5 - Women's Authority and Female Initiation in East-Central African History

Summary

Developments in the institutions and rites of passage form an important set of themes in East-Central African social history from the beginning of the First Age of Farming, two thousand years ago, up to the nineteenth century. These themes have much to impart about the playing out of gendered authority over time. Both female and male ceremonies of initiation have a long history among Bantu-speaking peoples, going back well before the proto-Eastern Savanna society from which the later Bantu-speaking societies of East-Central Africa all drew a great deal of their cultural heritage. A striking early development of East-Central African history, dating to the First Age of Farming in the later part of the first millennium BCE and the early part of the first millennium CE, was the loss, partial or entire, of male initiation rituals over large parts of these regions, shifting center stage to female rites of passage and entrenching women's authority over pivotal social relations. In a number of societies, these social patterns persisted down to recent times, while in other societies, social changes with offsetting effects took place at various times and in various regions over the past fifteen hundred years, in different ways bringing greater male agency into female initiation and women's spheres of authority.

Ancient Features of Female Rites of Passage in East-Central Africa

The comparative ethnographic and linguistic evidence combines to show that, in many Bantu-speaking communities of the First Age of Farming, female initiation comprised two sets of observances that could be months or years apart.