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Africa before the 'zuŋ u

Our land, Our People, Our culture !

merchant exchange of goods for their community. Women were responsible for a number

of things, including:

setting the rules of trade among themselves i.e. market taxes and tariffs
organising and managing the market system

agreeing terms of trade with outsiders.

Significant parts of Africa were matrilineal, and some still are.

Some 20 million Akan live in their traditional extended family households in areas

covered by modern day Ghana and Ivory Coast. Akan matrilineage has been described as
“A man is strongly related to his mother's brother, but only weakly related to his father's

brother." As a result, a man's nephew will have priority over his own son in terms of who

inherits what. 30

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Patriarchical Victorian m'zuŋ u colonial powers imported their paramount chief
model and ignored the important role that African women played and can continue to play
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in their communities. Little has changed. Little will change until we m'zungu make
fundamental changes to the way we approach modern day Africa.

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Institutionalised m'zuŋ u graduates sitting in their DfiD/FCDO standardised central
London offices are ill-equipped to be able to understand the concept of African Solutions to
African Problems.

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African Slavery

Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they

were in much of the rest of the ancient world. But slavery in Africa was quite different from
that brought about by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The following are excerpts from a paper entitled "Slavery and the Slave Trade in Pre-
Colonial Africa" . The whole paper is not very long but the very specific detail it contains
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related to different African regions, different African societies and different African tribes

makes it a very credible summary.

... the African continent became intimately connected with slavery, both as one of the
principal areas in the world where slavery was common, and also as a major source of

slaves...