Some African Women
14 THOMAS' HODGKIN ic OU'D like to visit the Queen-Mother, wouldn't you ? " was so clearly a question expecting the answer ` yes ' that it would have been useless to argue that one was neither clean enough nor tidy enough to meet anY.one so august. In any case my mental picture of a Queen- Mother—a mixture of Agrippina and Alexandra—turned out to be wide of the mark. This one kept us sitting for the shortest of intervals in the palace waiting-room before we were granted an audience : she was young, very pretty, and dressed in a neat, navy-blue uniform, like a district nurse—naturally enough, since she was also a trained midwife. We sat drinking light ale (brought with us in a bag by the local headmaster). While the Queen-Mother explained how she used to work at the hospital; but, alter a queenly row with the doctor in charge, had set up in private practice and was doing well. (In Ashanti society the Queen-Mother is not the physical mother of the chief—in this case she was his sister—but his constitutional mother, chosen from the blood roy,al. As Dr. Busia puts it: " She is expected to advise the chief about his conduct. She ntay scold and reprove him in a way none of his councillors can.") Our Queen-Mother's two functions—ancient and modern—were in a way complementary, since her job included giving advice to married couples, reasoning with wives who an away from their husbands, and with husbands who were Inconsiderate in their treatibent of their wives, reconciling the Parties (where possible) and making awards. "Esther says she will come back to you, Kofi, if you slaughter a sheep, pay her a fine of £5 and two new cloths, and promise not to Complain of her cooking again." So, when she wasn't managing Confinements, carrying out pre-natal examinations, or administering dried milk and halibut liver oil, the Queen- Mother acted as part marriage-guidance bureau, part parish Priest. And, to make sure that time didn't hang heavy on her nands, she dabbled in local party-politics.
* * Esi Baidoo describes herself as 'alias Mrs. Hannah Kudjoe' ?* her visiting card. There is nothing sinister about this alias ': it is simply a way of explaining that she sometimes Prefers to be known by her Akan, rather than her Christian name. Small, plump, swaddled in traditional cloth, enormously nergetic, by profession Mrs. Kudjoe is a party militant- rropaganda Secretary of the Convention People's Party, a,very Important job. In the days before the Party was actually Dorn Kwame Nkrumah came to speak at her home town. She ;cooked him his dinner, listened to his conversation, and was ,Convinced '—as Englishwomen three centuries ago were , convinced ' by George Fox. She has a single-minded belief in the Party and in Nkrumah, and the Nonconformist preacher's Sower to make others feel that she knows the way of salvation. u t being herself a woman of the people, she realises that normal people, women in particular, are interested in their °win troubles rather than in politics as such. When I first Met her she had just come back to Kumasi from a six months' tour of the Northern Territories—mainly in a Party van; but, when he van broke down, she travelled on the crossbar of a bicycle. In every village she came to she began by meeting the women, and advising them about their babies—how to feed them, keep them clean (with practical illustrations), and deal with their minor ailments. Gradually, in the course of a few days, she Would lead conversation round to the subject of Self-Govern- Silent and the Party : "SO means better provision for infant Welfare." We travelled on the same excursion to Liberia. During a two-hour journey on the Bomi Hills Railway (on which we were served alternately with beer. and whisky all the way), Mrs. Kudjoe, and three other leading CPP women, with only a word or two of English between them, kept us all happy singing Party songs and hymns (' Kwame Nkrumah will drive out the White Man '), and dancing, so far as the railway carriage would allow, to the tunes. They were an interesting contrast—Mrs. Kudjoe and the Liberian Acting Secretary of State for War. Mrs. Kudjoe in her red, white and green Party cloth, fastened with a Nkrumah brooch, with her Puritan momentum and enthusiasm. The Acting Secretary of State, an elderly, fashionable lady, who might have been the president of a Women's Institute' in one of the more exclusive parts of Surrey; sophisticated, conscious of her social position and the dignity of office, explaining, over her Coca-Cola, how exhaust- ing she found this unending routine of State occasions, and State banquets; as remote from Mrs. Kudjoe as Mrs. Asquith from Mrs. Pankhurst.
Mrs. Ransome-Kuti is more of an intellectual than Hannah Kudjoe; more of a radical than the Queen-Mother; more of an African than the Liberian Acting Secretary of State for War. She cooked a marvellous lunch for her husband—a grammar school headmaster in the big, genial, Broad Church style—and myself. In the intervals Mrs. Ransome-Kuti dealt with her correspondence, and made notes for a talk she was giving later in the day to the Egba Women's Union. The Egba Women's Union was the creation, primarily, of Mrs. Ransome-Kuti—a Nigerian version of a Townswomen's Guild, with borrowings from William Morris and Mary Wollstone- craft. The members dressed in beautiful blue cloth, which they wove themselves; ran literacy classes; discussed the questions of the day; and conducted such a vigorous agitation against the local ruler, the Alake of Abeokuta—on grounds of profiteering and misrule—that they eventually compelled him to abdicate. The Union celebrated the event with a thanksgiving service, a mass picnic in Tinubu Square, and the publication of an illustrated pamphlet in English and Yoruba— leading off with quotations from Thomas Jefferson, Charles James Fox and Lord Acton (appropriately misprinted as Lord Action ')—The Fall of a Ruler. Later, when the excitement had died down, and the Union's attention was diverted, the ancient Alake slipped quietly back. There are flourishing Women's Unions in other southern Nigerian towns —but their leaders say, "Mrs. Ransome-Kuti is our mother."
"But these are exceptional women—show-pieces, that naturally catch the wandering western eye of the journalist— unlike the illiterate sorcery-ridden mother of five living and five dead in the bush." Are they in fact so unlike ? The wife of Mohammed Abdallah, a pious policeman, sitting listening while he told us the moving story of Tawaddadu, whose beauty and intelligence enabled her to save her irresponsible husband from bankruptcy; the women of Walata, the freedom of whose manners shocked Ibn Batuta in the fourteenth century; decorating the walls of their houses with fantastic red convolutions; the village headman's wife at Nzaza in Moyen- Congo, who took us out into the fields, and explained very carefully how the sowing and picking of groundnuts were connected with the cycles of the moon; the members of the women's sections of the Bloc Democratique Senegalais and CPP, who seem as clever as Labour and Conservative women in Britain at organising socials, dances and jumble sales in aid of Party funds : these women have a robustness and a confi- dence in themselves, connected, I suppose, with the fact that they are economically indispensable—that farming and commerce cannot get on without them. Mrs. Ransome-Kuti, Mrs. Kudjoe and the Queen-Mother may be a bit extraordinary; but they represent, in their different ways, the sentiments of ordinary women—or they would not be the influential people they are.
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