WOMAN: IN TRADITIONAL GAMBIAN SOCIETY – PAST, PRESENT AND FUTUR

WOMAN: IN TRADITIONAL GAMBIAN SOCIETY – PAST, PRESENT AND FUTUR

By

Bakary K. Sidibe, R. 0. and W. F. Galloway

The Gambia Cultural Archives

Surprising as it would seem nowadays, most women of traditional animist society held considerably higher status than they do now. Some of them, especially in political life, were as highly placed as their male counterparts. For examples of the many women who held great political and economic prominence, one can mention the nyancho women of Kaabu, or the ngansingbas of Nyamina, Baddibu, and other states. Ngansingbas were older women appointed much as the mansas were to represent the interests of the women. There were also the lingueres, the queen-sisters of the guelowar state rulers in Sine and Saloum, not to mention the famous signares, prominent Eurafrican traders. In some Mandinka states there were several female rulers, especially in Niumi, Jarra, and Baddibu; and there were also a few in Kombo and in some of the Kaabu states.

Although Mandinka society is traditionally patrilineal, many of the indigenous societies, such as that of the Serer, among whom the Mandinka settled when they moved west, were matrilineal. Many lower river and south bank Mandinka states adopted some local customs, among them the custom of respecting the women of prominent families. Some, like the Nyanchos and guelowars, even adopted the custom of passing the crown down through the female line – though the society remained basically patrilineal.

This state of affairs remained more or less stable until the late nineteenth century, when Islam finally took strong root among the Senegambian peoples. Then the separation of male and female roles, which had always existed, became even more pronounced. The traditional woman was persuaded to accept that man is her superior and that her welfare, the progress of her off-spring, and even her own eternal salvation, depended upon her services and obedience to her husband. It became an ingrained cultural belief that women are too unreliable, too harsh, too emotional to be good rulers and leaders, a sentiment which brought to an end their formerly recognised political activity. Open political participation being ruled out, the only political leverage left to a woman of good family and great ability was through her male family members. An older woman of great intelligence could then, and still often does, wield a great deal of power, but only through -a strong son, brother, or husband intelligent enough to recognise the worth of her ideas.

Even though the women of a compound could wield tremendous political influence if they used their economic power collectively, they have rarely managed to organise themselves—mainly because the rivalry which seems to be inherent in the co-wife relationship often rules out such cooperation. Moreover, a feeling of common loyalty among a group of women coming from different families is more difficult to achieve than a feeling of loyalty to the lineage into which they have married, the more so because their own children belong to that lineage. However, where the eldest female member of a compound is a strong leader and sees the value of harmony in achieving the greater welfare of the lineage, she can draw the female members of the family together to exert strong pressure upon the men. However, what happens more often is that fair minded family heads work to promote harmony among all members of their compounds. These recognise that women are human beings; these accept ideas from all intelligent family members—male and female—and carry their ideas on to higher levels of family and village government.

In contradiction of this policy of refusing to recognise openly female contributions in the political sphere, women continued to have a recognised part in village and family life. There, though such things as weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies and bride transfers were heavily imbued with Islam, members of both sexes took separate but important parts, cooperating closely in the traditional way. For example at funerals, women wash the bodies of deceased females, stay to sympathise with female relatives and children, carry water and make cakes for charity. Men wash the bodies of males and stay to sympathise with the men. At naming ceremonies, the women prepare the food. As the baby is named, older family members gather to welcome it, the men sitting, by themselves in a group, saying prayers and distributing charity. Somewhere nearby, the women sit in another group with the baby and its mother. Since weddings are mainly lineage affairs, the men alone take care of the formalities, but the bride transfers are almost wholly a female affair. In short, no social function affecting both sexes can take place without active participation in some way by both men and women.

But even in village affairs, supposedly affecting men only and decided by many, women often play an important part. For example, if the men decide to rebuild the village mosque, one of the elders would then contact the head of the senior female age grades informing her of the contributions expected from the women such as carrying and building up some sort of evening social activity. (Elderly women are to women very much what elderly men are to the men: they are the ones who organise and direct the activity of the younger people.) From this point on, the women call their own meetings without the men, organise their own work strategy, and supervise themselves in carrying out their appointed tasks. In spite of the firmly held male views on female political incompetence, the men take it for granted the women are quite capable of making useful contributions to make projects, and moreover that they are quite capable of organising and directing themselves in order to do so.

