Chiefs and Other Great Female Ancestors: Voice, Authority, and the Politics of Gendered Temporality in Northern Mozambique

Abstract

The matrilineal Yaawo of northern Mozambique are recognized as having had a tradition of female figures of spiritual and political authority, though little is known of their history. This article takes “voice” as its analytical focus to explore how these women feature in the historical memories of the region. Methodologically, it brings together the study of oral traditions and oral history. Focusing on the narratives as “collections of diverse voices” (Barber 1989), I analyze how past voices echo in the narratives and intertwine with the voices of their contemporary narrators and how contemporary narrators engage with the remembered voices of the past. As this article argues, examining the ways that the relationship between the deeper past and the present is performed in oral history can bring us a better understanding of women’s gendered leadership in a more distant past, as well as its changing shape in more recent times.

Résumé

Les Yaawo matrilinéaires du nord du Mozambique sont reconnus comme ayant eu une tradition de figures féminines détenant une autorité spirituelle et politique, bien que l’on sache peu de choses sur leur histoire. Cet article utilise le concept de « voix » comme axe analytique pour explorer comment ces femmes figurent dans la mémoire historique de la région. Méthodologiquement, il rassemble les études de traditions orales et d’histoire orale. En se concentrant sur les récits en tant que « collections de voix diverses » (Barber 1989), j’analyse comment les voix du passé résonnent dans les récits et s’entrelacent avec les voix de leurs narrateurs contemporains et comment les narrateurs contemporains relatent avec les voix remémorées du passé. Cet article soutient qu’en examinant les manières dont s’effectue la relation entre le passé le plus profond et le présent en histoire orale, il est possible de mieux appréhender le leadership genré des femmes dans un passé plus lointain, ainsi que sa forme changeante dans une époque plus récente.

Introduction: “Voice” in the Study of African Pasts

“Voice” has long been an implicit part of the study of African pasts. Yet the oral methodology—that is, the ways of listening and interpretation—have shifted much through time. In the words of David W. Cohen, Stephan Miescher, and Luise White, “‘Voice’ has had a marvelous yet tortured history within writings on Africa.”¹ Framed within these methodological discussions, this article takes “voice” as its analytical focus to explore the gendered history of women’s spiritual and political power in northern Mozambique (see Figure 1).² Women of authority—categorized by terms such as “queen-mothers,” “father’s sisters,” “ritual sisters,” and sometimes as “chiefs”—usually only appear in footnotes in the written documentation and early history writing of southeastern Africa.³ And while the matrilineal Yaawo people of northwestern Mozambique are also recognized to have had a tradition of female figures of spiritual and political authority, little is known about their history.⁴ Portuguese colonial sources mostly refer to them as rainhas (“queens”). Yet the starting point of this article is that terms such as “rainha” reveal more about the gendered lenses of the male colonial observers than they actually tell about the history of gendered power in Yaawo society. Naming these women rainhas, the colonial agents framed Yaawo female leadership through European models of monarchical rule and gendered ideas of political power in which women’s authority is solely derived through their relations to men. They completely failed to recognize how female authority and gendered power were exercised within the Yaawo matrilineal context. In this article, I look beyond the colonial archive at deeper historical memory. Turning to oral historical narratives of the chieftaincies that emerged in the mid-1800s in Yaawoland in northwestern Mozambique,⁵ I explore how female figures of authority feature in the historical memories of the area. Here, oral historical narratives are understood as narratives about the deeper past that have travelled through time and various generations of tellers.⁶ They are thus simultaneously of the past and the present, and shaped by historical processes of change.⁷ Methodologically, this article brings together the study of oral traditions and oral history.

Figure 1. Northern Niassa, Mozambique. Map by Noora Katto.

The early studies in African oral tradition sought to capture the African deeper past in its pure, original form, uncontaminated by colonial history or the post-colonial present.⁸ This early methodology was connected to the idea of uncovering “a single ‘correct’ history.”⁹ Oral sources were defined in a formalist fashion as fixed “traditions” passed down across generations.¹⁰ Moreover, it was believed that in the process of transmission—with different narrators adding their voices to the original narrative—these sources had been contaminated. As Jan Vansina and his colleagues thought, it was the job of the historian to find the way back to the original testimony, or the “authentic” voice.¹¹ Since Vansina’s groundbreaking research, the methodology of studying oral sources has undergone major revisions. By the 1980s, historians of Africa had already moved away from the idea of a single history and literal interpretations toward understanding the narratives as imbedded in historical processes, products of history, and producing history.¹² Yet the divide that existed between oral traditions and oral history persisted.¹³ Crucially, this marked not just a temporal but also a methodological divide. A stronger call for more open definitions of oral tradition only came in the late 1980s.¹⁴ This coincided with the upsurge in life history research that focused on personal reminisces and the more recent history.¹⁵

A new methodological opening came in the early 1990s, when a new body of scholarship emerged that focused on the ways that the relationship between the past and the present is performed in oral historical narratives.¹⁶ Instead of “cleaning” them of their various histories of transmission and reinterpretation, precisely these processes of transmission became the focus of study.¹⁷ As Elizabeth Tonkin astutely writes, “if we understand the means by which members use their understanding of the past to shape the present, it may become easier to understand what that past could have been.”¹⁸ This scholarship—importantly drawing analytical insight from oral history research—has also attempted to bridge the methodological split between the study of oral traditions and the study of oral history.¹⁹ As Carolyn Hamilton argues, “both kinds of historical evidence are formed in the same process, the relaying of historical information by word of mouth.”²⁰ However, since the 1990s, this scholarship has advanced very little, and the debate has only been continued through individual researchers.²¹ Today the methodological divide continues to show in the way that most historical studies on the precolonial past use oral traditions mainly as evidence for reconstructing the past (meaning that their main interest is still in getting back to an original narrative) whereas oral history is concerned with questions of how people remember and make sense of—and situate themselves in relation to—the more recent past.

