Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: gender and colonialism in a Yoruba town by Lorelle D. Semley (review)

Lorelle Semley's engaging study of the historical and symbolic power of motherhood (and fatherhood) in Ketu, a Yoruba town in the Republic of Benin, makes an important contribution to the study of gender and power in the Atlantic world. This book explores the reality and representations of 'public motherhood' - the concept, introduced by Nigerian literary scholar Chikwenye Ogunyemi, that biological motherhood entitles women to certain forms of civic power. Semley's analysis of the shifting meanings of motherhood pivots around three transformative processes: the Atlantic slave trade, French colonialism and trans-Atlantic travel.

The title, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass, is taken from a popular Yoruba saying. According to previous writers, 'mother is gold' reflects the value of maternal love and sacrifice, and 'father is glass' suggests that a father's love and authority is ephemeral and contingent. Semley investigates women's social value and power as being derived from sources other than biology. Undergirding her analysis is a notion of power as precarious, shifting and multifaceted.

In Chapter 1, Semley examines 'mothers' in the founding myths that favour elite men, and casts women leaders and 'witches' as 'relics of a long-lost matriarchal order'. She poignantly challenges the accepted wisdom of these myths by highlighting the accomplishments of women whose supernatural power and resources were critical to men's survival in the early days of Ketu. In Chapter 2, she proposes two models of 'public motherhood' in the era of the Atlantic slave trade. The first model was embodied in the mothers of kings or other women with ceremonial and ritual duties. The second, which displaced the former, was represented by the massive influx of 'wives' and slaves during this period of decreasing autonomy for women. She identifies, in Chapter 3, a silence in the sources on marriage across religious faiths as being linked to rivalry between Muslims and Christians, the vulnerability of Ketu to warfare, and the failure of Muslim men (who arrived as strangers and married local women) to convert their wives and children. In Chapter 4, describing the colonial era, Semley reconstructs the lives of two women appointed as French colonial intermediaries by the local French administrator (and dismissed six years after taking office); their brief appointments reveal a moment when women's political power was decoupled - at least in the perception of the French colonials - from their agency as wives or mothers. Semley uses the French Antislavery Society's 1910 survey on African marriage and the family, discussed in Chapter 5, as evidence that at the turn of the century young women were increasingly challenging the authority of older women (and men) through elopement and divorce. Chapter 7 highlights the movement of women between Benin and Brazil, including the two Ketu priestesses believed to have initiated the Candomble religion. (The author appears to assume that there was no Candomble practice before the arrival of these two women in the later part of the nineteenth century.)

Semley makes a bold attempt at avoiding the pitfalls of linking women's power to their biology as mothers, yet her evidence from Ketu seems to reinforce the idea that women were 'public mothers' and men 'public fathers' in ways that mirror the biological 'naturalness' that she critiques in existing scholarship. Ambitious in its historical breadth and impressive in its depth and textured analysis of women's social and political power, this text offers lessons for Africanists and feminists who seek to appreciate the dynamic contexts in which women's power, and that of smaller towns and kingdoms, has fluctuated.