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Introduction: Households, Gender, and Politics in West African History
- Ohio University Press
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1 int roduction Households, Gender, and Politics in West African History In the late 1990s, when conducting oral interviews in the village of Somangoi, in Guinea-Conakry, West Africa, I met a very old woman named Fanti Traoré. She described for me local memories of the French colonial conquest, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century. Although Traoré was in her nineties when we met, she had not yet been born when the “Scramble for Africa” was at its height and European armies and explorers swept through Africa laying claim to vast territories. But Traoré’s mother had been alive back then, and she told her daughter about the first day that the French arrived in Somangoi. According to Traoré, her mother and the other women of the village had gathered to wave leafy branches and greet the colonizers. Traoré clapped her hands together and recited the verses that had been sung to the French over a century before: “Our new husbands are here, everybody should leave their old husbands, our new husbands are here!”1 At first pass, it may seem odd that the women of Somangoi identified these foreign conquerors as potential marital partners. In colonizing the Milo River Valley, as elsewhere in West Africa, the French did not come in search of new wives, nor did they try to anchor the colonial state by marrying local women. But when this song is situated in the context of precolonial state-making, which depended heavily on family ties and household relations, the marital logic articulated by the women of Somangoi starts to make a good deal of sense. This book examines the relationship of households to statecraft in the Milo River Valley from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century. It argues that when men make states—and men consistently dominate statemaking during the period under study—they also make households. It further argues that the relationship between household-making and state-making 2 w Introduction takes historically specific forms that illuminate the logic, parameters, and resources of a given political regime. Previous studies of African political history focus largely on male elites and on the formal institutions of rule that they controlled, without considering how those elites constituted the domestic sphere and treated it as a political resource. By approaching household-making and state-making as linked processes, this book generates a more nuanced understanding of West Africa’s political history and its transformations from the precolonial through the colonial periods. This analysis exposes the intricate workings and history of power, or the various techniques and strategies that elites used variously to cultivate, accumulate, coerce, manipulate, and mobilize their followers and subjects. This approach also exposes the shifting construction and politicization of gender roles—that is, the way that differences between the sexes are freighted with particular meanings, implications, constraints, and opportunities—by revealing how men and women engaged with and were affected by different state-making processes over time. This exploration of the relationship of households to states moves from a basic premise, which is that households serve as a constant preoccupation of state-makers and that political elites devote considerable energy to their construction and operation. But the manner in which they do so takes diverse forms. Stepping back from the Milo River Valley to consider the relationship between household-making and state-making on a broader historical scale makes this point clearly. In some places and times, political elites use the household as a foundation for statecraft, and they deploy marital bonds and familial ties to build and organize the state. Examples of such a state include kingdoms in medieval Europe that were made up of aristocratic families, and small-scale chieftaincies in Africa that were organized through real and fictive kinship networks. At other times, political elites use the household as a site to express and display the power, wealth, and connections that they have accumulated through external activities, such as warfare or commerce. One famous model of that type of state is that of Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King,” who transformed his palace at Versailles into an opulent showcase of his personal and political hegemony.2 And in yet other contexts, political elites treat households as discrete and separate entities that can, nonetheless, be managed by the bureaucracy of rule. Think here of modern republics, such as the United States, where politicians defend the sanctity of their “private lives” while they use legal systems and social and...