Positioning my research within this scholarship that has attempted to bridge these fields, I explore how explicit analytical attention to “voice”—and especially the relation between past and present voices—can more radically address the divide between the study of oral history and oral tradition. While previous research has tended to focus on the relation between present voices and past history, I stress the notion of communication between past and present. Drawing on Karin Barber’s work on the interpretation of oral texts, I focus on the Yaawo oral historical narratives as “collections of diverse voices.”²² I analyze how past voices echo in the narratives and intertwine with the voices of their contemporary narrators and how contemporary narrators engage with the remembered voices of the past. Moreover, as this article shows, focusing on voice to examine the ways that the relationship between the deeper past and the present is performed in the oral history encounters can bring us a better understanding of the changing shape of gendered authority in northern Mozambique.

This article consists of four sections. The first section focuses on how the past is voiced in the oral history interviews and how a sensory listening might help us hear that which is not part of the dominant narrative. I pay special attention to women’s speaking voice. In the second section, I explore the traces of the deeper past in the present focusing on the figure of the grandmother and her gendered power. I especially focus on an example of how a grandmother’s voice is remembered by her elderly grandson. In the third section, I explore speaking power and the ways that various contending voices pull different pasts into the present (from some arguing that women never held any significant power to others arguing that women once held the full spiritual-political power of the chief). In the final section of the article, I bring this analysis together to discuss the politics of gendered temporality and the challenge researchers face trying to hold these different historical temporalities in analytical juxtaposition—to not conflate one with the other or pull them into a linear narrative of change.

Listening Beyond Dominant Narratives

HELENA : Here, in the past, did you have a great biibi [biibi vaakulungwa]? A queen [rainha]? Now we say rainha, rainha. But a long time ago, for instance, in my home area we had a biibi. We had Biibi Aku-Ndeenda, right? There was biibi, the wife of the chief, then there was Biibi Aku-Ndeenda … of the basket [va kaselo]. These days we say rainha.

SUMIINI AIDE : Ahaaaaa …

HELENA : Yes. Here, that time, was there?

SUMIINI : Yes!

HELENA : Was there?

SUMIINI : Yes, of the basket, there was.

FABIÃO CHAIBO [overlapping speech] : There was.

HELENA : There was?

SUMIINI : Yes! There was. [A biibi] of the basket there was.

HELENA [affirming to Jonna in Portuguese]: She says there was.

SUMIINI : Yes, biibi! Yes, biibi. ²³

Sumiini, an elderly woman in Malulu, a village next the great Mount Unango, has so far been relatively quiet in this oral history interview, letting the male participants—Fabião and Saide take the lead. Yet when the topic shifts to women of authority (in Ciyaawo known as biibi; pl. acibiibi) of the past—Sumiini visibly lights up. Realizing what we are after—after my co-interviewer Helena’s rather lengthy introductory question—with bright eyes she leans forward in her chair and in a firm and excited voice asserts herself into the conversation. “Yes!” she claims. “Yes, of the basket, there was,” she later adds.

The unsolicited appearance of these women of authority in oral historical narratives is rather rare these days. This explains Helena’s lengthy question formulation, which draws on the experience we have so far gathered in our oral history interviews.²⁴ We have, for instance, learned that the different terms (biibi, rainha) cause some confusion as they themselves are historical products; they originated in certain time periods, yet over time they have taken on new meaning as the social context in which they were once used has changed. In the interview, while Helena introduces both terms together, she immediately points out that rainha (“queen”) is of a more recent origin, but “long time ago” these women were known by the title “biibi.” Drawing on her own memories, Helena also gives an example of a biibi that features in the oral historical narratives of her home area Chiconono (situated about 70 km northeast from our position in Malulu). As a maternal granddaughter of Chief Ce-N’tamila in Chiconono and a female ex-combatant of the liberation struggle, Helena’s own life history is closely embedded in the historical landscapes of Niassa (Mozambique’s northwestern province; see map). In this interview, Helena points out to our narrators that we are less interested in stories of the principal wife of the chief to whom the title of biibi is in present times more commonly associated; rather, the biibi that we are after is the biibi also known as “the biibi of the basket” (biibi va kaselo). Her power, as the elders in Malulu also affirm, was based on the basket that she used in the offering of the sacred flour in communal ceremonies in which the leaders sought the help of their ancestral spirits to ensure the well-being of their population. Both the sacred flour and the ceremony are known by the name mbopeesi.

