Cattle, Power, and Gender in Sub-Saharan Africa
For centuries, cattle were like money in many African societies. Though wealth has been a recognized symbol of power for centuries, in Africa, cattle represented not only wealth, but a strategy to survive. Surviving in harsh conditions has been such an issue in African history that the symbols of wealth and power have culminated around bearing children and cultivating the land -- two areas necessary for survival. Cattle were an important part of this system in several ways.
Cattle symbolized power because they were necessary for African men to obtain wives. Through a dowry system known as lobola, or brideprice, men "purchased" women's labor and reproductive capacities from their fathers with cattle.
In the West, we do not typically think of women as "farmers," but in precolonial Africa, women cultivated the land. As both farmers and mothers, women were a key component for survival -- they generated food and children, the next generation. Cattle thus became a method of obtaining power and prestige. Not only could men use it to exert power over women by "buying" their labor and reproductive capacities (Schmidt 5), but they could use it to exert power over other men. Men who owned more cattle had greater access to symbols of prestige like wives and children. In addition, men who married many wives increased their wealth because more women could cultivate greater areas of land and give a man more children.
The importance of cattle as a means for gaining power diminished as colonialism instituted wage labor. Money slowly replaced cattle, but the substitution caused great turmoil.
In S. Africa, cattle were an important barrier for staving off the apartheid system (Mager 32). The longer Africans owned cattle, the longer they could survive without depending on wage and migrant labor to support their families. But as Africans were increasingly denied the ability to own land or to work land for their own purpose, they were unable to support cattle.
Though women were more concerned with their ability to feed themselves and their children, men viewed the loss of cattle as emasculation (Mager 37). Under colonialism, a system called "indirect rule" often based itself on a hierarchal system that placed African men over African women, but it nevertheless denied men one of their most potent symbols of power, one of their most direct forms of controlling women's labor. As long as men had cattle, they "retained the symbolic power of the patriarchal order" (Mager 80).
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