James L. Giblin
You may be tempted to skip this chapter. Historians and historically minded students rarely get excited by kinship. Often they are intensely interested in matters associated with family and kinship, such as gender, sexuality, and generational conflict. Yet they seem much less interested in plain vanilla kinship – whom people think of as family, how they interact with them, and the moral weight they attach to their family relationships. But, if you are thinking of African people in the past without thinking about kinship, you are missing a vital source of their identity and focus of their energies. You miss the social space where African women and men have most often made a difference in their world; you miss their intimate concerns and dilemmas; you miss a volatile matrix of love, desire, hatred, and jealousy. And of course in the current day you miss the reason why so many Africans were early adopters of WhatsApp! If you doubt me, think about those mobile phone conversations you’ve overhead in African bars and minibuses. How many of them are between family members? If, like me, you are a historian who tries to imagine themselves back into the minds and bodies of African people in the past, you cannot skip over kinship.
My interest in kinship grew out of personal experience in Tanzania, particularly my involvement through both research and family life with people who come from the region of Iringa and speak the quite similar languages of Kihehe and Kibena. Throughout Tanzania they are known as the wanyalukolo, or wanyalu. This ancient Bantu word (Ehret 1998: 149) provides an entryway into some of the issues which I address below. Literally, wanyalukolo means “people of the clan” (in Kihehe/Kibena lukolo means “clan”). Yet, when I recently asked a speaker of Kibena to define the term in English, she said that it means “the related people.” Indeed, it is the sense of relatedness, rather than the connection with a particular kind of corporate group, that is more prominent in modern usage. Although wanyalukolo can certainly denote the fellow members of a patrilineal grouping that is believed to share descent, it is supremely stretchable. It can denote separate Bena or Hehe identities but also mark commonality between them, creating regional identity within a larger Tanzanian nation. In Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, it appears in the names of commuter buses and shops, appealing to people from Iringa for their business. It can be used by people who do not come from Iringa with affection and humor. Yet sometimes it is used in disparagement, particularly when Tanzanians associate wanyalu with parochialism and lack of ambition, the very qualities that in English might be called “clannishness.”
These examples lead to several points that I wish to make throughout this chapter. Kinship is both relationships and discourse; both are adaptable and are used with great creativity to achieve inclusion as well as exclusion. One can extend terms of kinship to cover persons not related by descent, and can also make them analogies that describe quite different social institutions. But there is a twist to this tale that I’ve seen when doing historical research: often, when asked to tell about their own lives, wanyalu men and women provide highly individualized autobiographies. They may have grown up in large families, created thriving families of their own, and have copious knowledge of genealogy. And yet they tend to portray themselves as solitary wanderers in a challenging and often hostile world. This leads me to a final, perhaps unexpected, theme about kinship: it coexists with, and indeed fosters, sharply defined individuality.
Kinship has never been as important to historians as to anthropologists, for whom it has provided a crucial source of insight into their core concern with the relationship between nature and culture. As understandings of that relationship have changed in recent decades, however, anthropologists have shifted decisively toward understanding kinship as a cultural construction rather than as a product of biological descent (Carsten 2000). This transition has dampened their inclination to regard kinship as self‐enclosed systems, and increased their concern with aspects of culture, such as gender, that are closely associated with kinship. This shift toward “constructivism” – “the proposition that any relationship constituted in terms of procreation, filiation, or descent can also be made postnatally or performatively by culturally appropriate action” (Sahlins 2013: 2) – has encouraged considerable reflection among anthropologists about the state of kinship studies (Sahlins 2013; Ensor 2011; Read 2007; Carsten 2004, 2000; Peletz 1995). Although we cannot do justice here to the broad scope of their reflections, we can touch upon some issues that are important for historians who wish to think about kinship as a context for historical agency.
