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chapter 10
reflecting on
precolonial
societies and
their relevance
today
“For I am my mother’s daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.”
—Mary McLeod Bethune
Protecting our peace involves recapturing the true essence of who we are at our ancestral core, both as Black women and, as Du Bois noted, as the mothers of civilization. It was in my Women in Africa class that I learned how sacred the role of African women was in antiquity. This was the history that was taken and hidden. It is our strength and universal knowledge that allow us to tap into the higher frequency that vibrates inside us and embodies who we truly are at our core. That empty space that I felt was filled with the knowledge that I came from a legacy of culture where matrilineal and matriarchal systems provided women with power, autonomy, and a central role in society.
However, it’s important to understand the challenges that Afrocentric education is up against. The underlying principles of patriarchy, which have dictated societal norms for centuries, are separation and control. During colonization, for instance, the fundamental decisions affecting the lives of colonized people were made and implemented by colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that were often defined in a distant metropolis. This brings us to an important term, “the feminization of poverty,” a phrase conceptualized by Diana Pearce in 1978. She observed this trend in her studies of women in America, but it’s a pattern that extends beyond national borders.188 Although poverty is a national and international social impediment, women tend to be most vulnerable. She observed that two-thirds of the poor were women over the age of sixteen, and an increasingly large number were from economically disadvantaged groups. The discourse on “the feminization of poverty” holds that, as a result of the recession and reduced public spending by governments, women are increasingly represented among the world’s poor.189 Yet, it is crucial to remember that in precolonial times, women were economic powerhouses in Africa.
Ancient Africans held a deep-seated respect for women. This respect was reflected in their social structures, family roles, and religious practices. The respect that ancient Africans had for women is well documented. As Dr. Charles S. Finch III, an Egyptian scholar, illustrates in his book Echoes of the Old Darkland, early men didn’t even realize the link between sex and birth; such was the degree of reverence and mystique surrounding women. Therefore, it was believed that new life was created by the woman alone. It was perceived that all life in nature emerged from women alone. When the first concept of God was developed, the female served as the model of the Supreme Being.190
It is not known exactly when the role of the male in procreation was discovered, but this discovery did not enhance the status of men. Their status only became elevated when the necessity of men became clear in war and conquest. In ancient Egypt and Kush, the importance of the mother was seen in the fact that the children took their surname from the mother. The mother controlled both the household and the fields. In Kush, the Queen Mother had the right to choose the next Pharaoh.
Prior to the Islamic conquest of sub-Saharan Africa in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the system of succession to the throne was matrilineal. Matrilineality refers not only to tracing one’s lineage through maternal ancestry; it can also refer to a civil system in which one inherits property through the female line. In Pre-Colonial Black Africa, Senegalese historian and anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop explains that, in the African custom of matrilineal succession, very strict rules were observed. The heir to the throne was not the king’s son, but the son of the King’s first-born sister (the king’s nephew). It was said: “You can never be sure who the father of the child is, but of the mother you can always be sure.”191
