Women to Women Marriage, Social Justice and House Property System in the Precolonial Period: Implications for Educating the Youth

Abstract

It has become fashionable for most literature on gender studies in Africa to view policies such as land registration and privatisation as a setback for women accessing portable wealth and argue that such arrangements leave women in a state of even greater insecurity in terms of accessibility to land and obtaining a livelihood. In addition, such studies tend to argue that privatisation of land, land scarcity, and the expansion of non-agricultural incomes have lessened dependency on clan-controlled land and hence negatively affected women. To the contrary, women tend to use unique pre-colonial strategies to address such setbacks, and as such, they are not entirely victims of land tenure discrimination in Africa. Therefore, in this study, we examine woman-to-woman marriage as a strategy women used to gain access to land and other resources by circumventing male authority, and we investigate how the households within the woman-to-woman marriage coped and contested over resources and portable wealth and how such changes effected customary law for women. This chapter also establishes links between statutory law based on Western notions of family and property and customary law, which embodies traditional family and property norms. Very little research has been done on how customary law procedures could be used to traverse into such difficult barriers.

By marrying women, these … women are clearly radically disrupting the male domination that operates in their everyday lives. Their stories may begin with land and struggles over material resources, but they are also stories of love, commitment, children, sexual freedom, vulnerability, and empowerment. The “implosion” of all these things makes these women’s stories unique and all the more compelling to feminists who are constantly searching for unique practices of feminism that resemble, but are not engineered by, western feminism.