Anthropologists have become uncomfortable with the “formalism of much of the literature on kinship” (Carsten 2000: 14), which leaves them “removed from the most obvious facts of actual lived experiences of kinship” (Carsen 2004: 8). More and more they ask how kinship is “shaped by the ordinary, everyday activities of family life” (Carsten 2004: 6). Yet, while they have embraced kinship as product of culture, they have not entirely abandoned the view that biological descent creates relationships that are “given by birth and unchangeable” (Carsten 2000: 14). While Janet Carsten, for example, argues for kinship studies that include the “intimate domestic arrangements and the behavior and emotions associated with them,” her view does not exclude biological descent. Kinship should be understood, she contends, as “composed of various components – substance [such as blood], feeding, living together, procreation [and] emotion” (Carsten 2000: 17, 34).
This approach, it seems to me, has much to offer historians of Africa. As Carsten points out, a focus on the “‘everyday’ – small, seemingly trivial, or taken‐for‐granted acts” (2000: 18) involves process and specific human actors, the very elements that allow historians to tell good stories. It is a focus, moreover, that foregrounds women. It also frees kinship from confinement by assumptions about static tradition and ascribed status. It enables historians to think of kinship as a dynamic, malleable social context that both accommodates and is changed by agency and conflict. It does not, however, discount knowledge of biological descent, which of course is cherished throughout Africa. Nevertheless, problems remain. One concerns the degree to which kinship resists transformation by human agency and external influences such as environmental conditions. A second issue is whether kinship constrains the development of individuality and consequently the expression of individual agency.
Scholars continue to regard kinship as a conservative social institution characterized by long‐term continuity and resistance to change. The archaeologist Bradley Ensor has argued, for example, that systems of kinship restrain individuals from flouting “behavioral norms” associated with family. He argues that kinship is not “merely an ideological ‘language’” which individuals violate willy‐nilly. Adherence to norms of kinship, he argues, is demonstrably strong. His most persuasive evidence comes from American Indian societies (Ensor 2011: 211, 214). Similarly, a recent comparative study of kinship in East Africa finds unexpectedly strong long‐term continuity in bridewealth arrangements, divorce, property rights, relations between co‐wives and the “extent of gerontocracy” (Mulder et al. 2001: 1062).
These arguments suggest that attitudes, behaviors, and moral expectations associated with the everyday routine of family life restrain innovation. Prominent anthropologists have argued that they also constrain the formation of individuality. Marcel Mauss, Carsten points out, believed that among the Pueblo Indians “personhood … could not be separated from clanship, and was not a vehicle for individual conscience.” Mauss held that “the role [of the Pueblo person] is really to act out … the prefigured totality of the life of the clan” (quoted in Carsten 2004: 85). A similar approach was applied to the Tallensi people of Ghana by Meyer Fortes, who argued that only their men attained full personhood, and then only in death (Carsten 2004: 89). Recently, Marshall Sahlins has returned to this issue. He defines “a ‘kinship system’ [as] a manifold of intersubjective participations [or] … mutualities of being”: “Kinsmen are persons who belong to one another, who are parts of one another, whose lives are joined and interdependent” (Sahlins 2013: 20, 21). Inhabiting such systems is “the ‘dividual’ person … ‘who is divisible’ and also ‘not distinct’ in the sense that aspects of the self are variously distributed among others.” Among such persons reigns “a notion of personhood where kinship is not simply added to bounded individuality, but where ‘relatives are perceived as intrinsic to the self’” (Sahlins 2013: 19, 22).
The contrasts between “bounded” and “unbounded” personality types that grow out of these approaches map conveniently, Carsten (2004: 87) reminds us, onto distinctions “between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern,’ or the ‘West’ and the ‘other.’” Yet, both she and Sahlins suggest that dismissing the notion of “unbounded” personhood may betray a Western‐centric viewpoint. Discomfort with it, they say, may stem from a taken‐for‐granted Western notion of the person as autonomous possessor of rights and legal liabilities. Indeed, historians would be unwise to disregard anthropologists’ appreciation of the immense diversity of institutions, attitudes, and behaviors that have been fostered by human cultures. Nevertheless, for many historians formulations such as “mutuality of being” and “dividuality” of persons are likely to remain elusive. They are unlikely to subscribe, for example, to interpretations of marriage that accept “the ‘dual unity’ of spouses, their immanence in one another” (Sahlins 2013: 48). With their almost instinctual inclination (sources permitting) to disaggregate ideas of collective action and reveal individual agency, historians are likely to resist understandings of any social institution that blur the boundaries between individual and collective identities. Admittedly, the source materials available for the study of the African past are often less revealing of individual agency than historians would wish. Yet they are not any more likely to testify persuasively to the pre‐eminence of collective identity.
If we return to Sahlins’s discussion of “mutuality of being,” we find many of his examples arresting. Yet, historical sources allow us to read them in ways that are suggestive of more bounded individuality. For example, he illustrates “the ‘dual unity’ of spouses” by noting the “prescriptions and prohibitions placed on women when their husbands are … outside the community” (Sahlins 2013: 48). In Iringa, accounts of precisely this sort of mwiko (Kiswahili), or taboo, are told by many women who were married during the colonial period when their region was a major source of migrant labor. Reflecting on their husbands’ long absences from home, they described many forms of misbehavior or carelessness that could bring misfortune and injury upon their absent spouses. Yet, were such beliefs the product of unbounded personhood, or might they be instead an expression of the moral obligations of kinship that fully “bounded” individuals chose to respect or violate? Sahlins’s “mutuality of being” is a deeply resonant idea, but from my historian’s perspective it is better understood not as unbounded personhood but rather as a moral code which by turns is honored and transgressed. In Iringa, one needn’t probe far into stories from the era of labor migration to see that men feared being abandoned by wives during their absence (as they sometimes were), while women (with even more reason) feared that their absent husbands would find new wives and never return home.
One transgression of kinship mutuality described by Sahlins is “the consumption or penetration of the body of the other with the intent to harm” (2013: 59). This will be familiar to anyone in Tanzania, where no form of witchcraft is better attested historically, or more commonly discussed in the current day, than biashara ya masharti. This Kiswahili phrase may be rendered as “business with strings attached.” It means achieving prosperity through Faustian bargains with witches who, in return for their services, demand great sacrifice, usually involving the murder of one’s child or another relative. Sahlins calls such practices “negative kinship,” but the phrase seems misleading if taken to mean that they stand outside the realm of kinship. Belief in such powers is intrinsically related to the treacherous nature of living‐in‐kinship. For as much as kinship provides mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity, it also produces betrayal and disappointment, especially when trusted kin make (or are judged to make) their individual interests and aspirations paramount. I would argue that such highly volatile interaction – now marked by support and succor, and later by meanness and rejection – makes personhood bounded. By experiencing this quality of living in kinship, everyone learns that even one’s closest kin cannot share one’s fate.
The moral weight attached to relations of kinship and their inseparability from fears of witchcraft provide reason, I believe, to doubt an understanding of kinship that once had considerable influence among historians. Although this view has taken various forms, at base it regards kinship as a combination of social relations and ideology that reproduces structural oppositions defined by gender or generation, thereby creating material inequality (Peletz 1995: 353–354). It implies that a given constituency (perhaps older men) acts in concert on the basis of shared interests. This interest group may then be thought to develop ideologies of gerontocracy or patriarchy which makes the welfare of the entire community appear dependent on their primacy. Formulated as it once was as the “lineage mode of production,” this approach to kinship has little influence on historians today. Yet it may continue to inform understandings of patriarchy and gerontocracy that remain influential. It should be tested against historical evidence of everyday living in kinship. As the following section will illustrate, everyday experience brings into play the great variety of obligations and expectations found in many African forms of kinship. They weigh heavily on every individual and criss‐cross lines of gender and generation. They raise the question of whether the resolution of the moral dilemmas of kinship can produce consistent bias (in favor of male elders who hoard wealth, for example, and against the young men who need it to marry). Indeed, such explanations of persistent inequality need to be considered alongside another enduring reality of kinship. For millennia (Ehret 1998: 159–160), family life has been marked by an intense and deeply intimate fear of the bodily and spiritual harm that may be inflicted through malevolent magic by persons who feel neglected.
