Gender and Labor in West Africa and West Central Africa

Gendered division of labor was present in African societies well before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the continued commercial exchanges with European traders. Men and women executed assigned tasks that could change over time, but in West Africa and West Central Africa certain women almost exclusively performed activities such as cooking and preparing food as well as rearing children.

Women of lower social positions provided more grueling work than elite women in the Yorubaland, a West African region encompassing present-day Togo, the Republic of Benin, and Nigeria, where speakers of Yoruba languages and its variations were and still are established. They were also active participants in trade caravans, transporting loads of goods on their heads.³ On the Atlantic coasts of Africa, women were also in charge of carrying water and wood, brewing beer, making palm oil, grinding corn, pounding millet, spinning, and weaving.⁴ The amount of labor provided by women likely depended on their social position. Whereas women performed most of the subsistence agricultural work in many societies of West Central Africa and West Africa, men dominated agricultural activities in Yorubaland. Yet, women dominated commercial activities as traders, distributors, and sellers at the daily markets and other periodic markets in Yorubaland towns.⁵ Likewise, travelers in all these regions of Atlantic Africa observed how women were also very active in the marketplaces where they sold fruits and vegetables, and where they also prepared foods during the early years of the Atlantic slave trade.⁶ Because these West African women could own property independently from their husbands, fathers, and brothers, elite women were able to accumulate wealth.⁷

The presence of women vendors in African markets can be explained in part by the fact that selling food and other goods in marketplaces was an extension of womenвЂ™s agricultural activities.

Their market activities also resulted from their participation in trade caravans that crisscrossed the hinterland of West Africa and West Central Africa. Olaudah Equiano, for example, remembered going to the market with his mother several times. He also had recollections of the various goods on sale. Even though his narrative does not mention women vendors, they were certainly active in the marketplace of his hometown in Igboland.⁸ African women who were captured in the interior and along the coastal areas to be sold in the Americas may have not been marketeers, but they certainly witnessed the activity of fellow women vendors. As noted by one historian, the small-scale trade of foodstuffs in the Atlantic world between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries occurred in the shadow of the Atlantic slave trade.⁹ But although in the shadow, this activity was crucial, and women were those executing these tasks.

In eighteenth-century Luanda, enslaved and free women of lower classes worked as traders, marketeers, and peddlers in the cityвЂ™s streets and outdoor markets. Hence, the term outdoor market (kitanda in Kimbundu) not only gave origin to the Portuguese terms quitanda (open market) and quitandeira (market vendor) but also traveled to Brazil, where enslaved women who worked as vendors in the streets or markets were called quitandeiras as well. In Luanda, enslaved and free street vendors sold fresh and cooked food, including dried fish, palm oil, fruits, vegetables, and pepper, as well as refined goods such as textiles and china.¹⁰

In West Central Africa, whereas free women worked autonomously, bondswomen who participated in retail trade were either employed or rented by their owners as street vendors. Asserting their independence, enslaved peddlers and marketeers, supported by their owners, often refused to observe increasing regulations and fees imposed by the local administration during the nineteenth century.¹¹ In 1850, when LuandaвЂ™s population was estimated at approximately 12,000 individuals, including 1,240 white persons (820 men and 420 women) and nearly 6,020 enslaved persons, there were 200 women licensed street vendors, but many more operated without a license.¹² These women often gathered according to their native language and region of origin.

They dressed in distinctive ways, wearing shawls and colorful clothes. Particular objects such as their baskets (quindas) were also emblematic of their activities in the city.¹³

As in Luanda, women street vendors were also central players in the urban sphere of Benguela, the third-largest slave-trading port in Africa, after Luanda and Ouidah. They circulated in the streets selling produce they cultivated. As early as 1760, the Portuguese colonial administration created a public market to regulate prices and control the work of women street vendors. But as in Luanda, the women resisted, and they continued to freely operate in the streets.¹⁴ Documented by travelers, the presence of women street retailers remained prominent in Luanda and Benguela after the end of slavery throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, some enslaved women peddlers were able to accumulate resources and purchase their own freedom.¹⁶ The stories and trajectories of African women who were captured and sent into slavery to the Americas are certainly connected to the activities of West Central African and West African women who were traders, marketeers, and peddlers for several centuries.

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Source: Araujo Ana Lucia. Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery. University of Chicago Press,2024. вЂ” 1702 СЂ.. 2024

Gender and Labor in West Africa and West Central Africa

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