Istwa Nou

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.

A common argument holds that women lose standing once a society reckons descent through fathers. African evidence does not support it. Among the Bantu speaking societies of the African Great Lakes, where descent has run through the male line for the past two thousand years, women held recognised spheres of property and authority of their own. In West Africa, independent women traders and entrepreneurs have been prominent for as long as the record reaches, in societies speaking Niger-Congo languages, whether those societies traced descent through mothers or through fathers. The kinship system turns out to be the wrong variable. What travels with women's authority is a cultural tradition, one carried across a third of the continent by the Niger-Congo expansions and rooted in societies far older than any African state. Ehret's point cuts against the habit of treating the subordination of women as a natural cost of social complexity. In this part of the world it was a local custom, and other customs were available.