Women and Men and the Gendering of Production

Women's authority in the history of East-Central Africa had a broad scope in the economic as well as the social and religious spheres. Technology and production, and not just social relations, were highly gendered in precolonial East-Central Africa, and long-term continuities in gender patterns persisted in some areas of work and technology while new relations developed in other areas. Moreover, in the making of material culture, ritual activities, themselves gendered, could be as important as performing the actual technology. Because the economic responsibilities gendered as female were essential to the survival of the societies, by necessity they often cast women in the historical role of innovators. The history of these developments forms another narrative of the ways in which women's authority made itself felt, and of the ways in which it came under challenge, over the long term in the history of culture and society in East-Central Africa.

Among the earliest Bantu settlers of East-Central Africa, at the close of the first millennium BCE and in the early first millennium CE, two slightly differing gender patterns are likely to have initially been present. In the societies ancestral in language to the later Central Savanna, Botatwe, and Sabi speakers, women were the farmers and the masters of the key technology of pottery making. Hunting was men's work, and the comparative ethnographic evidence indicates that men also had one kind of farming responsibility, performing the initial clearing of trees and bush from fields.