Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town
Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétu, Bénin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices.

1117465525
Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town
Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétu, Bénin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices.

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Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town

Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town

Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town

Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town

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Overview

Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétu, Bénin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253222534
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 11/29/2010
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Lorelle D. Semley is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Wesleyan University. Her work has been published in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and she is a contributor to Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Preface: "You Must Be From Here"-An Intellectual and Personal Journey ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Note on Orthography and Language xvii

Prologue: "Mother is gold, father is glass": Power and Vulnerability in Atlantic Africa 1

1 Founding Fathers and Metaphorical Mothers: History, Myth, and the Making of a Kingdom 13

2 How Kings Lost Their Mothers: Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade 32

3 Giving Away Kétu's Secret: Wives on the Eve of War 53

4 "Where women really matter": The "Queens" of Kétu and the Challenge to French Imperialism 71

5 "Without family ... there is no true colonization": Perspectives on Marriage 91

6 "The Opening of the Eyes": The Politics of Manhood on the Eve of Independence 115

7 Mothers and Fathers of an Atlantic World 134

Epilogue: A Rebirth of "Public Mothers" and Kings 153

Essay on Sources and Methodology 167

Notes 173

Bibliography 201

Index 221

What People are Saying About This

Franklin & Marshall College - Misty Bastian

A book that will be of great interest to Africanist historians, anthropologists, and others who want to learn more about gender relations on the continent.

"The histories of Africa's encounter with the West are incomplete without a comprehensive analysis of the gendered nature of that encounter. Semley's work is a welcome addition to a growing literature on gender and the European encounter with African societies. Using an array of sources, she presents a historical account of gender, elite power, and authority in Ketu, Benin. Semley (Wesleyan Univ.) situates the colonial history of Ketu and its gender dynamics within pre-European history and the history of the Atlantic slave trade . . . . Ketu men and women participated in politics, drawing on a variety of social status and gendered relations. The author explores their actions and, in depth and with elegant style, describes the economic, cultural, and social conditions through which they interacted with French colonial authority. The book's Atlantic context is welcome. This work is a poignant, timely reminder that women were central to the making of African colonial societies because they infused indigenous ideologies and forms of resistance against colonial restructuring. Semley points to the ability of women of various classes and status to draw on indigenous economic and political ideologies to define and achieve economic, political, and ritual power within a hegemonic colonial society. Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate libraries. —Choice"

C. J. Korieh

The histories of Africa's encounter with the West are incomplete without a comprehensive analysis of the gendered nature of that encounter. Semley's work is a welcome addition to a growing literature on gender and the European encounter with African societies. Using an array of sources, she presents a historical account of gender, elite power, and authority in Ketu, Benin. Semley (Wesleyan Univ.) situates the colonial history of Ketu and its gender dynamics within pre-European history and the history of the Atlantic slave trade . . . . Ketu men and women participated in politics, drawing on a variety of social status and gendered relations. The author explores their actions and, in depth and with elegant style, describes the economic, cultural, and social conditions through which they interacted with French colonial authority. The book's Atlantic context is welcome. This work is a poignant, timely reminder that women were central to the making of African colonial societies because they infused indigenous ideologies and forms of resistance against colonial restructuring. Semley points to the ability of women of various classes and status to draw on indigenous economic and political ideologies to define and achieve economic, political, and ritual power within a hegemonic colonial society. Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate libraries. —Choice

C. J. Korieh]]>

The histories of Africa's encounter with the West are incomplete without a comprehensive analysis of the gendered nature of that encounter. Semley's work is a welcome addition to a growing literature on gender and the European encounter with African societies. Using an array of sources, she presents a historical account of gender, elite power, and authority in Ketu, Benin. Semley (Wesleyan Univ.) situates the colonial history of Ketu and its gender dynamics within pre-European history and the history of the Atlantic slave trade . . . . Ketu men and women participated in politics, drawing on a variety of social status and gendered relations. The author explores their actions and, in depth and with elegant style, describes the economic, cultural, and social conditions through which they interacted with French colonial authority. The book's Atlantic context is welcome. This work is a poignant, timely reminder that women were central to the making of African colonial societies because they infused indigenous ideologies and forms of resistance against colonial restructuring. Semley points to the ability of women of various classes and status to draw on indigenous economic and political ideologies to define and achieve economic, political, and ritual power within a hegemonic colonial society. Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate libraries. —Choice

Emory University - Edna Bay

Focuses on metaphors and realities of women's power, secular and religious, and how power is exercised as public motherhood.

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