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Women, Land, and Power in the Zambezi Valley of the Eighteenth Century

2015; University of Wisconsin–Madison; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3368/aeh.43.1.19

2163-9108

Eugénia Rodrigues,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

This article explores the experience of female landholders in the area of the Zambezi Valley during the eighteenth century. This territory, then called Rios de Sena, was part of the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, which in turn was integrated into the Portuguese State of India (Estado da India) until 1752. mainly mixed-race women of the local elite had access to land, often vast territories, which allowed them to develop a multifaceted economic agency and construct a power base similar to that enjoyed by their male peers. Ownership of land was essential for controlling the labor of the local population (freeborn and slaves) and extracting tributes from them. By holding power over the land and its inhabitants, these women managed to gain control of economic, social, and political resources in a singular way.2Research into land rights in Africa has revealed a gender inequality, particularly during the colonial and postcolonial period when women faced obstacles to land control and other forms of ownership, as indeed they still do today. However, scholars have emphasized how women's access to land in Africa varied considerably over time and space.3 In fact, the limited land rights granted to women in the contemporary world should not be projected onto the past. In precolonial Africa patterns of land ownership and use were intrinsically bound up with kinship systems. In most of these societies land was not private property but belonged to a community, i.e., a kinship group, which claimed the rights to a territory that had been occupied or conquered by a founding ancestor. chiefs of these groups, possibly assisted by other political and social institutions, ensured family and individual rights to land use and ownership of its produce.4 Scholars have also shown how, in the context of the European expansion and the interaction between Africans and Europeans, African women acted as intermediaries and took on important roles in trade, often associated with the ownership of large or small tracts of land.5As in other societies, land ownership and power in Africa are often considered together and are generally understood to be eminently male concerns. question of power has historically been central to the construction of gender relationships, as Joan W. Scott has argued: Significations of gender and power construct one another.6 As recent studies have noted, the power of women and the control that they exerted over the institutions that distributed land ownership and use rights have changed over time. This research reveals women's forms of exercising power in the precolonial period that have been represented as exceptional in the memory of contemporary African societies dominated by male representations. 7 Scholars have attempted to analyze how women participated in the exercise of power in the precolonial period. In some cases, women were rulers, such as Nzinga Mbandi in seventeenth-century Angola.8 In other regions of Africa, women cogoverned states, the most common example of which is the role of the queen mothers, or held authority through participation in governing councils or by exercising power during interregnums.9 historical record indicates that, through these political roles, women also intervened in the definition of land ownership and use rights, though little is known about the way that these included or excluded women. Studies argue that the decline in women's power was related to historical changes already taking place in the precolonial period. These include the reshaping of political institutions following the Luba expansionism in East Africa, where forms of matrilineal succession ensured that women rather than their male relatives were the leaders,10 and alterations arising throughout the continent from the expansion of trade and imposition of European colonialism during the course of the nineteenth century.11As Philipa Levine observes, The building of empires themselves cannot be understood without employing a gender perspective. …