of a successful matrilineage lies within the Asante (Ashanti) Empire.
This particular state in West Africa (roughly modern-day Ghana) was defined by the respect it demanded be paid to its women who were highly regarded in society, sometimes even more so than men. The line of heritage and inheritance within families was traced through the head-male’s sister rather than directly through himself. As a result of this strong matrilineal structure, many of the Asante Empire’s rulers were women.
The Ohenemaa (queen mother) was the most important woman in the Empire and exercised the same level of power and autonomy as the Asantehene (king).
When it came to selecting a new Asantehene, the Ohenemaa held roughly 50% of the vote on her own — this being due to her status as representing all the Empire’s women, which was more than half its population. So, in essence, a new Asantehene could not be elected without the consent of the Ohenemaa.
She, too, had the power to be king if she so desired but, more often than not, she would rather see her son or maternal nephew sit the Golden Stool (the Asante throne).
There were, however, a few such cases when a woman did sit the throne, the most famous one being Yaa Asentewaa.
During the British occupation in 1896, King Prempeh I was exiled to Seychelles with a number of other high-ranking Asante officials, leaving Yaa Asentewaa, the queen mother, as the sole ruler. She was then selected by the remaining male officials to become war-leader and lead the remnants of the Asante army (roughly 5000 men strong) to battle during the War of the Golden Stool.
Her words to the war council following the demands of the British general-governor were reported as follows:
“How can a proud and brave people like the Asante sit back and look while white men took away their king and chiefs, and humiliated them with a demand for the Golden Stool. The Golden Stool only means money to the whitemen; they have searched and dug everywhere for it. I shall not pay one predwan to the governor. If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments.”
She briefly retook Kumasi (the Asante capital) from British forces in March of 1900, laying siege to the British fort.
The siege lasted almost 2 years until British reinforcements arrived in January of 1902 and managed to capture Yaa Asantewaa.
The interchanging domestic sphere
The genderless nature of African societies — and hence the equilibrium between the sexes — can be, perhaps, best expressed in the focused study of the Nnobi people conducted by Ifi Amadiume in Male daughters, female Husbands.
Therein, she posits the idea of what she calls the “male daughter” and the “female husband”. This was a system whereby, in Nnobi homesteads that were without any daughters, men from the extended family could act as substitutes for their female counterparts (a “male daughter”). Likewise, should a homestead lack a husband due to whatever circumstance, a woman from the extended family could be brought in to take over the traditional “husband” roles (“female husband”). Here, the word “husband” has been emphasised for, as we can conclude based on Amadiume’s proposition, it lacks the gendered relevance that is often expounded under the Eurocentric perspective.
For the Nnobi peoples, the gender of a person was irrelevant to the duties they performed; the conception of gender as we know it today simply did not exist.
Amadiume thus refutes the argument that women could not access or inherit land since “the institution of ‘male daughters’ [would] disprove this theory”.
A further hypothesis as to why this may be is simply because children were brought up in a vastly agender environment; boys were made to perform traditionally “female” duties and vice versa. Even childhood activities such as wrestling, hunting, and masquerading were encouraged amongst all children, male or female.
Under this pretense, the later acquisition of wealth, although the possession of assets differed somewhat between the sexes, was “apparently similar” in value. Hence, as with the localised case of the Nnobi, similar such principles and trends can be attributed to the region of West and Central Africa as a whole. African women, for the most part, occupied a relatively nonpartisan position within their own societies and enjoyed a great deal of respect, certainly more so than can be said of European and Asian women at the time.
Women’s political and religious power
Politics in West and Central African societies, too, was characterised by its balanced division of power between the sexes.
The continent’s overall political structure was, as Sudarkasa notes, split between “parallel chieftaincies, one line made up of males, the other females”.
With the exception of those societies deeply influenced by Islam (such as the Fulani-Hausa states under Usman dan Fodio in the late 1700s), women in most states between Senegambia and the Angolan coast held authority in the form of queen-mothers, princesses, chiefs, and regional or local officials.
Even where matrilineage was not the core social structure, the prevalence of dual-sex political systems in the region gave women the opportunity to greatly influence the implementation of certain policies.
There were even certain cases, like in Iyede, where women were given full, exclusive control over all female-related matters. Thus, women oftentimes, when entering court hearings, would be allowed to testify on their own behalf, their autonomous self. In this sense, African women exercised far greater autonomy over their own bodies and lifestyle than was originally posited by colonial scholars.
