How single unmarried women thrived in one pre-colonial West African society

I have spent a considerable amount of time wondering how single women could have made do in West African history. The non-existent yet much spoken of “African culture” of today paints a picture that such things never happened even though there are several renowned women who we remember today that never married, whether it is Queen Amina of Zaria, or Sarrounia, or Pa Sini Jobu, or even King Ahebi Ugbabe. Yet, most of us believe that independent minded women who are not interested in marriage only came to be so due to colonial European influence. Or assume that it must have been hard for unmarried women back when. In this post, I use Baule women of Ivory Coast as an example to show that it was not impossible to be unmarried and childless in a pre-colonial West African society.

It was a great pleasure coming across Mona Etienne’s “Gender Relations and Conjugality among the Baule”, in Christine Oppong’s Female and Male in West Africa. In a chapter, Etienne begins by mentioning that modern Baule women are known for being independent, noting that many middle aged and elderly Baule women who live in towns are unmarried yet acquire enough wealth to support those that are dependent on them and to maintain social networks. Some of these women have educated adult children or foster children who earn high salaries and are thus able to support their incomes, ensure that the women are taken care of in old age, and that they will have a “presitgious” funeral when they die. Young women holding these older women as role models, view marriage as “incompatible” with their personal goals of becoming wealth, or view marriage as a means through which they can get wealth as “a generous husband may help them attain wealth and success”.

Etienne boldly states that “this type of situation is not unusual in Africa, especially in West Africa”, and I believe that she means among modern West African women in urban environments. However among Baule women, even those in rural areas resist marriage despite pressure and the limited economic opportunities available to single women in the village, putting marriage aside because they want to go to the city or wanting to escape to the city because they do not want to marry. Both in the urban cities and rural villages, there are Baule women who are more concerned with achieving economic autonomy. Etienne traces this reluctance to marry, and this view of marriage as an unwanted convenience or “as an outright exploitation” to pre-colonial Baule society. Baule society has always placed premium in personal autonomy and individual freedom of choice for women and men.

Early European observers remarked on the high positions Baule women held. They had a voice in the decision making process in affairs that concerned the village. Furthermore all adult women were part of a secret society whose rituals were forbidden for men to see/watch. As part of this society, women defended the interests of the community against foreign threats, they also defended the interests of women against women although Etienne states that the more import role was safeguarding the community interests in times of illness and warfare. The support of women was absolutely crucial in affairs concerning the community, for example it was believed that men who went to war without the support of women would surely meet defeat and death. It should be noted that men also had their own secret society that women could not be part of.

It seems it was only in ritual that Baule women and men were divided as there was hardly any other case of separation between the sexes, and gender attributes were not rigidly defined. The division of labour in which men and women were assigned different tasks were apparently upheld due to efficiency in production and were not enforced by supernatural or civil sanctions. Deviations were acceptable when necessary or convenient meaning that men could perform women’s labour tasks when the situation called for it and vice versa. Finding a partner of the opposite sex to aid with labour did not necessarily mean finding a husband or wife, but could mean finding a “sister” or a “brother”. Deviations were only rare in the cases of apprenticeship though healers and diviners could be men or women.

Women chiefs were important, although they grew less in number at the time of colonisation. Women could attract vast amounts of wealth and dependants (both men and women), they played their role in trading and gold prospecting expeditions, and acquired domestic slaves in their own rights. Etienne mentions the traditions and histories contemporary women have of business minded grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and guesses that these women may have been encouraged by their own mothers hinting at a chain of enterprising Baule women who inspired their daughters over time. So Baule women’s search for independence and wealth is not new but rooted in history and traditional models.

