Land in transition: from social reproduction of labour power to social reproduction of power

ABSTRACT

Ifi Amadiume's seminal work, Male Daughters, Female Husbands developed significant insights into the relationship between gender, wealth and power, and anticipated the centrality of gendered labour processes in the survival of the family/household by highlighting the articulation between reproductive labour and the productive economy. In this epoch when various postcolonial states are grappling anew with land and agrarian questions, Amadiume's detailed study of the decommodification of land is especially salient for feminist inquiry as she has already drawn attention to the ways in which land functions generationally in the reproduction of authority, ritual, governance, kinship and power. This paper proposes a similar move beyond the present discourses which emphasise women's roles in the social reproduction of labour power, asking how a critical reading of Amadiume might help us understand the significance of social reproduction in relation to land as a contemporary realm of feminist power and struggles.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• land
• social reproduction
• labour
• customary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Amadiume (1987) writes that ‘there were two ways in which the potential Ekwe [Ekwe was a wooden drum used in traditional Igbo societies for public summons and announcements. The women so titled had rights of veto in village constitutional assemblies and were also considered as the mouthpiece of the village and town] title-taker controlled the services of others. People went to work for her voluntarily or she practiced what was called igba ohu, woman-to-woman marriage. Such wives, it seems, came from other towns. The ‘female husband' might give the wife a (male) husband somewhere else and adopt the role of mother to her but claim her [economic] services. The wives might also stay with her, bearing children in her name. Potential Ekwe women were, therefore, wealthy women, who through control of others’ services were able to create more wealth' (1987, 42).

2 The charge that embracing spirituality is an apolitical copout from feminist struggles is viewed in the feminist literature as a Marxism-derived theory about the relationship between politics and spirituality (Rountree 1999), with critics also accusing the Goddess movement of reinvoking the essentialist connection between woman and nature. These critiques are countered by those who show goddess archetypes as powerful inner forces which shaped women’s behavior and influenced their emotions, and that talking about ‘goddesses’ [as] a way for women to talk about themselves outside the restrictive dichotomies of masculine and feminine, mother/lover, careerist/housewife (ibid).

3 Moyo, Jha, and Yeros (2013), 97.

4 The provisioning for widows was aided by a stipulation in the 2013 new constitution that ‘all laws, customs, traditions and cultural practices that infringe the rights of women conferred by the constitution are void to the extent of infringement’ – a provision which rendered the custom of a widow losing her deceased husband’s land entirely or partially if she refused to marry a male relative, redundant (IRIN 2014).

5 A discussion of these limitations goes beyond the scope of this paper. However, see the following for a detailed critique: Moyo and Chambati (2013); Moyo and Yeros (2005); Moyo and Yeros (2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lyn Ossome

Lyn Ossome is a researcher specialising in the fields of feminist political economy and feminist political theory, with research interests in gendered labour, land and agrarian studies, the modern state and the political economy of gendered violence. She is the author most recently of Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya's Transitions to Democracy: States of Violence (2018) and co-editor of the volume Labour Questions in the Global South (2021).