“Women are the womb and the backbone of society
So, in this women’s season let’s celebrate how we came to be” (nelson & nelson, 2018)
matric
‘There were no matriarchies in precolonial Africa’, is what they said. This was said because it was seen that it would pose less of a threat to the status quo if not left untouched. It suppresses the anger of the continuous patriarchy we have found ourselves in for centuries. It puts a form of restraint on revolution. It controls the activities of activism. It strengthens or better yet supports gender stereotypes. It lets male privilege free of blame when populated by men who “at least” are aware of how motherly women warriors once ruled in some distant age. The petition is that if there was actually a time that we lived in matriarchies, which could be defined as a society solely governed by women, where the heads of the homes were woman, then maybe we will return to them inevitably, as a law of nature. This nostalgia assists us to idly continue living our lives without challenging the serious issue that in the times in which we live, if you are a female you are not considered fully human by society.
But in actual fact, not known to many is that woman were in fact equal if not superior to men. African societies, for thousands of years, were matriarchal and they prospered, but the Europeans replaced the millennia of prosperous matriarchy with oppressive patriarchy by bringing an oppressive form of colonial Christianity. The economic, spiritual and social efforts of African women, arose the world first civilisation and in turn African woman went to lead those matriarchal societies. A historian who goes by the name, Cheik Anta Diop, shows how as early as 10000 BC women in Africa founded organised crop and livestock cultivation, which then lead to the pre-condition for surplus, wealth and trade. The great responsibility for the well-being of human, was invented by African woman, that responsibility being namely food security, because of the practise of organised agriculture it made population expand, food surpluses and civilisation possible.
Pre-capitalist matriarchal civilisations in Africa included the Angolan Nzinga, Nigerian Zazzau, Ashanti of Ghana, and Sudanese Kandake, to name but a few. The typical was most evident a and enduring in black Ancient Egypt. Women in Africa retained and had complete control over both mobile and immobile property, such as real estate.” The Egyptian woman enjoyed the same legal and economic rights as the Egyptian man, and the proof of this reflected in Egyptian art and historical inscriptions. Egypt was an unequal society, but the inequality was based much more upon differences in social classes, rather than differences in gender.” (“origins of the oppression of African woman”, 2015).
There are a minority of societies led by females that thrive in the real world today. But there are some African tribes where women literally rule. The decent of Matrilineal has been contributory in tracing the origin of some of Africa’s tribes and its huge part of Africa’s history and evolution. “Matrilineality refers not only to tracing one’s lineage through maternal ancestry, it can also refer to a civil system in which one inherits property through the female’s family line. More interesting is the fact that most of Africa’s matrilineal tribes are still in existence.” (Taylor et al., 2016). The following tribes can attest to the proof of matriarchy in africa.
Firstly, the Serer tribe which is an West African ethno-religious group making up Senegals third largest tribe. They are historically as the matrilineal ethnic group that long resisted the expansion of islam
The biggest threat towards African women having a glorious future is our peoples ignorance of African women’s glorious past. Armed with the knowledge, Africans must now fight to restore African women to a position of respect and dignity that exceeds that which she enjoyed before colonialism