In terms of religious institutions — whether of a Christian influence, local traditional systems, or (oftentimes) a mix of the two — women coveted many positions, including that of priestesses, prophets, church leaders, oracles, and spiritual counselors.
Kimpa Vita (1684–1706), perhaps more famously known as Dona Beatriz of the Kingdom of Kongo, for one, utilised her position as a priestess of the Marinda Cult to sway politics towards the formation of an Afro-centric church, a Kongolese-Catholicism. This was a bold attempt to broker a peace between the Kingdom and the Portuguese crown, inspired by the late King Afonso I of the 1500s; in the process, she created her own movement, the Antonian Movement, that would catalyse in future rebellion against the Portuguese.
Women at war
Whilst war has been globally conceived to be a man’s domain, African societies historically invited women to partake in logistics, military tactics, espionage, and even battle itself.
The political and military branches of West and Central African societies were largely inseparable, and hence due to the active role women played in the former, they were bound to wind up in the latter.
Nzinga Ana de Sousa Mbande, queen of both the kingdoms of Ndongo (1624–1663) and Matamba (1631–1663), then, epitomises the conjugate between these two vital complexes.
Hailed as Africa’s “Warrior Queen”, Nzinga conquered and ruled over Matamba and Ndongo for over three decades in a constant battle against the Portuguese. She was both a cunning political diplomat and a frontline warrior. Not only did she form strategic alliances amongst the local African polities, but she oversaw deals with the Dutch West India Company too.
Her guerrilla tactics against the Portuguese, although unsuccessful at repelling the invaders fully, secured independence for the Mbundu peoples living in Angola for the duration of her long rule and several decades thereafter. Interestingly enough, her War Council was governed by her two sisters, Dona Engracia and Dona Barbara, the latter of whom would succeed her throne. It was to this end that Nzinga’s rule oversaw an African state that was primarily run by powerful women, almost a full matriarchy; and, insofar as our purposes here are concerned, her leadership set the bar for the status of women across the region.
Her story is best recounted in Linda Heywood’s Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen and elides both the military and political complexes of West-Central African society.
Another example of the integration of women into the military complex is highlighted by the Agoji of Dahomey, which was an all-female infantry regiment that was created around the 17th century and lasted until the 19th century.
They were the only modern army to ever comprise, entirely, of women and, as a result, were nicknamed the Amazons of Dahomey by British traders.
On their first encounter with the Agoji, the British were initially uncertain as to what exactly the Agoji were — they were famously against the initial notion that there could be such a thing as an all-women army; thus, initial descriptions of the Agoji tried to explain the group of women as being an “alien-like military regiment”, refusing to believe that they were not, in fact, men.
The Kingdom of Dahomey, along with the Oyo Empire, frequently engaged in the slave-trade during the 1800s and, as a result of immense violent clashes with their neighbouring states thereof, their male population was in serious decline. Thus, in 1716, under the reign of Queen Hangbe, a female bodyguard was established that would later become the Agoji, consisting of some 2000 women at its peak.
Women were either recruited voluntarily — with some even entering training at the age of 8 — or from slavery; and, by the time of King Agaja’s reign, the Agoji proved their success as warriors by conquering the neighbouring Kingdom of Savi in 1727.
During the Franco-Dahomean Wars (1890–1894), the French Foreign Legion engaged the Agoji in hand-to-hand combat at the battle of Cotonou for the first time; the French troops, surprised, later wrote:
“They [the Agoji] handled admirably hand-to-hand; for reasons unknown, they fire [their flintlocks] from the hip rather than the shoulder… never has there been women of such courage and sheer audacity.”
Women working the economy
As for economics, which was closely interlinked with politics, much the same can be said.
Due, in part, to their active involvement in policymaking, women were often given administrative power over designated economic activities. In many instances, women coveted control of trade and craft guilds as well as community markets, allowing them to implement, regulate, and adjust tax rates.
Dominance of commerce and the trading sector thereof, particularly in the case of Yoruba women under the Oyo Empire, was pivotal in garnering women a certain degree of independence. These women not only capitalised on trade but monopolised it, allowing them to pass wealth down to their daughters and exercise the ability to protest unfavourable policies — this was done by bringing the economy to a standstill.
