Yoruba Histories of Marriage and Belonging: Gender, Power and Innovation in Eighteenth‐Century West Africa

ABSTRACT This article argues that marriage was central to historical change in the Yoruba‐speaking region of West Africa during the eighteenth century. It draws on ìtàn , a distinct oral source, to show that conjugality shaped Yoruba processes of urbanisation and political centralisation, gendered divisions of labour and social innovation and creativity. Reflecting the importance of patrilineal kinship as a template for social and political organisation, marriage associated husbandly roles with power and belonging by birth, and wifely positions with support and origin from the outside. While women were excluded from some forms of authority, a primarily relational understanding of gender meant that husbandly roles were frequently open to women. Equally, wifely roles provided a template for the incorporation of dependants and enslaved people. Thus, conjugally defined gender relations reflected both the region's political and economic participation in the global slave trade and a distinctly Yoruba understanding of difference as a source of value and innovation.