Patriarchy and The Women Who Keep It Alive: A Colonial and African Lens

Patriarchy doesn’t just survive because men enforce it. It survives because women uphold it too—not out of cruelty, but because the system made survival depend on compliance. In this episode, Chisom traces the root cause of patriarchy (agriculture, private property, and the control of reproduction), shows how colonialism and religion weaponized it in Africa, and uses her Three Clarities Framework to diagnose why mothers reinforce culture that harm daughters, grandmothers police granddaughters, and women enforce the very systems that broke them. This isn’t about blame. It’s about naming the system—and rooting it out. 

Transcript

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I recently did a segment on white women and the patriarchy. In that segment, I said most of what we call gender equality was built to get white women equal to white men, not necessarily to dismantle oppression, just to rearrange it. In that context, I was looking at patriarchy from a Western perspective. This week, I want to unpack patriarchy from a West African context, a system I unfortunately know intimately well, one that is upheld not only by men, but often by women too. So here we are. I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom, where I bring clarity to the complexity of leadership, power, and systems. Patriarchy does not show up the same everywhere. It mutates, it dresses itself up in culture, in religion, in respectability, in tradition, it adapts. But its purpose is always consistent to destabilize women, to reduce us to dust, and to grind us down so much that we start to mistake our survival for freedom. And the unfortunate fact is that women are often the people who keep the patriarchy alive. We do it not to be cruel, but because the system gives us no other choice. Today I wanna talk about exactly how patriarchy reproduces itself through mothers who mutilate and cut their daughters, through grandmothers who police granddaughters, women who enforce the systems, the very systems that broke them. And I also want to explore how we root it out. To have this conversation, I want to segment this podcast into five different acts. So the first act I'm going to call the root cause. So basically looking at where patriarchy actually came from. I'm also going to say something that might not surprise you. Patriarchy is not natural. It is not biological. It is not ancient. And it is not universal. for 97 % of human history, roughly 200,000 years. Most societies were relatively egalitarian. Men and women had different roles, yes, but power was shared. Resources were distributed. Decisions were made collectively. Hunter-gatherer societies operated this way. Women gathered food and in most groups, women's gatherings provided more calories than men's hunting. That meant that women had economic power and economic power meant social power. There were no laws about who could inherit what, no anxiety about paternity, no need to control women's bodies or sexuality to ensure your wealth passed down to your biological children because there was no wealth to pass down. And then agriculture happened. Around 10,000 years ago, humans began farming, settling in one place, accumulating surplus. And for the first time in human history, you had something valuable that could be owned, controlled, and passed down in the form of land. And that changed everything. It was the birth of patriarchy because it meant power, prosperity, inheritance, and the control of women. Scholars like Gerda Lerner and Friedrich Engels documented that once men began accumulating property, livestock, tools, they wanted to pass it down to their biological children. But how do you ensure paternity when there's no DNA tests? You control women. You control women's bodies. You control women's sexuality. And you control women's reproduction. Marriage became a contract to guarantee legitimate heirs. Women became properties themselves. They were transferred from their father to their husbands. Virginity became valuable because it assured paternity. And adultery became a crime, but only for women. And this wasn't about biology. This was really about economics. And as an economist, I should know. And this is also what Engels called the world historic defeat of the female sex. Patriarchy emerged not because men were naturally dominant, but because private property created the need to control reproduction. And the easiest way to control reproduction was to subordinate women. clearly when I say this, patriarchy is an economic system disguised as culture. And I also want to be clear, I am not romanticizing pre-agricultural societies. Life was hard. Infant mortality and child mortality was high. Violence existed, but gender relations were fundamentally different. The shift to agriculture didn't just change how we produced food. It changed who had power. It introduced a hierarchy, not just between men and women. but also between rich and poor, landowners and laborers, rulers and subjects, patriarchy and class oppression emerged together. They are not separate systems, they are interlocking systems. And once patriarchy took root, it spread through conquests, through trade, through religion, through colonialism, but it didn't spread the same way