Matrilineal and other succession systems that enabled female political power.
The Iyoba of Benin was not a hereditary title passed from mother to daughter, but a reign-based office conferred by each Oba on his own mother. This article examines the origins, succession mechanisms, political authority, and enduring legacy of the queen mother institution in the Benin Kingdom.
Ukuhlobonga, the regulated non-penetrative courtship practice of the Zulu and other Nguni peoples, was central to the governance of royal marriage, paternity certainty, and succession legitimacy. This article examines its social logic, its place within the isigodlo and queen mother’s authority, and the ways colonial sources distorted its meaning.
In the Akan states of West Africa, royal legitimacy flows not through the father but through the mother. The Queen Mother (Ohemaa) is the living custodian of the royal matriclan, holding the power to nominate, enstool, and even destool kings. This article explores the origins, mechanisms, and enduring significance of matrilineal succession, centring the Queen Mother as a sovereign political authority in her own right.
The Balobedu Rain Queens of South Africa preside over one of Africa’s most distinctive systems of female sovereignty, in which the queen takes wives—women who bear children through designated male consorts, with offspring belonging to the queen’s matrilineage. This article examines the institution of female husbands within the royal household, its mythological origins, political functions, succession mechanisms, and resilience through colonial and postcolonial transformations.
An authoritative examination of the wives of Senzangakhona kaJama, their ranks, ritual roles, and influence on Zulu succession, drawing on oral tradition and colonial-era records with critical caution.
The Kingdom of Kush, centred on the Nile in what is now Sudan, developed a distinctive system of matrilineal succession in which the kandake—queen mother or ruling queen—held the key to dynastic legitimacy. This article examines the evidence, mechanisms, and enduring legacy of a political order where royal blood flowed through women, shaping Kushite governance, warfare, and spiritual authority for over a millennium.
The tangena ordeal was a judicial poison ordeal in the Kingdom of Imerina, used most intensively under Queen Ranavalona I to adjudicate guilt, purge political rivals, and reinforce royal authority. This article examines the ordeal as an indigenous legal and ritual technology embedded in Merina concepts of hasina, ancestral justice, and female sovereignty. It critically assesses colonial sources, explores the gendered dynamics of queenly power, and traces the ordeal’s abolition and contested legacy.
This article examines how matrilineal succession shaped royal authority in the Central African kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba. It explores the avuncular principle, the role of the royal kanda, and the extraordinary reign of Queen Njinga Mbandi, whose rise to power was both enabled and constrained by these indigenous succession norms.
An authoritative examination of how the Luba and Lunda empires of Central Africa built royal legitimacy through women, with queen mothers and royal sisters controlling succession, rainmaking, and land, and with female rulers such as Lueji exercising sovereign power.
The initiation of a Rain Queen (Modjadji) among the Balobedu of Limpopo, South Africa, is a prolonged, secretive process of seclusion, training, and ritual transformation. It converts a selected royal woman into the living embodiment of rainmaking power, political authority, and ancestral mediation. This article examines the evidence, cosmological foundations, succession rules, ritual stages, regalia, gender dynamics, colonial distortions, and contemporary significance of this unique institution.