Matriarchy and Power in Africa This Page Intentionally Left Blank Matriarchy and Power in Africa Aneji Eko

Matriarchy and Power in Africa This page intentionally left blank Matriarchy and Power in Africa Aneji Eko

First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN 978- 1-349- 48014-2 ISBN 978- 1-137-38279-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137382795 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Amnet First Edition: December 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Ruby, about whom Aneji worried whether “a skinny thing like that could give birth to any child.” To Onnegadon, Boma, and Ejeogba, who are the response to Aneji’s concern whether “a skinny thing like that could give birth to any child.” To Victoria Iyam and Charles Iyam. To my parents, Igemi and Iyam Uru Iyam, with whom Aneji had a complex relationship that was intensely contentious yet deeply loving. To Aneji Iyam and Irok Iyam. To the Igbadara lineage and all my brothers, sisters, and friends. To all my fathers and mothers. This page intentionally left blank Contents

Preface ix 1 Amama Ugima Mashin 1 2 Okopedi-Itu 19 3 Malam 51 4 The Signature 67 5 A Distant Journey 91 6 A Missing Bone 105 7 Broken Treasure 135 8 The First School-Leaving Certificate 145 9 When the Onun Slept 163 10 Then She Left 191

Index 193 This page intentionally left blank Preface

The myth of the submissive position of African women is too often accepted as a factual and general description of the condition of women in African societies. That perception seems to subvert and outlast the robust literature that affirms the position of African women in precolonial Africa as independent, assertive, resourceful, authoritative, and sovereign in diverse cultural contexts. Various scholars have noted the position of Yoruba women, who were responsible for the economic life of their societies and took the primary responsibility for long- distance trading; other scholars reveal the error in viewing Yoruba women as mere appendages to kingly royalty rather than recognizing their equality with the king and their power as the final voice in decision making. Others note that the precolonial African woman was never confined to the kitchen but effectively explored her domain and forcefully engaged the entire community, as in the case of the Ghana- ian businesswoman, or acted as the community’s spear point during warfare, as was the case in a southeastern Nigerian group. Certainly, these portrayals of the dominant role of women in Afri- can societies offer only a small glimpse into what was a dominant pattern in families, lineages, villages, and states. Indeed, the robust attempt by Aba women to counter the unwise attempt by the colonial government to challenge the premier position of women in eastern Nigeria did not start by the organized effort of a powerful women’s organization; rather, it originated in the frustration of an ordinary Igbo woman challenging the government’s tax collector who showed up at her doorstep. The face-off eventually culminated in the memora- ble Aba women’s revolt, which sullied and nearly marred the colonial venture in eastern Nigeria. Domesticity may seem synonymous with subservience, but Nigerian women—whether in the kitchen, in the marketplace, or on the farm route—have always been anything but passive. Matriarchy and Power captures a dimension of the dominance and power of Nigerian women and the diverse ways in which they controlled the society, asserted their power, and maintained their authority in spite of hurdles erected by a colonial encounter that x Preface attempted to minimize their role. As part of their authority, women then, as today, defined the manner of domestic relationships, deter- mined the statuses of individuals within the household, established the character of the relationship between men and women, adults and children, and facilitated the balance between the temporal and secular domains of communal life. Nigerian women continue to play these roles in their private homes and in their societies. This book uses the background of the important position of women in Nigeria to explore issues of social class relations, gender construction, childhood culture, and child-raising ideology and their implications for prestige both in the traditional past and in the contemporary present. The Aneji household serves as a guide for understanding how various southeastern Nigerian societies facilitate childhood culture, regulate adult-child relationship, and determine cultural expectations. Many Africans are sure to recognize the woman, Aneji, on whose child-raising philosophy this account is based, as her story is likely to mirror what they may remember or have heard concerning a parent or a relative, and even non-Africans may be familiar with the pattern of relationships the story of Aneji recounts. Matriarchy and Power is personal in its ethnographic detail but regional in its reference to childhood and child-raising philosophy, women’s authority, and gender relations, as well as in examining personal and communal relationships. While I have used Aneji as a resource for understanding the role of ordinary women in everyday relations, my greater focus is to appreciate the complexities of Nigerian cultures and to highlight local benchmarks for assessing those complexities as they relate to specific cultural contexts. We read, for example, that at Sunday church services Aneji sat at the center front pew, but later the same afternoon, she would publicly consult with one of the most revered traditional medicine men in the area to determine the source of evil directed against her by a dangerous neighbor or relative. The story shows that Aneji straddles these religious realms unquestion- ingly and assigns equal attention to both because each performs a different role in ordering the private life and in maintaining public stability; generally, the people in the story sought “offensive and defensive medicine because everyone understood that the church and God could only do so much.” The larger community understood that there was no conflict between the belief in their spirits and the belief in the Christian God and recognized how much benefit individuals derive from being attentive to both realms. The home of Aneji offers the secular balance and spiritual security the community needed to nurture its future members, and the Preface xi community expected its members to be raised with the discipline needed to maintain that balance and security. Consequently, if you were not behaving properly in your family, your parents would threaten you by warning that if you did not shape up, they would send you away to live with Aneji, who sometimes “would spank you, and you would not even know what you did to deserve the punishment, but you knew you deserved it.” Aneji met with important Nigerian personalities, traveled to the southern Nigerian city of Calabar in 1956 to see Queen Elizabeth, and even learned to