everywhere. I'm gonna call this next segment, Act 2. And I wanna talk about how patriarchy mutated in Africa through colonialism, religion, and the erasure of women's power. In Africa, the story we have been told is incomplete because pre-colonial Africa, there was power Before European colonialism, many African societies were matrilineal. What does that mean? It means descent, inheritance, power, were traced through the mother's line. Your identity came from your mother's family. Property was controlled by women. Children belonged to their mother's clan. In the Akan societies of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, the Queen Mother selected the chief. She had her own council. She presided over disputes about marriages and inheritance and household matters. She was not subordinate to the male chief. She was his equal, his advisor, his check. In a way, she was the scale in the society. In the kingdoms of West Africa, women dominated the market. They controlled trade. They had economic independence. They didn't need a husband to survive. In matrilineal societies across central and southern Africa, women had the right to use land. They controlled agricultural production. Their labor was valued, not invisible. Now, this doesn't mean that these societies were some matriarchal utopias. Men still had significant power in many areas. Petrarchy existed in some colonial African societies. But the story is not that simple. The story is not uniform. Now, what colonialism did was that when it arrived, it systematically dismantled female power. So let me tell you what the British, the French, the Portuguese, and the Belgian colonizers did. Number one, they refused to recognize female authority. administrators saw African governance through their own patriarchal lens. They couldn't comprehend that women held power. So they ignored queen mothers. They refused to recognize female chiefs. They only negotiated with men. In Asante, which is basically modern-day Ghana, Queen Mothers had presided over their own courts for centuries. They handled household disputes, marriage cases, market disputes, and both men and women brought cases to them. The British erased this. They only recognized male chiefs as native authority. Whereas female rulers continued to exercise authority, their decisions were never recorded, never legally recognized, and never written into colonial law. And by the time Ghana became independent in 1957, national legislation followed the colonial precedents. Only male rulers were recognized. To this day in Ghana, Queen Mothers are still fighting for legal recognition. So what else did the colonizers do? Number two, they imposed Victorian gender ideology through missionary Christianity. Christian missionaries didn't just bring the Bible, they brought European ideas about where a woman's place was in the world. Women belong in the home. Women should be modest. Women should be obedient. Women should be submissive. A woman's value is her purity. The is childbearing and domestic labour Mission schools, basically which was the primary avenues for Western education, reinforced this. Boys were educated for leadership and paid work and girls, if they were educated at all, were taught to be good Christian wives. This is to say that the colonial economy was built for men. Cash crops like rubber and cocoa and palm oil and groundnuts were controlled by men and European firms. The markets that women once dominated became masculinized. Women were pushed into informal economy. They were pushed out of trade. They were pushed out of paid work. Furthermore, matrilineal land systems where women used to have rights were replaced by colonial land laws that only recognized male ownership. Something else they did, so number three, they weaponized religion to justify patriarchy. And this is where it gets insidious. Islam arrived in sub-Saharan Africa. from the seventh century onward. Christianity arrived with European colonialism from the 15th century. Both religions were used to justify the subordination of women. But here's what you need to understand. Religion did not create patriarchy in Africa. Patriarchy used religion as its cover story. At this point, want to include a trigger warning because I'm going to talk about female genital mutilation, otherwise known as FGM as an acronym. So FGM, for example, predates both Islam and Christianity by over 2000 years. It is not required by the Quran and it is not required by the Bible. But in many communities, women were told that it was a religious requirement, that God demanded it, that a unmutilated or an uncut girl was unclean, unmarriageable, shameful to the family. And the same happened with purity culture, with virginity testing, with women's exclusion from religious leadership. Patriarchy hides behind religion. It's claimed divine authority and that makes it almost impossible to challenge because challenging the practice feels like challenging God. And it results in African women losing power legally. economically, politically, and culturally. By the time African countries gained independence from their colonizers, the damage was done. Colonial law remained on the books. Mission-educated elites, almost entirely male, took over governance. The cash economy excluded women. Customary laws were codified based on men's