Istwa Nou

From the fifth century BCE to the third century CE the empire of Meroe was ruled by queens. The Kandake held primary authority in their own names, over a multiethnic population that mostly traced descent through mothers. The pattern runs deeper than that. Comparative evidence across the Bantu-speaking third of the continent indicates that senior women already held recognised authority in the governance of their communities during the early Bantu expansions of the third to first millennia BCE. Earlier again, women drove two of the largest material changes in African history, the invention of ceramics and the spread of farming across much of the continent. The pattern also runs later. In seventeenth century Angola the state of Matamba, whose people also reckoned descent through the mother, was headed by a queen, the muhongo, while her male consort ran the army. Ruling women in Africa came out of a working kinship system, and the patriarchal habits of Western scholarship have made that system hard to see.