AFRICA is notable for the extent to which women participate in cultivation. An -tJLexamination of the contribution of men and women by means of 'The Ethnographic Atlas (Ethnology, 1967) shows that women play the major part in cultivation in 45 per cent of societies in Africa as a whole, and in 53 per cent of sub-Saharan societies. We are concerned here with the contribution women make to cultivation (in pastoral as well as purely farming economies) and not to its over-all control, which is largely in the hands of men. An investigation of the reasons behind the part played by women in hoe agriculture is not the prime purpose of this paper, but it is possibly connected with their role in hunting and gathering economies. There is a striking uniformity about the division of labour in such societies: men hunt, women gather; men manage the more complex techniques, while women do basketry, fishing, and gather shell fish (Murdock, 1968: 335). As Steward has remarked, this sexual complementarity of labour is a marked feature of all hunting societies, with the gathering activities of women often supplying a large proportion of the diet (1968 : 330). If at the hunting stage women were the ones who collected vegetable produce, they would tend to be the ones concerned with cultivating the domestic varieties of these plants; just as men, who had formerly been concerned with hunting wild animals, would tend to take over the husbandry of domestic livestock. Thus in simpler systems of agriculture-those cultivating the ground by means of the wooden digging stick, 1 the stone hoe or an iron blade-the fields would tend to be cultivated by women, though the