The Trail of the Mothers: African Gender Dynamics in the Americas

Often research on gender relations in African Diaspora starts with the Atlantic slave trade, as though there is a deep impregnable wall built between the African past and African lives outside of Africa.  This paper attempts to show a real connection between the African past and the social history of the African Diaspora. By examining the significance of sororal groups in proto-Bantu history and in Bantu-speaking societies of more recent periods it is possible to contextualize the key roles mothers and grandmothers have played and continue to play in the African Diaspora. The sororal group was the core coalition of women around which villages operated in many regions of pre-colonial Africa. There is evidence of these sororal coalitions in the Afro-Mexicans demonstrations of women demanding that the Mexican government grant them access to their community fishing waters.   Another example is that only women of African descent owned independent businesses in 18^th century Puerto Rico and that these female entrepreneurs were related by blood.