Nowadays, these women belong to the less dominant historical memories, and only narrative fragments exist in living memory. And, as I argue in this article, hearing these historical memories requires one to listen very closely to voice.²⁵ This means not just listening to the words but to the spaces in-between words, the emotional responses and bodily gestures through which meaning is also conveyed. This kind of listening engages our whole bodies and is what music scholar Nina Sun Eidsheim defines as “multisensorial listening.”²⁶ Listening to meaning beyond words is of course not new in oral history research. As Alessandro Portelli writes, also tone, volume, and rhythm are bearers of meaning—not just the words spoken.²⁷ Elizabeth Tonkin also writes that “gesture, intonation, bodily stance and facial expression are all cues, in the oral ambience, to topic orientation as well as to the speakers’ claim to authority.”²⁸ Anne Karpf, who calls it “deep listening,” importantly acknowledges that such an engagement propels the researcher into uncertain terrain.²⁹ As she writes, “the voice seem to require of the historian the kind of instinctual response which belongs more usually in interpersonal relationships than in traditional scholarship.” Voice and listening are, of course, intimately connected. For the feminist researcher this is tied to an ethics of listening that requires us to make a continuous effort in learning to listen, recognizing that what we do learn while listening is always shaped by our own cultural and social histories and our bodily situatedness within power relations; thus our understanding is always necessarily partial and incomplete. Yet as I argue in this article it is in this uncertain terrain that we have a chance to listen beyond “histories of hegemonies.”³⁰ This also follows Moses E. Ochonu’s call for a sensory methodology in historical inquiry, which, according to him, involves “sensing the African past beyond the recognized oral, written, and ethnographic corpus.”³¹ Writing on Mozambican history, Maria Paula Meneses, moreover, argues that it is “through deep, reflexive listening”—especially when researching women’s knowledge about the past—that “it is possible to uncover multisensory, locally situated histories that reveal knowledge beyond the colonial historiographical canon.”³²

Among the Yaawo people in northern Mozambique in contemporary times, the narrative accounts about the past are known as mbidi ya kalakaala (“old time tales”); they speak about the past lived by one’s ancestors.³³ These are not for the most part fixed or highly stylized narratives but connected rather to conversational remembering and an interplay of different narrators.³⁴ They include chiefly narratives that have been passed down through generations of narrators. They often tell the histories of chiefly lineages and dynasties, which is also the principal reason why they continue to be remembered—especially since their reactivation is required when a new chief is to be appointed.³⁵ The decedents of the old ruling families are the ones most invested in keeping these narratives alive these days. This includes chiefs, chiefly advisors, and members of the chiefly families.³⁶ Yet in my research, in addition to these histories of the old elites, I wanted to gain an understanding of the “broader circulation of historical knowledge.”³⁷ For this reason, I also interviewed elders who did not belong to the chiefly lineages but were revered for their knowledge of the past. The elders Sumiini, Saide, and Fabião—whose ancestors lived with the first Chief Ce-Cipaango at Mount Unango—mostly talked about the life in the old days, as remembered by their own elders. But they also talked about the narratives that they had learned about the “life of the chiefs” in the more distant past.

These days most chiefs are men, and the chiefly narratives have become a male affair. Yet at the same time, these narratives are not considered gendered knowledge belonging only to men, and I also met women who were knowledgeable in these histories. Asigale Mataaka, a female elder of the Mataaka family, whom I had the opportunity to interview before she passed away in 2015 in Mavago, was an expert in the history of the Mataaka chiefs.³⁸ I also interviewed a female chief, Ce-Nan’tima in Maniamba, and she spoke authoritatively about the history of the Nan’tima chiefs who, according to her, have always (since the establishment of the dynastic name in the mid-nineteenth century) been women.³⁹ Biibi Ce-Suula, the elderly maternal aunt of Chief Ce-Mangolowe, authorized the male chief’s words as he spoke to us in the interview; as she claimed, she had been the one to teach him all that he knew.⁴⁰ Yet in other places, I had to specifically ask to interview also women; otherwise, I was presented with a group of male elders only—usually the chief with his male advisors. Not all women had any special reaction to being asked about the history of the acibiibi, nor did they have any special knowledge to share. In Sumiini’s case, her reaction conveyed her attitude toward the topic, and suggested that it was not a matter of indifference to her. In this sense, her voice stood out from the male voices, which did not carry the same emotional tone (I will return to this point later). Yet, in the longer discussion that followed over the name of the great woman of authority of the Cipaango chieftaincy, they all participated in remembering her name and discussing the role she used to play in the chieftaincy. What is significant is that while Ce-Cipaango downplayed the spiritual role of the biibi, Sumiini, Saide, and Fabião emphasized her importance. Despite the masculinization of chiefly power, there are still elders who remember the biibi—or “grandmother” as she is also called—as a figure of authority.

On Grandmother’s Authority

CE-MAGUUTA : I don’t have anything to add. But I would like to say a bit about men and women and why the woman is the more superior [hierarchically higher]. I will try to tell you a little about what my grandmother told me.⁴¹

We have arrived at the end of our interview with Ce-Maguuta, a male elder and chiefly counsellor of Ce-Mataaka in Mavago. To the ambient sound of a neighbor’s maize grinding mill, we asked questions and heard stories about the Mataaka chiefs and the acibiibi. The Mataaka chieftaincy is the most famous of the Yaawo chiefly dynasties that rose to power in the mid-1800s, mainly because of its fierce leaders who also fought long and hard against Portuguese colonization of their lands. Ce-Maguuta speaks as the current guardian of these narratives.⁴² Yet he argues that he has had no formal training and has learned these histories through conversations with his elders, especially his maternal uncle, Chief Mafuta. Ce-Maguuta is a great storyteller with a remarkable memory, and to me it is striking how closely some of his narratives echo those that the Yaawo Anglican priest Yohanna Abdallah first recorded in writing in the early twentieth century (as far as I know, this book—found, for instance, in the Historical Archive of Mozambique—has no circulation in Niassa).⁴³ Especially one narrative that he still remembers about the first chief—a woman known by the name Ce-Syuungudi—is of special interest to me as she appears not to be remembered by most people any longer. According to this narrative, Ce-Syuungudi was the grandmother of the first Mataaka chief, and it was against her power that Ce-Nyaambi (as he was known before he became Mataaka) rebelled. He took his mother, maternal aunt, and younger brother and moved away from his grandmother’s village to establish a new matriclan (previously, the clan was known by his grandmother’s name).⁴⁴ He became chief, and his mother Aku-Nakavale the female head of the new matriclan; these days she is remembered as the first biibi. Later, through his slave-raiding wars and long-distance trade with the Arabs at the Indian Ocean coast, his fame and power grew, and nowadays he is known as the founder of the Mataaka dynasty. Mataaka I died in 1879, but the “Mataaka” title has continued with male heirs through matrilineal succession.⁴⁵

