3 |
Social Relations |
Family, Kinship, and Community |
News accounts of violent conflict in Africa frequently make reference to “tribe” and “tribalism” as potent ingredients of discord. The use of “tribe” in the African context is a legacy of colonialism and the research of early anthropologists. Anthropologists wanted to know how African societies without centralized leadership maintained order and stability while colonial officials demarcated African societies for the purpose of rule, ignoring complexities, interactions between groups, and the fluidity of boundaries. The persistent characterization of African populations as “tribes” gives the appearance of timelessness and glosses over the different forms of political organization that existed in the past. It implicitly suggests that tribe (or ethnic group) is the primary source of identity and mode of sociopolitical organization on the continent. It also obscures the existence of more important forms of identification, relatedness, and belonging that may play a role in, counteract, or facilitate the resolution of conflict. Like people in other parts of the world, Africans are enmeshed in a range of institutions and identify with multiple collectivities. An individual may be a mother, wife, sister, and daughter; a cultivator, cloth dyer, or teacher; a member of an age group, a participant in a local or national women’s association, and a member of an ethnic group as well as a citizen of a nation-state. These social positions and identities overlap and cross-cut each other; which of them takes precedence at any given time depends on the context.
This chapter focuses on social relations as lived and constructed through kinship, marriage, and forms of association beyond the family. It illuminates the diverse ways in which individuals negotiate these institutions and the changes taking place as a result of the day-to-day actions of African women and men in the context of historical, political, and economic processes that impinge on their lives. Social relations are dynamic and change is not new; yet transformations are often subtle before they become visible or acknowledged as a result of an event that brings them to the fore. Africans may highlight continuity when asked about specific practices. At the same time, older people contending that young people act very differently than they themselves once did often ignore the variability that already existed during their own youth.
Drawing on Western models of economic transition, twentieth-century modernization theorists assumed that the importance of kinship bonds would diminish once African economies developed and state institutions created a social safety net. Yet kinship has not lost its salience as a moral order that structures relationships and guides people’s actions as they meet the challenges of contemporary life. Anthropologists have used the concept of “kinship” to understand who gets counted as “family” in different African societies.1 They identified kinship, that is, relationships constructed through descent (a concept overlapping with what Americans usually call “blood relations”) and marriage, as the primary organizing principle. In classifying societies according to the ways in which they formed kin groups, they found that unilineal descent groups prevailed across the continent: a majority of African societies were patrilineal, tracing descent only through the father, and a significant number were matrilineal, reckoning descent through the mother. The descent system of the Tuareg, living in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Mali, and Niger, seems to have shifted from matrilineal to patrilineal in the process of Islamization, although higher-status groups within society appear to have retained more matrilineal elements than lower-status groups. Some populations, such as the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire or the San of southern Africa, have a double descent system, tracing ancestral ties through both the father and the mother. The latter differs from the ways in which Euro-Americans view connections between ancestors and descendants in that individuals belong simultaneously to two separately constituted descent groups. Among the San peoples, membership in both the mother’s and father’s descent groups conferred rights to the plants and animals of the territory associated with each group. In Beng society, each kin group is important in different contexts. Agricultural land, for example, is inherited through the matriline, while funerary rites are carried out by members of the patriline.
Kin groups tracing descent to a common ancestor often constituted lineages that acted like corporate groups. Clans encompassed groups that also claimed descent from a common ancestor but not all of the genealogical connections were known. Some populations were organized into lineages and clans, some had one but not the other, and the most decentralized had neither. In some places, lineages became identified with particular territories, mostly when land became scarce. Lineages and clans continue to structure identities and solidarities in Libya and Somalia, but their sociopolitical importance has changed in many other locales. Social status became more important than lineage or ethnicity after centuries of intermarriage between indigenous Berbers and migrant Arabs of the West African Sahara, blurring genealogical and cultural distinctions. In Morocco, individual achievements such as wealth or high levels of education now often outweigh descent from an important family. Descent remains important among rural Tuareg of northern Niger but is downplayed in urban areas in the interest of struggles for cultural autonomy.
In matrilineal and patrilineal societies children belong to the mother’s or to the father’s lineage, respectively, and authority over them is vested in the senior men of these lineages (i.e., maternal uncles vs. fathers). Relations with male kin of the other parent, like relations with sisters, are typically characterized by affection and can be drawn on for support when a child or youth has difficulties within the natal family. The definition of “family” is broader than in Euro-American societies since a greater range of individuals are considered siblings. Who counts as a sibling depends on the descent system. In patrilineal societies, the children of brothers call each other brother and sister; they also refer to their father’s brothers as “father” but differentiate between a father’s elder and younger brothers. Terms for brother and sister too generally reflect the age hierarchy; that is, someone is always referred to as “elder brother/sister” or “younger brother/sister.” Children of the same father but of different mothers are considered brothers and sisters, although their relationship may be fraught with tension and rivalries. Adoption is not a common practice and may even be discouraged because an adoptive child is of different “blood.” Fostering, however, is very common. It entails the relocation of children from their natal homes to homes where they are raised and cared for and does not occur only in the event of a crisis such as the death of parents or the mother of an infant: childless women often become “mothers” by raising the child of a brother or sister; and aunts, uncles, or significantly older siblings take in youths who attend secondary school or university in the city. Non-kin foster parents are usually wealthier individuals. In all of these circumstances, parents do not lose legal rights over the children.