sign her name much later in her life. But she also waged a nightly battle against the neighborhood night soil man and against a belligerent drunk. Men and women feared and respected her; the neighborhood children knew and revered her; but she was more at home with the social elite than with the lowly residents of her neighborhood, whom she often described as “lazy” and “animals” (the goat quite often being the culpable creature). Aneji was the author’s grandmother, and the account is woven around my childhood in an environment that was as demanding in its social expectations as it was exciting in its educational intent. Growing up as a boy in a household that was not only structurally matrifocal but peculiarly matriarchal brought me into contact with women who wielded powers that their male counterparts envied, feared, and respected. I have foregrounded the book in the concerns I had with questions that challenged the cultural context in which I was raised, particularly the pathological characterization of the matrifocal household I discuss. I strove to be objective without being immersed in the subjectivity of my roots, struggled with the decision to expose events that are private and embarrassing, and potentially revealed mat- ters that my ethnic and familial loyalty would rather suppress. Yet, the woman who informs this account always insisted I write down everything she told me, at a time when I had no idea what I would do with such notes or any interest in recalling what unfolded about her life. When I took notes, it was just to please her because I did not know how to record everything my grandmother was saying. In that respect, this account about childhood, individuals, and community is informed by the ethnographer’s experiences, the foolish assumptions of youth, the cultural license of age, and the hindsight of anthropo- logical lenses. A major advantage of the book is the elevated position of the Afri- can woman, Aneji, on whose life the book is anchored. Such a focus counters the familiar representation of African women as weak and subordinate, not only in comparable studies, but in other writings xii Preface about Africa. The woman, Aneji, occupies a position of reverence in her community that is often reserved for men, and she relates to men not as an equal but as a superior. The perspective in Matriarchy and Power—in which the woman’s position is not marginalized—suggests that as far back as colonial Nigerian times and beyond, there were ordinary women who received as much respect and reverence as the men and whose lives shaped the dynamics of their societies. This is also a report on a context of childhood from the author’s dual capacity as the child and the parent, the interpreter and the inter- preted, an insider and a professional anthropologist. It is a view of my family, lineage, and society that does not glamorize cultural behaviors and practices, but one that reflects the reality of child-raising practices among Nigerians and the negotiation of power and authority among members of diverse social classes. Centrally, the story is about a woman whose strengths and weaknesses mirror the experiences of many African women who grew up contending with the barriers of a patriarchal society, the constraints of illiteracy, and the reality of pov- erty. Specifically, it is an account forged in an African context in which childhood conforms, develops, and matures within rules and expectations collectively molded, negotiated, and fiercely guarded by every adult. The adults in the book do not merely share knowledge of their culture’s protocols, but they also constitute a cultural encyclopedia in an environment where memory is the bank of knowledge. Nigerian proverbs facilitate the communication of the elders and deepen their meaning, and the local flavor in which they are served provides a menu of humor and a taste of cultural wisdom. The story of Aneji is not confined to one Nigerian community but involves people and events in multiple environments and cultural domains. Readers find themselves in the Nigerian village of Agwagune after walking ten miles to get there, as a cyclist may not be available and the journey is commonly done by foot, and where farming and fishing are the primary occupations. The action is also set in Okopedi-Itu (now in Akwa Ibom State), where “even people whose unserviceable cars perpetually occupied a spot in some abandoned patch of ground beside their homes were respected as much as people who drove their cars around.” We also follow Aneji and me to the town of Arochukwu, “reputed for its variety of feared male and female organizations and the secret rituals that complemented them, as well as fierce masquer- ades that were said to kill just by the touch of a broom.” These diverse communities provide the unique ingredients that contribute to the experiences of the people in Matriarchy and Power and the similari- ties that bind them within a diverse environment. Major national, Preface xiii regional, and local events intersect and affect the lives of individuals in ways that challenge their strengths, expose their weaknesses, and reveal their capacities for surviving emotional and physical trauma, confronting national crises, and upholding social civility. Ultimately, Matriarchy and Power illuminates what some already know about Nigerian cultural practices and behaviors and, going further, introduces new elements and explanations that enable us to unravel the intricacies of African cultures as well as the numerous diversities in specific cultural locales.

The Agwagune People My grandmother’s village, Egbisim, is one of five villages that make up the Agwagune group of villages in the Biase area of Nigeria’s Cross River State. The other villages are Emomoro, Itu-Agwagune, Okurike, and Ugbem. The villages of Egbisim and Emomoro, with a combined population of about four thousand people, are referred to as Odumugom (Old town). The villages are not separated by any sig- nificant geographical boundary; people just know where one village ends and the next begins. Relationships among Agwagune villages are rather fluid, with members in the same age set from the various villages belonging to the same secret societies and men’s and women’s asso- ciations and observing and performing the same rituals. Endogamous marriage was strongly encouraged among the Agwagune, so almost everyone had relatives in three or more villages. My grandmother was from Egbisim and my father from Emomoro. Although the Agwa- gune patriarchy gives my father a greater say in raising his children, this was never the case in our family because my grandmother raised all of us. In addition, in the Biase kinship system, each person’s relationship is equally weighted for everyone on the female’s side and the male’s side. The villages are located on the banks of the Cross River and are hemmed in on other sides by marshes and swamps. The traditional occupations are farming and fishing for men and women.