For many years I have known several siblings whose father, Mohamedi, was an important African businessman in Iringa during the 1950s. He died in 1959, but their mother, Mwanaisha, lived until 2006. Her household in Njombe, one of the principal towns of Iringa Region, was for me a favorite destination. Mohamedi and Mwanaisha married about 1930 and had 10 children. Their business success came despite discrimination and denial of opportunities, which frustrated all African entrepreneurs in the colonial period. It allowed them to educate their children, one of whom rose to national prominence in government while others also followed professional careers. Two aspects of their enterprises particularly interested me (Giblin 2005). The first was their dispersal across a wide region in a pattern that followed the vital arteries of the colonial economy. To map their farms and hoteli (small eateries with simple accommodation for travelers) would be to map the main routes of labor migration across southwestern Tanganyika. They farmed market crops such as rice and potatoes in widely separated micro‐environments while maintaining hoteli for migrant laborers. Their businesses were integrated, of course, because the farms supplied food to the hoteli.
The second notable aspect of their business was their reliance on kinship. The wide dispersal of operations made trust a paramount consideration. Mwanaisha and her co‐wives supervised the farms and hoteli, while Mohamedi created a network of trusted associates by recruiting young men from households headed by men of his own patrilineal clan, or lukolo. (His own children he kept in school, a far‐sighted decision in view of the many opportunities that opened up for educated men and women after national independence in 1961.) Meanwhile, Mwanaisha and her co‐wives pursued their own opportunities, growing food and market crops in their fields and gardens while keeping their own cattle. Mwanaisha gained a position of influence not only within her own patrilineal clan, but also within that of her husband. On both sides of her large family network she became the go‐to expert on family history, genealogy, and protocols for venerating ancestors. As a result, when one of her brothers‐in‐law wished to marry her following her husband’s death, she was prepared to refuse, for she was neither isolated nor vulnerable as widows in virilocal societies are often imagined to be. Relying on her own influence, assistance from educated children, and the support of a wide network of kin, she retained control of her house and fields until her death.
The story of Mohamedi and Mwanaisha helps us address issues raised in the preceding section. It reveals spouses as fully bounded persons, each of whom lived in kinship independently, building overlapping but separate family networks. It is important to emphasize the effort invested in constructing networks, for their lukolo, or patrilineal clans, were not ready‐made corporate bodies. The clan was a field of potential relationships that could be made useful if much talk and action were invested to bring them to life. In effect, Mohamedi and Mwanaisha created networks whose core consisted of subsets of patrilineal clans. Men had an advantage in creating family networks because they enjoyed more mobility than women, whose responsibilities as mothers kept them closer to home. They could engage in network building by attending funerals and weddings and by regularly visiting relatives. This activity should be understood as work, and it puts in a different light the lingering stereotype of the always absent rural African male who leaves farming to his wives. Yet the outcome of such travel, which was a reputation for sociability, reliability, trustworthiness, and generosity, could also be the achievement of women who in their own homes also earned a reputation for hospitality.
Another point to be drawn from their story concerns the instrumental value of talk about kinship, and how it was used in particular circumstances. The discourse of family, and particularly the terms of address used by Mohamedi and Mwanaisha in their interaction with kin, conveyed specific calibrations of obligation, seniority, and authority. These qualities were crucial in constructing an entrepreneurial network which possessed hierarchy, yet maintained respect for mutual responsibilities, including the crucial obligation to keep family affairs private. Such kinship‐based networks permitted ambitious people like Mohamedi and Mwanaisha, who stood little chance of obtaining bank loans or government licenses, to nurture a business unnoticed by the colonial authorities and in the shadow of the colonial economy. Historians’ lack of interest in kinship, I think, may sometimes stem from a belief that family is removed from the spheres of political and economic change that most concern them. Here, however, we have an example of African people who, as they sought opportunity in a discriminatory colonial economy, relied on kinship as critically important social capital.
