Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
Wedding gift exchange from the turn of the century to the present has served as a medium through which women in the Maradi valley of Niger could assert their worth, create social ties and respond to a shifting political economy. Rather than exploring the implications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘dowry’ in isolation, this paper sees wedding prestations as an ongoing and evolving dialogue in which women's roles and worth are contested, the nature of wealth is redefined and the terms of marriage are negotiated. The crisis in domestic labor which arose with the decline of slavery in the early decades of the century gave rise to informal unions through which the labor of junior women could be controlled. Women responded to these informal marriages by staging highly visible ceremonies which established the worth and standing of the bride. With the growth of an increasingly urban-centered commercial and bureaucratic economy, women have been drawn into a desperate ‘search for money’ to continue to meet their obligations in the gift economy. While the outward form of wedding gift exchange appears unchanged, the importance of cash to the acquisition of goods, services, and productive resources has radically altered both the content and the significance of gift exchange. Gifts no longer embody wealth in people derived from ability within an agro-pastoral economy. Instead they reveal the giver's access to the resources of the state and the market. Women's eroding position within the economy since 1950 has drawn them further and further into gift exchange, both in order to build a safety net in the form of exchange value stored in a woman's dowry and to secure the social ties which can ensure their continued access to increasingly contested resources.
1 For an insightful summary of the range of approaches taken to the analysis of marriage payments, see Comaroff's, John ‘Introduction’, in Comaroff, J. (ed.), The Meaning of Marriage Payments (Chicago, 1980), 1–47Google Scholar; the edited volume itself serves as an example of processual approaches to the question.
2 Callaway, Barbara, Muslim Hausa Women in Nigeria: Tradition and Change (Syracuse, 1987), 69–70Google Scholar. Schildkrout, Enid, ‘Dependence and autonomy: the economic activities of secluded Hausa women in Kano, Nigeria’, in Bay, E. (ed.), Women and Work in Africa (Boulder, 1982), 74Google Scholar. For a provocative view of how women's food trade can be seen as ‘unproductive’ see Raynaut, Claude, ‘Aspects socio-économiques de la préparation et de la circulation de la nourriture dans un village hausa (Niger)’, Cah. Ét. Afr., XVII (1977), 569–97.Google Scholar
3 This paper is based upon oral and archival research conducted in Maradi (Niger) and in France on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant in 1988–9. I would like to thank Jay Tribby, who first pointed out to me the novelty of my seeing women as defining themselves through gift exchange. Sara Berry, Jane Guyer, Steven Feierman, Joe Miller, and Richard Miller made comments and raised useful questions about various incarnations of this piece. The usual disclaimers apply.
4 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Cunnison, Ian (New York, 1967), 8–10, 40–3.Google Scholar
5 A slave woman could in principle ‘cut the rope of her slavery’ and earn her freedom by bearing her master a child, or by paying her master a redemption fee, or fansa. Abraham, R. C., Dictionary of the Hausa Language (London, 1962), 947.Google Scholar
6 Cooper, Barbara M., ‘Reflections on slavery, seclusion, and female labor in the Maradi region of Niger in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, J. Afr. Hist., XXXV (1994), 61–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 I have assigned a pseudonym to each of the women cited in order to protect her privacy. Tapes of these and other interviews are on deposit with the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music (Bloomington). Tanin, , 15 03 1989Google Scholar. Other women from rural areas spoke in very much the same terms: Hassan, Asabe, 9 03 1989Google Scholar; Akbar, Hajjiya, 19 02 1989Google Scholar; Fati, Hajjiya, 17 11 1988.Google Scholar
8 The emotional and symbolic resonances of cowries can be seen in the many uses to which they are still put: they are used in bori divination and sewn in rows on the costumes worn by bori adepts; they are mimicked in costumes of the Samarya youth organization as tokens of ‘tradition’; they serve as counters for gamblers. In the early decades of the century their uses were even more varied: they were used for jewelry, were tokens of affection a woman would receive from a suitor, figured in wedding songs and games and were used in all the transactions women took part in from day-to-day. The cowry was likened to the female genitals and was associated with pregnancy because of its rounded shape. It was also called an ‘eye’, through which one could read the future. Nicolas, Guy, Don rituel et échange marchand dans une société sahélienne (Paris, 1986), 126.Google Scholar
