When African women take wives : A historiographical overview

2016

During a turbulent colonial and postcolonial century, African women struggled to control their own marital, sexual and economic lives and to gain a significant voice in local and national politics. This book introduces students to many remarkable women, who organized religious and political movements, fought in anti-colonial wars, ran away to escape arranged marriages, and during the 1990s began successful campaigns for gender parity in national legislatures. The book also explores the apparent paradox in the conflicting images of African women - as singularly oppressed and dominated by men, but also as strong, resourceful, and willing to challenge governments and local traditions to protect themselves and their families. Understanding the tension between women's power and their oppression, between their strength and their vulnerability, offers a new lens for understanding the relationship between the state and society in the twentieth century.

This is a Review Article of Osborn, Emily, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. xiii + 273. ISBN 978-0-8214-1983-0 (pb). Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), pp. xiii + 300. ISBN 978-0-8214-2120-8 (pb). Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), pp. xiv + 239. ISBN 978-0-8214-2145-1 (pb). It argues that the three books reviewed in this article make an important contribution to Africa's social and political history. Defying explorations of marriage as a product of the political economy and avoiding a consideration of marriage simply as an example of social or legal transformation, Emily Lynn Osborn, Rachel Jean-Baptiste and Emily Burrill focus on marriage, sexual relations and the household as important and contested categories of historical production. Their emphasis on the implication of marriage in wider social relationships resonates with historical-anthropological reconstructions of precolonial and colonial forms of gendered agency. It also reveals marriage as a vantage point for research that transcends conceptual boundaries between the private and the political, and by implication also boundaries between different fields of historical inquiry.

Gender and History, 2017

The three books reviewed in this article (Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here; Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights; Burrill, States of Marriage) make an important contribution to Africa's social and political history. Defying explorations of marriage as a product of the political economy and avoiding a consideration of marriage simply as an example of social or legal transformation, Emily Lynn Osborn, Rachel Jean-Baptiste and Emily Burrill focus on marriage, sexual relations and the household as important and contested categories of historical production. Their emphasis on the implication of marriage in wider social relationships resonates with historical-anthropological reconstructions of precolonial and colonial forms of gendered agency. It also reveals marriage as a vantage point for research that transcends conceptual boundaries between the private and the political, and by implication also boundaries between different fields of historical inquiry. The authors' shared emphasis on marriage as a 'messy engagement', embedded in family relationships, social obligations and political interests, makes for fascinating reading.

pb). Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), pp. xiv + 239. ISBN 978-0-8214-2145-1 (pb).

There is a great deal of discussion these days about the need to promote gender equality in Africa. Indeed, the need is obvious as millions of women toil in dreary, largely unpaid and unfulfilling tasks, responsible for most of the farming, marketing and commerce of rural Africa in addition to their child-bearing and child-rearing responsibilities. Many more sit in desperation in refugee camps where they have been driven or shelter in the bush, trying to avoid the conflicts around them. In large tracts of Africa they are without a voice; without power; and the first victims of the civil conflicts which have beset warring African states.

2006

This thesis explores representations of marriage in the works of Anglophone and Francophone African women writers. It presents a trajectory of such representations from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, and examines the various social, ideological and literary influences that have shaped these narratives of marriage. The introduction contextualises the study within existing critical scholarship on African women's writing and representations of marriage. From the evaluation of this literature, it identifies and states the thesis's problem and assumptions. It explores various theoretical perspectives on gender, feminism and nationalism as frameworks for analysis in the thesis. The body of the thesis makes connections between different contexts and periods of women's writing and between the different works of individual women writers. The first chapter focuses on the early works of Ama Ata Aidoo and Mariama Bâ, two pioneer writers from Anglophone and Francophone Africa. It examin...

The focus point of this paper is to examine the historical role and contribution of the African women in fostering development within the context of time and space. The paper will objectively analyse the social, political, cultural and economic status of the African women within the time-frame of the pre-colonial, colonail and postcolonial periods. The paper highlights the fact that in spite of the overwhelming socio-cultural and psychological restrictions on African women, they have recorded tremendous achievements in various fields of developments particularly in agriculture and in business.

Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae

This article discusses the challenges which the institution of marriage faces within the African indigenous societies. Marriage is understood to be one of the most vital mechanisms in maintaining the consistency of all societies on earth. Scholars, such as John Mbiti, understand marriage to be a drama in which everyone becomes an actor or actress and not just a spectator. While this sounds truly ideal, the reality is that most Africans understand marriage to be an institution primarily knotted within African cultural norms and traditions with disparity roles between the couple. The article argues that such an imbalance unleashes toxic masculinity and manhood ideologies which are chiefly designed to deny women the rights to be fully actresses in the theatre of marriage. It also argues for the need of liberative frameworks within which to challenge the dominative traditional and cultural dogmas which are creating disparities between men and women in marriage. Musimbi Kanyoro’s cultura...

Current Journal of Applied Science and Technology, 2021

The task of this paper is to highlight some of the marriage relationship tendencies that have changed in the modern African Marriage, in relation to the traditional norms, as manifest in two texts of two African Feminist writers. The study thus examines how Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes and Chimamanda N. Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus explore the marriage institution in Africa and unearth the changing dynamics in it, as it pertains to the modern or post-modern African society. The study concluded that though the dignity of marriage coupled with its necessity as a social institution is unquestionably maintained in our focused African texts, its dynamics, in modern society, must yield to positive change, at least, to reflect the emerging socio-economic trends in African society today.

Preorc Journal Of Gender And Sexuality Studies, 2020

Marriage as a social institution should be a union of love and interdependence between spouses. This is not always the case in African, where many societies are largely patriarchal. Marriage is contracted for many reasons, some of which are beneficial only to the men; some female folk also see marriage as a way of escaping from certain unpleasant experiences. Marriage in Africa is mostly for procreation which is often more pronounced than the relationship between couples. Cases of crashed marriages owing to childlessness are always on the news and women often take the blame. This paper examines the issues of marriage and procreation in Africa using Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives. Through the experiences of the female characters in the novel, the novelist criticizes the society where the female gender is subjugated, deprived, oppressed and abused. To examine this problem, this paper adopts the feminist approach to literary criticism, and it is discovered that marriages are contracted due to some patriarchal reasons as well as its perception by the female folk as a fortress from life's ugly experiences. It is discovered that procreation is used in securing marital positions and that women often contribute to the unfortunate and painful experiences of fellow women. The paper recommends that marriage for African women should be a thing of choice; that the women should be aware of the fact that marriage does not guarantee social and psychological fulfilment; that marriage should emphasize love and commitment rather than procreation, and that women should