Introduction: Women, trade and landed property in Africa

In the past four decades, the study of African women has become an integrated part of African history. Despite the manifest importance of women in all aspects of African life, they were, until the mid-1970s, marginalized historical subjects (Hay 1988). Women are now understood to have been active participants in the economic and social fabric of African societies. Women merchants, slave owners and slaves are among the groups that have benefited from a reframing of the dominant historiographical paradigm (Robertson and Klein 1983; Campbell, Miers, and Miller 2007; Sheldon 2017). In varying contexts, some free African women were able to achieve power and prestige through their participation in the local and international economy.

African and Eurafrican women living in port cities along the African coast in the era of the slave trade engaged in local and long-distance trade, individually or as commercial partners of foreign merchants with whom they established commercial and sometimes intimate relationships (Candido 2008, 2012; Ipsen 2015; Oliveira 2019). These women acted as cultural and commercial brokers, providing incoming merchants with access to local networks. Additionally, they provided the access to an established household and healthcare that were crucial to the survival of foreign men living in Africa (Brooks 2003; Ipsen 2015; Kriger 2019). In turn, African women were able to enhance their wealth and social prestige through access to imported goods that they could consume and trade locally. Along the western and eastern coasts of Africa, women merchants became known as nharas, signares, senoras and donas, terms reflecting their socioeconomic status and affiliation to European culture. The most successful of them owned land, slaves, urban real estate and vessels and engaged in the production of foodstuffs to supply urban markets, caravans and slave ships (Rodrigues 2000, 2015; Candido 2015, 2019; Oliveira 2015). Some among them traded in slaves, and then, after the commercial transition that accompanied the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, were able to invest in tropical commodities, including palm and peanut oil, wax and ivory (Wheeler 1996; Oliveira 2015; Candido 2015).

This thematic section of the Canadian Journal of African Studies had its genesis in two panels on Women and Trade on the African Coast at the 58th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in San Diego in 2015. The presentations focused on the trajectories of merchant women in African coastal communities, particularly their roles as traders and intermediaries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The questions addressed included: Through which processes did some African and Eurafrican women engage in trade? What were their particular roles in local, regional and international economies? How were they able to accumulate property and pass it on to their offspring? How did they fare as the slave export trade was gradually abolished through the nineteenth century? The two panels included scholars of Latin American, African and North American origins at various stages of their careers, from graduate students to emerging and established scholars based in Canadian and American universities. Although the invitation was extended to African-based scholars, the bureaucracy and financial cost of participating a conference in the United States prevented them from participating. The two panels included presenters Mariana P. Candido, Vanessa S. Oliveira, Olatunji Ojo, Pernille Ipsen, José C. Curto, Jane Hooper, Constanze Weise and Lindsey Gish. Harmony O’Rourke and Lorelle Semley kindly accepted my invitation to discuss the papers. Regrettably, three (Ojo, Ipsen and Gish) of the papers are not included in this special issue, as they were committed elsewhere. The five papers here, however, present a snapshot of the panels and of the current state of research on African’s women entrepreneurs during precolonial times.

Most previous studies on African women have been concerned with the colonial and postcolonial periods; in spite of the importance of that work, its focus on more recent historical times has affected our ability to identify continuities and changes in the experiences of merchant women, while the use of a reversal methodology has encouraged scholars to generalize colonial experiences into precolonial times (Hunt 1989). African women are now known to have engaged in local and long-distance trade in precolonial times throughout the African coast in places such as Saint Louis and Gorée, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Mozambique and Angola (White 1987; Mouser 1997; Havik 2004; Pantoja 2008; Osborn 2011; Jones 2013; Ipsen 2015; Schwarz 2019). The scholarly literature produced during the past four decades has furthered our understanding of African women’s experiences as intermediaries between European merchants established on the coast and African suppliers inland, and as independent traders in their own right. Nevertheless, we know more about the experiences of women on the Atlantic coast than those in other regions of the continent. The five papers in this thematic section follow the experiences of women as merchants and property owners through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Catumbela, Benguela and Luanda (Angola); in Mahajanga in northwestern Madagascar; and in the Nupe–Borgu region of the Sokoto Caliphate, Nigeria. Together they extend the historiography on African women prior to the formal imposition of colonialism in areas that cross the trans-Saharan, transatlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes.

