Market Women and Economic Power

Yoruba women dominated market trade, and the domination was constitutive of their social position rather than incidental to it. What this file sets out is the machinery: how a market was governed, who governed it, how a trader raised capital, what wealth could and could not be converted into, and what happened when market organisation was turned to political ends in the twentieth century.

The general account of the market as an institution, the four-day cycle and the physical siting of the market before the palace, is in Economy and the Market. The Ìyálóde as a political office is in Women's Political Offices. This file owns the economic substance.

Why the market and not the farm

Begin by removing a false picture. The common formulation that Yoruba men farm and women trade is a distortion. Oyěwùmí's objection to it is that the assumption imports an alien model, since both ọkùnrin and obìnrin were represented in trade and in farming 1. Sarah Mathews, who argues against Oyěwùmí on most points, agrees on this one, noting explicitly that men were present as traders and that focusing on women is not a claim that they were confined to the market by their bodies 2.

What the record supports is a strong statistical predominance of women in retail and market trade, not an exclusive gendered division. The predominance is what needs explaining and what has consequences.

The market's importance follows from the structure of the Yoruba economy. Yoruba towns were dense, agriculture was dispersed around them, and there was no other mechanism for moving goods between producers and consumers. The market was therefore the circulatory system, and it sat physically in front of the palace, so that commerce and government occupied one continuous space 3. Whoever controlled the market controlled the town's supply of everything.

Marjorie Keniston McIntosh's Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change (Indiana University Press, 2009) is the standard monograph on the whole subject and the single best entry point 4.

The structure of market authority

A Yoruba market was governed, not merely occupied. The offices are these.

Ìyálọ́jà, mother of the market. The senior woman of a given market, with authority over its traders and its internal affairs: allocation of stalls and space, the rules of trading, the settlement of disputes between traders, and representation of the market's traders to the town's authorities.

Bàbálọ́jà, father of the market, the corresponding male office, who works alongside the Ìyálọ́jà on the market's affairs 2. The pairing matters. The market was not a female enclave with a female hierarchy exclusively; it was a dual-office institution in which the women's office was the senior one in practice because the traders were predominantly women.

Commodity-line heads. Beneath the Ìyálọ́jà, each commodity line has its own leader, so that the yam sellers, the fish sellers, the cloth sellers and the rest each have a head who settles matters within her line and answers upward. This is the layer that made the system work at scale, and it is also what made the market instantly mobilisable: an instruction passed through the commodity heads reached every trader in a morning.

Àróọ̀jà, the market keeper, whose duty is to keep order and manage the market's arrangement and who actually resides there [S5]. Johnson records this office at Ọ̀yọ́ under the Ẹni Ọjà, the palace woman who had charge of the king's market and its perquisites and on whose arm the king leaned on the day he went to worship at the market [S5].

Ìyálóde, above the individual market, with oversight of women's trade generally and a seat in the council of chiefs. See Women's Political Offices.

Lóbùn, at Ondó, where the female chiefs hold the ritual monopoly on founding a market: they perform the ritual purification of a new market and pay homage to Ajé, each preparing her assemblage of Ajé for public veneration before the palace [S6]. No market existed at Ondó until women made it exist.

The pattern across all of this is that market authority was regulatory and judicial, not merely representative. These officers made rules, allocated scarce space, and gave binding judgments. A trader's livelihood depended on standing with them.

Ajé and the market's own theology

The market had a presiding òrìṣà and she was female. Ajé is the deity of the marketplace and of wealth, ọlà, and the ordinary Yoruba refusal to buy something is a blessing invoking her: Ajé ó ò wá, Ajé will come, meaning may profit come to you anyway 2.

Two documented festivals show her institutional standing. At Ondó the female chiefs venerate her when a market is founded [S6]. At Ilé-Ifẹ̀ the annual Olójó festival, which renews the Ọ̀ọ̀ni's kingship, renews Ògún and Ajé together: after homage to Ògún the festival proceeds to the market where Ajé's shrine is erected, and the king honours her in recognition of her importance to the economy of his kingdom [S6]. The Ifẹ̀ king's annual renewal requires him to go to the market and honour the female deity of trade.

Olupona and Lawuyi's formulation of what the Ajé festival does is worth quoting: it "is a celebration of wealth and fertility. It also enhances the role of women in lineage maintenance," since women create the lineage through fertility and ensure the resources to maintain it, so that women's control of Ajé "is tantamount to the acquisition of economic power" [S7] Ajé's shrine is the igbá Ajé, a large clean bowl, and the calabash association links the market deity to the same reproductive symbolism that runs through Yemọja ritual [S6].