This was not my first interview with Ce-Maguuta; I had interviewed him three times before.⁴⁶ In this interview, the focus was on gaining more knowledge about the spiritual-political role that acibiibi—starting with the mother of the first Mataaka, Aku-Nakavale—played in the Mataaka dynasties.⁴⁷ I had presumed this to be distant history for Ce-Maguuta, memorized narratives detached from his personal history. Yet this assumption is disrupted by Maguuta’s words at the very end of the interview when he draws on a personal memory of a dialogue with his own grandmother to explain to me the position of the biibi in Yaawo history and lifeworld. As he continues his narration,

CE-MAGUUTA : A chief [or leader] cannot be a chief without a biibi, that is not possible. Any place where there is a chief there has to be a biibi—the biibi is a woman. The chief descends from the woman. She [my grandmother] spoke like this. Is it true or false?

HELENA : It’s true.

CE-MAGUUTA : True?

HELENA : Yes.

CE-MAGUUTA : Only the woman can generate life. And she explained further: the women have the pot to cook relish [mboga], and there is always another pot to make maize porridge [wugadi]. So she questioned me: ‘Between the small pot for cooking the relish and the bigger one, which of them is greater? One being small, the other big—which is the greater?’ And I responded saying that I didn’t know which was the greater. So she said that the greater one is this [demonstrates with his hands]—

HELENA : The smaller one.

CE-MAGUUTA : The smaller one. Because just saying that we will have maize porridge, you know that we have relish, isn’t it? If there is no relish can we use the ciwulugo-pot to cook maize porridge?

HELENA : No, we can’t.

CE-MAGUUTA : Then this pot for cooking the relish is the one that is greater. This is what she said. For in the world who comes first and is greater [hierarchically higher] is the woman.

This narrative follows a call-and-response pattern in which Helena (familiar with the sensorial world of the narrative) plays an important role in assisting Maguuta. The narrative representing a dialogue between Maguuta and his grandmother is also remembered through dialogue. Nēpia Mahuika in his book on indigenous oral history importantly argues that we understand the transmission of oral history as a multisensory experience.⁴⁸ This narrative excerpt points to how knowledge about the past is learned through multisensory engagement in daily life. It evokes an image of young Maguuta (now in his 80s) spending time with his grandmother, possibly observing as she cooks. Isabel Hofmeyr writes about the spatial division of storytelling and how this aligns with the gendered spaces of everyday life.⁴⁹ Among my interviewees, many spoke of hearing these “old time tales” from both male and female elders, usually around the fire after dinner. In the past, education of children happened through storytelling sessions; it was through various kinds of stories they learned about the past and where their ancestors had come from, as well as the moral codes of society and the rules of proper conduct. The male and female initiation rites were of course the most important spaces where girls and boys were educated about their future gendered roles in society. As children grew older, they learned gendered tasks by following their parents, grandparents, and other relatives in their everyday activities. These were also important sites for storytelling. Some of the men I interviewed, for instance, told about learning stories while hunting. Maguuta had also previously told of how he learned many of the narratives he knows from following his uncle to the vegetable garden by the river and the highland maize field; and while his uncle worked, he told him stories.⁵⁰ Still, the educational moment remembered in Maguuta’s narrative describes his interaction with his grandmother.⁵¹ This suggests his young age at the time, as it used to be these older women, the maternal grandmothers, who were entrusted with taking care of the smallest children while the parents worked in the fields.

Importantly, the remembered conversation revolves around food and cooking. Food was (and still is in rural Niassa) the domain of women.⁵² In this narrative account, the position of the biibi in the Yaawo social hierarchy is explained through the two cooking pots. These pots are of different sizes: the ciwulugo-pot used for cooking maize porridge is bigger than the m’piika-pot, which is used for preparing the relish, often a vegetarian dish made of leaves or beans, in which the maize porridge is dipped when eating. Together these two complement each other and constitute what people consider to be a proper meal. Yet, as Ce-Maguuta remembering his grandmother’s words narrates, the m’piika-pot, though smaller, is more important. If there is no accompanying dish, there is no sense in starting to cook the maize porridge because it alone does not make a meal. It is significant that Maguuta’s grandmother uses the analogy of pots and food to teach her grandson about the position of the biibi. It was women who were in charge of the whole food preparation process, also cultivating a significant part of the food crops. Even the making of the clay cooking pots used to be women’s work.⁵³ Food as the basis of women’s power was, moreover, symbolized by the sacred maize flour that the biibi carried in a small basket and offered in the communal ceremonies, where on behalf of her population she sought the help and protection of her ancestral spirits.⁵⁴ Hence she is also remembered as the “biibi of the basket.”

