3000 BCE–present: (Bride Service and Female Authority in Africa’s Southern Savanna Belt — In Matrilineal Societies Across the Southern Savanna a Young Man Se…

3000 BCE–present: (Bride Service and Female Authority in Africa’s Southern Savanna Belt — In Matrilineal Societies Across the Southern Savanna a Young Man Seeking to Marry Had to Be Approved Not by the Father or Mother’s Brother but by the Sororal Group of the Young Woman’s Mother and Her Mother’s Female Relatives, Performing Bride Service Working for Months or Even Several Years Under the Direction of That Sororal Group, and After Marriage Required to Continue to Pay Especially Deep Respect Toward the Mother-in-Law): The southern savanna belt of Africa provides a particularly notable example of the long-term historical centrality of women in the social nexus. Widely in the matrilineal societies right across those regions, a young man seeking to marry had to be approved, not by the father or even the mother’s brother of the young woman he hoped to marry, but by the sororal group of her mother and her mother’s female relatives. 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 pay an especially deep respect toward the mother-in-law. This is not a footnote in the history of gender. This is a description of a social order in which the fundamental economic and reproductive transaction of society — marriage — was controlled by women. Not by fathers. Not by uncles. By the sororal group: the mother and her female relatives, acting collectively as the gatekeepers of kinship, the arbiters of alliance, the directors of the labor that a young man must perform to prove himself worthy of entry into their lineage. The distribution of these practices across the Bantu-speaking savanna belt tells us that this is not a local custom but an ancient institution, traceable to the earliest periods of Bantu expansion. For thousands of years, across a third of the African continent, women controlled marriage. The implications for world history are enormous, and the discipline has barely begun to reckon with them.