2000 BCE–present: (Women’s Proprietary Authority Persisting Across Kinship Systems — The Ancient Historical Recognition of Women’s Proprietary Spheres of Aut…

2000 BCE–present: (Women’s Proprietary Authority Persisting Across Kinship Systems — The Ancient Historical Recognition of Women’s Proprietary Spheres of Authority Not Limited to Matrilineal Societies but Often Persisting in Patrilineal Cultures as Well, Including Among Bantu-Speaking Societies of the Past Two Thousand Years in the African Great Lakes Region, Independent Women Entrepreneurs Long Prominent in West African Niger-Congo-Speaking Societies Whether Patrilineal or Matrilineal): This ancient historical recognition of women’s proprietary spheres of authority has not been a feature solely of matrilineal societies in Africa but has often persisted in patrilineal cultures as well — for example, among the Bantu-speaking societies of the past two thousand years in the African Great Lakes region. In West Africa, independent women entrepreneurs have long been prominent in societies that spoke languages of the Niger-Congo family, whether the society was patrilineal or matrilineal. The persistence of female economic and social authority across kinship systems — matrilineal and patrilineal alike — demolishes the last refuge of the patriarchal-universalist argument. One might concede that matrilineal societies preserve female authority and still argue that the shift to patrilineal descent inevitably produces female subordination. But Africa’s patrilineal societies disprove even this. In the Great Lakes region, where patrilineal descent has prevailed for two millennia, women still maintained proprietary authority over their own spheres. In West Africa, where both patrilineal and matrilineal systems coexist, women’s economic independence cut across the kinship divide. The variable is not kinship system. It is cultural tradition — and the Niger-Congo cultural tradition, carried across a third of the continent by the Bantu expansion and rooted in the earliest Niger-Congo societies of the tenth millennium BCE, carried within it a conception of gender that recognized female authority as structural, not exceptional. The subordination of women is not a consequence of social complexity, of patrilineal descent, or of any other structural feature that the Western academy has proposed as its cause. It is a consequence of specific cultural traditions — traditions that Africa’s Niger-Congo-speaking peoples did not share.