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Male Daughters, Female Husbands
Ifi Amadiume
(First published 1987)
Women's Economic Activities
The sexual inequality entailed in the patrilineal principle of inheritance with regard to access to economic resources for daughters was quickly offset by women at marriage. This was usually achieved through their economic resourcefulness, supported by Nnobi matrifocal principles in domestic organisation and encouraged by the ideology of female industriousness.
In the household, a wife's domain was a matricentric unit, consisting of herself and her children; it was a farming unit, with a specific farm. It was also an eating unit; all the children of one woman ate out of their mother's pot - from one ekwu. This was the unit bound by the closest and strongest sentimental sibling tie, nwanne. The survival of this unit depended on the mother's resourcefulness, and she expected loyalty and gratitude from her children in return.
At marriage, a girl's father would take yam and cocoyam seedlings from the stacks, arrange them on sticks, as was customary, and give them to his daughter, this was her farming capital. If she was an ada (first daughter), or a favourite daughter, he would point out her marriage present palm tree. The girl's livestock capital - a she-goat and hens - would be given to her by her mother, as would spices and vegetable seeds for her garden, a basket of seasoning ingredients for cooking (ngigo), a soup ladle and a few pots and pans. The she-goat was her ritual goat, eghu chi, and would multiply and produce her first cash capital, and when it died, it could be eaten only by the woman to whom it was given.
Male and female roles were given ritual expression at birth. Eight days after birth the child's head was completely shaved, A baby boy's hair was buried in the roots of a kola-nut tree, and that of a girl under a palm tree. One of the principal objects an adult male heading a household hoped to inherit or otherwise possess was a kola-nut tree, as kola was very important to his role. The rules governing the breaking and sharing of kola symbolised authority, status and gender differentiation in Nnobi.
The palm tree under which the hair of a baby girl was buried was called nkuwuana, and was the tree a father would point out to his first, or a favourite daughter, at her marriage. She would then periodically visit her father's compound to collect the palm fruit from the tree. As long as that palm tree stood, and there was someone alive to recognise it as her palm tree, marriage might not take place between descendants of that woman and those from her father's obi.
Palm Tree
One of the most valuable household resources for a woman was a palm tree. Every part of it served an important economic function. The sap of the tree, palm-wine, was controlled and distributed by men, except, of course, 'male daughters' controlled the circulation of that from their father's compound. Women fed the palm-fronds to goats. They made brooms from the side branches; the trunks were used as building material, or to support climbing plants, especially yam, or to make cooking fires. The sale of palm-oil, which women extracted from the fruits, was a major source of cash for both sexes; proceeds from the sale of the kernel were, however, exclusively owned by women. The shells of the fruit were used for fuel, and the fibre or chaff extracted during oil processing was used to make medicinal soap. The women used parts, or extracts from the tree to make light. For example, they made torches from pieces of izuke ( a bunch of leaves produced by the palm tree) which were broken off one by one and soaked in heated palm-oil. The extracted rope from the skin or bark of the palm tree trunks, which they used for weaving various items such as sieves, long baskets to hold foodstuffs drying in the sun, carrying and storage baskets, etc. They also wove floor and sleeping mats from them.
Staples
The same versatility can be seen in women's production and management of staples. The processing, sale, storage and preserving of all foodstuffs was done exclusively by women. It was, however, through the control of the circulation of yam that men asserted their authority over women.
According to a Nnobi saying, 'a woman answers her husband's call sharply or rudely when she knows there is no yam left in the yam store.'
Although both men and women farmed yam, those cultivated by woman did not compare in size and quantity with those produced by men, for a husband also enlisted his wives' labour to cultivate his yam, and the greater part of his farm was devoted to yam.
For the whole town, the call for the annual Eating of New Yam Festival, ikpo ji, was the prerogative of the man who held the title of Ezeani Nnobi, priest of the Land or Earth Spirit of Nnobi, for he held the yam medicine without which people could not begin digging out new yam from their farms and eat.
Following the signal for ili ji, the male head of the family would buy a cockerel and perform the Eating of New Yam ritual for his family. He and his sons would kill the cockerel and pound the yam medicine. He would then put the medicine into a little gourd and give some to his wife and daughters to lick before eating their own yam. The chicken was eaten by the male head of the family and his sons and not shared with the women. After this ritual yam could be eaten from the store or dug up from the farms to eat.
Within households yam medicine was held by the head of the household. After harvesting, yam and cocoyam were stored in the obi, the male section of the compound, which held the huge family yam stores. Successful women farmers and other wealthy women also had yam stores in the female section of the compound at the back of their units, but could not eat yam from them until their husband had performed the ritual for eating new yam. Men, therefore, supervised and controlled the use of yam from the family store.
The man's contribution to household subsistence was mainly the daily supply of yam, referred to itu ji abani, which he would hand to his children to take to their mothers. When husbands were away, wives were expected to use yam from their own stores.