While I was fascinated by their interaction with the colonial economy, it was only when I asked Mwanaisha about her youth and marriage with Mohamedi that I began to see the extraordinary complexity of her experience in kinship. Her parents, she explained, had both died when she was a child. As a result, she was raised by her paternal grandmother, who lived in the household of her brother’s son. His name was Maleva. Mohamedi was the son of Maleva. He had surely honed his own networking skills while watching his father, for as a well‐known healer Maleva often traveled to treat patients and to seek new medicines and techniques. As the children of a brother and sister, Maleva and the mother of Mwanaisha were binamu, or cousins. Children of binamu are considered siblings, so when Mohamedi decided to marry Mwanaisha they had first to sever this relationship. “Because I was married to my brother,” explained Mwanaisha, “at the time of the marriage they had to provide the ndumula lukolo [Kibena, meaning ‘cutting the ties of clan’].” This meant sacrificing a chicken and a sheep in apology to the ancestors because marriage would now override the relationship between the siblings. While marriage between them may have angered the ancestors, binamu and the children of binamu were preferred marital partners, and there are many examples of such marriages in the family history of Mwanaisha and Mohamedi. It might be supposed that such an arrangement would reduce the amount of bridewealth due from Mohamedi, but Mwanaisha said that her husband in fact provided unusually substantial bridewealth. Similarly, it might be thought that a woman married by the son of her guardian would be in a highly dependent position, but instead their marriage created a dense web of cross‐cutting obligations. I cannot fully describe here the weft and warp of relationships created by their marriage, but, to take only one example, Mwanaisha’s father‐in‐law was also her mjomba, or mother’s brother, a position that entailed great responsibility for her welfare.
Women in virilocal cultures are often thought to enter perilous circumstances or even servility when they leave their natal homes for the homesteads of their husbands. Undoubtedly such lamentable outcomes occurred in the past and continue to do so. The story of Mohamedi and Mwanaisha shows, however, that the range of outcomes made possible by kinship is broad. They lived kinship that had less to do with ascribed status than with contingency, for theirs was a world where speech and action made and unmade relationships while creating multitudes of opportunities and possibilities. The next section looks at a few studies by historians that reveal similar contingency and creativity within kinship.
A chapter of this length cannot provide a comprehensive account of kinship in historical studies of Africa. Instead, the following highly selective discussion concentrates on three aspects of the history of kinship. First, it considers studies that demonstrate agency within kinship in particular historical circumstances. Second, it considers studies that consider how kinship can be seen to interact with other institutions in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. Finally, it considers how discourses of kinship are extended beyond the bounds of family and applied to other venues of social life.
Although this chapter cannot do it justice, the field of historical linguistics has revealed a dynamic history of change in kinship over the longue durée (Vansina 1990; Ehret 1998; Schoenbrun 1998; Ruel 2002; Gonzales 2009). A recent contribution to this field by Christine Saidi (2010) makes a particularly daring argument. She doubts what she calls “the patriarchal myth,” or assumption that African gender relations have for millennia been “frozen into a patriarchal mode.” She recovers numerous traces of women’s authority from the distant past, including “sororal” groups among speakers of Bantu languages in east Central Africa during the first millennium CE that “consisted of adult sisters and their mother, with their mother’s sisters and their adult daughters.” These groups constituted the core, she believes, of village communities (Saidi 2010: 2, 75). In this and other ways, Saidi’s work suggests that women such as Mwanaisha, who through kinship had many opportunities to gain influence and security, were likely as common in the African past as domineering patriarchs.
Another recent study that describes women’s use of kinship to obtain positions of influence is Emily Lynn Osborn’s (2011) history of the Kankan region of eastern Guinea. Osborn traces interaction between “households” and political authority from the seventeenth century. Particularly interesting is her account of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new political culture arose in an area that had previously suffered war and depopulation. This was a culture of inclusiveness, and the way in which Osborn describes its emergence is intriguing. She argues that women contributed to rebuilding their families and communities by accepting marriage with newly arrived migrants who settled down with their wives’ families. In this way they both respected norms of responsibility for kin while also transforming kinship itself. For, while previously virilocal marriage had been the norm, now women “put into reverse marital practices.” These women exercised socially innovative agency while conforming to norms of behavior expected of wives and mothers. By rebuilding families, moreover, they benefited themselves, for “the household continued to offer women the clearest path to achieving a degree of informal prestige and power … women who served as the marital linchpin between powerful host families … and new migrants … could use their position to influence social and political processes” (Osborn 2011: 56, 66).
