YEYE OLOKUN-IGBADER SPEAKS: Polygamy, etc

[Baba Ahmed]

Asomdwee, may these words be a cooling in your ear (inner/outer, imo) -

Her name is Niara Sudarkasa, title: Doctor. She was president of Lincoln U. of Pennsylvania from 1987-1998 which was the alma mater of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, 1st President of Ghana and Dr.Nnamdi Azikiwe 1st President of Nigeria. Her accolades include a lengthy list of honors, too many for this short piece. One is directly relevant to this excerpt; "In 2001, she was honoured with a Chieftaincy in the historic Yoruba KIngdom of Ife, when His Majesty Oba Okunade Sijuwade, the Ooni of Ife, conferred on her the title of Yeye Olokun-Igbader, 'The Mother from a=Across the Seas Who Brings a Time of Peace.'" During an interview with the magazine African Business and Culture formerly published in London England, she was asked,

ABAC: "Are you aware of any links or relationship between the decline of power in the role of the Black woman and the fall of Black nations in colonial Africa and pre-colonial Africa?"

NS: "What immediately comes to mind, as I reflect on this, is the loss of economic and political power among women with the onset of colonialism. I can't think of any comparable examples from a period in pre-colonial African history. Women in tradition African societies had very important economic roles. With the exception of those Muslim women who were ketp in seclusion and who worked in their homes, virtually all African women worked outside the home. They were noted as producers, both in agriculture and in crafts. They were also traders both within their communities and across communities. Some of htem were medical practitioners such as midwives or herbalists. Some were involved in what we today would refer to as service occupations.... e.g., there were whole groups of women who sold cooked food to relieve other women of the time-consumint job of preparing all of their family meals.

["Women's economic activities were part of their domestic roles as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters, but these activities were also bona fide economic roles in the public domain, contributing to the community's overall economic well-being. Men and women tended to have parallel responsibility within the economy. For example, where males were the principal farmers, you tended to find women as the principal traders and vice versa. Both genders had their crafts, and both genders were compoensated equitably for what they did. As I said, men and women tended to engage in different lines of work, but women's work was not considered 'less valuable' than that of men.

"The colonial system imposed a European-oriented market economy and introduced European currencies as the medium of exchange and the standard of value for all goods and services. In the British and French territories, for example, everything was now given a value in terms of the pound (sterling) or the franc. Although, by and large, the masses of Africans, men and women, were at the bottome of the economic ladder, below the Europeans and immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, those economic opportunities that were given to Africans were usually given to men. Women's roles were devalued, and their earning power was limited in most areas.
"In the European-dominated colonial economy, women tended to work as 'petty traders' or in the echelons of the agricultural sector. Where Africans were given loans to use as capital in trade and other activities, these loans were given primarily to men. Higher paying rade, such as trade in export crops, was primarily in the hands of men. Therefore, you begin to see a developing inequality, an inequity, in the value of what women did and what men did. This erosion of the economic power of African women has been written about by many scholars, including myself, but the first scholar to analyse this process on a wide scale was Esther Boserup, author of the book entitled Women's Role in Economic Development....

ABAC: "Can you give us any examples of the role Black women played in developing family structures that have been most beneficial towards the development of Black communities?
NS: "Let me begin by saying that in my work I have tried to show that the key institution under-pinning African societies on the continent as well as in the Diaspora, has been the extended family. In my view, this is the most important social institution evolved by and among African peoples. It is the one that has enabled them to survive in the face of monumental atrocities from outside Africa, as well as brutalities from within. Women as well as men had critical roles to play in sustaining the extended family. As I mentioned previously, African women were (and are) workers. There is no tradition of thee 'stay at home mom' in Africa. Virtually all women were active in the public domain, as well as in the domestic domain. Within the family, women and men were interdependent, or mutally dependent, rather than women being dependent on their husbands.
"As mothers, women also had an important role to play in terms of imparting those values to the children that kept the families and community together. Based on my research, I have identified what I call the 'Seven Rs' as the fundamental values under-pinning African families and communities.

SEVEN Rs:

• Respect is the first of the 'Seven Rs.' It is the most pervasive and inviolable of the values in African societies. It governs intergenerational and intragenerational relationships. Respect for elders is especially importand, and is taught to every child, everywhere.

• "Responsibility emphasises the need for mutual aid and assistance throughout the extended family, and among groups of related families.

• Restraint is the value that reminds a person that he/she cannot always 'do his own thing.' In making decisions, a person had to take into account the needs of the family, and be prepared to forego his of her own desires where necessary.

• Reciprocity is the value that requires a person to repay the help rendered by a relative, friend or acquaintance. Reciprocity might extend over generations -- as when a person helps his brother or sister's child in return for help given by that relative in the past.

• Reverance is a value deeply rooted in African society. Africans are known as a spiritual people, and the spiritual realm is conceptualized as directly impacting upon the temporal realm. People have reverence for unseen forces as well as for some of those forces considered to be manifest in nature. Hence, children are taught reverence for the Creator, for life, and for the forces that can protect, sustain or destroy life.

• Reason was a very fundamental value in traditional African society. This might best be seen in the way disputes were settled. Elders would bring people together, and they would talk about the case, consider the issues, and review the precedents. Evrybody would give his or her side, and they would talk and talk until the Elders had enough information to make a decision as to the most reasonable way to proceed. Once a decision has been made in this manner, people are expected to abide by it. Settling disputes was based on reason not on violence.