José C. Curto’s paper looks at the multifaceted roles of women in agricultural production along the Catumbela River, the “bread basket” of Benguela, the second most important port in Angola. Curto draws on a census carried out along this river basin in 1797, following a short period of particularly high volumes of slaves exported into the Atlantic world through Benguela. This study shows that private ownership of land was already a reality in this area in the late eighteenth century and that women were involved in every stage of agricultural production. In contradistinction to the image of African women as mere agricultural labourers, Curto shows that women of both African and mixed-race origin owned rural estates and relied on free and enslaved labour to produce the foodstuffs that supplied the population of Benguela and the slave ships anchored off its bay.

Mariana P. Candido examines the mechanisms that African women employed to accumulate wealth and property in Benguela during the nineteenth century. Her work shows that the end of the slave trade and the transition to so-called legitimate commerce introduced changes in the processes of wealth accumulation and land use in West Central Africa. In spite of the continued importance of control over people, new notions of wealth and property accumulation took hold in Benguela and its interior. Candido argues that African women were able to achieve new social and economic positions by investing in landed property, dependents and goods. Her work effectively shows that African women were active agents of change, establishing new consumption patterns and altering notions of land ownership.

My own contribution focuses on the experiences and strategies of women in retail sales in mid-nineteenth-century Luanda, the colonial capital of Angola. The work of free and enslaved market women known as quitandeiras was essential in feeding the temporary and permanent population of the most important Angolan port, including foreigners and free and enslaved Africans. Despite their key role in the supply of foodstuffs, quitandeiras became the target of metropolitan policies aiming to sanitize colonial spaces and to “civilize” their inhabitants; these women increasingly faced the imposition of fines and the risk of imprisonment. The sanitization discourse incorporated into colonial policies through the nineteenth century further contributed to depreciating women’s work by portraying market women and street vendors as agents of disorder and insalubrity as well as smugglers.

During the nineteenth century, merchants from East Africa, India and the Arabian Peninsula visited the port of Mahajanga in northwestern Madagascar in search of commodities, which they sold to Americans and Europeans. Although western accounts ignore women’s contribution to these commercial exchanges, Jane Hooper’s work shows that they engaged in the production of food and cloth and formed relationships with foreign men. Her study examines not only the political and economic influence of women in Madagascar but also the challenges that historians face, particularly in terms of source material, in understanding the power that African women exercised. Women, as wives and community members, helped men of distinctive backgrounds to create commercial networks conducive to exchanges in the Indian Ocean World. As Hooper argues, African women were critical in bridging the gaps that existed between producers and exporters, as well as between the local and global economies.

Constanze Weise’s contribution shows that women engaged in the local and regional economies along the Nupe–Borgu frontier of the Sokoto Caliphate, in what is today central Nigeria. Major trade routes reaching into both the trans-Saharan world and the Atlantic coast crossed this region, providing a multitude of business opportunities for local communities. Women worked as street vendors and market women, operating in nearby areas where they traded foodstuffs and manufactured goods. They also engaged in long-distance trade as merchants, porters and brokers, travelling with large caravans along trade routes that allowed local goods to reach distant markets. Some upper-class women became influential political figures in their communities in their roles as cultural brokers and slave traders.

These papers provide evidence that, in spite of the endurance of oppressive systems such as slavery, racism and colonialism, some women were able to accumulate capital and property through their participation in local and long-distance trade in the Saharan, Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Their social and economic power conferred prestige and presumably a degree of independence from the men in their lives. Together, these studies contribute to integrating the experiences of women merchants and proprietors into the social and economic histories of Africa.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank all the participants in the two panels on Women and Trade on the African Coast at the 58th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Diego in 2015. I am especially grateful for the patience and commitment of the authors whose papers are published in this thematic section. Thanks are due also to Michel Panzer and Claire Robertson who kindly agreed to fill the role of chairs, as well as the discussants Harmony O’Rourke and Lorelle Semley. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Belinda Dodson, CJAS coordinating editor, for her patience and support.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Vanessa S. Oliveira

Vanessa S. Oliveira is an assistant professor of African history at the Royal Military College of Canada. She has published several articles and book chapters on women merchants, interracial marriage and slavery in Luanda. She is co-editor (with Paul E. Lovejoy) of Slavery, Memory and Citizenship (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2016). Her book Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce and the Economic Transition in Luanda is under contract with the University of Wisconsin Press, scheduled to be published in December 2020. Dr. Oliveira has been a member of the Canadian Journal of African Studies editorial board since July 2019.