Osborn does not share Saidi’s view that patriarchy is a myth; instead, she believes that the women of Kankan acted within a context of male gerontocracy (Osborn 2011: 65). Closer in spirit to Saidi, though located in a very different time and political context, is Brett Shadle’s (2006) study of Gusiiland in colonial Kenya. Shadle argues, much like Osborn, that women welcomed marriage because it afforded respectability and opportunities to exercise agency. His sensitivity in this respect reminds us why so many young women in the modern day are not merely willing but desperate to marry. For, while he recognizes the great variety in marriage practices across Africa, he asserts that the Gusii women who sought to be married and maintained stable marriages “should be regarded as less the exception than the rule.” “Women became adults only upon marriage,” he writes, and “only when widowed could rural women expect to be without a husband” (Shadle 2006: 227). Shadle takes a particularly broad view of “female agency” (2006: xxx), pointing out that one of the expectations women had of husbands was emotional fulfillment. Indeed, his entire book is marked by an uncommon appreciation for the full personhood of Gusii men and women, for he sees that their motivations are many and not necessarily consistent. This perspective influences his reading of court cases involving marital and domestic disputes, leading him to the conclusion that women, with surprising frequency, found support from their own families when seeking divorce. This is the point at which he diverges from Emily Osborn. Where Osborn accepts the existence of male gerontocracy, Shadle argues memorably against the view that Gusii society is structured around oppositions between youth and elders: “fathers and sons were not always at each others’ throats, neither did seniors always act as a cabal. Much social instability resulted from seniors refusing to work toward common goals” (2006: xxix).
Shadle’s use of court records to study marriage and family in colonial Kenya introduces us to the ways in which kinship may interact with the bureaucratic state and other modern institutions. It also introduces a problem of historical method. I say this because I suspect that African readers of “Girl Cases” would likely be surprised by its silence about efforts to use family connections in order to influence judges. Undoubtedly this silence is attributable to the nature of his documentary sources, for Shadle is a highly perceptive historian. Authors of written case records would not, after all, wish to mention the backroom pleading and outright bribing that precede judgments. Similar limitations in the documentary record are probably at work in Richard Roberts’s (2005) study of early colonial courts in Mali. His finding that litigants often preferred courts run by French officials hints that they may well have lacked confidence in African judges to whom they were not related.
In an eyewitness report by the anthropologist Thomas Beidelman (2012), however, we see clearly the role of kinship in colonial courts. His account of rural Tanganyikan courts in the last years of colonial rule describes vividly the “pressures of kinship.” They undermined the impartiality that British officials expected of courts, helping to create what Beidelman calls a “landscape of colonial illusion and delusion.” Any Tanzanian today would recognize these late‐1950s courts. Judges were both susceptible to bribery and acutely sensitive to the pleading of relatives. They were lenient with fellow family members, harsh in their treatment of other ethnic groups, and willing to take the claims of family obligation into account. In one case between mother and daughter, the court found the sexually explicit language in which the daughter denounced her mother reprehensible, yet showed an almost equally strong disapproval of the mother for bringing an intimate dispute into public view. “Such verbal abuse between parent and child,” Beidelman says of the court’s opinion, “was so shameful that truly decent people would have kept matters quiet.” Another dispute involved an apparently unmarried beer brewer who accused her male cousin of refusing to pay for a drink. Some knowledge of the emotions associated with such relationships helps to explain why this trivial complaint wound up in court. The dispute was likely sparked by the man feeling that his cousin owed him a free drink, possibly smoldered because the woman resented her cousin’s unwillingness to marry her, and was probably inflamed by his failure to gain the support of one of his most intimate relatives, his father’s sister. As it happened, she was both the mother of the complainant and her brewing partner. The court failed to reach a judgment, probably because the judge was related to both cousins and feared appearing to favor either of them (Beidelman 2012: 184, 188–189, 192, 194).
