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.

In the matrilineal societies spread right across Africa's southern savanna belt, a young man who wanted to marry applied to the mother of the woman and to her mother's female relatives, acting as a group. Their consent was the one that counted, ahead of her father's and ahead of her mother's brother's. To win it he performed bride service, working for months and sometimes for several years under their direction. After he was accepted and married he was still required to show marked deference to his mother in law for the rest of her life. Marriage is the central economic and reproductive transaction any society makes, and here the women of the lineage controlled it. They judged the suitor, set the labour, and admitted him or refused him. The practice turns up in societies speaking languages from deep and separate branches of Bantu, which puts it in place long before those branches parted. For thousands of years, across a third of the continent, this was ordinary.