Baule Gyaman girls in exquisite gold jewelry with horsetail switches

Among the Baule, early stages of marriage were marked by long periods of duolocality, that is the wife continued to live with her kin and the husband did the same. Marriage was not thought to be complete until the wife took up residence with her husband. It is due to this that noble women, women who belong to families that held high political office, are said to not marry. Such women could not be expected to move and take residence with their husbands if they did marry because they had a chance at a political office. And apparently the same thing happens today, even though the traditional political office does not hold as much important in this post-colonial age. Yet there are women who refuse marriage because they are heirs to a political seat, or whose families oppose their marriages for the same reason. Etienne states that these cases must be less frequent that in the past, because colonial and post-colonial administrations does not encourage women holding traditional political positions. In pre-colonial times when this discrimination was non-existent, there would have been more noble women refusing to marry or whose families refused their marriages. There would have also been noble women who married but did not live with their husbands as they did not want to risk losing their chance at a political seat. Thus for politically ambitious women, marriage was a constraint and noble women were not anxious to married, or if they did get married often divorced to claim their political office with their kin.

Baule women retain economic rights in their own kin group. They have rights to the labour of a brother or any other kinsman with whom they could launch an economic partnership similar to that between spouses. Basically, unmarried women could form ‘marriage-like” partnerships with their kinsmen on solely economic grounds. Kinship relations among the Baule are traced from both parents, rather from either a father and a mother, with succession and inheritance being generally matrilineal. In this cognatic system, people continually sought to attract dependants from all sides of the family tree that they could rely on, and who could rely on them in turn. Elders looked to attract dependants in order to increase their own wealth while juniors wanted to establish ties with elders who were rich enough to finance entrepreneurial undertakings and who were generous enough to offer dependants a share in the profits. Kin group membership was not rigidly ascribed and there was less gerontocracy or autocracy. Elders did demand respect and had some authority, however rigidly enforcing authority could led to the departure of dependants and even the eventual dying out of a kin group due to all the members leaving.

Riches came from having a large number of dependants to contribute to one’s revenue. No elders or chiefs could completely take the labour or revenue of their dependants, meaning that dependants always could keep a little something to themselves. The elders held on to a bonus which increased their own wealth. People acquired wealth and personal property either from their labour and also from estates inherited matrilineally. Relationships of dependency were flexible, all adults had the possibility of building their own group of personal dependants. A son who remained with his father’s kin was a “child of male” and could not inherit there, and neither could his children unless he married a woman in the same kin group as his father. In order to inherit, one had to be a “child of a female”. A man could return to his maternal kin in order to inherit there. Or he could build his own group, with his sisters, or his sister’s children, or by attracting maternal kin unrelated to his father. These people would show allegiance only to their “brother” and contribute their labour to his estate while receiving some revenue for themselves.

A women who chose to live with their husband had access to similar opportunities. She could create her own group by holding on to her unmarried or divorced daughters. These would be joined by her dependants unrelated to her husband, her domestic slaves, and younger members of her own kin group. By fostering and adopting children, a married woman could grow the number of people who depended on her. Usually when a woman took up residence with her husband, she was given a child in adoption and would adopt other children as time went on. Junior dependants would join her group if she had a reputation of wealth and generosity. All a married woman’s dependants owed allegiance to her alone, and respect to her husband. Through this, a married woman essentially she aided the people in her own kin group and maintained ties with them even though she now lived with her husband.

Etienne argues that marriage in Baule society was more of an “association of a woman and man for purposes of reproduction and production with shared rights in both children and products”. Children owed labour and allegiance to both parents, but this could be circumstantial depending on the child’s desires and ambitions. A married woman controlled the products of her labour and gained new wealth from surplus production. Gender equality was so that the two most important products in pre-colonial Baule society were controlled by men and women; yam for men and cloth for women. Division of labour meant that both men and women contributed to the production of both. Women and men controlled surplus production by controlling the labour of their dependants, domestic slaves, children and junior kin. And by controlling male dependants who worked in yam farming for example, a woman could use her surplus production to fund other opportunities such as long-distance trade and gold prospecting.