A somewhat similar situation, suggests Elke Stockreiter (2015), prevailed in the Islamic kadhi courts of late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Zanzibar. Highlighting “the social embeddedness of the Islamic court system,” Stockreiter points out that kinship and other social networks influenced the courts: “Women and men from lower social strata drew on personal networks and relationships in order to … achieve a favorable outcome.” Kadhi were predisposed to be receptive to informal pleas for assistance because they had been trained in a juridical tradition that mandated “support of the weak, defined in terms of social status and gender [that] enabled the marginalized to challenge the established social hierarchy in the kadhi’s courts.” Stockreiter’s study extends far beyond the use of family ties to influence courts. She tells a broader story of turbulent change in kinship following the abolition of slavery as former slaves and former masters both claimed and denied kinship with each other. Hers is a story, too, of how mila (to use the Kiswahili word for traditional “custom” that encompasses the morality of kinship) finds accommodation with another “underlying moral discourse … [an] Islamic social discourse about female protection and a legal discourse about fault.” Her highly nuanced story of resourceful women and men leaves Stockreiter unwilling to characterize Zanzibari society as patriarchal (Stockreiter 2015: 84, 86, 88, 165, 197–198).
Elisabeth McMahon’s (2013) study of Pemba, one of the islands of Zanzibar, also demonstrates the centrality of kinship in the lives of slaves and former slaves. Slaves created families not only among themselves but also through relationships with masters. They fashioned three distinct forms of kinship: “blood kinship … most commonly found among parents and their children,” marriage, and “networked,” or “fictive,” kinship. For the generation that passed from enslavement to postabolition freedom, McMahon shows, living in kinship meant ceaseless strategizing and negotiating. Being married, situated in a network of children and relatives, and recognized as a member of a clan were all immensely valuable sources of status, security, and rights in property. McMahon’s observation that creating new families allowed men and women to become “lineage founders” provides an unexpected insight into the problem of personhood within kinship. Many of these “founders” would have been predominantly first‐generation slaves who, before being torn from their natal families, had surely learned stories of the founders of their clans. No living person, of course, had ever seen such founders, but stories of them provided an idealized image of personhood that the enslaved could emulate as they sought honor and respect (McMahon 2013: 196, 209).
This important work from Zanzibar highlights the instrumental value of kinship for individuals who encountered institutions of slavery and colonial and Islamic courts. Another example of kinship shaping an encounter with an unfamiliar institution is provided by Kathleen Smythe’s (2006) study of Catholics in Ufipa, a region of western Tanzania. Smythe emphasizes the importance within family life of the socialization of the young. In Fipa culture, she shows, children and youth passed through successive stages of maturation as they progressed toward adulthood. These stages were marked by changes in sleeping locations. The young first slept with parents, later with grandparents, and finally with young people of the same age and gender. The boarding schools built by Catholic evangelists could be understood as part of the same process of socialization. As a result, Smythe argues, European missionaries were integrated into Fipa society as “parent and grandparent figures.” Through this deployment of “family ideals,” Fipa communities naturalized these unfamiliar newcomers and found a discursive context whose familiarity gave them an advantage in dealing with them. The Catholic missionaries gained status, but found themselves held to new expectations and obligations, for they “became part of the web of relations within Fipa families.” As always in family life, disappointment with unfulfilled expectations was inevitable. Smythe shows that Fipa Catholics categorized missionary discrimination, celibacy, and their general obtuseness as instances of failure to respect the obligations of kinship (Smythe 2006: xxx).
