Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast

This article explores transformations in gender relations along the Swahili Coast of East Africa through an historical examination of four domains of social life: politics, kinship, economics, and musical performance. By examining data about the relative social positions of women and men across a span of five centuries, I seek to counteract widespread tendencies to project assumptions of male dominance onto the past and to uncritically attribute current practices of gender segregation to the presence of Islam. Islam penetrated the Swahili Coast as early as the ninth century, yet gender segregation is a quite recent phenomenon dating back only to the last century. The data presented here cumulatively indicate: 1) that there have been shifts in Swahili society from a time when women occupied positions of greater power, prestige, wealth, and opportunity than is available to them today; 2) that this has entailed the cultural elaboration of an opposition between "African" and "Arab" designations; 3) that this opposition has a strongly gendered dimension; and 4) that musical practices play a central role in these historical and cultural processes.