Women’s organisations were commonplace, established for the purpose of elevating and empowering women economically. Yoruba women, once again, proved crafty in this regard, setting up savings associations called esusu to help raise capital for their cause. Not only that, but a similar phenomenon can be deduced amongst agriculture. There, women held special rights over crops such as cassava, cotton, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, yams, and peanuts.
This, essentially, gave them some rite to the land; and, coupled with secure profits from commerce, these women were able to maintain their independence from men.
A similar story is true of Igbo women in the Owerri and Calabar provinces. The local afia (marketplace) was run, strictly, by women; and these women further utilised the afia to hold mikiri, secret, women-only gatherings for the purpose of discussing politics and/or organising protests on women’s issues.
Thus, as is true to Marxian theorists, she who has control over the productive forces and commercial exchange in society could hardly be called oppressed.
On the bright side, there has been a push by recent scholarship towards reviving an Afro-centric history of the African continent. One of the major focus areas thereof has been to reconstruct the historiographies of the fundamental machinations of African civilisations to look at Africa’s modern (20th century) statecraft from a more holistic point of view.
There are stark differences in the way women interacted with and moved about society; the history of the European woman and the African woman were not always the same. The rise of a more homogenous history for womankind was largely a result of the expanding European powers and the imparting of their ideals unto the rest of the world.
Call it a “globalisation of ideas”, if you will.
The problem with said formation of a global hermeneutical knowledge system is that it has, historically, pivoted around the hermeneutics of the victor, the most powerful. Rather than mixing and refining all the world’s constituent histories, the general pedagogy has somewhat flowed in the direction of the Eurocentric, “Western” system.
Once Europe had locked Africa in a vice grip by the 20th century, the notion of “the patriarchy” was embedded into the African landscape. Lugardian Indirect Rule became the prime suspect for uprooting the traditional political and social systems in West Africa. In reducing these traditional systems of governance, the British — and later the French, who eventually took towards a more Lugardian-esque rule due to its success — were able to undermine the social cohesion of the conquered civilisation and thus exploit it.
Establishing a strong patriarchy was the best means to this end.
Local governments weren’t destroyed so much as they were reconstructed through a set of “warrant chiefs” and local administrators whose loyalties were paid to the colonial government. Women were the first to be excluded from this system for it helped to maintain loyalty amongst the local men by promising and disillusioning them with “sole authority and power”.
And, ironically, this would be one of the downfalls of the colonial system. Women were pushed towards greater acts of rebellion (one such example being the Women’s War of 1929) and the rise of Africa’s nationalist movements largely hinged on the organisation of all these excluded groups and minorities.
The severe whiplash from having all their power taken away from them in a matter of decades is unimaginable.
So, when we look back on the forging of Africa’s modern states, it is important to understand the position of the African people prior to colonialism.
Why were the issues of women so deeply interconnected with the anti-colonial movement?
Why did the colonial governments fear women?
Why is it still such a contentious issue today?
References:
Aidoo, A. A. (1977). Asante Queen Mothers in Government and Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 9(1), 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41857049
Amadiume, Ifi. (1992). Male daughters, female Husbands. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. (1997). “Nineteenth Century Woman.” In African Women: A Modern History, by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, translated by Beth Gillian Raps, 9–56. Colorado: Westview Press.
Heywood, Linda M. (2017). Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Nwabughuogu.A.I,(1981),The Role of Propaganda in the Development of Indirect Rule in Nigeria, 1890–1929, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 14 (1): 65- 92
Ogbomo, O.W., and Q.O. Ogbomo. (1993). “Women and Society in Pre-Colonial Iyede.” Anthropos 4 (6): 431–441.
Ogbomo, Onaiwu W. (2005). “Women, power, and society in pre-colonial Africa.” Lagos Historical Review 5 (1): 49–74.
Stanley B. (2011). Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey, London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd.
Sudarkasa, Niara. (1986). “”The Status of Women” in Indigenous African Societies.” Feminist Studies 12 (1): 91–103.
Sweetman, David. (1984). Women Leaders in African History. Oxford: Heinemann International Literature and Textbooks.
Yoder, John C. (1974). “Fly and Elephant parties: Political polarization in Dahomey, 1840–1870”. The Journal of African History. 15 (3). Cambridge University Press: 417–432.
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