Patrilineal and matrilineal societies exhibit considerable variability in residence patterns, claims to authority, and individuals’ access to resources. Anthropologists who conducted research in Africa during the 1930s and 1940s focused on kinship in order to elucidate social organization. This led them to emphasize structures, rules, and norms. Although their studies became classics in the development of anthropological thinking about kinship, they made kinship systems appear more timeless and rigid than they are in practice. They did not consider how kinship structures might have been altered by the slave trade or how colonial policies were affecting practices such as inheritance. They also did not take into account the incorporation of individuals or social groups who were not born into the lineage or marry into it. Historians of Africa have demonstrated that kin groups in both sedentary and pastoral societies often expanded by integrating conquered people, slaves, or refugees from conflict or other calamities, while others contracted as a result of famine, disease, or slave raiding. To better capture social dynamism, anthropologists now pay attention to the ways in which individuals and social groups interpret and use rules, construct relatedness through everyday practices, and modify kinship practices over time as political and economic circumstances change.
Marriage in many societies is the primary means for expanding kinship relations and reproducing descent groups. Although birth rates across Africa have declined in recent decades and couples increasingly limit the number of children, having children remains an important goal of marriage for the group and for individual men and women. Children may provide social security in old age; they also affirm the social personhood of adult women and men and ensure a form of immortality. Dying without having had at least one child means that one’s name and one’s influence in the world are not extended. Marriage is also used strategically to develop alliances, especially among those of high social standing, much as European royalty or powerful families elsewhere in the world have done.
Among late twentieth-century patrilineal Bamana people of central Mali, male household heads were obligated to identify suitable spouses for marriageable men in order of seniority. They took into account existing relationships between their own family and those with women of marriageable age, families’ social standing, and the character of a potential bride, and sent an intermediary to a woman’s kin to express their interest in her and seek their consent to a marriage. Forging connections between kin groups through marriage is valued as a means of developing solidarity within and across villages. Affinal (in-law) relations are transformed into consanguineal (blood) relations over generations when repeated marriages take place between two kin groups. Marriages between cross-cousins—children of a brother and sister in the first or subsequent generations—were preferred because they perpetuated already established ties. They were also thought to be more stable because a bride would be among relatives and family members could intervene to help resolve conflicts, if necessary. These practices connected families and villages across the generations so that, for example, a woman’s daughter would be married to the son of one of her male relatives. Elders did not have to respect the age hierarchy when it came to marrying a second wife because it was recognized that some men’s personal characteristics made them more attractive as spouses. A family could, for example, propose a young girl as a future bride for one of the young men to reinforce a relationship between the two kin groups.
Intrinsic to the emphasis on the family over the individual was the assumption that the couple would develop affection for each other as they lived together. In the past, the couple was informed only after the arrangement had been concluded. This changed in the second half of the twentieth century, when elders increasingly relied on money earned by young men on labor migration for the payment of taxes and bridewealth (that is, the transfer of goods and services from the groom’s family to the bride’s family) and for the purchase of agricultural equipment. Through their ability to earn cash, junior men gained greater autonomy within the household. One of the results was that their elders would ask a junior man if he wanted to marry a particular woman before concluding a marriage agreement. Their earning capacity also allowed junior men to ask their seniors to find a second wife for them or to initiate negotiations for a woman they had met and wished to marry.
Figure 3.1. Couple during wedding celebrations in a village of Segou region, Mali.
Maria Grosz-Ngaté.
Young women did not receive the same opportunity to express their opinion, even after they began earning money in cash-cropping areas or in the city during the 1970s in order to buy some of the goods they would bring into their marital home. Their mothers sometimes intervened if they objected to the choice, but they often did not prevail. Mothers could, however, delay the wedding a year or more by contending that they needed more time to complete the daughter’s trousseau. Occasionally, young women who strongly objected to a proposed marriage refused to return home from working in the city; others ran away after they were married. These actions put them at odds with their male kin and subjected their mothers to criticism.
The preference for marrying people from within a known social network extends well beyond Bamana villages to other African societies and to contexts where marriageable men and women have greater freedom in choosing a spouse. Among the San peoples of southern Africa appropriate marriage or sexual partners are individuals whose grandparents or great-grandparents were siblings. Consanguinity and affinity overlap, and affines can be recategorized as kin. While this may seem highly restrictive to outsiders, it actually allows for considerable flexibility, as San individuals draw on a range of available options to develop and manage a social network that provides support in times of need. A preference for marriage within a (usually extensive) network of relationships does not mean that people marry only within their own social group. In societies where clans were historically important, marriage between members of the same clan was often expressly forbidden. People also marry across ethnic boundaries. This is not a recent or primarily urban phenomenon but extends to populations in rural areas; for example, Maasai pastoralists of north-central Tanzania intermarried with Arusha cultivators to expand their productive strategies, especially during times when drought or disease decimated their herds. The fact that marriage in many societies is often used strategically to strengthen and cement ties based on material interests does not mean that marital relationships in Africa are, or have been, devoid of emotional attachment and passion.
Figure 3.2. Maasai women watching the bride enter in Kajiado district, Kenya.
Jennie Demille.
The stability of marriages has varied across space and over time, regardless of whether they are monogamous or polygynous. In some societies (for example, the Hausa of Maradi in Niger, the Mbororo Fulani of Cameroon, or the (!Kung San of the Kalahari), divorce and remarriage have been common. The incidence of divorce has been low in others not only because divorce spells a rupture in relationships between the two families but also because it may lead to disputes over the repayment of bridewealth, especially when the portion to be repaid has already been consumed by the wife’s family. Women in patrilineal societies may themselves be reluctant to leave their husbands because they cannot take their children with them. Many women seek a divorce only when conflict is extreme; women in urban southwestern Nigeria, for example, generally do so only if they want to remarry. However, a growing number of women across the continent do not remarry after divorce or widowhood if they have a measure of financial autonomy due to success in trade or other professions.