In the past few years significant changes have taken place in the traditional social roles of men and women as a natural reaction to European values spread by schools, radio and cinema. One of the most important influences is the European idea of individualism and personal independence. This is a highly attractive idea, especially to young people who have seen and felt the great weight of family and community obligations on the individual, and who have tasted the sweet fruit of independence, such as the sole ownership of one's pay check and of the material well-being it can buy. But the ideal of personal independence threatens to rip asunder the traditional Gambian social fabric, which is built upon the premise that the family and community welfare takes precedence over the wants and needs of the individual. More and more young people of both sexes are showing resentment at the restraints and demands of the old system.

Traditional village women, upon whom the heaviest burden of self-sacrifice has been placed, cannot help wanting greater personal and economic well-being for themselves. They closely observe the personal behaviour and standard of living of the female teachers posted in their communities, as well as of the visiting home economists and other government officers who come to the village. They note and resent the difference between their lot and that of these educated women. They also cannot help resenting their family and community for denying them an education, which would help to give them the same things.

The traditional attitude towards female education is one of reluctance on the part of the men because it is felt that education is a sure way of “spoiling” a daughter, of making her unwilling to do hard, sustained labour in the fields and at home, or making her reluctant to obey her husband and in-laws as readily as wives are sub-posed to, and even of making her reluctant to marry at all, which, according to Islamic teaching, is a sin. In short, a woman who wants to live her own life is 'flying directly into the face of Gambian tradition. This applies to men as well, of course, but more so to women.

Women are beginning to make material demands that men and the village environment cannot meet. A few enterprising women manage to leave the village environment through marriage to educated men from urban areas. Also more men are moving their families to urban areas. Once a transplanted village woman has enjoyed the comparative ease of urban life, it is difficult for her to reconcile herself to going back to the drudgery of village life again.

In traditional economic life men and women have always had separate roles. Traditionally men have been responsible for the types of work which entail heavy cutting and clearing of fields. For this reason they have traditionally been in charge of growing sorghum, for long the staple food crop of the Senegambia, because it is grown in the wooded and brushy upland areas. Women have taken over the types of work which do not require much clearing, such as rice farming. Though rice growing is very hard work, the fields are usually level and open, and can be ploughed, planted and worked without the help of men. In addition they tend vegetable gardens, run small village industries such as dyeing and pottery making, and keep poultry.

An interesting development took place in traditional economic life during the late nineteenth century as well, coinciding with the growth of Islam in the Senegambia. As groundnuts came to be more and more important as a cash crop, the men began increasingly to concentrate upon groundnut growing and to spend less time on millet. As a consequence, rice began to be more of a staple food in the areas where it would grow, surpassing millet in importance. Women came to be depended upon to produce the biggest share of the family food. Although traditional society in rice growing areas depended so heavily upon female labour, cash crop farming continued to give men the advantage because it gave them control of a supply of liquid wealth.

The dual development of great dependence on a female labour force and increasing use of money served as a great spur to polygamy. It was obviously an advantage to have a great many wives to produce food, and with cash at his disposal, an ambitious man had the wherewithal to obtain more wives more easily. In Senegambian society, people are power, and the production of food enables one to gather more people about him and to support them. Cash crop farming, properly balanced with food production, enables a family head to increase his own and his family's influence and standing. In this way women were used to build up the poser of the patrilineage into which they married.

As long as a man's wives were well-fed and were given the traditional three dresses a year, they were expected to be happy. Not that they always were, but it was thought that they should be No one in society would then – or now – listen to a woman complaining of over-work and injustice if she were seen to be well-fed, well-clothed, and living in a fairly solid compound – much of it made possible by her own labour.

In the mid-twentieth century, a further change began to take place in the traditional division of labour with the advent of machines and government policies encouraging the growth of diverse cash crops and commercial development. For example, when rice becomes a cash crop and when machinery is used, men begin to join the women in the rice fields in places like the MacCarthy Island Division. Also, where less rice is produced, as in the upper river, women join the men in growing groundnuts. The result of this beginning breakdown of strict barriers between male and female labour greatly increased production.

But for women there is a real danger that this development may result in increased subjugation and unequal opportunity rather than merely in lightening their burdens, because their great economic importance is what gives them what little right they have to be heard now. There is a strong tendency among the affluent classes everywhere, and especially among the Muslim middle classes, to keep their women at home to tend children exclusively and to be mere decorations attesting to the affluence of their husbands. As it is now, the provincial village woman has something valuable to contribute, and she knows it. Moreover, even though her life may be very hard, she must have great freedom of movement in order to go about her work. Let us hope that improved education and enlightened development policies discussed below will forestall any retrogressive tendency to make the life of rural Gambian women less valuable and fulfilling than it is now.