9 Hajjiya, ‘Jeka’, 14 02 1989.Google Scholar
10 Diarra, Fatoumata-Agnes, Femmes africaines en devenir: les femmes zarma du Niger (Paris, 1971), 303.Google Scholar
11 Landeroin, Captain, ‘Du Tchad au Niger: notice historique’, Documents scientifiques de la mission Tilho, 1906–1909 (3 vols.) (Paris, 1911), i, 513–14.Google Scholar
12 For a more extended discussion of the importance of thread and cloth in Maradi, see Cooper, Barbara M., ‘Cloth, commodity production and social capital: women in Maradi, Niger, 1890–1989’, African Economic History, XXI (1993), 51–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Hajjiya, ‘Malaya’, 4 09 1989.Google Scholar
14 Hajjiya, ‘Jeka’, 12 02 1989.Google Scholar
15 Indo, Hajjiya, 14 10 1988.Google Scholar
16 Smith, Mary F., Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa (New Haven, 1981), 175.Google Scholar
17 This prosperity was also reflected in gifts from the groom's female kin who brought the tuwon jere–the ‘porridge to be all lined up’ and offered to members of the bride's family. Smith, , Baba of Karo, 114–15.Google Scholar
18 Aisha, Hajjiya, 28 02 1989.Google Scholar
19 Labo, Aisha, 1 02 1989.Google Scholar
20 Gaba, Hajjiya, 16 03 1989.Google Scholar
21 Raynaut, Claude, Structures normatives et relations électives: étude d'une communauté villageoise haussa (Paris, 1972), 85.Google Scholar
22 Nicolas, Guy, Dynamique sociale et appréhension du monde au sein d'une société hausa (Paris, 1975), 190.Google Scholar
23 Buga, , 14 04 1989.Google Scholar
24 Nicolas, , Don rituel, 141–2.Google Scholar
25 Nicolas, , Don rituel, 220.Google Scholar
26 Cooper, , ‘Reflections’.Google Scholar
27 Buga, , 14 04 1989.Google Scholar
28 Nicolas, , Don rituel, 89, 136Google Scholar. The humiliation implied is amplified by using Tuareg social categories since, as Nicolas notes, the social distance between the noble Tuareg and their slaves was generally greater than that between the Hausa and their slaves.
29 For more detail, see Roberts, Pepe, ‘“Rural development” and the rural economy in Niger, 1900–75’, in Heyers, J., Roberts, P. and Williams, G. (eds.), Rural Development in Tropical Africa (New York, 1981), 193–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Raynaut, Claude, ‘Le cas de la région de Maradi (Niger)’, in Copans, J. (ed.), Sécheresses et famines du Sahel (2 vols.) (Paris, 1975), ii, 5–43Google Scholar. For a full discussion, see Cooper, Barbara M., ‘The women of Maradi: a history of the Maradi region of Niger from the ‘Time of Cowries’ to the ‘Time of Searching for Money’, 1900–1989’ (Ph.D. thesis, Boston University, 1992), ch. 2.Google Scholar
30 Divorce is quite common in this region. Among 105 of my informants whose marital careers I could fully document, 34 women experienced divorce two or more times. Of 105 first marriages, 57 ended in divorce; of 67 second marriages, 33 ended in divorce.
31 The earliest metal bowls were known as ‘Amerika’ and could be purchased from French traders women knew by local nicknames such as ‘The one who breaks bottles’ and ‘The one who has sheep’. Abu, Hajjiya Ta, 31 08 1989.Google Scholar
32 In the mid 1950s there might be separate rows set up of calabashes and enamel bowls; Labo, Aisha, 1 02 1989.Google Scholar
33 Nicolas, Guy and Mainel, Guy, La vallée du Gulbi de Maradi (Bordeaux, 1964), 247.Google Scholar
34 Callaway, , Muslim Hausa Women, 70.Google Scholar
35 This phenomenon occurred in Nigeria as well: see Pittin, Renée, ‘Marriage and alternative strategies: career patterns of Hausa women in Katsina City’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1979), 398.Google Scholar
36 Gaba, Hajjiya claims to be the first woman in Maradi to have received a metal camp bed in the mid 1940s, which she still owns and points to as evidence of the wealth of the grandmother who raised her, 10 03 1989.Google Scholar
37 Muni, A'i Mai, 25 04 1989.Google Scholar
38 Nicolas, , Don rituel, 50.Google Scholar
39 Hasiya, Hajjiya, 4 09 1989.Google Scholar
40 When a woman is asked whether a child raised in her household was her own (as opposed to a brief guest, a servant, a child being babysat), she will often respond rhetorically, ‘Didn't I marry her off?’ meaning that their relationship as parent and child had been duly brought to fruition through the arrangement of marriage and the provision of suitable gifts.
41 Comaroff, , ‘Introduction’, 33.Google Scholar