Prompted by a widespread interest in romantic love on the part of African youths, scholars have begun to explore discourses, sentiments, and practices of love, and the ways in which Africans engage and remake ideals of intimacy from elsewhere over time. They are finding that young people have long used claims of intimate passion to set themselves apart from their parents’ generation and that those who defended it in their youth often questioned it as a sound basis for marriage once they grew older. Today’s youths debate the romantic love depicted in Latin American television serials, South Asian films, Nigerian videos, and local popular print media, and many embrace it, along with monogamy, as an ideal basis for marriage and as a way of being modern. Young women associate notions of romantic love with companionate marriage, greater support from husbands, and independence from kin. Yet students or urban migrants who wish to marry partners with whom they have developed affective relationships usually inform their parents and elders, who then enter into dialogue, carry out the appropriate rituals, take charge of any gift transfers, and make practical arrangements. Desires to marry for love and to achieve the lifestyle associated with it frequently come up against harsh economic realities. As African economies have declined, an ever greater number of men have to delay marriage because they do not earn enough to provide for the housing and other basic needs of a young family, especially in urban areas. They are therefore prevented from becoming social adults, since marriage is generally considered a passage to adulthood. Under these conditions, men may express their love as well as their masculinity by providing support and gifts to one or more girlfriends. Some women avoid marriage (or remarriage following divorce) and engage in a sexual relationship in exchange for financial support unless they are able to sustain themselves economically.
Christian missionaries in Africa have held up ideals of romantic love and companionate marriage since at least the nineteenth century as part of their efforts to establish monogamy and eradicate polygyny, that is, the practice whereby a man has more than one wife. They perceived African marriages as loveless and duty-bound and led a constant battle to have converts adhere to the exclusive relationship of monogamy. Churches, especially the Pentecostal churches that have expanded rapidly in recent years in many parts of the continent, also promote the monogamous nuclear family and the concentration of resources on this smaller unit, emphasizing the “family” of church members over the extended family, which they assume to be “traditional.” Islam allows a man to have up to four wives as long as he is able to provide for each of them equally, yet many Muslims have only one wife. Polygyny is not confined to the rural areas or to those without formal schooling, but it is far from universal even in societies where it is legal. Outsiders frequently consider polygyny as quintessentially African. Yet not all men support polygyny nor do all women reject it, even as African feminists speak out against it. Africans who defend it often cite “tradition” in making their argument and ignore its connection to social status, even in the past.
Weddings are among the most important social events in many African societies. They make social ties visible and reaffirm them through acts of reciprocity. The celebration of weddings in the West African Sahel reflects changes as a result of conversion to Islam during the twentieth century as well as increased access to money and material goods. Ritual proceedings vary between rural and urban areas and between ethnic groups, but here as elsewhere in Africa weddings celebrate the alliance not just of two individuals but of two kin groups. While kinship is central to the wedding ceremonies in which I participated in villages of the Segou region in Mali, non-kin relationships and solidarity are equally in evidence: the bridegroom and bride are both assisted by their age-mates, the groom’s family is helped by other village households to ensure that there is enough food for the guests, the male elder in the groom’s family gets small contributions from other elders, and the relationships that the groom has forged throughout the province are demonstrated by the monetary contributions he receives from other men. Men’s ability to establish networks of mutual giving has increased significantly as a result of the cash they earn on labor migration.
Weddings are preceded by ritualized communication and exchanges between the families of the bride and groom, even if the relationship was initiated by the couple rather than by family elders. Gifts in patrilineal societies flow in both directions, but the more substantial prestations move from the groom’s family to the bride’s, often over a period of years. Although they consist of different categories of gifts, anthropologists refer to them collectively as “bridewealth.” Some are made only once, while others occur throughout the period of engagement. Their composition has changed over time in relation to socioeconomic changes. Annual prestations consisted of agricultural products, including millet grain and beer, when Bamana of Mali made a living primarily by agriculture. Millet beer was replaced by grain or money as people became Muslims, and millet grain gradually gave way to money and cloth as young men increasingly migrated to the cities to earn extra income. The annual payments are stipulated by the bride’s family at the time the marriage arrangement is agreed on. In pastoral and other societies where animal husbandry plays an important role, marriage relationships are constructed through the transfer of cows, sheep, goats, or camels. Bridewealth may continue to be reckoned in cows or sheep even if it takes the form of cash, and the marriage of a son could be tied to the receipt of bridewealth for a daughter.
Marriage in some societies is delayed when payments are not made. In others the status of a marriage, and the children born of it, may be ambiguous if the wedding takes place before all of the gifts have been transferred or are not completed after the wedding. Incomplete payment or nonpayment of bridewealth may lead to disputes when a deceased woman’s relatives claim her body for burial, contesting the right of her husband’s people to bury her. This is the case even in settings where there has been a widespread decline in the payment of bridewealth, mostly for economic reasons, but where expectations and demands for it still persist. Among the urban poor, couples often simply live together under “customary law,” although what constitutes “custom” and its attendant rights and obligations are continually redefined. In predominantly Muslim Mali, the parents of a young couple often have a religious ceremony performed to give a cohabiting couple social legitimacy. A religious marriage is also considered to be more flexible and easier to dissolve than a marriage with bridewealth and/or a civil ceremony conducted before a representative of the state.
