Women and Ethnicity

Finally, ethnicity has been implicitly recognized until now as strictly a matter involving men, because, according to the patriarchal model, men transmitted only identity to their offspring. This was so because the indigène in colonial society was excluded from the Napoleonic Code and could legally convey no property to his descendants. A more accurate hypothesis would suggest, however, that men, as the only recognized wage-earners in colonial society, transmitted class position to other men. As, despite massive evidence demonstrating it, the real proletarianization of women was never recognized by either colonial legislation or historians, African women transmitted a legal status of 'native', the basis of which lay in race. On the other hand, the resultant cultural identity^[59] —and this signifies the language being used as much as the whole process of socialization in urban culture—was transmitted by women and peer groups (children and adolescents of the streets, neighbourhoods and compounds) which formed according to principles we have not yet learned and whose impact on the reproduction of the expressed identity we are unable to determine. The school provides an impetus for wage-class socialization and status-related (racial) identity, which at the time was embodied in the term 'native'. And, of course, in the Belgian Congo the

school meant the Church. We should not underestimate the importance of this type of socialization (as we have all done until now) in analyzing the 'native' category in its relation to the reproduction of the political system, as well as for the political culture of ethnicity. The 'native' was a largely negative juridical concept as all 'natives' were excluded from the Napoleonic Code, which grouped together, by its own definition, ethnic beings, or rather, ethnic men. This situation recalls one existing in many parts of the West before World War II, in which the bourgeoisie was perceived as 'national' while the people were seen as 'ethnic'.

On the political level, ethnic culture was, and is, a purely male culture. At its top, the associations of graduates and, later, the ethnic associations such as Abaco ignored the very existence of women. In the colonial culture of the urbanized African male as expressed in the missionary press or in the first magazine for blacks. La Voix du Congolais, she is either the villainess—the 'free' woman (prostitute) who corrupts the race and is responsible for the fall in the birth rate, with the drop even in the rural areas attributed to her loose behaviour—or the faithful, reproductive shadow of her husband, who is himself in turn depicted as the loyal servant of the civilizing European. The ideal woman is effectively the shadow of a shadow.

I can only provide several clues into the matter, as its investigation awaits completion. For a very long time, at least until the 1940s, the principal strategy underlying the relationships between men and women in the city seemed to follow the very principle of the economy responsible for imposing proletarianization: individualism and trade, which means absolutely nothing as far as the social mechanisms of reproduction in the village were concerned. According to their own perception of things, those who went to the city, by force or by their own will, found themselves cast in the role of slaves because their legitimating ties with the rural community had been temporarily cut.^[60] They tried in this environment to take advantage of the uncertain opportunities represented by wage-earning and the market, and it was essentially for these reasons that associations of every sort, ranging from recreation to mutual assistance, became so common. It was here that men and the rare women lived, each on their side of the barrier separating male wage-earners from their female counterparts who were ideologically excluded from the wage-earning class. It was in this way that a trade developed which conformed nonetheless to the practice of bourgeois society in general and to colonial society in particular. The sexual relationship was a matter of ownership—either one owned a woman by virtue of a contract, or one purchased her services sporadically.

What is more, as the men were practically all either wage-earners employed by 'civilized' masters, as white employers were termed in legal terminology, or 'undesirables', the economic life of the African urban centres was carried out by women. As the number of women in the urban areas grew from the 1940s onwards, economic life intensified. They circulated more easily than men, whose assignments were controlled by the state. Finally, they were able to cross ethnic and even racial barriers, if they were willing to pass from one man to another as wife or cohabitant. With the development of native urban centres, administrative practice recognized their importance in what would today be called the informal economy,^[61] but what at that time was considered illicit for all purposes except tax collection. The women sold sex and alcohol which they produced themselves in those urban centres or in the surrounding villages. The fact that there was a tax on 'single women' and a tax on beer allowed many families in para-traditional centres to survive, for the colonial state found it to its fiscal advantage to permit women to remain in the urban areas.

The wage-earner's spouse, who had been brought to the urban industrial centre to stabilize the man's labour in one place, was a perfect proletarian since she was denied a wage and was, for a long time, even deprived of the food ration that was a legal component of her husband's salary. Without any resources whatsoever, she had to live and support her children by miraculously multiplying her husband's food ration which the employers had calculated as adequate to sustain a single working man. In the city she had neither relatives, nor land, nor even a house, which ordinarily belonged to the employer. Contrary to the situation in the rural 'extended family', which could be observed existing in a continuum ranging from 'households' to residence communities, and to relatives, the woman proletarian assumed a narrowed role in an institution specializing in the reproduction of labour and which was subjected to definite cycles.^[62] Her social status was undoubtedly worse in the urban area than in the village, because, although 'ethnic' law, whose codification was based on an abstract anthropological model, epitomized arbitrariness in the village setting, economic activities were fewer in number and less strenuous there. Three things allowed the colonized woman to get around the role of spouse that colonial ideology placed upon her: trade, which could only be illicit in terms of the existing legislation; solidarity between women and relatives; and, to an ever-increasing degree, the production of children, as the colonial world considered the woman only as a reproducer and protected her in this role alone.

It is significant that African 'modernity', which is basically equivalent to the production of the wage-earning world and the évolués, in its principal religious expression as Messianic, hence essentially Christian movements, is not only basically male-oriented but openly hostile to women. The witchhunt ordered by Mwana Lesa in the 1920s aimed at women particularly, while Khakism commands woman to be a sexual instrument in the service of her husband.^[63]

Women established their own social and economic space in the city, however, by the 1950s at the latest. This was essentially that city-country space which assured the circulation of consumer goods as well as the movement of children. At one time, children used to be sent back to the village but increasingly from the end of World War II they came to the city from the village to be introduced to urban culture, to go to school and, in the 1950s, to allow the 'father' to become eligible for family allowances and the extra food ration for children under his guardianship. The women in cities were legally powerless, but through their social practices they gave shape and form to this space where the real identities of their children's generation developed: identities which were moulded before these children later became wage-earners or members of the lumpenproletariat. It is probably this fact which explains the importance which the poets of Négritude give to filial devotion toward the mother and which seems to me to be specifically a characteristic of urban culture in the colonial world and not necessarily one belonging to 'tradition'.

However, one ought not to yield to the illusion of autonomy for popular female activities. Women were rigidly controlled unless they left this mixed space for the lumpenproletariat,^[64] where, being exposed to the arbitrary nature of the colonial state, they oscillated between prostitution and impossible wage-earning conditions.^[65] With the perhaps essential complicity of the colonial institutions, the existence of the dowry and its manipulation structured the exploitation of women and the youngest male family members,^[66] and 'traditional' authorities still controlled its mechanisms.