Paper short abstract:

I focus on Yaawo oral historical memories of slave raiding to study historical changes in matriliny (looking beyond just the idea of the masculinization of power). I focus my analytical attention on ‘lukosyo’ (matriclan) as a category of belonging, tracing changes in its meaning.

Paper long abstract:

“It was the captured people who populated these lands,” a Yaawo elder explains, pointing to the heritage of slave raiding in the social landscape of Niassa. This period—generally referred to as the time of the “wars of abducting people”—is remembered as the time when the Yaawo chiefs raided the lakeside Nyanja communities; rival Yaawo chiefs attacked each other’s populations; and the Yaawo and the Ngoni fought one another. Many captured people were assimilated into their capturers’ communities; others were sold further. Slave trading became a monopoly of the great Yaawo chiefs who sent huge caravans to the coast. For common people (especially women and children), this was as a time of increased insecurity, and people sought refuge in hilltop strongholds. In this paper, I am interested in exploring more closely how matriliny changed during this specific historical period (beyond just the idea of the masculinization of power). My analysis focuses on a distinction made in the oral historical material between the social categories of ‘acikapoolo’ (unfree people) and ‘vaandu alukosyo’ (people of the matriclan). I will especially zoom in on ‘lukosyo’ and explore its (changing) significance (and gendered construction) as a category of belonging as well as the processes of inclusion and exclusion to which it was tied. I also study these past meanings in relation to the meaning(s) people give ‘lukosyo’ these days and discuss how this might further help us understand the historical processes of change in matriliny.