The early missionaries to Africa who encountered bridewealth saw in it merely the purchase of a woman and referred to these prestations as “brideprice.” Anthropologists attempted to correct this misperception by highlighting the rights in the productive and reproductive capacity of a woman that the groom’s family acquired through these payments. They pointed out that the payment of bridewealth gave the prospective husband and his family rights to a woman’s labor and allowed them to claim the children born of the marriage; that is, children belonged to the father’s family even if the couple later divorced. Subsequent research led to a more nuanced understanding: the transfer of bridewealth not only compensates for the “loss” of a woman but also establishes her and her family’s “worth,” expresses social difference, and constitutes not only a marital relationship but also kin and affines. Contributing animals to the bridewealth cattle where these form the medium of payment is a tangible way of affirming one’s belonging and position within the kin group. Patrilineal kin were implicated in the agricultural products given by Bamana to a bride’s family in the past because they collectively cultivated and harvested the crops. Similarly, members of the bride’s kin group were reaffirmed in their position when they received grain or shared in the consumption of millet beer. With the insertion of money into the exchange, the involvement of family members is diminished because the bridegroom can earn the bridewealth on his own by working in the city. Whereas a payment of millet or animals could be forgiven during periods of severe drought, monetary payments are expected regardless of economic circumstances. Money is not redistributed in the bride’s family but goes to the father, who gives a portion of it to the bride’s mother so that she can buy household goods for her daughter; cloth is given to the mother on behalf of the bride. The development of cash economies over the course of the twentieth century and the increasing availability of consumer goods have led to the gradual commodification as well as inflation of bridewealth payments.
The increase in bridewealth is tied to expectations of what a bride should bring into the marriage. The kind and number of cooking utensils, bowls, cloth, household furnishings, and jewelry considered essential to a trousseau have increased over time and are subject to fashionable trends. Young women set themselves apart from their mothers’ generation through the content of their trousseau and also compete with one another, especially in polygynous families. More important, jewelry, cloth, and household items enhance a bride’s stature and become the basis for her future home as well as a hedge against hard times. A portion of the cloth and bowls a bride brings with her is redistributed among female kin of the groom at the wedding; the groom and his father also receive some garments. The bride’s mother is responsible for accumulating these goods through her own and her daughter’s income-generating activities, the bridegroom’s gifts, and her relationships with female relatives and other women. A woman who contributes a piece of cloth or an item of houseware when the daughter of a female relative or friend gets married creates an obligation on the part of the recipient. Through these gifts and exchanges women define themselves as valuable social beings. Social relationships between women are created and reaffirmed through contributions to the trousseau just as relationships are expressed and affirmed in the assembling and redistribution of bridewealth.
The range, quality, and quantity of gifts expected of prospective husbands, especially those who migrate overseas, have increased most notably in urban areas. Writing about Senegal, Beth Buggenhagen has shown that bridewealth has become a means of obtaining valued consumer goods and of meeting material needs for the families of prospective brides since neoliberal strategies to downsize the state and restructure African economies have jeopardized their livelihoods. Mothers and female relatives of a bride take on an ever greater role in the process, at the expense of senior men, when they make specific requests for gifts and take charge of their distribution. They use the money, cloth, or other gifts received for themselves and their home as well as to strengthen family ties and build their social networks. The money they invest in a rotating credit association will provide them with capital when it is their turn to receive the accumulated funds. Yet the heightened importance of bride-wealth frequently subordinates young women’s own wishes to the interests of their senior matrikin and puts considerable pressure on junior men. The upsurge in young people’s professed desire to marry for love may be a response to these predicaments and a way of resisting the commodification of marriage; at the same time, youths who embrace the ideals of romantic love also express their sentiments through gifts.
Figure 3.3. Bamana women sorting the cloth for a bride’s trousseau, Segou region, Mali.
Maria Grosz-Ngaté.
Men have complained for some time that demands on them make it difficult to marry and that women are frivolous in the way they spend money. But the escalation of bridewealth and wedding goods has also been denounced by Pentecostalist Christians and reformist Muslim groups. In Niger, for example, the Izala movement decreed that bridewealth should be restricted to a modest sum and encouraged women to reduce their acquisition of material goods. The governments of Niger and of neighboring countries as well as local communities have at different times set limits on bridewealth payments. These have met with variable success, since agreements could be broken or legislation was not enforced. Moreover, a limit on a cash payment can be easily circumvented because bridewealth consists of a series of gifts rather than a lump sum of cash.
Figure 3.4. Carrying gifts into a bride’s new home, Dakar, Senegal.
Beth Buggenhagen.
In societies reckoning descent matrilineally or bilaterally, bridegrooms frequently worked for their future wives’ families for a period of time. Among the San peoples of southern Africa, for example, a new husband would come to live and work with his wife’s family until several children had been born. He demonstrated his commitment to the group by offering his wife’s kin an animal he had hunted or obtained by working at a cattle post or in the mines. During this period the couple periodically visited his descent group and participated in productive activities in order to retain his entitlements to the land occupied by his own group. The converse took place if the family planned to reside with the husband’s people after brideservice ended. Such visiting maintained not only social relations but also the children’s rights to the land. Some African societies practiced neither brideservice nor the exchange of substantial bridewealth. Among the Asante of Ghana, for example, where marriage did not confer rights to the wife’s labor or the children she bore, family elders only poured a libation to mark the alliance between kin groups.
Across the African continent, intimate attachment is expressed through gifts that the groom makes to the prospective bride. Gift giving also continues after marriage: husbands are expected to offer their wives clothing, especially in advance of important holidays; among pastoralists, at the birth of their children women receive animals that are theirs to dispose of as they see fit. Gifts and other forms of material support signify emotional commitment and are evidence of caring, especially under conditions of economic hardship. Affection and economic interests are therefore intertwined rather than opposed, as Western ideology suggests.
Although the sociality and gift exchanges related to marriage play a crucial role in the affirmation of kinship, they are not the only means of expressing social attachment. Other life cycle events such as name-giving ceremonies and funerals may be equally or more important. In the cities of Mali and Senegal, male relatives and friends come together for the name-giving ceremony and offer cash to the father of the baby, while women gather around the mother with gifts of cloth. These presents create obligations much like at weddings. Social attachment and belonging are also made manifest when urban residents or overseas migrants build a home in their village of origin. Urban Nigerians, like North Africans working in France, construct often elaborate homes to establish a presence in their natal villages and demonstrate their success. They may never return on a permanent basis, but the house allows them to maintain connections by having family members live in it and by involving other villagers in the maintenance of the home.