While the title biibi (or even the Portuguese term rainha) are currently in popular use, this woman of authority is also known as angaanga (grandparent), or even principal grandparent. As Maguuta explains, the chief descends from her. As “the mother of the chiefs,” she is recognized as the founder of the matrilineage. When the first biibi died, the name she had adopted was passed onto a daughter’s daughter—and for whom taking on the name signified social rebirth. Through the name the successor stepped into the position of the ancestral founder and had to be treated with the same respect. Thus in the “hierarchy between the biibi and the male chief,” as Ce-Maguuta explains, the biibi was the superior one. Moreover, it was her closeness to the ancestors that put her in a position of spiritual power. As Ce-Maguuta explained further, “Because of this they [the mothers] are higher in hierarchy than the chiefs who descend from them and to whom they gave birth. They [the mothers] have the right to pray for the prosperity/well-being of their children.” Other narrators even told me that the biibi had “the right to speak first,” which means she had the first right in addressing the ancestral spirits.⁵⁵ And in this sense, in this remembered version of the past, her speaking voice carried much power.

Ce-Maguuta’s narratives do not originate from single moments in time but have been shaped “over a lifetime of listening and learning.”⁵⁶ The last narrative that he shares, almost as an afterthought, is one he must have heard at a very young age. Yet in this interview it is presented as the frame to guide us in understanding the historical narratives of the Mataaka chiefs and acibiibi. Oral history telling is special in the way it pulls different temporalities into conversation with each other in present time-space. Karin Barber writes of how in these moments the past becomes reintegrated into the present.⁵⁷ For our interviewees, this is perhaps even more strongly the case, as telling these historical narratives is closely linked to remembering one’s ancestors.⁵⁸ It is through these “acts of memory” that their continued existence in the world of the living is ensured.⁵⁹ Forgetting severs this link and can lead to turmoil.⁶⁰ The mbopeesi ceremony is the most important site for remembering one’s ancestors. In Maguuta’s case, telling stories about the acibiibi of past times—including his own grandmother—affirms their importance to the present world. Yet this is not the only version of the past that exists in the present, but contending voices bring the past into the present in different ways.

Speaking Power, Contending Voices, and the Multiple Pasts of the Present

David Schoenbrun writes about the “relentlessly dispersed character” of speaking power.⁶¹ By this he is referring to the abundance of different kinds of narratives that exist about the past and the various claims to authority their narrators make. The question of who spoke in the mbopeesi ceremony was a matter of some contestation in our interviews. Some interviewees argued that the biibi had the right to speak first; others claimed that it was only the male chief who spoke and thus communicated with the ancestors. Speaking is connected to power, and thus this is not an insignificant narrative detail. This contestation points to different historical experiences but also the different ways that these figures of female authority are remembered and their power interpreted these days. The reason that certain historical narratives of the past survive while others disappear is not only explained by the present but is connected to the importance that speakers and listeners, over several generations, attach to them.⁶²

These days the narratives of the historical first acibiibi of the chieftaincies are not part of living memory for most people. Returning to our conversation with Sumiini, Saide and Fabião at Unango, the opening of the topic with Sumiini’s emotional response was followed by a long discussion in which the elders together sought to remember the name of the first biibi of the Cipaango chieftaincy. Finally, after some discussion, they produced a name: Ce-Ngavaane. This difficulty in remembering these names is due to their diminished authority in contemporary times. The previous biibi to hold the title Ce-Ngavaane died in 2018, and at the time of our interview, her successor was yet to be appointed. Moreover, the conversations with Chief Cipaango point to a longer history of the masculinization of chiefly power. His narrative accounts are strikingly different from those of Ce-Maguuta. He, for instance, claims that the biibi never performed mbopeesi together with the male Cipaango chiefs. This claim is, however, more likely linked to his experience as chief and does not necessarily speak of gendered power in the more distant past. For instance, Chief Cipaango remembered an old narrative that claims that the first chief was a woman; she was called Ce-Ngulupe. The Kalaanje, Nam’paanda and Cipaango chiefs that ruled at Mount Unango descended from her.⁶³ Ce-Ngavaane was a daughter of Ce-Ngulupe,⁶⁴ and she gave birth to the first Ce-Cipaango. The current Chief Cipaango’s interpretation of how Ce-Ngulupe lost the power of the chief and the spiritual power of the mbopeesi is because she failed to demonstrate the emotional calmness expected of a leader. According to him, there was a dispute that happened in the chiefly council, and Ce-Ngulupe became involved in the argument. For this reason, she (and by extension all women) were defined unsuitable to rule and men took over.⁶⁵ This speaks of the chief’s current understanding of the gendered shape of chiefly power, but it also points to the masculinization of that power over a longer time-span. Yet the fact that Ce-Ngavaane lies buried next to the first Ce-Cipaango in Malulu (together with the chief’s counsellor Ce-Diguluve and another biibi, Ce-Malola) also points to her once significant role in the chieftaincy. The current Ce-Cipaango himself speaks of his wish of one day being buried there with “the greats.”

