Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change 9780804766241, 080476624X

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Women in Africa

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Women in Africa Studies in Social and Economic Change Edited by Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California

} Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1976 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

| Printed in the United States of America | Cloth 1sBNn 0-8047-0906-8 Paper ISBN 0-804'7-1011-2

Original printing 1976

, Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

05 O04 OY 02

Preface

This collection of papers is the culmination of a project of the Women’s Committee of the African Studies Association. In response to the encouragement of the Board of the Association, the Committee resolved in the fall of 1973 to prepare a volume of articles on African women. Our goal was to remedy two perceived problems associated with women’s issues—the relative paucity of literature on African women, and the difficulty encountered by female scholars in having their work published. We wish to express our appreciation to the African Studies Association for its continued financial support to the Women’s Committee during the preparation of this volume. And a special word goes to Raymond Ganga and Berhanu Abebe for their critical and supportive contributions to this endeavor, and for their strong theoretical commitment to equality and symmetry.

N.J.H. E.G.B.

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Contents

Contributors 1X

Introduction 1 NANCY J. HAFKIN AND EDNAG. BAY

The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women

Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal 19 GEORGE E. BROOKS, JR.

The Dual-Sex Political System in Operation: Igbo Women

and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria 45 KAMENE OKONJO

‘Aba Riots’ or Igbo ‘Women’s War’? Ideology,

Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women 59 JUDITH VAN ALLEN

Luo Women and Economic Change During

the Colonial Period 87

MARGARET JEAN HAY

Accra, Ghana 121

Ga Women and Socioeconomic Change in CLAIRE ROBERTSON

Vill Contents The Limitations of Group Action Among Entrepreneurs:

The Market Women of Abidjan, Ivory Coast 135 BARBARA C. LEWIS

in East Africa 157

Rebels or Status-Seekers? Women as Spirit Mediums IRIS BERGER

From Lelemama to Lobbying: Women’s Associations

in Mombasa, Kenya 183 MARGARET STROBEL

Sierra Leone 213

Protestant Women’s Associations in Freetown, FILOMINA CHIOMA STEADY

Women and Economic Change in Africa 239 LEITH MULLINGS

Less Than Second-Class: Women in Rural Settlement

Schemes in Tanzania 265 JAMES L. BRAIN

Index 299

References Cited 285

Contributors

Epona G. BAy is Assistant Professor of African Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She taught in a girls’ school in Malawi,

where she first became concerned with women’s issues in an African perspective. A historian who received her Ph.D. from Boston University, she has carried out field research in West Africa on the social history of royal women in the kingdom of Dahomey.

Iris BERGER received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1973. She has been an Instructor in History at the State University College of New York at Oneonta, and in 1975-76 was visiting Assistant Professor at Wellesley College. Her research interests include the impact of African and other Third World revolutionary movements on women. James L. Brain worked for twelve years as a Community Development Officer in Tanzania and Uganda. He studied anthropology at the London School of Economics and later at Syracuse University, where he received his Ph.D. after carrying out research on village settlements in Tanzania.

He is presently Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the State University College, New Paltz, New York. GEORGE E. BROOKS, JR., is a historian whose major research interest is the Upper Guinea Coast of West Africa. He has published widely on the

activities of European and American traders along the West African coast. Brooks received his Ph.D. from Boston University, and is Professor

of History at Indiana University, where he teaches African and world history. NANCY J. HAFKIN is Assistant Professor of History and Afro-American

Studies at Boston State College. She studied history at Brandeis University and at Boston University, where she was associated with the African Studies Center, She did research in Portugal and Mozambique in 1970-71 on the history of nineteenth-century coastal Mozambique, and received her Ph.D. from Boston University in 1973. With Edna G. Bay, she is cochairperson of the African Studies Association’s Committee on Women.

x Contributors MARGARET JEAN Hay received her Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Wisconsin. She did fieldwork among the Luo of Kenya, and has published

works on the changes in trade and agriculture brought about by the colo- , nial regime and on the relationship between economic interaction and ethnic identity in the precolonial era. She is Assistant Professor of History at Wellesley College. —

BARBARA C. Lewis received her Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University in 1969, and teaches at Livingston College, Rutgers _ University. She did dissertation research on the Transporters’ Association of the Ivory Coast. Most recently, she has conducted a survey under the auspices of the Ivoirian Ministry of Planning on fertility, employment, and status among urban women. LEITH MULLINGs is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia

University. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University , _ of Chicago in 1975. Mullings has done research in both Africa and the urban U.S., and includes among her research interests social and éco-

nomic change, urbanization, and medical anthropology. |

KAMENE OKON JO is a Research Fellow at the Institute of African Stud-

ies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She studied economics at the Univer- | sity of Erlangen-Niirnberg, Germany, and is currently completing her doctoral work in sociology at Boston University. In 1971~72 she did field-

work among Igbo women of Nigeria west of the Niger River. _ CLAIRE ROBERTSON received her Ph.D, in African history from the Uni-

versity of Wisconsin in 1974. Her dissertation, on twentieth-century Ga women in Ghana, dealt with the relationship between changes in economic organization and marriage patterns in Central Accra. She is Assis-

: tant Professor of History at Bucknell University. _ FILOMINA CHIOMA STEADY received her D.Phil. in social anthropology _ in 1973 from Oxford University. Born in Sierra Leone, she has conducted

University. ! |

field research in Freetown, has taught at Yale University and at the University of Sierra Leone, and is currently Assistant Professor at Boston MARGARET STROBEL studies women in the context of ethnicity, stratification, and social change in Swahili society on the East African coast. Strobel received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1975, and was appointed interim director of the Women's

Studies Program there. , ,

JUDITH VAN ALLEN teaches courses on colonialism in Africa and on the

historical formation of gender roles at Strawberry Creek College, an interdisciplinary program of the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation in the Department of Po-

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