In parts of Kenya and Uganda where patrilineal kin loyalties and territorial attachment have become closely intertwined, the presence of a grave allows descendants of a common ancestor to lay claim to a particular piece of land. Where one is buried therefore becomes highly significant and potentially contentious. Even in places where the identification with land is less tight, burial in one’s home village can be important for establishing the identity of the deceased and for situating the living. Funerals and postburial rites themselves link household, family, and the wider community. They create, reaffirm, or reconfigure solidarities and social differences by drawing attention to who is helping or declining to help with expenditures, especially in settings where funerals are lavish events that require substantial resources. New communication technologies allow those in charge to mobilize social networks that stretch across national and international borders. Governments, religious figures, and development experts often criticize large funerary expenditures as drawing money away from productive investment, mostly with little result. However, organizing an expensive celebration for reasons of status and prestige does not mean that family members do not engage in serious debates over it. How rituals of death are conducted varies widely across the continent and is influenced by religious change. They have been the social rituals par excellence among the Asante of Ghana. Elsewhere, elaborate ceremonies are more recent developments, although people may contend they are a tradition. In yet other contexts, burials of women and men who had numerous children and grandchildren had been lively celebrations of life before conversion to Islam but became more austere afterward.
Figure 3.5. Asante funeral in Ghana: sisters sit in the front row on the ground while the wife sits in the second row.
Gracia Clark.
The dominant ideal of the family in the United States is a husband, wife, and children who reside together in a household, conceived as a physical space such as a house or an apartment. They own common property, pool income, and share resources. This ideal elides “family” and “household.” It has persisted in spite of changes in family structure and household composition. In Africa, families have historically not constituted domestic units that sleep under one roof, pool resources, and make collective decisions concerning their use. Although the term “household” is widely used in the literature on Africa, its meaning in a given context needs to be defined rather than assumed. Kinship principles underlie inheritance and property rights as well as relations between members, but their interpretation is shaped by political and economic circumstances, ideologies disseminated through education and the media, religious affiliation, and state policies. Christianity was closely bound up with European legal codes that were introduced during the colonial period and frequently strengthened patriarchal authority. The influence of Islam has already been noted with respect to polygyny, but it has also affected relations between spouses and claims to inheritance in areas where it is widely practiced. Family law, known as code de la famille, seeks to regulate power and authority within the family in countries formerly governed by France. Recent legislative efforts to amend the law in countries such as Mali and Senegal in order to strengthen women’s position were drawn out and did not bring the results hoped for by feminists due to contestations by Muslim groups.
Depending on their position, age, and gender, family members have different rights and obligations. They negotiate access to material, social, and symbolic resources with each other. In addition, individuals have different abilities, aspirations, and personalities that may be in tension. Regardless of family form, mothers occupy a central place in the household and are held responsible for their children’s behavior and success in life. Children are linked to their mothers by strong affective bonds and continue to seek them out throughout life, particularly in polygynous families. Conjugal rights and obligations constitute an arena of gendered negotiation, and expectations of what a husband and wife should contribute, do, or be are tied up with changing notions of responsibility. Husband and wife are not expected to be everything to the other spouse, and same-gender relationships remain important after marriage. Women continue to cooperate and socialize extensively with other women within and beyond the family and build social networks; men do the same. Although household provisioning is bound up with masculinity in urban and rural areas regardless of what “provisioning” encompasses (for example housing, food staples, school fees, cultivable land for a wife), women increasingly take on roles formerly ascribed to men. In urban Morocco, women in civil service and commercial occupations now often support the family and become the centers of patronage networks, providing resources and helping to navigate the bureaucracy. The shift in women’s economic roles extends to the noneconomic domain and may lead to contestations over authority by husbands and other male kin.
Figure 3.6. A mother and her daughters taking morning chai in the kitchen of a Maasai homestead (boma), Kajiado district, Kenya.
Nicholas G. Demille.
Figure 3.7. Women chefs in Marrakech, Morocco.
Corbis.
Women-headed households have increased across the continent in rural and urban areas. In South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda, child-headed households have also increased. Some children who have lost one or both parents to AIDS and have no grandparents able to care for them prefer to live on their own rather than moving to the home of a relative whose resources are already stretched. So-called child-headed households may involve several children or youths who fend for themselves, an older child in charge of younger siblings, or a youth managing a household with an ailing grandparent.
Among rural Bamana of Mali, as well as in many other societies that trace descent through the paternal line, a family consists of brothers and their wives, married sons, grandchildren, and unmarried sons and daughters. It may be augmented at any given time by short- or long-term visitors, including married daughters and sisters, other relatives, or friends. Historically, families have contracted and new units have emerged when enduring unresolved conflict led to fission and division of the family fields, or when members left the area in response to ecological conditions or new opportunities. The resulting units may be nuclear families. A family cultivates common fields and eats its daily meals in the household of the family elder; the food is prepared collectively by the daughters-in-law. The elder is responsible for family affairs but leaves the management of day-to-day activities to a younger brother or son as he ages; decisions are often made after discussion. Family members belong to different residential units.
Young men construct their own houses once they reach maturity, and these houses become the nucleus of a new household when they get married. Those who marry more than one woman have to provide a house for each wife. While men are considered the owners, each house is effectively the wife’s domain; there she lives with her children, prepares an occasional meal, and receives visitors. Women used to work in the family fields but many now are required to do so only during the harvest, giving them more time to engage in activities that generate personal income. Authority among women parallels that among men, but hierarchy is based on the number of years married into the family rather than on age. Living in an extended family brings challenges but also provides mutual support, allows women to share the labor of food preparation, and frees senior women from such duties altogether.
