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" The cultural politics of bridewealth : "
Kannan, Joyce Anwera.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1095367
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TLets393660
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| Main Entry
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Kannan, Joyce Anwera.
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| Title & Author
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The cultural politics of bridewealth :\ Kannan, Joyce Anwera.
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| College
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School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)
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| Date
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2000
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| student score
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2000
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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In 1948 Kikuyu women in Murang' a district staged a protest against compulsorylabour for soil conservation works. The protest emerged as a result of women'sfrustrations and increasing insecurity produced by the drive for peasant accumulationin the reserve, and accordingly has been viewed in terms of the growing genderconflict within the household over resource control which became an aspect in theinternal debates over land which culminated in the declaration of a state ofEmergency in Kenya in 1952. The aim of the thesis is not to disprove this, but topoint, by way of examination of the key institutions and ideologies defining the livesof Kikuyu women; marriage and the kinship network, which combined under thesingle principle of bride wealth, at some of the processes by which women came to bedivested 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 adultmembers of Kikuyu society continued to uphold the control of female and youngermale reproduction by male elders. The failure of the change-over in tribal governmentwhich should have taken place throughout Kikuyuland during the 1920s, is identifiedas the point at which the ideology of community and kinship which had supported thesurvival and growth of society in the pre-colonial period began to unravel. Theoverwhelming significance of the event known as ituika to the development of theKikuyu polity and its centrality in sustaining the ideology of riika and therelationships which it supported, is undermined by the insufficiency of the archivaland oral data. Nevertheless, the coincidence of the emergence of ituika, with theintensification of inter-generational debates over political authority and control overnew agencies of resource distribution in the reserve, are linked to the conflicts overland, and what many writers have identified as the redefinition of land rights in favourmbari 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 kininterests in the survival of a marriage, which provided women with the assurance ofsecurity and support in the household. The demise of riika ideology and the increaseduse of more exclusive forms of wealth as bridewealth, led to a more restricteddefinition of kinship, and what colonial observers decried as the commercialization ofthe bridewealth negotiation. By the 1920s, while money had come increasingly toreplace livestock in the equation, the role of women in defining male control of landhad become enhanced by the greater emphasis on the land allocating powers of thembari. Indeed the thesis argues that by the 1920s, for rich and poor men alike, controlof female reproduction had become of overwhelming importance as a means ofsecuring claims to land, and of making that land more profitable. Furthermoreattempts by the British administration from the 1930s onwards, to modify customarymarriage by imposing certain restrictions on the performance and practice of thebridewealth custom supported the development of more exclusive ideas aboutmarriage and kinship which for women, sharpened the insecurity produced by landhunger, over-population and modifications in customary practice.
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School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)
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