testimony, giving men advantages in marriage, divorce, property, and inheritance. And the cruelest part. This part, this colonial Christian capitalist patriarchy, was rebranded as African tradition. It is not The victorian gender roles that missionaries imposed, they called it tradition. The male only property rights that colonizers legislated, they called it tradition. The exclusion of women from leadership called tradition. But it is not tradition, it is colonialism wearing a mask. Now I wanna talk about how women became the enforcers of patriarchy. Thinking about it from the context of patriarchal bargaining and the psychology of survival. And this is what I think is the hardest part. And a lot of people don't wanna talk about these parts, but we have to ask questions like, why do mothers cut their daughters? Why do grandmothers police granddaughters bodies, movements, clothing and behaviors? Why do women enforce the very systems that broke them? I want to introduce you to a concept if you don't already know of it, it's called patriarchal bargaining. And this term comes from sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti And it's quite simple. It's basically when the system offers you no real power. So you bargain for whatever scraps of security you can get. And this is the logic of the Patriarchal bargaining. Here's essentially how it works. You're a woman in a society where you can't own property. You can't inherit wealth. You can't work for wages. Your only path to economic security is through marriage. Your only path to... Respectability is through your husband and son. So what do you do? You comply, you conform, and you make yourself marriageable. And once you're married, you endure. You submit to your husband. You submit to your mother-in-law. You work without pay. boys. Because if you don't have a boy child, you don't really have a child. And then you wait. You wait for your sons to grow up. You wait for your sons to marry. You wait for the day when you become the mother-in-law. And finally, after decades of subordination, You get power, over your own life, but power over your daughter-in-law's. This is the bargain. You endure oppression now in exchange for the promise of authority later. If you're wondering why mothers would cut and mutilate their daughters, it's survival. And I want to talk about FGM specifically. 230 million girls and women alive today have been cut, most before the age of five. And in the vast majority of cases, it is women performing the cutting. Mothers who hold down their daughters, grandmothers who insist it must be done. Why? Are these mothers monsters? No. they do it because the system made them believe that this is the only way to protect their daughters. UNICEF calls female genital mutilation a self-enforcing social convention. Here's what that means. In societies where FGM is practiced, an uncut girl is seen as unclean, unmarriageable, source of family shame wayward in a sense they believe that an unmutilated child will be promiscuous. If you don't cut your daughter, she will be mocked, excluded, rejected by potential husbands. She will not be able to marry. And if she can't marry, then she has no economic value. So mothers make a calculation. The pain of cutting is temporary. The pain of social exclusion is permanent. They are not trying to harm your daughters. They are trying to secure your daughter's futures in a system where marriage is survival.

And here's the most painful part: 17:25

many women who cut don't even associate the health consequences such as chronic pain, infections, complications in childbirth, death, with the procedure. even worse, when a girl falls ill after being cut, it's attributed to like evil spirits, bad luck, God's will, but never the razor blade. and this cycle continues to reproduce itself. This is how patriarchy sustains itself without men needing to enforce it directly. mothers police their daughters because they were policed mother-in-laws dominates daughter-in-laws because they were dominated women enforce beauty standards virginity culture docility submission because they paid that price themselves and if they had to pay it why should not the next generation They don't ask questions. They assume it is the norm and they continue the abominable act. But they don't do it in malice. It is trauma reproducing itself. And this trauma is reinforced by religion because you were told that God demands it. It is reinforced by culture because you were told it's tradition. It is reinforced by economics because compliance means security. It is also reinforced by social pressure because non-compliance means exclusion. Patriarchy doesn't just break women. It turns them into enforcers. Let me be very clear. I'm not blaming mothers. I'm naming a system. A system that gives women so few options that enforcing harm on their daughters feel like the only way to protect. A system that offers women so little power that the only power they can access is the power to subordinate other women. Patriarchy will not end until women stop reproducing it. and women will not stop reproducing it until systems exist where survival doesn't require compliance. So like I do most things in life, I'm going to use my three clarities to diagnose this system. So identity clarity. Who are we protecting? When a