Despite the backdrop of violence in the encounter between Almoravids, the French, and the Soninke, it is still possible to identify the Soninke legacy of a political and social organization which was economically self-sufficient, built on a matricentric unit of production dominated by women. The chapter argues that this matricentric unit of production can be traced to the survival of a matriarchy system in Gajaaga. Most types of social structures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Gajaaga and its hinterland, consisted of syncretism between Islam and animism favoring patriarchy. In fact, patriarchy in Gajaaga was new and borrowed from Islam, which in turn was brought in by the trans-Saharan slave trade. As such, it overshadowed the previous system of matriarchy, which we can dredge up from the past by analyzing the present existence of autonomy and power held by women in the Soninke socio-economic organization. By analyzing European travelers’ accounts of the West African ecological environment, the relation between communities and nature, and the agricultural fields crossed by Europeans in the Upper Senegal river region, we can determine the existence of the matriarchal character in Gajaaga.

The essay provides an overview of Wright’s engagement with psychoanalysis. It traces Wright’s literary adaptations of psychoanalysis from his first completed novel Lawd Today! to his later writings and surveys his collaborations with the German-American social psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham’s studies of matricide provided Wright with the material for his novel Savage Holiday (1954), which has long been recognized as his most explicitly psychoanalytic fiction. Wertham developed his theory of matricide partly through a critique of Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet and he repudiated Freud’s claim of the universality of the Oedipus complex. In contrast to the critical consensus that reads Savage Holiday as an orthodox depiction of an Oedipus complex, the essay traces the novel’s indebtedness to Wertham’s work and its relation to Wright’s anti-colonial nonfiction. Within these contexts, Savage Holiday appears as a critique, rather than an orthodox representation of Freudian psychoanalysis. Through this rereading of the novel, the social history of matriarchy emerges as an important theme of Wright’s writings of the 1950s.