Women, power and authority in traditional African societies

By Ben BRAKO(koBENa BRAKO)

The prevailing assumption in modern gender discourse is that African women were historically marginal, subordinated, or politically irrelevant until their supposed “liberation” through Christianity, Islam, Western education, or liberal feminism. This assumption is not only inaccurate; it is methodologically flawed and historically unsound.¹

Traditional African societies did not organise power along the same axes as post-Roman Europe or Confucian East Asia. Authority was neither singular nor abstract, neither centralised nor masculinised. Instead, power was distributed, functional, and relational, anchored in the survival and moral coherence of the community.²

Within this grammar of power, women were not auxiliary actors. They were institutional authorities.

Power flowed from responsibility: lineage continuity, land custodianship, spiritual mediation, economic organisation, and moral arbitration. These domains were not collapsed into a single office but existed in parallel, mutually reinforcing one another.

African societies did not assume that governance, spirituality, economy, and morality must be monopolised by one gender. Authority was complementary, not hierarchical.³

Ghana as a Microcosm of African Gendered Authority Matrilineal Akan Societies: Constitutional Female Power

Among Akan societies, matriliny was not a kinship curiosity but a political architecture. Lineage, inheritance, and legitimacy flowed through women. The Queen Mother (Ohemaa) was not a spouse nor a ceremonial relic; she was a co-sovereign authority.⁴

Her responsibilities included:

• Nomination and deposition of chiefs
• Custodianship of lineage legitimacy
• Moral arbitration in disputes of succession and governance

A chief ruled by maternal sanction. Without it, authority was void. This arrangement has no true analogue in medieval Europe, where queens rarely exercised independent constitutional authority, nor in imperial China, where lineage legitimacy remained rigidly patrilineal despite powerful empresses operating informally.⁵

Patrilineal Without Patriarchal Absolutism

In Ga-Dangme and Adangbe societies, descent followed the male line, yet women exercised decisive authority in markets, ritual life, and clan governance. Colonial observers mistakenly equated patriliny with patriarchy, projecting European inheritance norms onto African systems. In Africa, descent never implied monopoly over power.⁶

III. A Continental Pattern of Institutional Female Authority

What Ghana reveals is not an exception but a continental logic.

Across Africa:

• Igbo societies institutionalised dual-sex governance, with women’s councils capable of sanctioning male excess⁷
• Yoruba polities recognised the Iyalode as a formal political authority
• Central and Southern African societies vested women with ritual authority that shaped national destiny⁹

No comparable breadth of female institutional authority existed simultaneously across Europe or Asia prior to modern reform movements.¹⁰

Spiritual Authority and Moral Legitimacy

Traditional African cosmology recognised a unified cosmic force expressed through ancestors, land, and ethical balance. There was no centralised clergy and no doctrine of female impurity. Spiritual authority derived from calling, competence, and moral alignment, not gender.

Women frequently served as priestesses, healers, spirit mediums, and custodians of fertility, rain, and land. This stands in sharp contrast to Abrahamic traditions, where religious authority became clericalised and male-exclusive, and to South Asian Brahmanical systems, which formalised ritual exclusion despite early feminine divinities.

 Authority Under Pressure: Women in War and Existential Crisis

Societies reveal their deepest assumptions about authority not in times of peace, but in moments of danger. War is not a space for symbolism; it is the arena of maximum trust.

Across African history, when legitimacy faltered or survival was threatened, women were repeatedly entrusted with supreme leadership, including military command. This was not anomaly. It was activation.

Yaa Asantewaa of Asante

As Queen Mother of Ejisu, Yaa Asantewaa was already a constitutional authority: kingmaker, guardian of lineage legitimacy, and custodian of the Golden Stool’s moral sanctity. When male chiefs hesitated in 1900, she invoked ancestral duty and collective shame—tools available only to someone occupying the highest social altitude.¹³

Her leadership was not tolerated; it was accepted. That acceptance is the argument.

The Women Warriors of Dahomey

In Dahomey, women’s military leadership was institutionalised. The Mino (Ahosi) formed a standing, salaried, professional military corps integrated into statecraft. No comparable female military institution existed in Europe before the modern era.¹⁴

Further Continental Examples

• Nzinga Mbande of Ndongo and Matamba combined diplomacy and warfare against Portuguese expansion¹⁵
• Amina of Zazzau led territorial expansion and urban fortification in Hausaland¹⁶
• The Kandakes of Kush confronted Roman imperial power militarily and diplomatically¹⁷

No society entrusts its survival to those it considers inferior. War exposes social truth.

1. Comparative Perspective: Africa, Europe, Asia

In medieval Europe, female military leadership was treated as transgressive; Joan of Arc was executed and later sanitised as anomaly rather than institution. In East Asia, female warriors appear largely in legend rather than in durable governance structures.

Africa differs fundamentally. Female leadership in crisis was legitimate, repeatable, and normalised. Authority was measured by moral legitimacy and communal trust, not by gender exclusion.²⁰

Clarification, Not defence: On Harmful Practices and Analytical Error

Once the indigenous system of authority is understood, certain practices often cited as proof of African misogyny can be addressed with clarity rather than defensiveness.

Widowhood rites, menstrual seclusion, female genital cutting, wife inheritance, food taboos, and son preference are real phenomena. But no civilisation is defined by its pathologies. European witch burnings, Indian sati, Chinese foot-binding, and Japanese seclusion practices are not treated as civilisational essence. African practices deserve equal analytical fairness.²¹

Briefly:

• Widowhood rites were originally protective, later corrupted²²
• Menstrual seclusion reflected cosmological potency, not impurity²³
• FGM is neither pan-African nor cosmologically mandated²⁴
• Wife inheritance functioned as social security, later abused²⁵
• Food taboos were symbolic allocations, not markers of inferiority²⁶
• Son preference intensified under colonial economic pressure, not indigenous philosophy²⁷

These practices represent distortion under stress, not structural design.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the African Grammar of Power

African women were not waiting to be empowered. They were already empowered within systems that valued balance over domination and responsibility over abstraction. Colonial modernity did not liberate African women; it redefined them downward, even as Europe and Asia themselves struggled toward gender reform.²⁸

Africa’s task today is not to borrow gender models uncritically, but to recover its own grammar of power—one that recognised women as governors of lineage, economy, spirituality, and moral order.

Power was not absent.

It was displaced.

The future will not be built by borrowed memory,

but by reclaimed truth.