Women's Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa

A radical reassessment of the importance of women in East-Central African society during the precolonial period. This study of more than two thousand years of African social history weaves together evidence from historical linguistics, archaeology, comparative ethnography, oral tradition, and art history to challenge the assumptions that allAfrican societies were patriarchal and that the status of women in precolonial Africa is beyond the scope of historical research. In East-Central Africa, wom