The works discussed here provide examples of the creative use of kinship in a variety of historical periods and circumstances. They reveal the importance of kinship as a resource in encounters with unfamiliar institutions. Kinship could also be valuable in the creation of new institutions. I close with two examples, both from Uganda, that show how institution building might involve stretching the language of kinship to create new understandings through analogy (Strathern 1992: 2; Sahlins 2013: 15). The first is Rhiannon Stephens’s (2013) history of motherhood. Stephens is most interested in the discursive character of motherhood: “As a cultural form, as a social relationship, and as a key element in political charters, motherhood took an ideological form that was both internally consistent and enduring over generations … But it was by no means unchanging. People adapted their ideology of motherhood as they faced new challenges and possibilities.” By analogy they stretched motherhood beyond women’s role in biological reproduction to the realm of politics. Initially, the “ideal form of motherhood was for a woman to have many children.” By the end of the first millennium CE, however, Ugandan societies were extending the concept. Now “motherhood was viewed as an institution for creating networks of relationships and mutual obligation that cut across dominant patrilineal divides.” “A woman’s ability to convert motherhood into instrumental power,” Stephens explains, stemmed partly from gaining the position of mother of a political noble, and partly from her own political skills (Stephens 2013: 6, 12, 13). The political arena in which these Bagandan mothers acted was larger and more hierarchical than the comparatively tiny stage on which women like Mwanaisha negotiated their lives of kinship in Iringa. Nevertheless, I would suggest that their skills and talents were not fundamentally different.
A similar perspective marks the history of clans in Buganda by Neil Kodesh (2010). It takes him back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before the emergence of Buganda’s famous state. In this pre‐state period, argues Kodesh, Buganda witnessed extraordinary social innovation that was facilitated by kinship. He proposes that, as bananas became the main Bagandan food, conflict over land devoted to banana groves intensified. At that juncture, spirit mediums were particularly well prepared to alleviate conflict, for their work required travel and made them known and respected in widely scattered communities. It was they who knit together dispersed communities by giving them a common identity. This process of unification, Kodesh argues, created “publics,” or “knowledge communities,” that were capable of stimulating innovation precisely because the mediums drew together bodies of specialized knowledge held by different groups. What cemented these groups together was kinship. Older understandings of descent now became the foundation of new clan identities: “The language and practices of clanship [emerged] as the disembodied life forces of deceased leaders were transformed from ancestral ghosts into … the founders of clans.” The formation of clans, in turn, allowed banana farmers to “establish widely recognized connections with ancestors,” which became the basis of long‐term claims to land (Kodesh 2010: 68–69, 79, 93, 96). Like Stephens, Kodesh goes to the heart of the anthropological debate about kinship as product of nature or culture. From Stephens we learn that motherhood was both a biological role and a social construct. From Kodesh we learn why genealogy has been a cherished form of knowledge for the Bagandan people, and also why the Bagandan clans are not the product of genealogy but rather of innovative speech and social agency.
The preceding discussion cannot do justice to the many studies that address family and kinship in Africa. A fuller historical account of African kinship would draw heavily on historical linguistics, utilize a vast corpus of ethnography, consider a much broader range of twentieth‐century social history, and incorporate a growing literature on African families of the twenty‐first century. Certainly we would ask how kinship assists African people as they respond to challenges ranging from HIV/AIDS and neoliberalism to urbanization and globalization (e.g., Therborn 2004; Dilger 2008). The few studies that I have discussed serve to show, however, that historians’ understandings of family and kinship have moved decisively away from structuralism and reflect a growing doubt about patriarchy. Increasingly, historians see kinship as a complex interweaving of relationships (only some of which are created by biological descent), daily practice, and discourse which creates moral obligation. While it may well be true that the routine of family living and the gravity of the normative values attached to familial relationships slow change and ensure continuity, historical research demonstrates that kinship relations are adaptable and resilient. They provide models for thinking about a variety of dilemmas and practical means of dealing with them.
Too often, the source materials available to historians of Africa do not allow much insight into African individuality. Even so, some of the studies discussed here plainly reveal the imprint of individual agency. They show, I believe, that living in African kinship has produced men and women who possess sharply defined personhood and the skills of interpersonal negotiation needed to achieve their ambitions. So the next time you find yourself on a rattling commuter minibus hopelessly stuck in traffic, look around and ask yourself: Aren’t those passengers juggling text‐message conversations on multiple mobile phones practicing old skills of kinship in twenty‐first‐century Africa?