Unmarried Bamana men and women spend parts of the year away earning cash; young married men do so as well but may take their wife (or junior wife) along unless they leave the country. Ideally, a man curtails his time away once he becomes the family elder, but this is impossible if he has no younger brothers or sons able to earn extra income. While men on labor migration are ostensibly subject to the authority of family elders, the lack of local self-sufficiency effectively limits this authority even during periods when they return home. The number of migrants who settle permanently in the city and become heads of new families has increased considerably since the 1990s. Here, as elsewhere, the prescription for sons to reside close to their father after marriage is giving way to economic exigencies.
Figure 3.8. Women pounding and sifting millet for the family meal, Segou region, Mali.
Maria Grosz-Ngaté.
In southern Ghana, matrilineal Akan couples frequently do not share a residence: about two-thirds of married women live in houses with, or built by, their maternal relatives. Men do the same; if their own family lives far away, they rent a room near their spouse. This pattern has not changed significantly in spite of the fact that Christian churches have tried to promote co-residence and shared budgeting. Domestic units here consist of relatives who trace their descent to a common maternal ancestor as well as of children and adults who are closely or distantly related. The affective and material bonds between husband and wife thus transcend residential boundaries, and the sharing of food by eating together or taking a cooked meal to the nonresident husband becomes a material expression of marriage. Husbands and wives are encouraged to cooperate closely with their respective matrikin, who also provide a social safety net for children when their parents divorce or when fathers cannot meet their financial obligations. Kobena Hanson has argued that an individual’s position within the unit is affected by the internal and external economic, social, and symbolic resources she or he can draw on, and which are due in part to the relations she or he has built through gift giving and other contributions. The salience of the extended family among rural and urban Akan has declined, but the nuclear family is not as strictly bounded as among Euro-Americans, so extended family members continue to have rights and obligations.
Changing economic conditions, new production regimes, and urban migration have resulted in more fundamental reconfigurations of rural families in eastern and southern Africa. In South Africa, family unity and mutual support were already undermined in the early twentieth century when black farmers were forced into reserves or tenancy agreements with white farmers. This was exacerbated when those who sought work in the diamond or gold mines were prevented from bringing their families to the mining centers, leading some men to start new families in town. People of the Taita Hills in southeastern Kenya left their homes in search of work earlier and in larger numbers than the Bamana discussed earlier. James H. Smith found that families had contracted to largely nuclear units by the 1990s, with more than 80 percent of households headed by women or by women standing in for men who were away. This reality contrasts with an ideal of patriarchal authority and a conception of the household as an expression of a man’s independence from his natal family following the payment of bridewealth. Although supposedly autonomous, many of these households depend on neighbors, kin networks, and even connections with international nongovernmental organizations to sustain themselves. Among the Gikuyu, men with insufficient land moved to the city with their wives and children instead of maintaining two households.
Domestic arrangements in cities vary widely across the economic spectrum. The educated tend to have fewer children and live in households formed around nuclear units, but they also often share their home with an elderly mother, young relatives going to school or university, and one or more domestic servants. They are likely to interact more with members of their social networks than with their neighbors. In middle- and lower-income neighborhoods, homes are subdivided into apartments that are occupied either by members of an extended family or by multiple unrelated nuclear families, some of whom may be recent migrants to the city. Individual rooms are also rented to single individuals, generally men, or to a group of male migrants. Renters may be regarded and treat each other like family, except when conflicts arise. Many household tasks are performed outside, extending the often tight space of the home and leading to increased sociability. Households are lively social sites where neighbors and friends come and go; people of varying ages also socialize in front of the home. Urban residents differ in the extent to which they maintain ties with their rural relatives. Some visit regularly and offer support, while others reduce contact even if they have sufficient resources.
Domestic units in the growing informal settlements of Africa’s burgeoning cities are subject to frequent dissolution and re-formation because poverty and illness prevent residents from conforming to ideals of who should live together. According to Fiona Ross, many residents of a shantytown in the Western Cape of South Africa had to reconfigure their households and formalize previously fluid relationships in order to qualify for a new housing development intended as a model community. The pressures toward social conformity and the legal and aesthetic constraints that came with the new formal housing gave rise to an imagined norm of living in nuclear families and to tensions if residents did not abide by it. Previous ways of relying on reciprocity and sharing networks also gave way to new modes of association.
Many African families have become transnational in recent decades, with individual members dispersed between the home country and other African countries, the Middle East, Europe, North America, or Asia. This development is due as much to the pursuit of new opportunities such as work or education as to forced movement prompted by civil conflict. Long-distance migration was once largely a male phenomenon but now includes women who move on their own, not just as a spouse. Among the educated and professional classes, women may study or work in another country while the husband remains at home. Movement between the host and home countries is limited by financial and legal constraints for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, but they too remain connected by telephone, the internet, photos, videos of family ceremonies, gifts, and remittances. While their remittances help to support those at home, as discussed in the chapter on livelihoods, they also alter family dynamics. Junior men often send remittances to their mothers to help cover daily living expenses, leading to a shift in the gender balance of power within the senior generation. Wives who cannot accompany their husbands for economic or legal reasons may also depend on their mothers-in-law for a portion of the remittances. Separate remittances can give rise to tensions, as each woman may suspect that the other has received a larger share. Migrant couples who raise families overseas have to balance conflicting demands on their resources as they try to make a home, educate their children, and remit money to elderly parents and others in need. They endeavor to send their children home for extended stays with relatives or during school vacations to strengthen ties and teach them their cultural values. Some couples are compelled to leave older children with grandparents or other kin. These children may feel materially and emotionally neglected, especially if other children are born in the host country. The separation may also cause tensions between siblings. Although transnational families have become part of the social landscape for Africans across the economic spectrum, research on many facets of this phenomenon has only just begun.
