Grandmothers, Mothers, and Persons of Authority: The Non-Patriarchal History of the Bantu Matrilineal Zone, 300 CE to 1500 CE

Introduction

Patriarchy as an ideological concept was imported into Africa with the arrival of outsiders. The main focus of this chapter is the history of Bantu-speaking peoples from 300 CE to 1500 CE and earlier, who lived in a large region that cuts through the centre of the African continent and named the Bantu Matrilineal Zone (BMZ). Some people who reside within this zone organize their families and communities patrilineally and may have different concepts of authority, but none could be defined as patriarchal. Even in patrilineal large centralised and de-centralised West African societies during the precolonial period, there were no patriarchal authorities as scholars Nzegwu (2006), Mbembe (2001), Ogbomo (1997), Oyěwùmí (1997), Amadiume (1987), Diop. (1987), Sacks (1979), and others have shown.

Bantu-speaking peoples became a separate linguistic group, often referred to as proto-Bantu, about 5500 years ago. They are linguistically part of the African language family of Niger-Congo and are a subset of the Benue-Kwa languages of West Africa. Their ancestral home is located along the border regions of modern-day Nigeria and Cameroon. Bantu societies appear diverse, yet as they settled two/thirds of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, they have maintained some basic common concepts and institutions that can be traced to the proto-Bantu era (Forshey, Gonzales & Saidi, 2017). This chapter, though concentrating on the 300 to 1500 CE era, will examine those institutions and beliefs that have survived over the Longue Durée and were present during this historical period. Their shared epistemologies included an honouring of motherhood and matrilineal social organising; using the cosmic family as a basic social, political, economic and spiritual centre; striving for heterarchical-based communities; and observing non-binary social categories. Using archaeology, historical linguistics, oral tradition, art history, genetics and critical analyses of comparative ethnography, it is possible, at least in part, to recreate the deep social history of this large region.

Scholars of early Bantu history now have enough data to show that social institutions over the Longue Durée were not patriarchal. What is most disappointing is that still some scholars of Africa continue to ignore the studies of earlier history and make assumptions about older African social institutions, based on observations from the late precolonial and colonial period. This was a time of great stress for Africans and does not represents what is often referred to as ‘African tradition.’ After over thirty years of studying and writing about gender in Africa, it is unfortunate that books like Bruey’s (2021)Patriarchy and gender in Africa continue being published. The introduction to this edited volume is an excellent example of the problems with ignoring earlier history:

In her introduction the editor honours the work of such African scholars as Oyěwùmí yet she has not included their significant contributions towards understanding gender from an African perspective. These kinds of scholarship examine the situation in modern Africa and conclude that patriarchy is based on deep African traditions. The alternative is to research and then popularize the social history of early Africa prior to the Atlantic trade in humans and colonialism. While this chapter is limited to Bantu-speaking peoples in the BMZ, it shows that for over a millennium prior to intense contact with the West, many Africans based authority and status on life stage, age, ability, and family--not on gender, and certainly not on patriarchy. Anthropologist Arnfred (2023), after several decades of researching Makhua, a matrilineal people of northern Mozambique, sums up the problems with basing any study of African social institutions on definitions from outside the continent: