‘I am in the Batawana's country,’ wrote the Herero chief Samuel Maharero to the British Magistrate in Tsau in Ngamiland on 28 September 1904. ‘I am writing to tell you that I have been fighting with the Germans in my country; the Germans were my friends; they made me suffer so much by the manner in which they troubled me, that I fought with them…’ (PRO CO 879/80). On the same date he wrote to the Tawana chief Sekgoma: ‘I tell you that I have fought with the German, they trouble me and killed my people, then I was angry about that. I have fought with them for 8 (eight) months, and I have no ammunition to-day, this is the reason why I came here…’ (PRO CO 879/86).

African men, like men everywhere, have dominated the public sphere, holding the vast majority of official positions of power and authority. In pre-colonial African societies women were formally subordinate to male authority and male dominance was buttressed by an ideology of male superiority and a status system where women showed deference to men. But formal systems, ideologies and codes of etiquette are not realities. In some societies women wielded considerable influence and authority, so much in fact that these systems have been characterised as dual-sex political systems with each sex managing its own affairs (Okonjo, 1976). Women were not so much involved in hierarchical orders of relationships as in complementary, mutually dependent relationships.

On that day if you had seen me, you would not have known me; dirty cap with feathers and a long stick, since doesn't fear send a walking stick forward? I put dirty clothes on and I looked like ‘massa’ [my husband]. I even wore plant leaves around my neck so as to make all men [people] put their minds to this [problem].…Today fombuen doesn't march because there isn't trouble but if cows come again they will join! Women know the sound of the whistle and they will leave their cooking pots on the fire. [A Kedjom Ketinguh woman who participated in the 1958 fombuen march to Bamenda]

The Nyamwezi and Sukuma area of Tanzania covers about 50,000 square miles from Lake Victoria in the north to the southern edges of Tabora District. The area probably contains between 4 and 5 million people, about one fifth of the total Tanzanian mainland population. The two peoples speak regional variants of a single language—the name Sukuma simply meant ‘northerners’ originally—and they share many common social structural and cultural forms (Abrahams, 1967b).