3000 BCE–1600s CE: (African History as Counterweight to Patriarchal Presumptions — Mature Women’s Authority in Social Governance Already Existing During the …

3000 BCE–1600s CE: (African History as Counterweight to Patriarchal Presumptions — Mature Women’s Authority in Social Governance Already Existing During the Early Bantu Expansions of the Third to First Millennia BCE, Women as Active Instigators of the Inventions of Ceramic Technology and the Creation of Agricultural Ways of Life, the Kandake Queens of Meroë from the Fifth Century BCE Through the Third Century CE Serving as Primary and Powerful Rulers in Their Own Right in a Multiethnic Matrilineal Empire, and the Muhongo Queen of Seventeenth-Century Matamba in Angola Serving as Monarch While Her Male Consort Commanded the Military): African history offers strong counterweights to these presumptions about male and female roles in history. The comparative cultural evidence across the Bantu-speaking third of Africa strongly comports with the conclusion that the authority of mature women in the social governance of their communities already existed during the early expansions of Bantu peoples of the third to first millennia BCE. Women even earlier in time were the active instigators and primary participants in major material cultural changeovers in Africa, notably the inventions of ceramic technology and the creation and expansion of agricultural ways of life in large parts of the continent. Later on, from the fifth century BCE through the third century CE, the queens — the Kandake — of the multiethnic empire of Meroë, most of whose peoples followed matrilineal organization of kinship, served as primary and powerful rulers in their own right. In much more recent times and farther south, in seventeenth-century Angola, in the state of Matamba — whose people also reckoned descent matrilineally — the queen, the muhongo, was the monarch, while her male consort commanded the state’s military forces. The range of evidence is staggering. From the invention of ceramics to the governance of empires, from the deep Bantu past to seventeenth-century Angola, African women exercised forms and degrees of authority that the patriarchal lens of Western scholarship has rendered systematically invisible. The Kandake who ruled Meroë were not exceptions or anomalies. They were products of a social system — matrilineal kinship — that structured authority differently from the patrilineal systems of the Eurasian middle belt, and they exercised that authority with a normalcy that only seems remarkable when viewed through the distorting prism of a discipline that assumed male rule as the default condition of human society.