These days, chiefly power is mainly in male hands, and these men mostly appear to control the chiefly mbopeesi ceremony. Male voices carry more weight in remembering these chiefly narratives, and in many of these narratives the acibiibi no longer appear as significant figures of authority. This apparent “masculinization of political power” is a result of complex historical processes.⁶⁶ For instance, the growing slave trade and militarization of society contributed to the rise to power of the new, often male-dominated, chiefly dynasties in the nineteenth century.⁶⁷ New forms of wealth acquired through long-distance trade that the chiefs controlled, as well as the spread of new forms of male authority through Islam, further strengthened their power.⁶⁸ The Yaawo started to convert to Islam in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the end of the 1880s, the biggest Yaawo chiefs in Mozambique had become Muslims.⁶⁹ The slave-raiding chiefs, moreover, took captured women as wives, and their children became incorporated into the father’s lineage.⁷⁰ This explains why the status of the principal wife grew so strong in the chieftaincy; referring to the Cipaango chieftaincy, Alasiya and Elisabet argue that the respect for the biibi of the basket and the biibi-wife was the same.⁷¹ “Colonial patriarchy,” moreover, influenced how existing Yaawo gendered structures of power were interpreted and later consolidated by the Portuguese authorities.⁷² Early missionaries and anthropologists played a key role in shaping these ideas.⁷³ This is how the Anglican Bishop Charles Smythies, who visited Chief Kalaanje at Mount Unango in 1887, made sense of the woman of authority he happened to meet:

Kalaanje, the chief, was away. We were received by a lady whom we understood to be his daughter. She could speak very well and appeared a clever and superior woman for this country. She received us on a kind of platform amongst the boulders, surrounded by a company of women, the men being apart, a little distance off. I congratulated her on being able to speak so well.⁷⁴

The excerpt shows Smythies not knowing what to make of this speaking woman.⁷⁵ While he acknowledges that she speaks with authority, he takes a patronizing attitude and jumps to the conclusion that she speaks with the authority of her father. Yet it is most likely that the woman he encountered was the biibi of the basket, which means that she was either the mother, maternal aunt or sister of the chief, but definitely not the daughter. The missionary writing show these male authors’ tendency to want to fit all the women into the categories of wives and daughters. Their Western categorization shows their misunderstanding of Yaawo matrilineal structures of social organization, which did not center around the father.⁷⁶ Even so, these interpretations contributed to how female power became recognized within the colonial administration. Women of authority in the matrilineal societies of Mozambique remained largely invisible to the Portuguese.⁷⁷ During colonial rule, it was generally men who were appointed as state-recognized chiefs. For instance, Ce-Nan’tima lost her position as territorial chief, or “Sultan,” to chief Ce-Maniamba, one of her male sub-chiefs as the colonial officers chose to recognize him above her.⁷⁸ Ce-Cipaango argues that there was “no rainha in the past.” Later, he clarifies that there was a biibi of the basket, but she was not accepted into the government, which means she was never recognized by the Portuguese.⁷⁹

Despite its discourse on “women’s liberation,” this masculinization of political power was also continued by the Mozambique Liberation Movement (Frelimo) during the independence war against Portuguese colonial rule (1964–1974). Frelimo only appointed men as “chairmen” and secretaries in the liberated areas. In its socialist rhetoric, moreover, women were redefined as the most oppressed category. The Frelimo leaders came from the patrilineal south, and many had been educated in Christian mission schools. Frelimo’s gender analysis of society and especially of women’s “oppression” was based on the elites’ own experiences, and thus, like the Portuguese, they failed to recognize women’s positions of authority in matrilineal societies.⁸⁰ In the words of Frelimo’s leader Samora Machel, “a woman is even exploited by a man who is himself exploited.”⁸¹ According to Frelimo history, it was only during the liberation struggle that women learned to speak with authority.

Maguuta’s narratives, however, point to the continued existence of other historical memories in the present. The majority of the people who participated in our interviews attributed the biibi some power. Some interviewees argued that the chief always went together with the biibi to perform mbopeesi. While the historical processes described above have contributed to changes in the gendered structure of power, this cannot be described as all-dominating linear process of change.⁸² For instance, Islam did not eliminate matriliny or the belief in the power of the matrilineal ancestral spirits; rather, Islam was assimilated into matrilineal chieftainship, and the mbopeesi ceremony became part of the Islam the Yaawo practiced.⁸³ With Islamization, the Yaawo initiation rites gained Islamic elements (food taboos were taught, and verses of the Koran were cited) and also the names of the rites changed, but otherwise many of the older dances and songs so important for the rites continued being practiced.⁸⁴ Early Christian missionaries even held that pre-Islamic practices were simply added to rituals and practices of Sufism, which led them to proclaim that the Yaawo were not even proper Muslims and had a very superficial understanding of Islam. Moreover, it appears that women’s spaces—especially those that men could not enter and which they in their writing largely ignored—were also sites of resistance against increasing patriarchal influence. The Anglican missionary Canon Lamburn, working among the Yaawo in Tunduru, Tanzania (from the 1930s to his death in 1993), writes like this about the nsoondo, the Islamized women’s initiation rite:

The girl’s rite has not found so wide an acceptance amongst the Yao. As with all women’s rites, so especially with msondo [nsoondo], it is most difficult for a mere man to obtain any clear information as to what takes place or as to why some chiefs who are themselves Muslim take so strong an objection to a rite which purports to be only a Muslim version of the chiputu rite. Most Yao men do not know what takes place, for it is kept a strict secret amongst the womenfolk.⁸⁵

Ciputu was the name of the female initiation rite before its Islamization. Women used to have three initiation rites (as my elderly interviewees remembered): ciputu, manaawa, and litiwo. The third rite, litiwo, which continues to carry its old name, moreover, is the most important rite as it signifies initiation into motherhood. It used to be a celebratory event with drums and dancing. The woman undergoes the litiwo ceremony when she is close to giving birth. Teachings in the initiation rites are conducted through song and dance and address issues of female sexuality. The same Anglican missionary, for instance, was embarrassed to offer the English translation to one such song he documented in his book. He argued that the readers could easily translate it themselves by using the dictionary at the back of the book. I met a group of elderly women in Muembe, one of them the biibi of the Dikondaaga chieftaincy, who performed some of these songs for us.⁸⁶ They only agreed to start talking about the litiwo after the men, who had also gathered to observe the interview, had been asked to leave. One might even argue that these female-dominated spaces produce their own temporality that disrupts the linear time of the often male-dominated historical narratives.