Of course colonialism changed things considerably. The introduction of cash crop lead to Baule women losing control over production. And losing control over production lead to losing control over dependants, as reduced productivity reduced a woman’s ability to attract dependants, and less dependants reduced a woman’s productive capacity. There is more to be said on how Baule gender relations and marriages were affected by colonialism and urban migration, however that is not the purpose of this post so I will end things here hoping that those who read this post have a clearer idea of how single unmarried women thrived in pre-colonial Baule society.

What I read
Etienne Mona, “Gender Relations and Conjugality among the Baule”, pp. 309-319 in Female and Male in West Africa (1983) edited by Christine Oppong

King Ahebi Ugbabe

Ahebi Ugbabe’s life story is to me, equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating because Ahebi Ugbabe was a woman ahead of her time, and her story provides incredible insights into pre-colonial Igbo attitudes towards gender and sex. And frustrating because of the exact same reason; that is pre-colonial Igbo attitudes towards gender and sex. Ahebi Ugbabe was a woman who rose in the dawn of British colonialism of what is now Nigeria, to become a female king to a people who did not have autocratic rule, and a female headman and warrant chief to the British colonial forces. She was a woman who became a man as Igbo society allowed, ruled as a man with the support of foreign powers, until the elders of the society thought that she had gone too far and essentially re-transformed her to a woman.

By gathering several oral histories about her character, Nwando Achebe paints a very detailed and amazing picture of a defiant woman who challenged established ideas of how much a woman could become a man. As a young girl, Ahebi Ugbabe fled to Igalaland for two apparent reasons. One was to escape being forced to marry the goddess Ohe as a punishment for crimes her father had committed in Enugu-Ezike. The other may have been due to being raped, and then possibly being forced to marry the man who raped her and fathered her child. It may have been a combination of these reasons that lead to a Ahebi Ugbabe fleeing to Igalaland as a teenager.

In Igalaland, Ahebi Ugbabe turned to sex work, this gave her enough finances to set up a trade, and also access to important and powerful people such as Attah Igala, the King of the Igala, and some European colonists, both of who aided her in realising her ambitious goals as a ruler. Her activities, as a trader and sex worker, gave Ahebi Ugbabe economic power and political influence.
After establishing herself as a person of influence and affluence, Ahebi Ugbabe acted as an informant to the British by leading the British invaders to Umuida and Ogrute. It is still uncertain what Ahebi Ugbabe’s motives in aiding the British were, Achebe suggests that she used the British to enact revenge on the people whose customs had caused her to flee from her home at a young age, or possibly to remove the institution of deity marriage and domestic slavery which the British used as justification for colonialism.*

In return for her aiding them, and in recognition of Ahebi Ugbabe’s linguistic skills (she was fluent in Igbo and Igala, and pidgin English with which she communicated with the British colonialist), Ahebi Ugbabe was given political offices by the British. First as a headman, then as a warrant chief in 1918. The headman was an agent of the British who controlled the wards that comprised villages, while the warrant chief was the indigenous leader who ruled the people in place of the British in the indirect rule system. In Igboland which was decentralised and gerontocratic, warrants (basically pieces of paper) were given to men who rose to claim positions as heads of their communities. Although Ahebi Ugbabe’s high political office was not so strange in Igbo political life in which women could attain high levels of powers, she was apparently the only woman in colonial Nigeria, and perhaps British Africa to fill these offices. In occupying these roles (of headman and warrant chief), Ahebi Ugbabe’s authority was okayed by the British and grudgingly accepted by the people of Enugu-Ezike. Similarly Ahebi Ugbabe’s becoming a king was sanctioned by the Igala.

