Istwa Nou

Across West Africa, in patrilineal and matrilineal societies alike, women have long acted as independent economic and social agents, and the reason is structural. Marriage there did not make a woman a dependent of her husband. In the trades and occupations women carried on, they owned what their labour produced. The largest commercial operators in recent Nigerian history have frequently been women, and the record shows women as major traders in that region in earlier centuries too, Muslim women among them as well as followers of the older Niger-Congo religion. In the territories absorbed in the fourteenth century CE into the kingdom of Benin, the weavers of cotton and raffia cloth were women. That cloth was the main export of the state, through the slave trade era included, and the women who made it controlled access to it and took the profit from it. The wealth of a West African kingdom rested on the enterprise of women, over a wide area and many centuries.