3000 BCE to the present · Africanspan
Stratified African kingdoms kept women in office anyway
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Where social and economic stratification rose in several parts of Africa, it did not carry female subordination with it. The list is long. The authority of the Kandake at Meroe. Economically independent women running major commerce in West Africa down to recent centuries. Queen mothers holding power in West and Central African kingdoms, alongside other institutions through which women acted on the state. Women holding chiefships in the kingdoms of the southern savanna belt. And in Matamba a queen who was the customary monarch. In the matrilineal savanna societies a suitor needed the consent of the bride's mother and her sisters, worked bride service under their direction for months or years, and deferred to his mother in law for the rest of her life. Those customs turn up in societies whose Bantu languages sit on different deep branches, which puts them in place by the proto-Savanna Bantu period of the early second millennium BCE. Patriarchy is not the entry fee for complex society.
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