Birthing Wealth? Motherhood and Poverty in East-Central Uganda, c.700-1900

Abstract

Motherhood as a means of ensuring future status is a well-established concept in African history and has perhaps been best articulated by Claude Meillassoux in his study of pre-capitalist agrarian societies. In his analysis, ‘women benefit from the agricultural labour of their unmarried sons and … their influence depends on the number and position of their children’. This dependence is complicated by the fact that women are ‘deprived of actual rights over their progeny’. Should their ‘children desert them, women have no redress; if childless they cannot, as men can, adopt a descendant; should they be infertile, in old age they are seen as witches’.1 According to Meillassoux, a woman's social — and thus economic — status is entirely reliant on her biological ability to procreate and on her social ability to ensure that her children do not abandon her. This vision of the interdependence of motherhood and African women's social standing is widely held. It has become a commonplace in the literature on pre-colonial Africa to note the vulnerability of infertile women to poverty and social exclusion.2 To a certain extent this holds true. Research on the Yoruba in nineteenth-century Nigeria, for example, shows that women were perceived to use witchcraft to improve their position in a polygynous household in the hope of reducing the number of children born to their co-wives. Those women without any children were presumed to act with envy or malice towards other women in the household who had achieved reproductive success.3 If the lack of children is understood to result in low social standing, the inverse is implicitly held to be true: namely, women who had large numbers of children achieved high social standing.