Abstract
This general survey of the lives of women in pre-colonial East Africa draws upon recent innovative scholarship in multiple fields, especially that of historical linguistics. Based on the longue durée approach, this scholarship is giving us glimpses of how ecology, trade, war, violence and other calamities, institutions and ideologies related to monarchy, motherhood and spiritual formulations, slavery, and changing marital and kinship patterns impacted the lives of both ordinary and elite women and how, in turn, these women as historical players shaped these forces through innovation and contestation. Motherhood and marriage were at the center of the revolutionizing thrust in the evolution of political systems in this period, most notably with respect to the centralization of power and the development of hierarchical systems that emerged in many of these polities. Women in acephalous groups as well as those in centralized polities exercised considerable power at the local level and played decisive roles that determined the quality and character of their polities. Evidence proves that women’s productive and reproductive labor was at the core of advancements made during the Iron Age in the Nile Valley and the Great Lakes region. Prior to the agricultural revolution, the sexual division of labor was relatively flexible and equalitarian; thereafter much of women’s labor became primarily designated to food production on land women did not own. Women captured in expansionist wars frequently became booty and were treated as commodities in regional and international trade in which some women stood to gain. Women’s participation in commodity production and trade as societies became more complex attests to women’s agency and empowerment. The articulation of intensified global commercialization in the eighteenth and nineteen century with domestic demands for female productive and reproductive labor for the sustenance local communities accelerated the demand for female slaves and the retention of large numbers of slave women for domestic use by both men and women. While enormous gaps in our historical understanding of women in this period remain and continue to pose a challenge, we now possess a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the central roles pre-colonial African women played in their societies.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahmed, C. C. (1995). Finely etched chattel: The invention of a Somali woman. In A. J. Ahmed (Ed.), The invention of Somalia (pp. 157–189). Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press.
Akurang-Parry, K. O., & Clay, C. B. (2008). Africa: 5000 B.C.E.-1000 C.E. In B. G. Smith (Ed.), Encyclopedia of women in world history (Vol. 1, pp. 43–46). New York: Oxford University Press.
Amory, D. (2008). Fatuma, queen of Zanzibar. In B. G. Smith (Ed.), Encyclopedia of women in world history (Vol. 2, pp. 257–258). New York: Oxford University Press.
Berger, I. (1973). The Kubandwa religious complex of inter-lacustrine East Africa: An historical study c. 1500–1900. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin.
Berger, I. (1976). Rebels or status seekers? Women as spirit mediums in East Africa. In N. Hafkin & E. Bay (Eds.), Women in Africa: Studies in social and economic change. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Berger, I. (1981). Religion and resistance: East African kingdoms in the pre-colonial period. Tervuren: Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale.
Berger, I. (1995). Fertility as power: spirit mediums, priestesses and the pre-colonial state in interlacustrine East Africa. In D. Anderson and D. Johnson (Eds), Revealing Prophets: prophecy in eastern African history (pp. 65–82). Oxford: James Currey.
Berger, I. (1999). Part 1. Women in East and Southern Africa. In Berger, I., & White, E. F. Women in sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring women to history (pp 5-58). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Burstein, S. (Ed.). (1998/2009). Ancient African civilizations: Kush and Axum. Princeton: M. Wiener Publishers.
Campbell, G., Miers, S., & Miller, J. C. (Eds.). (2007). Women and slavery. Volume I: Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and the Medieval North Atlantic (pp. 215–137). Athens: Ohio University Press.
Chretien, J.-P. (2003). The great lakes of Africa: Two thousand years of history (S. Strauss, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. (2009). Africa and Africans in the 19th century: A turbulent history. New York: Sharpe.
Doyle, S. (2007). The Cwezi-kubandwa debate: Gender, hegemony and pre-colonial religion in Bunyoro, Western Uganda. The Journal of the International African Institute, 77(4), 559–581.