At the moment, Gambian society is in a state of quiet turmoil. Individuals and whole families are experiencing uncertainty, disruption, internal division, and unhappiness which only time and sensible policies on the part of people and their government can begin to alleviate. We must realise that this dilemma affects the whole of society, not just the male half; and that efforts to alleviate the stresses of change need to be aimed at the need of women as well as of men. Those responsible for rural development need to take this into consideration when making their plans.

Recently there was a National Freedom From Hunger Campaign (NFHC) conference to discuss various rural development projects. The conference was welcomed and many more like it will help to pinpoint areas of priority in rural development. But unfortunately this conference did not last long enough to discuss any of the projects at length, and to show how all members of society would benefit from them. Moreover, it also failed to produce a clear-cut national plan as to how the various departments of national and local Government would coordinate their various efforts. Such a plan is needed before anything useful can be done.

Another important oversight was the lack of any real plan for bringing women in to share the benefits of the projects. Most of the proposals made at the conference, with the exception of home economics, were geared to the needs of men. We have seen that in rural life, men and women participate and cooperate responsibly in almost every phase of community life. We have also seen that there was traditionally a clear-cut division of labour between the sexes, that in many cases it was the labour of women which fed the family. However, it appears that the proposed rice cultivation, market gardening, and poultry projects—all traditionally the province of women—are aimed at men only. It seems that men are to be the only ones taught how to turn these industries into profitable commercial enterprises. No one has offered any good reason why full use should not be made of women's as well as men's contributions at the village level. Nor has anyone offered a good reason as to why village women would not want to make money for themselves. If economic and social change is desirable, then surely an effort to create a balanced change means less hardship on families and individuals. The loans and other development funds and facilities offered to rural men should be offered to women as well. Agricultural agents should make a particular point of letting women know of the opportunities available and should assist the women as willingly as they assist the men.

There should be an Agricultural Agent and a Home Economist posted in each District. Individual farmers and housewives could consult them at any time. Moreover, these representatives would work particularly with two groups: first with the primary and junior secondary schools to establish young farmers' and young homemakers' associations; secondly, with the village age grades. The age grades are the most obvious organisations through which to establish contact with every level of adult society.

The Ministry of Education needs to cooperate closely with the Agriculture and Rural Development projects as well. First it should work more quickly to gear junior secondary and primary school education to fit the everyday needs of the student. The main aim of the schools still seems to be to qualify people for jobs to be found only in urban areas. At the same time it arouses false hopes and expectations in young people. If women are to take part in organised commercial agriculture, they have to be made to realise early that changes are not meant for men only. Girls in junior secondary schools could be educated to fit this changing pattern. School projects in poultry raising, gardening, rice growing, dyeing, dress making, as well as home economics, could very easily be incorporated into the curriculum. A change in the school curriculum to reflect the needs of the community is badly needed for both sexes.

Another thing which the Ministers of Agriculture and Education should do is to create a functional literacy project, and to station a Literacy Officer in each District. His work would be closely coordinated with that of the Agricultural Agent and the Home Economist. Such a project has already been proposed – but again it was intended primarily for men. As most adult village women are illiterate and are given little or no help by Government agents on how to be better farmers, functional literacy would be one of the easiest ways of reaching them. The aim of functional literacy teachers and agricultural workers should be to improve communications between Government and people and to give rural men and women knowledge of how to improve the quality of their own lives as well as techniques enabling them to compete successfully in commercial agriculture.

These reflections upon the role of the Gambian women, past, present, and future, are not intended to cover in detail every aspect of the subject. Rather, they are intended to provoke thinking on the place of women in our society while we are discussing development generally. It is clear to everyone that fast changes are taking place. It is also clear that these changes very often alarm people since many of them are not desirable changes. Therefore, we must from time to time look at ourselves critically to see where we are going and to see if we can constructively direct the changes taking place so that they are culturally acceptable and desirable while benefitting the individual, rather than letting change come helter-skelter. Those areas of Government responsible for development, such as the Ministries of Economic Planning, Health, Education and Agriculture, can and should come together to discuss development plans and to see how these can be coordinated for the development of every sector of the community. Special attention could be paid to problems concerning women, since often this area of social development is left to the mercy of time and providence.

(Ndaanan, Vol. 5, Issue 1&2, March/September, 1976, p. 1-5)

Bakary Sidibeh and Miss W. F. Galloway both worked for the Cultural Archive Office, Banjul.