It is this kind of disruption that I also hear in Sumiini’s voice when she speaks out in the so-far male-dominated conversation. Her voice suggested that the topic—even while she could not offer a proper historical narrative (and neither could the men)—carried some importance to her. “The properties of the embodied voice,” as Karpf writes, “bring to testimony the texture of experience.”⁸⁷ If we “listen back,” as Mandy-Suzanne Wong and Nina Sun Eidsheim suggest, “we may sense living memories” that are at once personal and cultural.⁸⁸ While the position of the biibi as the female counterpart to the male chief has weakened, the biibi as a figure of female authority has become more closely linked to the family sphere. The narratives about the acibiibi are also closely tied to the mbopeesi ceremony. With changes in social structure and hierarchies of power, and especially the diminishing of chiefly power, the mbopeesi ceremony of the chiefs has lost significance.⁸⁹ Still, especially our elderly female interviewees spoke of the continued importance of the biibi as the female head of the family. For instance, Alasiya (the elder sister of Chief Cipaango) and her friend, Elisabet, spoke about being the acibiibi in their families. Similarly to the acibiibi of the chieftaincy who carried the names of her ancestors, the family acibiibi also carry their grandmothers’ names. As the two women explained, when a biibi becomes old, she selects one of her granddaughters to assume her name. “It is with the name,” as Alasia explains, “that the education starts.” The biibi hands her mbopeesi basket over to the girl and starts teaching her. When there is a female initiation rite, it is the girl, who under the supervision of the biibi, puts the sacred flour on the initiates, thus protecting them as they make their way through this dangerous liminal stage into adulthood. This is how Aweetu—biibi of the house of Dikondaaga and sister of the current chief—recounts how she speaks with her ancestral spirits as she prepares the children for the initiation ceremony:

My elders died, and I was left with the mbopeesi basket. These children are leaving this house for initiation. I inherited from you this basket and its mbopeesi flour. O my grandparents, O my mothers, and all the ancestors I do not know—this mbopeesi stands firm. The child, where they are, not to have fevers, not to stumble, for snakes not to bite. O my grandparents N’taamila and others, all the chiefs help the child in the initiation, wherever they go, to be happy.⁹⁰

The main task of the acibiibi, and not just that of the great acibiibi, has since long ago been that of protection.⁹¹ Now the mbopeesi offering at the initiation ceremonies has become the task of these family acibiibi. Saide argues that since there is no new Ce-Ngavaane, every family on their own prepares the mbopeesi for their children before they undergo the initiation rite.⁹² Similarly to the great biibi of the chieftaincy, this biibi also performs a mbopeesi ceremony by the n’solo spirit tree; yet while the great biibi performs this ceremony for the safety and prosperity of the entire community, the family biibi prays to the ancestors for the well-being of her family. The continuity of the biibi signifies women’s continued access to spiritual power when men dominate all positions of power within the Mosque. Moreover, these rituals signify continued embodied remembering in a context where these women have been largely forgotten in historical narratives. It might even be that these embodied rituals have since long ago been the more significant site for remembering these women of authority—not the historical narratives.⁹³ Maybe a telling example of this embodied remembering was also the way that many of my interviewees wanted not only to describe the ceremony but to show me how the mbopeesi was performed.⁹⁴ Without any prompting from me, they acted out how the biibi, barefooted, carried the kaselo to the n’solo tree (in the demonstration, any tree), how she knelt down, and how—while sifting maize flour (in this case, dirt) through her fingers into a small heap on the swept ground—she made her pleas to the ancestors and to God.⁹⁵ As the narrators/performers explained, if the heap still stood untouched the next day, her mbopeesi had been well-received.

Politics of Gendered Temporality

The figure of the biibi has of course been continuously reinterpreted, and her role has not remained static. These days, in people’s historical understanding, the biibi is sometimes connected with the figure of the OMM woman (the representative of the Mozambican Women’s Organization, OMM), the principal female leaders of the socialist period. The OMM was created during the liberation struggle in 1973 with the aim of mobilizing also the wider female population to support Frelimo in the struggle. While Frelimo’s Female Detachment (DF) had already been established in 1967, not all women could become soldiers. The northern landscapes of Niassa belong to the areas where the liberation war was fought and where the liberated areas that Frelimo controlled existed.⁹⁶ Helena (my co-interviewer and listener) is herself an ex-combatant, and at least on one occasion she argued that the continuity of the biibi is in the OMM secretary. Also, Ce-Maguuta participated in the liberation struggle, and when I first met him in 2013, I interviewed him as an ex-combatant. But as I learned that he was very knowledgeable in older history as well, I interviewed him on the deeper past in 2014, 2018, and 2019.