Kin abroad and at home are a resource. Kin relationships, even distant, come with the expectation to aid in ways small and large. This ranges from hosting a kinsperson or co-villager coming to town for medical treatment to lending money, even if it is unlikely that the borrower will be able to repay it, and helping to establish a small business. Those who have achieved a modicum of economic success and/or high levels of schooling are under particular pressure not only to assist materially but also to facilitate opportunities by using their connections. Assistance within the family can generate a form of patron-client relations since those who have been helped often reciprocate by carrying out domestic or other tasks for the giver. Aiding kin can lead to tensions between spouses when one party is perceived as favoring kin over the immediate family. Individual aspirations and a changing notion of family coupled with economic uncertainty are leading to more instances where elderly parents, relatives, and widows are not cared for. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has also strained familial harmony and kinship relations, so now church congregations often care for sick members who have no other support, or put pressure on members to fulfill their familial obligations. Failure to assist kin may make individuals subject to witchcraft accusations. Conversely, those experiencing misfortune frequently attribute it to witchcraft carried out by jealous kin or to the curse of a parent who has been neglected.
Respect for age has been a constant across the diversity of African societies. Children are socialized to show respect for parents and older kin, and anyone younger is traditionally expected to defer to persons belonging to an older cohort. Children, youths, and young adults could be asked to carry out tasks for anyone who is senior to them. While older unrelated persons are still regularly addressed as “mother” or “father,” deference to older kin and non-kin is diminishing.
Displacements caused by civil war and the use of child soldiers have destabilized families, including previously accepted forms of patriarchal authority. The child-headed households that emerged in the context of the AIDS pandemic are another dramatic manifestation of changing family dynamics. Beyond such major disruptions, intergenerational relations are undergoing new transformations as families and governments become incapable of ensuring basic economic security, neoliberal economic strategies undermine collective solidarities, the expansion of Western-style education alters aspirations, and global media purvey fantasies of consumption.
The decline in the authority of male elders as young men provide much-needed cash dates back decades and has been mentioned in relation to migration. A more recent development is the loss of parental authority when new economic opportunities make it possible for children and youths to provide for themselves and even for their families. Charles Piot has seen northern Togolese youths point to “human rights” to back up their refusal to work in the fields or their decision to seek work in Nigeria against the wishes of their parents. David Kyaddondo has highlighted how children in eastern Uganda are becoming more autonomous vis-à-vis their parents due to their involvement in the emergent local rice economy. Previously expected to help with various activities and take on growing responsibilities, their ability to earn and control money is changing the relationship with their parents. Their relationships with other adults are also altered as they deploy individual agency in obtaining work and speak more authoritatively in their interactions with them. Although elders welcome children’s economic contributions, they are also concerned about the loss of respect and the reversal of roles. This development is giving rise to a moral debate about intergenerational relations. In a township of the Western Cape in South Africa, male and female youths are redefining their social personhood and standing within the community by drawing on global youth culture. Together with socioeconomic changes, this is eroding the central position adult women long held within the household and the community.
“Sugar daddies,” wealthy men who provide young women with material and symbolic advantages in exchange for sex, have been a part of the urban landscape for some time. This phenomenon has expanded to include tourists and expatriate professionals. By entering into such sexual relationships in the short or long term, young women obtain money and sought-after commodities that they cannot get from their parents or from boyfriends of their own social class. Some are even able to start a business. While this flouts moral standards and accepted modes of achieving adult status, it allows them to become patrons to their kin and their fiancés, altering intergenerational and gender relations.
Kinship and the family often serve as models for other kinds of social relations, and the kinship idiom can be used to mediate new forms of community and membership, from urban associations to citizenship. Schoolmates forge bonds as though they were kin and draw on these connections as they move through life. Friends can also become fictive kin and be treated like siblings or cousins, and friends of senior relatives may be addressed as “uncle” or “aunt.” Among the Mande peoples of West Africa, ritualized joking between different clans and ethnic groups establish relatedness between strangers and promote social harmony.
African women and men have been enmeshed in non-kin relations ranging from close friendships to various kinds of associations as far back as there is evidence of social life. Male and female circumcision, where one or both were practiced, made age-mates out of cohorts of individual participants. The bonds created as they underwent the process and associated rituals crosscut kin ties and social status and lasted a lifetime. Male age-mates played important roles in social life because they generally remained in the same locale after marriage. The creation of the Segou Bamana state (today’s Mali) during the eighteenth century is attributed to an age group that rebelled against the elders, and the precolonial Zulu state (in what is today South Africa) relied on male age-grades in building its military regiments. Junior age-grades were often called upon to work in the fields or carry out community projects. The importance of age-grades has been attenuated since boys are now usually circumcised in clinics and because related rituals have been modified significantly or eliminated altogether due to conversion to Christianity or Islam and to schooling. However, they may still put on masquerades during certain times of the year.
In East African pastoralist societies, age-grades were a highly developed social institution consisting of a hierarchy of grades that structured men’s experience of the life cycle and shaped their masculinity. Men’s roles, rights, and responsibilities changed as they moved through the stages of uncircumcised, circumcised, and various levels of elders; women were central to the rites that marked the different stages. In Kenya and Tanzania the age-grade system began to be transformed as a result of colonial policies, a process that intensified in recent decades when the tourist industry commodified the “warrior” grade and made the Maasai “warrior” emblematic of pastoralist masculinity.
Among the Mande language groups of West Africa, initiation societies created special bonds among men and, in some areas, women. Scholars have also called them “secret societies” because initiates gained esoteric knowledge over time and their activities were kept secret from outsiders. The Sande and Poro of Liberia and Sierra Leone were powerful women’s and men’s associations respectively; the Komo was an equally powerful men’s society in the savanna region further north. Bound up with indigenous religious practices, these societies declined dramatically once members became Muslims or Christians. The masks and other objects associated with these societies can now be found in museums and are discussed in the chapter on art. By contrast, Mande hunters’ associations remain active, although they too entail esoteric knowledge and require initiation. Their members distinguish themselves from commercial hunters through their strict code of conduct and their intimate knowledge of flora and fauna. Hunters’ associations observe an age hierarchy based on time of initiation, but social status is immaterial. Hunters’ music has become highly popular, and the associations themselves have been taking on new roles in new contexts: they have acted as security patrols to protect communities against crime, served as guards in national parks, and participated in and fought against insurgencies. Their leaders forge connections between associations across national borders.
