Paper short abstract:

State and NGO actors present autonomous individuals in nucleated houses as key aspects of African development. Whilst women in Maputo do desire houses of their own, this is not, I suggest, a matter of nucleation, but of re-embedding themselves in alternative networks of hierarchical dependence.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout Africa, state and NGO actors present development goals as tied up with ideals of equality and individual autonomy. The adoption of such ideals is supposed to reconfigure not only public relations, but intimate ones too, fostering affective bonds between autonomous individuals and promoting the nuclear family as the Fukuyaman end of domestic history.

In periurban Maputo, most young women live virilocally, assuming positions as dependents at the bottom of the household hierarchy. Unlike previous generations, however, these women uniformly strive to move away, often to distant suburbs, and into independent houses, which they perceive as the condition of a proper marital family. The desire for physical separation, along with material aspirations for a private plot seem, at first blush, to indicate that the nuclear family has indeed become the ideal personal, as well as political, constellation.

This paper suggests, however, that the desire for a self-built house in fact reflects an alternative form of social change - one embedded in competing notions of marriage and the person. The nucleated home is not a token of autonomous family units, but is rather understood as a necessary step towards strengthening ties of dependence with the husband’s kin. Weaving these ties, women make themselves as wives, mothers and full social persons.

The self-built house is, then, not a space for nucleation and autonomisation, but the materialisation of women’s relational personhood and position in their husbands’ kinship network. Women thus create new intimate spaces that run at cross purposes to liberal democratic models.