African widows: anthropological and historical perspectives

Variety characterizes widows' experiences around the world and in Africa south of the Sahara. This article explores the socioeconomic and cultural contexts of African widowhood, using anthropological studies in a number of African societies, including the author's research among Abaluyia of western Kenya. Some features of African widowhood are characteristic of African women's lives regardless of their marital status: their embeddedness in kinship systems and dependence on those systems for claims to productive resources, their economic self-reliance (which does not mean prosperity), strongly gendered divisions of labor, and the pervasiveness of patriarchal gender relations. Other features are specific to widowhood, including remarriage, issues of personal autonomy, and loss of status, access to productive resources and social support. Colonial and postcolonial historical transformations, including Africa's current dire economic situation and the AIDS epidemic, are considered in relation to widows' lives. An interesting question (given the theme of this edited volume) is whether a husband' s death puts African widows "on their own again," and whether, given African systems of kinship and marriage, most African women (and indeed men, too) can ever be said to be "on their own."