A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 by Rhiannon Stephens (review)

In this unique and noteworthy work—indeed, the first book-length history of motherhood in pre-twentieth-century Africa—Rhiannon Stephens delivers the powerful proposition that motherhood is an institution with an ideology. Her agenda is two-fold: first, to destabilize the conventional ways in which most people think about motherhood; and second, to question the timeless and ahistorical accounts of “African motherhood.” The book focuses on a group of Bantu-speaking people (Baganda, Basoga, and Bagwere) who inhabit the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria-Nyanza and covers a period of more than twelve centuries—before, during, and after the organizing of centralized polities and chiefdoms in this Great Lakes Region of East Africa. Stephens demonstrates that over the long durée significant innovations and transformations took place in the conceptualization and experience of motherhood and that motherhood was at the center of the most salient historical developments in this region. These changes commenced with the creation, organization, and reproduction of durable communities ordered around lineages and clans. These groupings, in turn, were aggregated into broad webs of obligation and support that guaranteed the monopolization of political power by emerging dynastic families.

The book is organized into five chapters. The first sets out the book’s methodological foundations—historical linguistics, comparative ethnography, analysis of oral traditions and archives. To those working on the earlier periods of African history, this is not new material, but Stephens presents it skillfully. Chapter 2 covers the ancestors of the Buganda and South Kyoga centralizing societies in the period 700–1200, exploring who could become a mother and under which conditions. Stephens contends that as royal families increasingly controlled leadership, the ideologies of motherhood that shaped kinship organization moved into the political realm. Chapters 3–5 present examples from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries to illustrate how, over time, conceptualizations of motherhood mirrored transformations in the North Nyanzan communities. Stephens contends that by the end of the nineteenth century a new political landscape, purged of powerful queen mothers and in which women were generally typified as enslaved by men, emerged out of a collaborative hegemony between elite men and British colonialists. Stephens laments that this unfortunate and highly gendered political landscape has shaped our understanding of gender relations in the early history of East Africa. She vehemently rejects this characterization, arguing that “it was new in the19th century and needs to be understood as the consequence of bitter power struggles over political economy” (16).

Overall, Stephens’s impressive grasp of linguistic historical reconstruction enables her to bestow agency to historical actors, both men and women, whose past accounts would otherwise be lost to us. Through their words, we are able to understand and appreciate their struggles to create, regulate, rationalize, contain, manipulate, sway, govern, and dominate ideologies of motherhood in a bid to deal with issues of social reproduction and work out different trajectories to shape sustainable and robust communities.

My only criticism of the book centers on its title, A History of African Motherhood, which perhaps suggests more than it delivers. In fact, this overly generalized title is surprising, given Stephens’s view of motherhood “as diverse, as culturally specific and as subject to change over time” (4). The book covers essentially the area of Uganda that today encompasses the societies of Bugwere, Busoga, and Buganda—all of which descended from the common ancestral North Nyanza language community. While the subtitle does narrow down the topic to motherhood in Uganda, the linguistic groups discussed in the book hardly encompass more than a tenth of the ethnic groups in the country. In addition, we are not told why the narrative starts in the year 700 and not 600 or, for that matter, 800. However, these are relatively trivial criticisms of the wonderfully accomplished book Stephens has bestowed upon us.

Judiciously interlacing...