This article examines the possible relevance to Africa of the recent contribution to the history of industrialization in western Europe made by a group of historians of the family using statistical demographic techniques, especially ‘family reconstitntion’, developed by Peter Laslett at Cambridge. It is suggested that in particular the work of David Levine on eighteenth-century England yields a hypothesis about a link between ‘proto-industrialization’ and increased population growth which may be applicable, in a suitably modified form, to black Africa.

The article focuses particularly on the mechanism of widened income opportunities for young people lowering the age of marriage. Levine concentrates especially on the lowering of the marriage age of women causing enhanced fertility per wife. The modified form of the hypothesis suggested for black Africa would focus more on the reduction of the age of marriage for men and on the transition from polygyny to monogamy, the latter especially producing increased fertility per individual wife.

This article opens with a brief mention of the major criticisms which are currently made against the emirs' role in the development of Western education in northern Nigeria during the colonial era. It is suggested that these criticisms are ill founded and that they are more often than not based on a misconception of the emirs' power in the colonial situation. It is argued that the emirs were not de facto rulers of their respective emirates and had no powers to initiate educational development projects. The main discussion focuses on their attitude to Western education and how they took advantage of the educational opportunities offered by native administration schools to foster the political interests of their sons. It then examines their efforts to persuade the British administration to expand educational facilities in their emirates including those for female education and why these efforts were generally fruitless. Examination of the historical record reveals that the emirs played a more prominent role in the advancement of Western education than has hitherto been recognized.

Early twentieth-century missionaries in South Africa invariably subscribed to an ideology of domesticity for African Christian women. Being a housewife and mother was seen as a full-time spiritual vocation. In Johannesburg, for example, women's domestic role within marriage gave point to the whole range of female mission activity. Housewifery was not only taught at special mission schools, but also in women's hostels, a girls' youth movement and a delinquents' institution. These agencies and the African women's prayer unions also sought to combat premarital pregnancy in adolescent girls, because Christian marriage was regarded as the only proper context for motherhood. Maternity was central as well to female medical mission efforts. But the ideology of domesticity was in practice fraught with contradictions in the South African setting. First, housework training inevitably had an ambiguous status since it often aimed at supplying domestic servants to white households. Secondly, full-time motherhood was impossible for urban African women compelled to supplement their husbands' low earnings. White liberals therefore favoured higher African wages partly to free black women financially to fulfil their ‘natural’ child-rearing role. African women themselves have campaigned for domesticity against the authorities' policies of labour control. Bloemfontein in 1913 and Crossroads squatter camp in the late 1970s provide striking examples of such struggles. The Western feminist may see both the family and the role of housewife as oppressive. For the black South African woman, by contrast, the ideology of domesticity infusing these institutions may represent something positive denied her by the state.

In its ideal form, the Chewa family system is supposed to place considerable emphasis on the mother right, the avunculate, uxorilocal marriage, husband's subordination to wife's kin, and importance of female children as future reproducers of the lineage. In practice, however, there are a number of factors which have tended to mitigate the impact of these tendencies in the system, as far as men or husbands are concerned. Attention has been drawn to the fact that a number of important changes in the marriage contract, family residential patterns, exercise of domestic authority, and control or custody of children, have been the result of historical developments. There is therefore a need to understand these developments, even if the changes in the Chewa family system to which they led have not brought about a complete transformation of the system.

Several of these historical developments have been reviewed, as well as the features of patriliny to which they have given rise in several parts of central Malawi. They include the growth of the slave trade in the nineteenth century and the opportunity which this gave to some lineages to acquire women who could be married virilocally; the intrusion of patrilineal peoples like the Ngoni which increased the incidence of virilocal marriage and patrilineal descent; the spread of certain Christian missionary teachings that are in conflict with matrilineal principles of family organisation; and such developments of the colonial period as labour migrancy and cash-cropping which often impinged on relations between husband and wife and family life in general.

This paper explores some of the major methodological problems associated with the study of the history of the family in Africa. It sets out to explore the problem of the unit of analysis, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures. Using both historical and contemporary examples from southern Malawi the paper explores this problem further by analysing the role of the matrilineage vis-à-vis the household over time.

Both oral and written sources specifically concerned with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structure of kinship relations and it is difficult to know how these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. Even using present-day evidence it is difficult to integrate cultural perceptions of kinship and family relations with realities – in particular with the economic realities, which may change much faster than cultural norms. In the final section of the paper it is suggested that the nearest we can get to a knowledge of the history of the family, avoiding the problems of ideology and the drawbacks of structural and evolutionary models, is to approach the subject ‘sideways’. By studying other institutions and relationships which impinge on family structures, we may get closer to defining the boundaries of these structures. This approach is illustrated using the example of chinjira - a non-kin-based relationship between women which exists in parts of southern Malawi. A study of chinjira indirectly demonstrates both the strength and the limits of kinship relations.