Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarly, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
I was always brought up to believe that women in West Africa did not own plantations. Men grew cash crops like cocoa, and women assisted in food crop farms. If women wanted a cash income, they became petty traders. So, I was surprised to find, when leading teams to survey forest-edge economic activities for a conservation project in eastern Sierra Leone, that the women I worked with began to talk about their own cocoa trees. How was that possible? I needed to find out more.
After I finished my doctorate, I applied for a small grant to re-visit these villages and to make further enquiries. I began with a baseline survey in four villages in Gaura Chiefdom and collected information on economic activity from all the women in these villages. That meant asking about their right to land.
Among Mende-speaking people of eastern Sierra Leone a woman's land right depends on her being a member of a land-owning clan. A Mende woman is always classified as belonging to her father's clan. I for example remain a Mokuwa - my father's family - even though I sometimes use my husband's name with my own for some legal purposes. But I will never be part of his family, at least in the Mende way of thinking. When our daughter would come to me for pocket money, I sometimes answered her 'go to your father - you are not part of my family.' This of course was a joke, but there is a serious point behind it. If I ever I need land I must go to my father's family for it.
Most Mende villages are small, so about half of all married women come from other villages to join their husbands upon marriage. After I had completed my baseline survey, I selected women according to their matrimonial relationships to talk to them about how they had acquired the land to plant trees.
Acquiring land to plant trees for their crops is always an important issue, since the trees will be there for a generation or more. I talked in depth to four groups of women: 1. women born in the village and married to a man also born in the village, 2. women from the village who brought back a husband from elsewhere, 3. women from elsewhere who moved in to join a husband from the village, and 4. women from elsewhere arriving with a husband also born elsewhere. Women in the first group could plant either on land from their own families or combine with their husbands to plant on their land. Women who came from other villages were counted as 'strangers' - a term referring to their need to find a landlord if they were to become planters.
As expected, a good number of the women-owned cocoa trees in my survey belonged to women born with land rights in the village. Yet, I was surprised to find that an even greater number of trees (the unit I used in my survey since it is easier to count trees than to measure farm sizes) were owned by women who had moved in from other villages. The trees were in the woman's village of birth. The land had been allocated by her father's clan. If the village was nearby the woman attended to them on regular visits to her family. Other holdings, in more distant villages, might be cared for by her brothers in her absence. From this, I realised two things. First, these arrangements were often not very convenient, and I wondered why women invested in more distant plantations when they could have combined with their husbands to make a family plot in the village where they resided. Second, I discovered development agencies seeking to support supply chains for organic cocoa did not know about these 'outside' trees. When these outside plantations went unrecorded, women's interests in cocoa were underestimated by about half. Put numerically, women's output was recorded as about 30 per cent of men's output, but when outside holdings were counted this rose to 60 per cent.
I followed up on both topics. On the first issue of women investing in their own crops, I quickly discovered that starting a plantation was a very important strategy for women approaching menopause. Women feared being usurped by another wife or girlfriend. Fears of marriage breakdown and abandonment were very real. The women trees on their father's land were safer because they would never be counted among her husband's assets. She (and her biological children) would remain the only beneficiaries. Her brothers would protect her economic interests. She then had the option to go home if the marriage failed, or widowhood proved difficult in her husband's village.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
The second factor - the under-representation of women's agricultural interests - had serious consequences for the visibility of women within the marketing chain. Because, neither cocoa buyers nor non-government agencies supporting the cocoa sector knew that women had these 'distant' plantations, women were not actively sought out as economic actors with produce of their own. Happily, after they saw my evidence, some cocoa buyers showed interest in developing marketing outlets geared more specifically to the needs of women with 'hidden' cocoa.
Flagging this output as 'women's produce', to take account of the fact that participation in cocoa production reflects women's life cycle needs is inspiring. Though I cannot promise that you will soon be eating 'women produced' chocolate bars', but if the idea takes root, African women would be taking charge of their own destiny especially when facing precarious conditions related to old-age. It would be nice to chew on that.
Esther Mokuwa is from Bo in central Sierra Leone, and holds a PhD in development studies from Wageningen University. Currently she is a research team leader for the Pares project on community-driven health (UK National Institute of Public Health).