mother cuts her daughter, she believes she's protecting her. But what is she protecting her from? from a system that punishes non-compliance. When we enforce virginity culture, we believe we're protecting girls from shame. But who's shame? Is it the family's shame? The community's shame? We're not protecting the girl. We're protecting the system's stability. When we worry that little girls, tiny girls will be promiscuous, where does the boy or the man fit into all of this? Do they have zero responsibility? The question is, who are we actually protecting when we enforce these norms? Are we protecting our daughters? we protecting the pay patriarchy And are we protecting men? The context we need to see here is that these systems are interlocking. Patriarchy doesn't operate alone. It operates alongside colonialism, which dismantled pre-colonial gender systems and imposed European patriarchy. It's interlocks with capitalism, which turned women's bodies into commodities in marriage markets. It intersects with religion, which gave patriarchy divine authority. And it also intersects with racism, which justified colonial violence as civilizing backward Africans. You cannot dismantle one without addressing the other. Gender inequality and class inequality are not separate problems. They merge together. They reinforce each other. A poor woman has fewer options than a wealthy woman. A black woman faces both racism and sexism. A disabled woman, a fat woman, a trans woman faces compounded oppression. Context clarity means seeing the whole system, not just the symptoms. And then we move to power clarity. What would it take to stop? It's a machine. and we need to start asking the hard questions. What power do women actually have to break the cycle? Individual resistance is not enough. A single mother refusing to mutilate or cut her daughter will face social exclusion in places where it is practiced or not illegal. And her daughter will as well. Patriarchy is a collective system. Dismantling it requires collective action. So what would it actually take? Number one, economic independence for women. If women can own property, inherit wealth, earn wages, and do not need marriage for survival, the bargain collapses. In many places, of course, women own property, they have wealth, they have jobs, they earn wages. But marriage is still a symbol of status, a symbol of achievement, a symbol of survival. And long as that remains as a bedrock to patriarchy, women will continue to be subordinates to men. Now I am NOT saying that people should not get married. My point is we need to unshackle women from economic interdependence on systems that keep them small. What would it actually take? Legal reform, laws that criminalize FGM within an African context and also everywhere else where it is practiced, laws that guarantee women's property rights, laws that guarantee an end to child marriage, laws that protect women from domestic violence. third, we also need education, but not the colonial kind. We need education that doesn't just reinforce gender hierarchies. We need education that teaches girls that they have value beyond marriageability or marriage. We also need community led. norm change, not top-down Western uh interventions, but grassroots movements where communities decide collectively to abandon harmful practices. And we also need redistribution of power, not just representation, not just a few women in leadership while the structures remain intact, but we actually need redistribution of land, of wealth, of decision-making authority. clarity means naming what it will actually cost to dismantle the system and that cost is high because the people who benefit from patriarchy men yes but also the women who've climbed to the top of the hierarchy will continue to resist it So how do we root it out? I'm gonna call this act five. So what are some tools for dismantling patriarchy? What can we do? How do we actually root out a system that is 10,000 years old, that is entrenched in law, in religion, in culture, in economics, and also women themselves in force? Here's what I think are some concrete tools. Number one. solve a problem we have to admit it exists. So we have to name it as a system, not individual failure. We need to stop blaming individual women for enforcing patriarchy. We need to start naming the systems that give them no other choice. When you see a mother policing her daughter's clothing, don't just call her oppressive. Ask, what is she afraid of? What is she afraid will happen if she doesn't? When you see women upholding purity culture, don't just call them complicit. Ask, what were they taught about their own values? Naming the system means seeing the structure, not just the people who are trapped in it. Another way to root it out is through economic independence, and that has to be non-negotiable. As long as women's survival and value depends on marriage, patriarchal bargaining will continue. Women need rights to own and inherit property, access to education and paid employment, control over their own income, legal protections against uh economic abuse. This is not about individual empowerment. This is about dismantling the material conditions that make patriarchy rational, because it is anything but rational. A third way to root it out is through community led change, not