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The author attempts to essentially access a degree of power among the matriarchies that developed among West African societies. In an area manifested in Islamic-teaching assessments of socialized hierarchy that came from the Sahara, mixed with mercantile facilitations in the transatlantic slave trade, it becomes very circumstantial to understand how women with more social power or form of prestige were able to come around within their own respective hegemonies. Women in groups such as the Bundu and Sande of Sierra Leone contained their own pyramidal structure of social status and wealth (pg. 95, Societies and Stools). Wives and daughters were highly regarded among these societies spiritually, which instituted the way they reciprocated among marriage proposals.
I find this chapter in Michael A. Gomez’s Exchanging Our Country Marks to hold a lot of ambiguity to the account of women’s importance in these revolving societies. The Poro men groups in Sierra Leone, for instance, have their ways in personifying women’s lively power on earth to that of nature itself, like when they prescribe to shamanic rituals carried out by Senufo women who are the spiritual mediators. As my colleague Viktoriya mentioned in her post, most women who ended up in power were among skilled workers and crop farmers in these early settlements. These kind of women possessed skills at an almost equal pace to that of enslaved men, and led political roles acceptably within their own domain of social prowess, which sometimes evolved into a sense of prestige in the West African river systems of this time.