Women in Pre-colonial Africa: East Africa

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.