Title:
|
The cultural politics of bridewealth : marriage, custom and land in colonial Mubang'a.
|
In 1948 Kikuyu women in Murang' a district staged a protest against compulsory
labour for soil conservation works. The protest emerged as a result of women's
frustrations and increasing insecurity produced by the drive for peasant accumulation
in the reserve, and accordingly has been viewed in terms of the growing gender
conflict within the household over resource control which became an aspect in the
internal debates over land which culminated in the declaration of a state of
Emergency in Kenya in 1952. The aim of the thesis is not to disprove this, but to
point, by way of examination of the key institutions and ideologies defining the lives
of Kikuyu women; marriage and the kinship network, which combined under the
single principle of bride wealth, at some of the processes by which women came to be
divested of their rights in land.
Until the 1920s, the principles of pre-colonial social organisation, mbari and riika,
which together had acted to mediate the distribution of primary resources among adult
members of Kikuyu society continued to uphold the control of female and younger
male reproduction by male elders. The failure of the change-over in tribal government
which should have taken place throughout Kikuyuland during the 1920s, is identified
as the point at which the ideology of community and kinship which had supported the
survival and growth of society in the pre-colonial period began to unravel. The
overwhelming significance of the event known as ituika to the development of the
Kikuyu polity and its centrality in sustaining the ideology of riika and the
relationships which it supported, is undermined by the insufficiency of the archival
and oral data. Nevertheless, the coincidence of the emergence of ituika, with the
intensification of inter-generational debates over political authority and control over
new agencies of resource distribution in the reserve, are linked to the conflicts over
land, and what many writers have identified as the redefinition of land rights in favour
mbari interests which began in the late 1920s.
Of the ideologies which had traditionally supported women's rights in the household,
it was the notion of kin contributions to, and receipt of, bridewealth that invested kin
interests in the survival of a marriage, which provided women with the assurance of
security and support in the household. The demise of riika ideology and the increased
use of more exclusive forms of wealth as bridewealth, led to a more restricted
definition of kinship, and what colonial observers decried as the commercialization of
the bridewealth negotiation. By the 1920s, while money had come increasingly to
replace livestock in the equation, the role of women in defining male control of land
had become enhanced by the greater emphasis on the land allocating powers of the
mbari. Indeed the thesis argues that by the 1920s, for rich and poor men alike, control
of female reproduction had become of overwhelming importance as a means of
securing claims to land, and of making that land more profitable. Furthermore
attempts by the British administration from the 1930s onwards, to modify customary
marriage by imposing certain restrictions on the performance and practice of the
bridewealth custom supported the development of more exclusive ideas about
marriage and kinship which for women, sharpened the insecurity produced by land
hunger, over-population and modifications in customary practice.
|