3000 BCE–present: (Africa as Counterevidence to the Stratification-Equals-Patriarchy Thesis — In Several Parts of Africa the Rise of Social and Economic Stra…

3000 BCE–present: (Africa as Counterevidence to the Stratification-Equals-Patriarchy Thesis — In Several Parts of Africa the Rise of Social and Economic Stratification Not Automatically Bringing Female Subordination, the Kandake of Meroë, Independent Women Entrepreneurs in West Africa, Queen Mothers in West and Central African Kingdoms, Women Holding Chiefly Positions in Kingdoms of Africa’s Southern Savanna Belt, and the Muhongo of Matamba as Customary Monarch All Reinforcing This Point, Matrilineal Societies of the Southern Savanna Belt Requiring Male Suitors to Be Approved by the Sororal Group and Perform Bride Service Under Female Direction, These Customs Traceable to Proto-Savanna Bantu of the Early Second Millennium BCE): In other world regions, notably in several parts of Africa, the rise of social and economic stratification does not seem automatically to have brought female subordination along with it. The authority of the Kandake in Meroë; the major roles of economically independent women entrepreneurs even down to recent centuries in West Africa; the power and authority of queen mothers in many West and Central African kingdoms, along with other institutions for exerting female agency in such states; the holding of chiefly positions by women even in kingdoms in Africa’s southern savanna belt; and, in the case of Matamba, to be the customary monarch of a state — all these examples reinforce the point. The southern savanna belt provides a particularly notable example of the long-term historical centrality of women in the social nexus: widely in the matrilineal societies across those regions, a young man seeking to marry had to be approved not by the father or even the maternal uncle but by the sororal group of her mother and her mother’s sisters. To gain their acceptance he had to perform bride service, working for months or sometimes even several years under the direction of that sororal group; and even after acceptance and marriage he was required to continue to display especially deep respect toward the mother-in-law. The distribution of these practices across societies speaking languages belonging to different deep branches of the Bantu group makes highly probable the existence of these customs at least as far back as the proto-Savanna Bantu society of the early second millennium BCE. Africa shatters the assumption that complexity and patriarchy are inseparable. Here are kingdoms with stratified classes, hereditary rulers, priestly elites, monumental architecture — every feature that the Eurasian model associates with the subordination of women — and yet women retained proprietary spheres of authority, controlled marriage through sororal gatekeeping, served as queen mothers and chiefs and monarchs, and operated as independent economic actors across both matrilineal and patrilineal societies. Patriarchy is not the price of civilization. It is a regional pathology of the Eurasian middle belt, not a universal human condition, and Africa is the proof.