In many areas of the continent, artisans have constituted a separate social category. They were members of kin groups just like their pastoralist or cultivator neighbors but were linked by virtue of their profession. Like people of servile status, they were also often connected with particular families. Which kinds of artisans were set apart in this way has varied widely but generally included blacksmiths. The West African Sahel and savanna region is well known for its highly developed system of occupational groups encompassing blacksmiths and potters (the latter being the sisters and wives of blacksmiths), bards (also known as griots), leatherworkers, and, among the Fulbe, weavers. They were expected to marry within their category and pass their status on to their children; still, boundaries could be redefined. Their social status was lower than that of farmers or herders. At the same time, they were considered to have special spiritual powers. The smiths in particular were known for their occult and healing powers. The griots remembered the royal genealogies, transmitted family traditions, and sang the praises of those who stood out through their actions. They were both respected and feared because they knew family secrets and could choose what or what not to reveal. They were close to the powerful in society and, along with the blacksmiths, served as mediators, since neither category could accede to political office. Among the Tuareg of the Sahara Desert, smiths did much of the work that among the Mande was done by griots. Blacksmiths and leatherworkers practice contemporary forms of their professions, while weaving has declined considerably as a craft. Griots still play a role at social and political events, but they have also been criticized for being co-opted by politicians and wealthy individuals who wish to enhance their status. Some have gained fame on the international music scene or, like other artisans, have moved into altogether different kinds of work depending on their educational achievements. Any member of these groups can now accede to political office, but intermarriage outside their group is not yet universally accepted.
James Ellison’s research in southern Ethiopia has shown that craft workers and traders in Konso express their separate social status in a kinship idiom by referring to themselves as the Fulto “family,” after their eponymous ancestor. Their membership has expanded in recent years as impoverished farmers have sought entry in search of new economic opportunities and the connections that the far-flung networks of the Fulto “family” can provide. “Family” members assist each other and take part in feasts and public rituals. Farmers’ adoption of this new identity (and lower social rank) was facilitated by the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s and their embrace of the free market spirit.
Figure 3.9. Inside the Fulto house, meat and hide bracelets from a sacrificed animal are divided for distribution in all Konso villages.
James Ellison.
African women and men also form various types of association in the pursuit of common goals. Some of these dissolve once they achieve their objectives; others are permanent features of social life. They include cultural organizations, associations devoted to development, and clubs where friends meet to discuss issues of the day in an informal setting. Even those that are economic in nature (e.g., various kinds of self-help societies, including the rotating credit associations discussed in the chapter on livelihoods and, more recently, community and nongovernmental organizations) offer their members sociability, moral support, and an opportunity to expand personal networks. Associations of urban migrants from the same rural area or, if overseas, from the same ethnic group often sponsor the construction of schools, churches or mosques, or development projects; they also often provide assistance when a member dies and the body has to be repatriated. Women’s associations in villages or urban neighborhood and the women’s wings of political parties embody their solidarity when they dress in the same cloth on festive occasions. Religion is becoming an increasingly important basis of association, whether in the form of church groups, choirs, study groups, or groups devoted to social and religious matters. The daairas so prominent in Senegalese religious and social life have been re-created in the diasporas, including in the United States, where adherents of a Sufi order organize religious rituals, provide mutual support to each other and to newcomers, support religious leaders, and negotiate with local authorities on behalf of the group. Finally, Africans living overseas have taken advantage of the internet to create virtual communities centered on their homelands in which they debate issues of public interest with members abroad and at home.
Figure 3.10. Women’s rotating savings and credit associations meeting donors, Dakar, Senegal.
Beth Buggenhagen.
Given the size of the African continent, it should not be surprising that there are differences in the ways domestic units are established, kin groups are defined, and connections between unrelated individuals are forged. Yet these differences have always been fluid, since population groups have modified cultural ideals and practices when, for example, political or migratory processes led to new interactions with others. More important than the variations in forms of family, marriage, and community within and across nation-states is therefore the tremendous dynamism of African social relations. Change, while not new, seems to have accelerated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From Algiers to Cape Town, from Mombasa to Brazzaville and Dakar, Africans develop new forms of relatedness as they engage processes of globalization in everyday decisions and struggle for better futures. People in all walks of life are reinterpreting ideals and expectations of relatedness in light of education, religion, images circulating through a variety of media, the growth of market-based economies, and environmental change. Domestic units seem to be contracting, relationships between women and men are being reconfigured, and intergenerational relations are being renegotiated. New forms of community that transcend kinship, patronage, and ethnicity are also emerging. Yet these changes are not unidirectional, nor are they inevitably converging on any singular model. Continental and overseas diasporas are integral to these processes and are challenging preconceived boundaries of “African” social relations.
I thank Gracia Clark and Rosa De Jorio for their comments on a draft of this chapter. Figure 3.10 was first published as figure 6 in American Ethnologist 33(4): 679, November 2006, and is reprinted here with the permission of James Ellison and the American Anthropological Association.
1. The discussion in this chapter does not highlight the specificities of immigrant populations such as the South Asians of southern and eastern Africa, the Lebanese in Western and Central Africa, the Afrikaners of South Africa, and the British and other Europeans in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. These generally adapted the social structures of their home countries to their new environment but continued to intermarry primarily with others of their community, often even after they had lived in Africa for generations and no longer had a “home” outside the continent.
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