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Theresa W. DevasahayamSub-Saharan AfricaThe gendered division of labor within the family
in societies in Sub-Saharan Africa is a consequence
sub-saharan africa 245of the particular historical conditions under which
family structures emerge and the ways in which
family relations are constantly renegotiated.Islam
Islam is practiced today by the majority of men
and women in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger,
Nigeria, Gambia, Guinea, Chad, Sudan, Somalia,
Djibouti, and the Comoro Islands. Additionally,
Islam is an important minority religion in the East
African countries such as Kenya and in the Gulf of
Benin countries (Coulon 1983, 6). The mass appeal
of Muslim reform movements throughout Sub-
Saharan Africa at the turn of the twentieth century
can be understood in part by transformations tak-
ing place in the domestic sphere. These changes
took place in the context of a social crisis that was
engendered by the French conquest and the dis-
integration of the political structures in the region,
particularly West Africa, which destabilized the
material basis of social production. Though early
converts to Islam were, as Robinson (1991) sug-
gests, “weary of war,” most likely they also sought
land and bridewealth. Former slaves as well as
young men converted to Islam to acquire land
through the patronage of Muslim shaykhs. Klein
(1998) suggests that many people in the region of
the Senegambia turned to Islam to escape slavery
and focuses on the ways in which former slaves
were incorporated into social and familial struc-
tures under Islam. Though Muslim missionaries,
traders, and scholars spread Islam throughout
much of Sub-Saharan Africa, Launay and Soares
argue that the Islamization of many communities
was the “unintended consequence” of French colo-
nial rule. Islamic reform movements can be under-
stood in terms of “the emergence of a qualitatively
new ‘Islamic’ sphere; conceptually separate from
‘particular’ affiliations such as ethnicity, kin group
membership or slave origins, as well as from the
colonial state” (1999, 497).Slave trade and labor
migration
Colonial rule and the Atlantic slave trade funda-
mentally altered the social basis of rural and urban
artisanal economies in West African societies (Sow
1985, 567). In other parts of Africa during the colo-
nial period men from many communities, particu-
larly in Eastern and Southern Africa, left their rural
homes in search of employment in colonial projects
such as road building, portage, and mining, in addi-
tion to work on agricultural plantations. On the
heels of this largely male migration to the urban
centers of production, many adult women followed