Colonialism was essentially the creation of an infrastructure to facilitate and legitimize the theft of resources from the colonies, and for Europe to accrue the profits.*
Prior to the introduction of artificial wants and the requirement to pay crippling colonial taxes, African people had a lot more time to style their hair, an aspect of self-care that seemingly infuriated the British: “The idle husbands put [their wives] upon braiding, and fettishing out their wooly hair (in which sort of ornament they are prodigious proud and curious), keeping them every day, for many hours together, at it.”31
I don’t know about you, but a lifestyle of abundance that leaves me with more than ample time to get my hair did and chill with my homeys sounds much more appealing than a world of running out of money ten days before payday, direct debits, overdrafts, hour-long rush-hour commutes, and the whole nine-to-five situation, but hey, that’s what we call progress, right?
To meet the demands of the British Crown, African farmers had to seek unskilled, poorly paid wage employment. The Nigerian scholar A. G. Adebayo argues that any examination of the underdevelopment of Africa is incomplete without understanding how taxation was used to uproot the people, extract their resources, and remove from them not only a part of their income but also the investment capital they might have saved.32
As recently as 150 years ago, wage labor seemed both degrading and perverse to the people of what was about to become Nigeria. The schedule that most of us grudgingly accept today—starting work at a certain predetermined time (not of your own choice), eating at a predetermined hour dictated by a boss, finishing work at a regimented time (ordained from on high)—was seen by my great-greats as akin to slavery. It was considered anathema to work for a person who was not a blood relative. Compounding these affronts on freedom and autonomy, the British imposed fines for lateness and unauthorized absence. These were deducted from what were already meager or “starvation” wages.
THE INVENTION OF WOMEN
“But whoa, steady on, Emma, African cultures are inherently oppressive, sexist, and patriarchal.” This common, progressive-liberal concern is an almost knee-jerk response whenever I start to talk about gender in the African context. I’m curious, though; we’ve seemingly accepted that gender is a social construct, but if this is true, wouldn’t it be constructed differently at different times as well as places? If we have accepted that it is a construct, why would we understand the Western category of “woman” as universal and historically consistent?
We might consider the fact that the group that came to be known as “women” during the colonial era were probably not historically conceived of as a cohesive group, united through a shared biology; or that, united now as “women,” this group’s fate actually took a turn for the worse under the European administration.
The postcolonial scholar Walter Rodney writes that colonialism introduced a system whereby:
Men entered the money sector more easily and in greater numbers than women, women’s work became greatly inferior to that of men within the new value system of colonialism: men’s work was “modern” and women’s was “traditional” and “backward.” Therefore the deterioration in the status of African women was bound up with the consequent loss of the right to set indigenous standards of what work had merit and what did not.33 [my italics]
In The Invention of Women, Yoruba sociologist Oyèrók Oyěwùmí goes further, making the argument that gender was not an organizing principle in Yoruba culture. Accordingly, lineage and seniority were far more important than the presence or absence of a vagina in determining an individual’s position in society. This argument is supported linguistically by the lack of gender in Yoruba pronouns and by the fact that Yoruba names can be used for both men and women. Among the various attacks women were now subjected to, wage labor was one that was hugely damaging.
The gender distinction noted by Rodney “led to the perception of men as workers and women as non-workers and therefore appendages to men.”34 This was dangerously misleading. African men, unlike their European counterparts, were paid a pittance, ensuring that women’s labor was now more necessary than ever before, yet at the same time it was becoming newly devalued.
Wage labor demanded migration away from ancestral lands, to new colonial, commercial centers. This had a deleterious effect on the “structure, cohesion and function of the family, the community, and interpersonal relationships.” As Oyěwùmí explains, women accompanied their husbands, moving away from their kin groups. That most powerful of resources—the chorus of “mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, best girlfriends”—was being disassembled.
The case of Madame Bankole, a subject in an ethnographic study of Yoruba migrant families, is illustrative:
In 1949 she married . . . another Ijebu man . . . He was transferred frequently from place to place, and she went with him, changing her trade each time. From Warri in the Western Niger Delta she transported palm oil to Ibadan and re-sold it there to retailers.
Then from Jos and Kano she sent rice and beans to a woman to whom she sublet her . . . stall, and received crockery in return that she sold in the North. She also cooked and sold food in the migrant quarters of those towns. From 1949 to 1962 she moved around with him.35
Beyond the apparent entrepreneurship that characterizes Yoruba business culture, we observe a dramatic change in Madame Bankole’s status:
Madame Bankole, had become a wife, an appendage whose situation was determined by her husband’s occupation . . . The combination of male wage labor and migration produced a new social identity for females as dependents and appendages of men . . . For example, in spite of the fact that Madame Bankole was not dependent in economic terms, there is a perception of her dependency built into the new family situation. The anafemales had moved from being aya to wife.36
A corollary of women’s exaggerated identity as wives was that other identities became muted. As couples moved away from kin groups, women’s identity as offspring (daughters) and members of the lineage became secondary to their identities as wives. Though Madame Bankole retained a dominant precolonial occupation in Yorùbalánd, . . . the fact that she had to fold up shop whenever her husband’s job demanded shows that she and her occupation were secondary. The family itself was slowly being redefined as the man plus his dependents (wife/wives and children) rather than as the “extended” family, including siblings and parents.37
In the changing colonial landscape, hairdressing was a trade that women on the move could practice in any new town, but this informal economy often represented a departure from the past. Niangi Batulukisi, a researcher of African design, explains:
Without denying the skills of contemporary individuals, we have to emphasize that in the past there were no professional hairdressers like those who practice in the African cities of today. Among those who follow the old traditions, a person’s choice of a coiffeur or coiffeuse is dictated by a friendship or family relationship, since giving someone the responsibility for your hair is an act of trust. (The fear that some of your clippings might fall into the hands of a person who wished you evil, and could use it to do you harm, justifies the greatest possible care in selecting the person who will do your hair.)