For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has
been
dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of
production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining
factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history
of
women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged
gender
relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct
women's
history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses
of
the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological
analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians
have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes
in
the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society,
even
during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane
in the
early nineteenth century.More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate
connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa.
Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist
historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective
and of
focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century
kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To
counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of
nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state
government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that
women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction
among
them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted
their position and were contented’.
In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals
including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa
(CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial
gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in
the
new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition
of
traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical
appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also
hides
dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those
relations are and have been.
Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas and political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history.
In 1929, French colonial officials in Mauritania began monitoring a young man named Yacouba Sylla, the leader of a religious revival in the town of Kaédi. A Sufi teacher (shaykh), Yacouba Sylla had incurred the hostility of local administrators and the disdain of Kaédi's elite for preaching radical reforms of social and religious practice and for claiming authority out of proportion to his age and his rather minimal formal education. He claimed to derive his authority instead from a controversial shaykh named Ahmed Hamallah, then in exile from his home in Nioro, French Soudan (now Mali).
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