top down interventions. We don't want Western NGOs parachuting into African communities to save women from FGM because we see that they have largely failed. But you know what works? Communities deciding for themselves. In Senegal, the organization, I believe it's called Tostan or Tostan. I hope I haven't butchered it. But Tostan works with entire villages, men, women, elders, religious leaders to have collective conversations about human rights, health, and FGM. When the whole community decides together to abandon the practice, there is no social exclusion because everyone stops at the same time. That is how we break free from self- enforcing social conventions. you don't just rescue individual girls, you change the entire community norms. A fourth way to root it out is to refuse the binary. Patriarchy loves the binary. Traditional versus modern, African versus Western, culture versus human rights, refuse them. We can honor your culture without honoring the parts of it that harm women. You can reject colonial impositions without defending every pre-colonial practice. You can critique Western feminism and racism and also critique African patriarchy. These are not contradictions. They coexist and they are both true. And a to engage this is that men must also be a part of the solution. Women cannot dismantle patriarchy alone. Men benefit from patriarchy, even poor men, even marginalized men, and they will resist change unless they see why it is also in their own interests. Programs that work are programs that engage men and boys to challenge toxic masculinity. Programs that help men and boys see women as full human beings that are equal to them. And programs that help men and boys reject violence. These kind of programs, they work. But only when they are led by people who understand that patriarchy harms men too. Just harms them differently. And the sixth way to engage is that solidarity must exist across differences. Women men are not a monolith. A wealthy, urban African woman and a rural woman who both face FGM have different experiences of patriarchy. A cisgender, heterosexual woman and a lesbian or trans woman, they face different kinds of oppression. Dismantling patriarchy requires solidarity across race, class, sexual orientation, uh ability, geography across the board, Not surface level representation, real solidarity and real distribution of Listen. I have a lot of bones to pick with the system of patriarchy And I am coming for it wherever it lives So let me end where I started Patriarchy is not inevitable. It is not natural and it is not prominent. It emerged under specific material conditions, agriculture, private property and the needs to control reproduction. mutated across cultures. Colonialism in Africa, the caste system in India, Confucianism in East Asia. Victorian Christianity in Europe and the Americas. It is upheld by women, not because they are cruel, but because the system made survival depend on compliance. But it can also be dismantled, not easily, not quickly, not without cause. I may not be alive to reap the benefits of it being dismantled, but patriarchy will not end until women stop reproducing it. Women will not stop reproducing it until the systems exist where survival doesn't require compliance. And those systems will not exist until we are willing to redistribute power from men to women, from the wealthy to the poor, from the global north to the global south. Listen, this is not a plea for equality within existing systems. This system we are in is rotten. This is a demand, a request. I don't know what to call it. To burn the system down and build something new. I want to come for the systems of patriarchy wherever it lives in the laws that deny women property, in the religions that claim divine authority for women's subjection in the cultures that call oppression tradition, in the economic systems that make marriage a survival strategy. And in the families where mothers cut their daughters because they see no other way. I'm coming for all of it. I'm inviting you to look deeply in your life, in your culture, in your society, in your systems and interrogate the ways in which patriarchy shows up. there will not be easy answers. We don't have savior complexes. I have zero sense of arrogance that we can dismantle in a generation what took 10,000 years to build. But I have clarity and I know that with solidarity, the long hard work of structural change is possible because our daughters deserve better. Thanks for listening to Overnight Wisdom. If this conversation challenged you, good. Share it with someone who needs to hear it. Share it with your mother, your mother-in-law, your friends, your girlfriends, your dads, your brothers, your uncles. If you have a different opinion, I'd love to hear from you. I welcome your questions, your feedback, your challenges, your comments. The only way to solve these big problems is if we're actually willing to engage them and engage through the discomfort. And if there's a systemic challenge, you'd like to see me unpack using my Three Clarities framework, give me a shout. I'd love to hear from you. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Thanks for being here. Until next time. I wish you a great rest of the day, week, weekend whenever you're listening to this. I'm Chisom Udeze