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Article Excerpt
Abstract: Many Third World women have traditionally had what Western women have recently worked to achieve: autonomy, economic independence, and access to and exercise of power--in cooperation with women and men. These claims are supported by highlighting similar cultural patterns shared by populations on opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean, in Africa south of the Sahara and Native North America.
Prologue
On Monday July 15, 2002, the Associated Press reported that about 600 unarmed Ijaw women in Escravos, Nigeria had exactly one week earlier taken over the country's largest Chevron-Texaco oil terminal. Holding 700 workers, including Americans, Britons and Canadians hostage, they used walkie talkies to communicate with each other as they negotiated with the oil company. Their threat to strip naked, a culturally-validated practice that irreparably shames the target, in part contributed to their ability to control the facility. "Our weapon is our nakedness," said Helen Odeworitse, a spokeswoman for the group. The women--mainly mothers and wives ages 30 to 90--demanded jobs for their sons, electricity for their homes, and economic development in Nigeria's oil-rich but dirt-poor Niger delta (The Associated Press, Monday July 15, 2002a, p. 14).
Their sons, individually and in small groups, usually take out their frustrations by kidnapping workers, intimidating contractors, sabotaging oil company facilities and in general settle disputes with guns (The Associated Press, Monday July 15, 2002b, p. A14; Frynas, 2000; Human Rights Watch, 1999). These actions have minimal constructive consequences in resolving the worst problems: high unemployment and unchecked pollution. On the other hand 600 unarmed Ijaw women in a bloodless siege took over an international mega-corporation's facility from where they conducted negotiations. These women exercised one of the mandates their culture requires of women: organizing to effect specific goals and to negotiate outcomes peacefully. (1)
This paper will show that modern Western feminist goals of economic, political and social autonomy, gender-neutral cultural options for advancement in their communities, same-gender and cross-gender patterns of cooperation, and the exercise of power, are culturally mandated in much of sub-Saharan Africa and Native North America. These indigenous cultural systems which emphasize balances of powers and cooperation between the sexes continue to work in spite of the centuries-long efforts of Islam and Judeo-Christian religions and Western colonialism to suborn them. The data supporting these claims span the Atlantic Ocean: Africa south of the Sahara and Native North America. (2, 3)
Africa South of the Sahara I: Women's Collective Action
In much of the Third World merit and personal gifts, individual and kin place in local hierarchies/lineages, as well as age, are significant foundations of social organization (Oduyoye, 1995, p. 12). Sex/gender, however, is limited to the physical properties of procreation in which women's biology, her capacity to bear children, is rated higher than men's. In many African matrilineal societies "women are the center of the kinship unit. Without women "'a lineage is finished,' the Akan say" (Oduyoye, 1995, p. 7). Speaking of precolonial periods and of the Oyo Yoruba of Southwest Nigeria sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997) comments.
Biological facts do not determine who can become the monarch, or who can trade in the market.... The classic example is the female who played the roles of oba (ruler), omo (offspring), oko, aya, iya (mother) and alawo (diviner-priest) all in one body.... Unlike European languages, Yorubo does not "do gender;" it "does seniority" ... [which] ...is highly relational and situational ... it is neither rigidly fixated on the body nor dichotomized.... most Yoruba names are gender-free ... constant gendering and gender-stereotyping does not arise in the Yoruba language.... Thus, social categories deriving from an elaboration of anatomic distinctions--categories like "men" and "women" or kings--did not exist. Oyo social categories were gender free in that the anatomy did not constitute the basis for their construction and elaboration. Access to power, exercise of authority, and membership in occupations all derived from the lineage, which was regulated from within by age, not sex. (pp. 12, 14, 42, 43, 83) (4)
The Ijaw women's coup is only one of innumerable expressions of women's collective power, particularly in societies with strong corporate kinship groups. Lineage status and age aside, like most African women, the Ijas are enculturated to organize with other women, in highly sophisticated ways for specific purposes.
Nigeria has seen a great many similar women's organizings. The Aba riots, known as the Igbo Women's War of 1928 to 1930 forced the British to rescind taxes on women traders (Amadiume, 1987; Okonjo, 1976; Onwuteaka, 1965). In the 1940s the Market Women of Abeokuta, a common African institution, successfully expelled Egbaland's king (Sofola, 1998). Grassroots women's demonstrations in southwest Nigeria in the 1980s led to the demise of the Babangida regime (Aina, 1998). Tens of thousands of women participated in these rebellions. In one the British killed about fifty women and injured another fifty. Although hard-pressed, the women refused to kill or physically harm anyone (Leith-Ross, 1965). (5)
Rural Owerri (and other) Igbo women who are married out of their lineages can, as strangers in their husbands' villages, exercise power through their control over subsistence farming and as providers of most of the food. Their achieved statuses combine earned authority with real power minus the trappings of an ofo, a physical symbol of an office. As Margaret Green (1947/1964) points out, equally important is the fear of women's anger, believed to call up sickness. The widespread custom among women in a village of swearing solidarity before village shrines underscores culturally mandated unity that ties women in most of Sub-Saharan Africa to other women.
One expression of this solidarity of women is the Owerri Ibgo women's massive walk-out just before the height of the influenza epidemic of 1919. There was a rash of thefts and murders of pregnant women and
children that the women were determined to stop. The women's rebellion lasted for more than a month. By means of a series of rituals before the shrines of two powerful Agbaja deities that included specific foods, the women of each village forced their husbands to foreswear on pain of death that they did not kill and steal and would never do so (Green, 1947/1964).
The Mende and Sherbro women's secret Bundu society of Sierra Leone punishes men who offend their wives. One chief was deposed because he abused his wife (Hoffer, 1972). Shirley Ardner (1973) describes a similar women's uprising in 1958, called anlu, among the Kom in Cameroon. Several grievances against the government whose officials, among other things, uprooted crops and destroyed perfectly good food and liquor in the market, led to a forty-mile march of two thousand women supported by another four thousand sitting in the market. They forced the transfer of unpopular teachers and even set up their own courts in competition with those of the government. Government officials no longer interfered with the women's affairs (pp. 428-431). (6)
In the 1970s a group of Kom women led another anlu, this one against a man who offended them. Anlu is started off by a woman who doubles up in an awful position and gives out a high pitched shrill, breaking it by beating on the lips with the four fingers. Any woman recognizing the sound does the same and leaves whatever she is doing and runs in the direction of the first sound. The women pour into the compound of the offender singing and dancing, and, it being early in the morning, there would be enough excreta and urine to turn the compound and houses into a public latrine. ... Vulgar parts of the body are exhibited. (Ardner 1973, p. 428) (6)
The underlying configuration shared by most Sub-Saharan cultures is "organizing in terms of age and gender" (Trager, 2001, p. 95). Women are raised to work and cooperate with other women. This communality is reinforced through membership in women-only organizations. Their corporate character is regularly articulated by means of well-established rituals performed by the membership (Trager, 2001, pp. 97-103). That many of them are carried out before an entire village or town underscores widespread cultural authorizations that accord women their share in their communities' systems of power. Although women members of high-status lineages can more easily achieve high office with its concomitants of power and wealth, lesser lineage Ijaw, Kom, Mende, Sherbro, Yoruba and Igbo women, by virtue of their women's organizations, also wield considerable clout.
Africa South of the Sahara II: Power and Hierarchy, Lineage and Merit
Much of Africa south of the Sahara consists of hierarchically ordered populations. Before colonialism many of them, such as the Swazi, were dual "monarchies," balances of power between the sexes as embodied in the co-rulers: a "queen mother," Indlovukati, the mother/wife (Lady Elephant) and one of her sons...
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