Interestingly, there is a moment in the most recent interview in which Ce-Maguuta also appears to merge the history of the biibi and that of the OMM women. He has just argued that the male chief and the biibi always used to work together. Then he moves to explain that, “the biibi especially helped the male chief in the area of mobilization,” which, as he continues “is the work of the OMM.” After this, his description of the virtues and responsibilities of the biibi echoes so closely the Frelimo narrative about the ideal OMM women that he seems to have jumped in time to talk about her and not the biibi of the long ago past. He describes, for instance, how this woman “represented the female wing.” She organized and mobilized women in the villages, raising awareness about social coexistence. Using the Portuguese word “moral,” he even proclaims that “the woman is the guarantor of moral and cohesion in the family.” Then there is another temporal shift, and he appears to return to the remembered narratives of acibiibi of long ago, describing how the biibi always travelled with an entourage of counsellors, body guards, and other servants and slaves who helped her in her work.⁹⁷ In this short narrative moment at least two gendered historical temporalities become neatly intertwined. It shows how Maguuta once again draws on his own life experience in an attempt to make the distant history less distant. What is interesting is that in this narrative moment he ends up merging the histories of these elite women of the time of the great Yaawo chieftaincies with that of the new “emancipated woman” of the socialist period.

The challenge for the researcher is, of course, to hold these different historical temporalities in analytical juxtaposition and not to merge them together. The current writing of change in Mozambican gendered history still too often follows a linear temporal model, in which the liberation struggle is interpreted to signal the beginning of a struggle for women’s empowerment. Such traditional schemas of periodization, as feminist gender historians argue, tie women’s and gender history to linear narratives of change.⁹⁸ Yet, as this article shows, the past does not fit into this linear shape, at least not in northern Mozambique. The liberation struggle did not mark the first time that women spoke with authority. The changing shape of women’s spiritual and political power is far more complex, and our tendency to follow these linear models risks distorting our understanding of both the past and the present. Of course, the liberation struggle opened up new spaces for women’s political agency and also introduced new concepts of gender equality. As Ce-Maguuta remembered in our interview on the liberation struggle in 2014, “During political lessons they talked about women’s role, saying that we are not different, we are equal. So we have to do all the work together.”⁹⁹ Still, people drew on older ideas of gendered power to interpret these new ideas and make sense of their new roles.

What I find striking is that some of our interviewees, especially veterans of the liberation struggle, narrate continuity between these two historical figures of female authority, the biibi and the OMM woman. However, I argue that the joining of these two figures in people’s historical imagination can be understood by looking at the changing role of the biibi, who currently finds herself firmly removed from the domain of chiefly power. At the same time, the OMM woman has become the national symbol of female political leadership and authority. Of course, the OMM woman is not invested with spiritual power; however, some OMM women in Niassa also occupy the position of biibi in their families or communities. In these cases, these two positions of female authority and leadership become even more closely connected. Biibi Aci-Vaanjila (also known as Sultan Aci-Vaanjila) in Majune belongs to a dynasty of female rulers since the time of the first Mataaka, but she is also known as an active member of OMM. Moreover, the interview accounts show how the role of the OMM woman has been reinterpreted in relation to the historical models of female gendered power available in the Yaawo matrilineal context. At the same time, the appearance of the OMM woman has also created space for new negotiations over the power and authority of the biibi (whose position in relation to male leaders has greatly diminished in many communities). Importantly, these negotiations draw on both old and new languages of gendered power. Currently, many people understand both female figures as leaders of women, taking care of the interests of women. Helena (clearly also personally invested in the topic), at the end of our interview with Ce-Cipaango (who had been very dismissive about the role of the biibi in his chieftaincy) calls on Cipaango to appoint a biibi to be approved by the government to work alongside him, for, as she argues: “There are women here who also have a right to a chief! How do you resolve the problems of women if you don’t have a rainha?”¹⁰⁰ Her words are met with approving sounds from female members of our audience, some of whom are also ex-combatants.

Conclusions

This article has studied the deeper history of women’s gendered power in northern Mozambique, focusing specifically on the figure of the biibi. Patriarchal storylines that have gone hand in hand with the masculinization of political power have pushed these women into the margins of historical memory. My analysis has thus focused on how we might listen beyond these dominant narratives to the echoes of other pasts in the present. The oral methodology adopted in this article has involved listening very closely to voice—and not just present voices but, moreover, to the ways that present voices engage with the remembered voices of the past. This has meant conceptualizing the relation between the past and the present as that of communication. Remembering inherited oral historical narratives about the deeper past, the narrators pull not only past voices but also different historical temporalities into conversation with each other in present time-space. These oral history telling events thus also require the contemporary narrators to negotiate the temporal distance between their own lived experiences and those of their ancestors.

Working on the margins of oral historical memory has in this article meant taking a sensory approach to listening. This kind of listening has brought marginalized narrative fragments and practices of embodied remembering to our analytical attention. Furthermore, studying the relation between past and present voices—thus opening the multi-temporality of historical time to our analysis—has allowed us to explore women’s gendered history of power beyond linear narratives of change. This analytical approach has helped us gain a better understanding of female authority in the past. We have explored a deeper past in which male spiritual-political leadership was not the norm and women also spoke with authority. The oral historical narratives point to how, in the nineteenth-century Yaawo chieftaincies, the acibiibi occupied positions of spiritual and political authority alongside the male leaders. Finally, this article has argued that the distant past is not disconnected from the present but the connection is visible, for instance, in the ways that people draw on both old and new models of gendered power to negotiate positions of women’s leadership and authority in the present time-space.