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Sub-Saharan African Stories
Sub-Saharan Africa is a very large land area with hundreds of different cultural groups that defy facile generalization. Nevertheless, lifestyle differences exist alongside modal cultural traits found in the area. These modal traits are reflected in many African stories.
An Assertive Husband and an Assertive Wife in a more or less egalitarian relationship are often found in African folkstories. Most stories tend to avoid patriarchal male-dominant themes. Violence is relatively rare. Conflicts are often resolved without harshness.
Historically, African wives as described in many anthropological studies differ markedly from wives in Europe or Asia. Sudarkasa states:
Marriage in Africa was a contractual union which often involved long-lasting companionate relationships . . . . Interpersonal relationships within African families were governed by . . . respect, restraint, responsibility, and
reciprocity.
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Okonjo enumerates the long established major roles of Nigerian women in farming, trading, and craft activities, often as the main breadwinners in the family, and frequently as significant participants in political decision making. Bohannan concludes that
"Women in Africa are not, in short, a deprived group as they were in the nineteenth-century Western world."
Levinson reports that domestic violence has been present in varying degrees in African societies. However, even in societies where male dominance is culturally prescribed and wife beating common, mechanisms exist to mitigate serious harm. For example, a violent husband is often publicly humiliated by gossip in the marketplace; easy access to divorce is often used by women to escape from a battering husband; and women can return to their own families for protection.
Violence against a wife, though rare, sometimes appears in an African story. An example is
"The Woman Who Was a Lioness."
In a time of great famine, the lions were very hungry. In order to get food for her starving cubs, one of the lionesses offered to change into a beautiful woman, marry and then kill a man who owned many head of cattle, and bring the cattle back for her cubs and the other lions.
Although she carried out part of her plan, her efforts to kill the man were thwarted by the man's son. One night, the son roused his father saying there was a wild animal in the house. When the father looked into the dark, he observed his wife changing into a lioness. He immediately took his son and left for the village. When he told the townspeople of the danger, they came and set fire to the house. The woman-lioness burned to death.
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