Istwa Nou

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.

Women prospered as independent traders in large parts of Africa for a structural reason. Marriage there did not, as far back as the evidence reaches, convert a wife into an economic dependent of her husband. She kept her own property, her own trade and her own earnings. Once that is established, a run of questions opens up which historians have mostly declined to ask. Where women have held authority, what were the customs and institutions through which they held it? Where major changes in material culture occurred, which of them did women drive? Ehret's earlier chapters give examples, crediting women with the invention of ceramics and with the creation of agricultural ways of life. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of what crossed the Atlantic. The women who ran the markets of Saint-Domingue, and the madan sara who still move most of the food in Haiti, work inside an arrangement their great grandmothers would have recognised, one that was in place long before any ship.