Ehret, C. (1998). An African classical age: Eastern and Southern Africa in world history, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia/Oxford: J. Currey.
Feierman, S. (1974). The Shambaa kingdom: A history. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Feierman, S. (1990). Peasant intellectuals: Anthropology and history in Tanzania. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fernyhough, T. (2007). Women, gender, history, and slavery in the 19th century Ethiopia. In G. Campbell, S. Miers, & J. C. Miller (Eds.), Women and slavery. Volume I: Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and the medieval North Atlantic (pp. 215–137). Athens: Ohio University Press.
FitzSimons, W. (2018). Warfare, competition, and the durability of ‘Political Smallness’ in nineteenth-century Busoga. Journal of African History, 59(1), 45–67.
Fourshey, C. C., Gonzales, R. M., Saidi, C., & Vieira-Martinez, C. (2016). Lifting the loincloth: Reframing the discourse on gender, identity, and traditions – Strategies to combat the lingering legacies of spectacles in the scholarship on East and East Central Africa. Critique of Anthropology, 36(3), 302–338.
Gollock, G. A. (1971). Daughters of Africa. New York: Negro University Press. (Original, 1932. Longmans, Green & Co., Longon).
Gonzales, R. M. (2002). Continuity and change: Thought, belief, and practice in the history of the Ruvu peoples of Central East Tanzania, c.200 B.C. to A.D. 1800. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.
Gonzales, R. M. (2009). Societies, religion and history: Central east Tanzanians and the world they created, c. 200 B.C.E. to 1800 C.E. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hanson, H. E. (2002). Queen mothers and good government in Buganda: The loss of women’s political power in nineteenth century East Africa. In J. Allman, S. Geiger, & N. Musisi (Eds.), Women and African colonial history (pp. 219–236). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Horton, M., & Middleton, J. (2000). The Swahili: The social landscape of a mercantile society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kagwa, A. (1934). The customs of the Baganda (E. B. Kalibala, Trans., M. M. Edel, Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Reprint, New York: AMS Press (1969).
Kagwa, A. (1971). The kings of Buganda (M. S. M. Semakula Kiwanuka, Trans. and Ed.). Nairobi: East African Publishing House.
Kapteijns, L., & Spaulding, J. (1989). Class formation and gender in precolonial Somali society: A research agenda. Northeast African Studies, 11(1), 19–38.
Kiwanuka, M. S. M. (1971). A history of Buganda: From the foundation of the kingdom to 1900. London: Longman.
Kodesh, N. (2004). Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and collective well-being in Buganda. Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University.
Kodesh, N. (2010). Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and public healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Kropacek, L. (1984). Nubia from the late twelfth century to the Funj conquest in the early fifteenth century. In T. D. Niane (Ed.), Africa from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. General history of Africa (Vol. 4). London: Heinemann.
Lebeuf, A. (1963). The role of women in the political organization of African societies. In D. Paulme (Ed.), Women in tropical Africa (pp. 135–156). Berkeley: University of California Press.
McDow Thomas, F. (2018). Buying time: Debt and mobility in the Western Indian Ocean. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Médard, H., & Doyle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Slavery in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. Oxford: James Currey/Kampala [Uganda]: Fountain Publishers/Nairobi [Kenya]: EAEP/Athens: Ohio University Press.
Miller, J. C. (2007). Introduction: Women as slaves and owners of slaves, experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and the early Atlantic. In G. Campbell, S. Miers, & J. C. Miller (Eds.), Women and slavery. Volume I: Africa, the Indian Ocean world, and the medieval North Atlantic (pp. 1–40). Athens: Ohio University Press.
Musisi, N. B. (1991). Women, ‘elite polygyny,’ and Buganda state formation. Signs, 16(4), 57–86.
Musisi, N. B. (1992). Transformations of Baganda women: From the earliest times to the demise of the kingdom in 1966. Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto.