Ahebi Ugbabe was made king by Attah Aliyu Obaje, she was initiated into the sacred throne of the attah and had her ears pierced as all attah (rulers of the Igala kingdom) do in remembrance of the earliest female King Ebulejonu, Ahebi Ugbabe was then given a beaded crown, a horsetail that marked her station, beads to wear on her neck and wrists, a black fowl to sacrifice to her chi, and a staff that signified male kingship. This initiation is not so strange when you consider that in pre-colonial times, the official title of eze was one given by the attah, and that all ezes were required to make a pilgrimage to Igalaland. Achebe mentions Igala pioneers that may have inspired Ahebi to pursue a female kingship, such as Attah Ebulejonu, a female king of the Igala who is said to be a woman born of a half-human, half-leopard father, and who ruled as a Female King; Princesses Inikpi who buried herself alive, along with nine of her slaves as a willing sacrifice to help safeguard the Igala kingdom in a time of war, and who afterwards was elevated to become a goddess; and Oma Idoko who was similarly sacrificed, although unwillingly.

The Igbo pre-colonially practised a gerontocracy and believed in leadership by merit, power was shared between male and female elders in a complimentary fashion, yet Ahebi Ugbabe ruled autocratically. Her subjects, the people of Enugu-Ezike were compelled to recognise Ahebi Ugbabe as king because she had the Attah and the British behind her and supporting her. Ahebi Ugbabe soon became known as a greatly feared ruler, she was bestowed titles that were usually the reserve of male kings and chieftains, along with titles solely for exceptional women and women who had transformed themselves into men. Ahebi Ugbabe was praised both as an exceptional woman and an exceptional man.

And as a man, Ahebi Ugbabe’s treatment of women followed society’s taboos. She had a masquerade house in her palace that women were forbidden to enter. She slept surrounded by young virginal girls, teenagers and women were not allowed to sleep near her following the belief that menstrual blood was contaminating. Ahebi Ugbabe married several women, and several slaves one of whom she adopted as her own son. Her palace was a sanctuary for women who ran from abusive husbands, and Ahebi Ugbabe married some of the women who decided not return to their husbands. At the same time, her palace was a kind of corrective facility for “difficult” wives. Men sent their wives to King Ahebi’s palace and paid her to deal with their stubborn wives, until they became softened and were ready “to live in peace and harmony with their husbands”. King Ahebi’s palace was a sexually liberated place, her wives not only had as many lovers as they wanted to, but they were apparently also encouraged to sleep with her important male visitors. Thus the women in her palace lived as free women and sex workers. There was also a coed school in King Ahebi’s palace at a time when it was rare for girls to be educated.

There were several people who were not happy with King Ahebi. Particularly the male elders who were upset with her disregard of traditional leadership and elders, her autocratic rule, her reception of bribes and the manner she forcibly took away men’s wives. However they tolerated King Ahebi until she did the unthinkable, she tried to own a masquerade. Masquerades are believed to be the ancestors come back to the land of the living, they enforce the laws of the community and are agents of social control. They were also the domain of a solely male secret society and in a society where gender and sex were fluid, ownership of, and the ability to control a masquerade differentiated the male from the female. Only cis-gendered men who were initiated into the masquerade secret society were allowed to control masquerades. Ahebi Ugbabe was a female king and a female husband, and indeed she was treated as a man in her community. Yet when King Ahebi came out with a masquerade, this was considered the ultimate insult and disregard of society’s rules.

Ultimately, King Ahebi fell from grace when the British betrayed her by not supporting her when she took the male elders to court after they object at her masquerade. The British resident who presided over this dispute, concluded that Ahebi Ugbabe did not have the right to control a masquerade as she was a woman. With the British no longer backing her, Ahebi Ugbabe’s influence significantly lessened, people stopped attending her court and her market. Now the British sought to reconnect with the male elders they had previously ignored, and with this the male elders were free to force Ahebi Ugbabe’s re-transformation into womanhood.

She still retained considerable influence and wealth until she died in May 1948. Today most people do not know about King Ahebi and her legacy, however she lives on as she was transformed into a medicine by one medicine man, and then to a goddess who sees and reveals the unknown.

* Interestingly, although Ahebi Ugbabe may have been unique in Britain’s African colonies as a woman who became a headman and then warrant chief, she was not the only African woman who acted as an informant to aspiring colonial authorities. More on this in future posts.

What I Read
Achebe, Nwando (2011), The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, Indiana University Press
Listen to Nwando Achebe talk about her research and King Ahebi here.

Pre-colonial Igboland: On Woman-to-Woman Marriage

Nwando Achebe writes that “woman-to-woman marriage in Africa has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality” (emphasis hers)…and I actually agree with this…kind of. While I strongly believe in pre-colonial lesbian secret societies littered across the African continent, at the risk of falling into the trap of Eurocentric and Western (mis)understanding of African social institutions, it should be made clear that the institution in which women were allowed to marry women was not created to facilitate gay marriage. In fact, another researcher, Kenneth Chukwuemeka labels woman-to-woman marriage “an improvisation to sustain patriarchy” and “simply an instrument for the preservation and extension of patriarchy and its traditions”, the basic argument being that in Igbo society the male child was of utmost importance and it was in this obsession to have a male child to continue the lineage that woman-to-woman marriage came about* (and also apparently because when a female husband wants to marry a wife, a male relative is required to do the talking for her).

Reading Achebe’s The Female King of Colonial Nigeria, one could be forgiven in believing that woman-to-woman marriage was unique among the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria. It wasn’t. This institution can be found across the African continent among various ethnic groups, with slight differences in norms and practices. Even I was surprised to discover, among the Yoruba where a widow who wanted to remain with her in-laws could marry a female relative when there were no men in the family as considerable options. In other societies, women who could not have children, and widows took wives and claimed the children their wives had as their own. In others women who did not have sons could marry a woman who would act as a daughter-in-law, in fact married to the female husband’s non-existent son. In all societies where this was practised, female husbands occupied high statuses in the community.

In Igboland women who were considered exceptional in the eyes of society due to their wealth and/or social standing, and those who were past menopause could marry wives for themselves, for their husbands, for their sons, and/or for their siblings. These influential women were usually viewed as men, due to the fluidity of gender in the pre-colonial Igbo context, by marrying women their status was elevated mostly due to female husbands paying bride-price. Woman-to-woman marriage allowed for greater freedom of sexuality for the wives, they could have boyfriends, anonymous men whose only duty was to supply sperm, henceforth “male sperm donors”, and this was socially accepted. Any child they had were taken care of by their female husband, and carried her name and this was legitimate in the eyes of society.

Children were very important to this society, apparently women who had given birth to ten or more children were honoured by receiving the title, Lolo. It was also common for a man who had no sons to appoint a daughter who would become a female son. This female son would be required to remain in her father’s home (as opposed to leaving for marriage) and would receive his inheritance. A daughter could become a son after secret rituals were carried out to aid this transformation. The female husband did not have to go through this, they simply had to go out and marry whoever they wanted and by doing so became men and husbands. The female husband was treated like a man and enjoyed equal privilege with her male counterparts, she sometimes even associated with the male elders, however there were some restrictions.

Kenneth Chukwuemeka suggests that while the wife married to the female husband had her own companions, the female husband too always had a male companion (emphasis mine). This male companion, “satisfied her erotic desires and supported her when the biological realities became inevitable”. Which suggests that all women have an emotional and biological need to be with a man. Which I find laughable, as well as problematic. Even though apparently all female husbands had male lovers, they could not be seen openly with them, and if she had a child with it was considered illegitimate and treated as an outcast.

Every single African researcher I’ve read says with the utmost conviction that the practice of woman-to-woman marriage did not involve sexual relationship between the couple, it was not lesbianism because none of the women who married other women was romantically or sexually attracted to other women. They were only interested in children, every single woman who became a female husband just wanted a child that was considered legitimate in society’s eyes.

If woman-to-woman marriage was an ingenious way through which women manipulated the existing system to achiever higher and economic status, as this page suggests, what is to say that only heterosexual women took advantage of this? Is it impossible that lesbian-like women in the pre-colonial past could not have similarly manipulated the society sanctioned woman-to-woman marriage to achieve personal goals? Could the one lesbian in the village employed woman-to-woman marriage to be with a woman she loved? Then again I am still unsure of what pre-colonial Igbo reactions were to homosexuality, whether it was a taboo that lead to exile or something that was accepted, or something in between. Practices such as woman-to-woman marriage suggest fluidity between gender roles in pre-colonial Igbo culture yet they don’t really say much else. As sexual practices in Africa past remain under-researched, largely because most if not all of our scholars and researchers today are heterosexist and believe that everyone was heterosexual because children are everything, I doubt we’ll ever really find out what other kinds of sexual practices took place among female husbands and their wives. Especially those female husbands who were apparently single and wealthy women.

Woman-to-woman marriage is still practised in Nigeria today. Since writing this post, two of my friends have revealed that they have relatives who are female husbands and have wives.

*I personally question this obsession, really, all African societies apparently had for children from the dawn of time. On one hand it does make sense for people in any part of the world to want to continue their lineage and pass on their heritage, but I wonder why Africans seem to solely occupy this domain of fascinating over children. Some say it is due to high mortality rates, but was this really unique to Africa past, or present even. It is almost as if wanting the preservation of a culture is unique to us?

What I Read
Achebe, Nwando (2011), The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, Indiana University Press
Chukwuemeka, Kenneth (2012), “Female Husbands in Igbo Land: Southeast Nigeria”, The Journal of Pan African Studies, Vol. 5, No.1 (link goes to pdf files)
Cadigan, R. Jean (1998), “Woman-to-Woman Marriage: Practices and Benefits in Sub-Saharan Africa”, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1

Pre-colonial Igboland: Marriage to a Goddess

In Nwando Achebe’s recount of Ahebi Ugbabe’s life, she looks into the practice of marrying women to Goddesses as a sort of human sacrifice and slavery system.

With the abolition of the international slave trade in 1805, some Igbo people created new deities and mystical forces that were to help them fight the internal slavery that continued on after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as to protect those who were left behind. These primarily female deities functioned to defend societies, they served as both mothers and protectors. The deities shielded communities from slave raiders and they repopulated the communities by using the bodies of women and the sperm of “anonymous human male sperm donors”. This institution was called igo mma ogo and allowed female deities to marry women so as to repopulate society. The children born from such unions were said to be children of the Goddess and her human wife, they bore names of their deity parents.

The women who were chosen to marry Goddesses were usually demanded as retribution for crimes that someone in their family had committed. Such crimes included murder, manslaughter and theft. Although the women married to Goddesses were not allowed to marry any freeborn men, they were allowed to have sexual relationships with freeborn men, those are the male sperm donors mentioned above. These men played their part in helping the female deities become female fathers.

One example of a powerful female medicine that went on to become a deity is Adoro of Alor-Uno, a northern Igbo town. As with most other towns in northern Igboland where the most popular and powerful deities were female, Adoro was a Goddess. She started out as a “medicine”, a spiritual force, to protect Alor-Uno during wars with other towns, and to save them from the slaving activities of the Aro and Nike who were renowned as aggressive slave-traders. Adoro grew to become a Goddess who meted our justice in events in the community, she also maintained social harmony and was apparently one of the most powerful expressions of female religious and political power in Nsukka.

Adoro was a mother, a nurturer and a fertility Goddess tasked with the responsibility of repopulating a society that had been ravished by the slave trade. She was a powerful war deity and as a legal instrument, she was called upon to judge cases that were thought to be too difficult for human justice. Adoro also maintained moral conducted, she detected criminal behaviour (for example those who were thought to have committed a crime would be called to swear upon Adoro, if they were innocent they were free but if they were not, they would be punished by her). Adoro punished though were stole, told lies, bore false witness, committed murder or adultery.

Criminal offenders would present their children in marriage to appease the wrathful Goddess with the support of her priests. Sometimes the family of the criminal would cast lots so as to figure out who would offered to Adoro while at other times, Adoro would instruct the wrongdoer to marry one of her daughters (that is the daughters of one of her wives). The women who found themselves dedicated to Adoro were both freeborn and enslaved, while they served to help Adoro repopulate society, they also helped build a relationship between Adoro and their families as she offered her protection to them as they had a Goddess for an in-law.

The wives of Adoro led strictly regulated lives. Initially it was forbidden for women betrothed to Adoro to marry freeborn men, they had sexual relations with Adoro’s priests (attamas) who would impregnate them. Daughters born of these relations were forbidden from having relationships with either Adoro priests or freemen, but only with men of similar status. As the number of Adoro wives increased, freeborn men were encouraged to have sexual relationships with them. None of Adoro’s wives could return to their natal village, even if they wanted to.

With the full coming of colonialism, the British missionaries became obsessed with Nsukka religion. They had heard of the system of igo mma ogo and convinced that it was a native form of slavery and human sacrifice, the missionaries sought to destroy the institution. They were somewhat successful, and it may be worth mentioning that several of the women married to Adoro ended up becoming Christians or using Christianity to combat a system which they found oppressive.

*

Igo mma ogo seems to be a unique institution, Achebe only uses examples like Adoro and another Goddess Ohe. However, I find it interesting that she seem to overlook that in many societies, including pre-colonial Igbo ones, priest, priestesses or devotees of both Gods and Goddesses were often referred to as their “wives”. Institutions similar to igo mma ogo can be seen among the Akan of Ghana were priestesses would be married to a God or Goddess and thus be exempt from marrying human men although they were not barred from sexual activity. I would like to, in the upcoming paragraphs, examine another aspect of women marrying goddesses using Mami Wata, the beautiful and seductive Goddess who is thought to make people rich and powerful through sexual encounters with her or her agents.

Igbo Mami Wata devotees and worshippers were considered to be married to her, they gave up living as human wives for the mysticism, water worship and marriage to the Goddess. And when they were married to humans, Igbo Mami Wata worshippers would set aside one day of the four-day Igbo market week to meet marital obligations to their “Goddess husband”. The wives of Mami Wata were not tasked with having children to bring up population numbers as with Adoro or Ohe. Nonetheless, my fascination stems from Mami Wata being a seductive goddess, all my life I have heard of Mami Wata encountering people men sexually. I am yet to hear of a woman who encountered Mami Wata sexually and therefore couldn’t have sex with any human being ever again.

Mami Wata is a Goddess that is considered to be active in the social, economic and sexual lives of ordinary people. Mami Wata demands exclusivity, people who have sex with her or her agents may never have sex with other humans or risk insanity. Though she is popularly imagined as female, Mami Wata does not have a familiar sexual orientation and claims human spouses indiscriminately regardless of gender. So why would she only be having sexual encounters with her human male spouses or are Mami Wata’s human female spouses really good at keeping secrets?

Perhaps this is a topic for another post, either way I found it an interesting addition to this one since it fits in the theme of women marrying Goddesses. I also believe this is a perfect way to round this post up and open the next post which will be on the “controversial” topic of woman-to-woman marriage (it is only “controversial” because people are still arguing about whether the female husbands had sexual relations with their wives).

What I read.
Achebe Nwando (2003), “IGO MMA OGO: The Adoro Goddess, Her Wives, and Challengers— Influences on the Reconstruction of Alor-Uno, Northern Igboland, 1890–1994″, Indiana University Press, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Winter)

Achebe Nwando (2011), Ahebi Ugbabe: The Female Colonial King of Nigeria

Izugbara O. Chimaraoke, “Sexuality and the supernatural in Africa”, pp. 533-558, in African Sexualities: A Reader, ed. Sylvia Tamale