For at least the past twenty years, historians of pre-colonial Africa have studied gender and ethnic relations, but have focused on either gender or ethnicity without making reference to the other. This essay redresses this neglect by demonstrating that changes in gender and ethnic relations within pre-colonial Africa so profoundly influenced each other that it is impossible to understand one without also taking into consideration the other. Documenting this intersection requires more than simply reconstructing how ethnic groups (in their efforts to compete with others for social and political status) altered gender relations within their societies by handling differentially the affairs of their female and male members. It involves more than analyzing how those disadvantaged because of their gender used the prevailing ethnic relations to ameliorate their own situations, and how these actions in turn altered ethnic relations in the societies in which they lived. It requires as well that we reconceptualize the very definition of ethnicity.

All too often, terms that define particular social categories provide an exclusive racial, ethnic, class or gendered definition. We ignore intersections among these categories. In far too many African historical studies, for example, African men have been defined as representatives of their ethnic groups and as such are described according to their ethnicity. Women are simply women, an undifferentiated and marginalized mass that by implication played no role at all in shaping the content of their own identities or that of others.