The Woman in the Nso’ Dynasty
By Mitzee Goheen

(Part 1 of 3)

On the occasion of the Rural Woman’s Day on October 15th, The Frontier Telegraph here presents the Nso’ Woman as seen through the eyes of another woman, the Urban Western Woman.

Introduction

Seated in smoky kitchens, women of Nso' gather at the end of a long hard day of farming to share gossip and food. At the centre of their talk are allusions to their men folk, often the subject of derision. Men are frequently referred to as incompetent, unable to care for themselves and too irresponsible to take care of their children. Women chuckle, or ruefully shake their heads and declare, 'Men are like children. What good are they? Who feeds the household? Men are useless some bodies! They only live to drink raffia wine and converse!' In their words we can hear the echoes of women's statements to the British anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry over four decades ago: 'Important things are women. Men are little. The things of women are important. What are the things of men? Men are indeed worthless. Women are indeed God. Men are nothing. Have you not seen?'

At the same time, gathered in mimbo parlours and off-licenses, men philosophize about women. 'Women,' say the men, 'should always listen only to the man.' They cannot 'reason correctly' because 'their hearts get in the way.' This is given as a rationale for keeping women at home, on the farm, and out of positions of public decision-making. Listening to men in Nso' today one is again struck by the similarity of statements made forty years ago: 'Ruling is for the man. If you catch trouble, will you send for a man or a woman? A woman has farm work. You call her the mother of the farm.'

These conversations provide two very different images of women: on the one hand, powerful and in control, and on the other, subservient to men. These may appear as puzzling today as they did to Phyllis Kaberry when, perplexed by these contradictions, she asked the Fon of Nso' why, if women were held in such high esteem, if they were like God and were the mothers of the farm, did they not sit on important political councils? To which the Fon replied, 'Yes, women are like God, and like God they should stay quiet and let men run the country' (Kaberry 1952).

These statements are not as contradictory as they first appear. Access to power through control over symbolic and material resources is different for men and women both individually and as a group. The field of power in Nso' is gendered. Relations of power have taken on new configurations and conditions, boundaries and meaning of categories, including gender and marriage, are becoming contested in new ways. As long as men did not threaten women's control over resources considered to be within the female domain, women have been content to subscribe to the fiction of male dominance.

In this paper, I will examine strategies of power and accumulation in Nso'. In doing so I will trace both the development of male hierarchies of political power and control over female production and reproduction as a facet of male accumulative strategies. Male hierarchies were (and are) based on control over women's production and reproduction. I will trace these themes from pre-colonial Nso' through the colonial period to the present.