Musisi, N. B. (2008). Muganzirwazza. In B. G. Smith (Ed.), The Oxford encyclopedia of women in world history (Vol. 3, pp. 281–282). Oxford: University Press.
Newbury, D. (2009). The land beyond the mists: Essays on identity and authority in precolonial Congo and Rwanda. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Pankhurst, R. (2001). The Ethiopians: A history. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Prouty, C. (1986). Empress Taytu and Menilek II: Ethiopia, 1883–1910. Trenton: Red Sea Press.
Reid, R. J. (2011). Past and presentism: The ‘Precolonial’ and the foreshortening of African history. Journal of African History, 52, 135–155. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853711000223.
Rockel, S. J. (2006). Carriers of culture: Labor on the road in nineteenth-century East Africa. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Roscoe, J. (1911). The Baganda: An account of their native customs and beliefs. London: Macmillan.
Sacks, K. (1979). Sisters and wives: The past and future of sexual equality. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Schiller, L. D. (1990). The royal women of Buganda. International Journal of African Historical., 23(3), 455–473.
Schoenbrun, D. L. (1993). Cattle herds and Banana gardens: The historical geography o f the Western Great Lakes region, Ca AD 800–1500. African Archaeological Review, 11, 39–72.
Schoenbrun, D. (1996). Gendered histories between the Great Lakes: varieties and limits. The International Journal of African Historical Studies 29(3),461–92.
Schoenbrun, D. L. (1997). Gendered histories between the Great Lakes: Varieties and limits. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 29(3), 461–492.
Schoenbrun, D. L. (1998). A green place, a good place: Agrarian change, gender, and social identity in the Great Lakes region to the 15th century. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Schoenbrun, D. (2004). Gendered themes in early African history: 2000 BCE to 1400 CE. In Theresa Meade and Merry Weisner-Hanks (Eds.) Companion to Gender History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 249–72.
Schoenbrun, D. L. (2013). A mask of calm: Emotion and founding the kingdom of Bunyoro in the sixteenth century. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55(3), 634–664. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417513000273.
Stephens, R. (2007). A history of motherhood, food procurement and politics in East-Central Uganda to the nineteenth century. Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University.
Stephens, R. (2008). East Africa, 1500–1900. In B. G. Smith (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of women in world history (Vol. 3, pp. 122–126). New York: Oxford University Press.
Stephens, R. (2009). Lineage and society in pre-colonial Uganda. Journal of African History, 50(2), 203–221.
Stephens, R. (2013). A history of African motherhood: The case of Uganda, 700–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tamrat, T. (1972). Church and state in Ethiopia, 1270–1527. Oxford: Clarendon.
Tripp, A. M. (2017). Women and politics in Africa. Oxford research encyclopaedia of African history. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.192.
Tuck, M. W. (2007). In H. Médard & S. Doyle (Eds.), Slavery in the Great Lakes region of East Africa (pp. 174–188). Oxford: James Currey/Kampala [Uganda]: Fountain Publishers/Nairobi (Kenya): EAEP/Athens: Ohio University Press.
Vansina, J. (1966). Kingdoms of the savanna. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.
Vansina, J. (2004). Antecedents to modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya kingdom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Watkins, S. E. (2017). ‘Tomorrow She Will Reign’: Intimate power and the making of a queen mother in Rwanda, c. 1800–1863. Gender & History, 29(1), 124–140.
Willis, R. (1981). A state in the making: Myth, history, and social transformation in pre-colonial Ufipa. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Wright, M. (1993). Strategies of slaves & women: Life-stories from East/Central Africa. New York: Lilian Barber Press.
Zewde, B. (2001). A history of modern Ethiopia (2nd ed., pp. 1855–1991). Oxford: James Curry.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Crown
About this entry
Cite this entry
Musisi, N.B. (2021). Women in Pre-colonial Africa: East Africa. In: Yacob-Haliso, O., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28099-4_123
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28099-4_123
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28098-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28099-4
eBook Packages: HistoryReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities