“The Father is also the Sister”: A Non-binary Gendered History of Matrilineal Bantu Communities

Abstract

Gender, as broadly construed by Bantu-speaking peoples, is not fixed in the same way that it is in the West. This kind of gender flexibility is counter to binary gender concepts which classify gender into two separate, opposite, and rigid forms of masculine and feminine. This study proposes that in the Bantu Matrilineal Zone [BMZ], gender, though sometimes acknowledged, was not a major factor in determining authority or responsibility and was rarely conceptualized in binary terms by Bantu-speaking peoples over the three thousand years prior to colonialism. The lack of historical binary gender concepts within the BMZ is supported by ethnographic studies and oral traditions that represent social activity between 1450 and the present, as well as linguistic data which can date Bantu epistemologies and social history to earlier periods. To recapture Bantu social history over the longue durée, it is necessary to peel away layers of colonial and post-colonial impositions. During the late precolonial and colonial period, most of the writings of missionaries, anthropologists, and historians described Bantu-speaking people in Western-centric binary and deterministic gendered terms; non-Bantu concepts of gender were often imposed onto Bantu ideas of family and society in ways that overemphasized the significance of gender.

Keywords

• Bantu social history
• non-binary gender
• linguistic historical analysis
• Bantu life stages