The smaller species of yam require up to six months in the ground to mature, the larger species up to ten months. Poor output owing to poor soil, overcropping and poor storage meant that yam served as a staple for a very short period of the year, after which everyone turned to the women's crops: cassava, cocoyam, plantain, maize and melons. These were therefore secondary staples only in terms of prestige and in so far as they were female crops.
During discussions with the present traditional ruler, describing the indigenous economy, he said,
In the olden days, men cultivated yam, and women also cultivated yam. But it was the job of the women to tend the yam plants, ilu ji. It was the job of the women to plant maize, bitterleaf and various other plants in the yam plot. Women cultivated cocoyam. It was also their job to dig out the cocoyam. Marketing - buying and selling, selling and buying - was a women's job. Women played a vital part in the production of foodstuff. As for men, once they'd cleared the bush and planted the yam, the rest of the job was left to their wives. It was the job of the women to go to the market, produce food and feed their husbands. Women played the lion's part in the economy of the town even up till the present century. The cultivation of cassava is completely done by women. Men don't cultivate cassava. They only grow yam.
During my fieldwork in Nnobi in 1980 and 1982, the general accounts of the traditional economic activities of women had not changed, as the traditional ruler himself observed. The most important difference is probably the introduction of food processing machinery, but from my observation, most women thought it too expensive, and still used traditional implements, such as mortars and grinding stones. Another difference is in diet. General accounts of the economy and diet of the olden days showed that owing to the scarcity of meat the food was mainly vegetarian. The very poor could barely afford even fish.
Apparently people became rich in earlier times by raising and selling livestock, such as goats, poultry and dogs. Those who could went to Onitsha and bought fish to sell. Some took palm kernels to sell in Onitsha and bought fish, yam, oil-bean seed (from which ogili, the fermented seed for flavouring sauce was made) to sell.
Women, Marketing and Cash
Cowrie shell, referred to as ego, money, was the most common currency used. Most transactions involved money; marriage payments for daughters, sale of livestock, fruit trees, tubers, grains, vegetables and spices, all involved money. Palm fruit was the main cash crop, with palm-wine and palm-oil both being sold for money. Except for palm-wine and yam, which were sold by men, most marketing was done by women, so that most of the cash passed through female hands from the sale of either their own or their husband's goods. Following the principle of the sexual division of labour and gender division of crops, women kept their own profit and what was considered theirs; nothing considered as female and nothing belonging to women was sold by men. But women marketed most of what was considered to be male and as belonging to men, and kept some of the profit. The control of goods and cash by women was a result of their monopoly of market space. This accorded with the Nnobi ideology of female industriousness, economic self-help, and self-sufficiency of the matricentric unit and also was supported and reinforced by the gender ideology which demarcated male and female space.
The sale of livestock and poultry was the quickest way of raising capital. Women tended and helped sell their husband's livestock. When handing over the proceeds to their husband, they would say for how much they had sold a goat or hen; or they might increase the agreed sale price and keep the profit. This was also the case with the sale of palm-oil, yam, plantain, banana and other fruits, as most immovable property belonged to husbands, but was cared for and the produce marketed by their wives. Money derived from any food trees planted by a wife, however, belonged to her, as did money from the fruits of the palm tree pointed out to a daughter by her father, or to a wife by her husband.
The surplus of all food items, processed or raw, was sold by women in the markets. A woman's garden was a regular source of petty foodstuffs, vegetables and agricultural production and their control of the subsistence economy gave them easy access to markets and cash. Whereas most of the cash turnover from women's marketing was put back into the subsistence economy, men's profits were mainly for their personal use, such as marrying additional wives, or taking titles for themselves or their sons. Their main means of getting large sums quickly was through marriage payments received for their daughters, or the sale of livestock such as a male goat, castrated and fattened to fetch a large sum of money.
As a result of the redirection of money back to subsistence and household needs, a woman had to be extremely successful economically, and have a large labour force, to save enough money to be able to participate in the achievement-based title-taking open to women as well as men, such as the ogbuefi. The incidence of women's title-taking was, therefore, lower than that of men. The tendency was for women to take the Ekwe title, which was involuntary, and granted through divination. Though based on the idea of social recognition of hard work, candidature was controlled through ritual, and thus only a limited number of women were chosen. The Ekwe phenomenon, which I see as an essential part of a system which sets a high premium on female economic success, is described in the next chapter.
This chapter has traced the possible origins of the central position which Nnobi women held in the traditional economy, and a sexual division of labour directly related to ecological factors has been described. As women took control of the subsistence economy, men sought authority through the control of ritual specialisation. Even though women were economically self-sufficient, men monopolised the right to tell them when, for example, they could begin to eat yam every year. Various patriarchal and matriarchal ideologies embedded in myths of origin were used to justify this sexual division of labour. At the same time, the presence of strong matrifocality and female orientation in the culture gave women in general a favourable position in both the domestic and public sectors of the traditional society. Female industriousness was, for example, rewarded with both prestigious and political titles ogbuefi and Ekwe. But, more importantly, we find that a flexible gender system encouraged the institutions of 'female husband' and 'male daughter'. This meant that certain women could occupy roles and positions usually monopolised by men, and thereby exercise considerable power and authority over both men and women.