• The last of the 'Seven Rs' is Reconciliation -- a value found in various religions and recently made famous by its invocation in South Africa by Archbishop Desmond Tutu."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

{Baba note: I'll continue below with the "nutty meat" of this post on polygyny (polygamy) by citing here a highlighted quote in the interview}

"...I have said that the greatest advantage of a system of polygamy is that it affords all women the opportunity of bearing children in the context of a family. The mothers are all married women, though groups of them may be married to one man. There are no illegitimate children in polybamous societies."

[Baba Ahmed]

ABAC: "Can you briefly comment on the role Black women have played in developing certain family structures around the dynamics of polygamy?

NS: "This is a very complicated subject, and one on which women often disagree. In my publications, I have said that the greatest advantageof a system of polygamy ((or polygyny, which is the technical term for plural wives) is that it affords all women the opportunity of bearing children in the context of a family. The mothers are all married women, though groups of them may be married to one man. There are no illegitimate children in polygamous societies.

"Traditionally, in African societies, senior wives usually participated in teh decision of their husbands to take a second wife and subsequent wives. When I was doing my first fieldwork among the Yoruba, may women told that after having a number of children, they had actually recommended a younger woman to their husband, and she became a junior co-wife. They preferred to bring into the family a young woman whose character they knew, and having a junior wife relieved the senior wife of some of her responsibilities of caring for her husband. She could free herself to expand her trade in terms of the volume she handled and/or in terms of the volume she handled and/or in terms of the distances she travelled.

"Things are changing a lot today. Christian ethics and Western laws against polygamy have made many African women (and some men) reject that form of marriage. The idea of having one man and one wife came to Africa with Europeans, but when I conducted my fieldwork in NIgeria in the early sixties and in Ghana in the late sixties, I knew may people who were Christians involved in polgamous marriages. They might not have been practising Christianity the way Westerners thought it should be practiced, but they were practising Christians, nonetheless.

"Many of them solved the probelm of plural spouses by having one legal wife and other wives whom they had maried according to their own laws and custom. Even today that continues but there is increasing pressure on middle-class professional men to have only one wife. There are many businessmen, for example, who have more than one wife thought only one wife is officially presented to the outside world. In an article on motherhood I wrote recently, I noted that today if you lood at heads of stae and other public figures from around the world, when they are on diplomatic visits to the United Ntions, to Washington, D.C., or to other Westrn capitals, you would think that everyone was married monogamously and living in a nuclear family. Even public figures who come from parts of the world where you know they have more than one wife, officially travel with only one wife. [b]This is a testament to the strength of the Christian ethic and European dna American influence around the world.[b]

"As African Americans, we live in a society where monogamy is the only legal form of marriage, but we practice what amounts to de facto forms of polygamy. The high death rate among young Black males, their high rate of incarceration, their high rate of addiction to drugs, and a number of other factors have skewed the demographics such that women in the childbearing ages greatly outnumber males in those age groups. The married and unmarried men who are left often have children with different women, who accept this because they still value motherhood.... Many of those women are doomed to lived as single parents, without steady partners, in a life that is far from fulfilling. Women who are committed monogamists but cannot find husbands often find themselves living lonely, frustrated lives. As the African American extended family becomes more and more fragmented, women are struggling to recreate the African tradition of strong bonds of friendship among women. However, the American society in which we live tends to emphasize competition rather than cooperation among women.

"One of the things I found most admirable among traditional African women was that they had so many 'women's societies' and 'women's associations,' and swa themselves as having a solidarity with each other that was in their mutual best interests. When I was younger, I used to discuss the potential advantages of polygamy for young living without partners, but nowadays I have almost given up. Women who know they are involved in relationships with men who have other women still reject polygamy as an offensive idea.

"I still say, however, that unless you have actually lived in a society where polygamy exists and get to know the pros as well as the cons of this institution, one should not dismiss it out of hand. Or course, nowadays, many African women have embraced the Western ideals of monogamy and nuclear-type families. African women who speak as feminists in favor of women's liberation tend to speak agains polygamy. This is predictable, if you understand the influence of the West. Yet, it a person goes back and looks at their mothers or grandmothers, and other women in polygamous marriages and sees how they live and relate to their co-wives, I believe that at a very minimum, this person would conclude that your should not condemn an institution that you do not understand."
_________________________________

Baba note: well there it is, y'all. Whacha gon say? That truly comes from an Afrikan Spirit(uality)? Are u sure that's where its coming from? Or will u be honest to yourselves and admit ina mirror, its from a Christian, Eu-rope-an/Amerikkkan Cultural mindset?

UHURU: in body/mind/spirit and SooooooooooooooUL Power! While staying BlackNificient!!!!

Peace.
Baba Ahmed

[Baba Ahmed]

Question: I wonder if our respected and honored sista forgot to mention the word, LOVE? One would think that a learned anthropologist who was a "full Professor of Anthropology" such as Dr. Niara Sudarkasa would not omit such a worshipped word in the Eu-rope-an worlds, huh? But without saying so directly metinks this article is about Being Afrikan.... abroad and here! This is one area, no matter how hard we try, bruthas can not work it out..... alone. And I don't mean including homos.

Is that a foreign concept too? Brought along with enslavements, to confuse the minds of those who claim its a "SPIRITUAL THANG?"

While the krakkkas bust their tickle box all the way to all the banks, mixing their spirits of confusion with their deposits. And we play at love, luv, luv... from Cupid's arrows.