Note the tonal distinction: Ajé the òrìṣà of wealth is not àjẹ́, the women's power treated in Àjẹ́ and Our Mothers. They are separate words. The relation between them is an argument, not a fact.

Credit: èsùsù and àjọ

Trade requires working capital, and Yoruba women raised it through an institution that has since travelled across the Atlantic and into the economics literature.

Èsùsù is a rotating savings and credit association. Members contribute a fixed equal amount at fixed intervals, from daily to bi-monthly, and the whole pool goes to one member each round, the order decided by ballot or consensus. It operates outside the formal legal and financial system on an oath of allegiance and mutual trust [S8]. William Bascom's 1952 article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the classic description, and his observation is that it resembles a credit union, an insurance scheme and a savings club while being distinct from all three [S9].

Àjọ is the urban variant, in which an alájọ collector takes daily contributions, retains a commission, and deposits in bank accounts [S8].

Three features explain its durability. It is interest-free, so its credit costs less than the formal alternative. It fits daily cash flows, which is exactly what a market trader has and what a monthly-repayment bank product does not. And it reaches people the banks exclude [S8]. Women participate more than men [S8].

The institution translocated with the Atlantic slave trade and survives in the Anglophone Caribbean, where the Jamaican partner is the direct descendant [S8][S10].

For a woman trader, èsùsù was the mechanism by which small daily margins became a lump sum large enough to buy stock at wholesale, and it required no husband, no lineage sponsorship and no collateral. That is the material basis of the separate female economy described in Marriage from the Woman's Side.

Trading networks

Yoruba women's trade operated at several scales and the distinction matters, because political leverage came from the upper end.

Retail and petty trade, the alárobọ̀ level, is the majority: buying small, selling smaller, turning stock daily in a local market.

Long-distance and wholesale trade is where fortunes were made. Precolonial Yoruba market women were itinerant traders with a formidable presence across the towns and villages, and that legacy carried into the twentieth century [S11]. The nineteenth-century routes ran to Porto-Novo, Badagry and Ikorodu and carried agricultural produce, tobacco, cloth, cosmetics, firearms and enslaved people [S12]. Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà and Ẹfúnróyè Tinúbú operated at this level, and the composition of their trade is set out in The Nineteenth Century.

What was lost. The colonial commercial system inserted expatriate firms and, in the Ìbàdàn case Oladejo documents, Lebanese traders into wholesale distribution, so that Yoruba market women increasingly operated the retail end of a chain whose upper reaches they no longer controlled [S13]. The railway and the growth of imported goods reorganised the Dugbe, Ogunpa and Old Gbagi business districts above the level at which women had operated [S13]. The women's institutions survived. Their position in the structure of trade did not.

How trade wealth converted into political leverage, and where it did not

The conversion that worked

The market could be closed. This is the fundamental instrument and it is not metaphorical. Because the market was the economy's circulatory system, an organised body of traders could stop the town. Yoruba market women could and did open and close entire markets to protest or to force local politicians to hear them, and Mathews observed the practice still in use at Ìbàdàn in 2013 2. No comparable instrument was available to any other constituency.

The market was the organising unit. Traders met daily, in one place, arranged by commodity, under a chain of command that already existed. Political mobilisation did not require building a structure.

The Ìyálóde office channelled it. A woman with wealth and following could be recognised with a title carrying a seat in council. This was the legitimate route from money to standing, and it is why Awé argues the office's nineteenth-century prominence was a product of the war economy rather than of ancient custom; see Women's Political Offices.

Political mobilisation in the twentieth century. Oladejo documents Ìbàdàn market women as active political mobilisers engaged in eclectic political action through decolonisation, with leaders who could sway the electorate inside and beyond the marketplaces [S11].

Where the conversion was blocked

This is the part usually left out and it is the more important half.

Wealth could not be displayed. Karin Barber's finding from Okuku is the sharpest statement: "Big Women" could not express wealth to build reputation in the way "Big Men" did, by buying land, marrying wives and having many children, and a woman who flaunted wealth as a man did would be accused of witchcraft 14. The display repertoire that converted male wealth into public standing was closed to women on pain of accusation. See Àjẹ́ and Our Mothers.

Trade wealth did not become land. Land was held by lineages and allocated through them, and the accumulation of land was the principal male route from wealth to permanent standing.

It did not become general chieftaincy. Market authority translated into the women's titles and not into the ordinary chieftaincy ladder, and in the modern Ìbàdàn constitution the female line explicitly cannot produce an Olúbadàn 15.

It did not become control of the colonial or post-colonial state. Colonial administration dealt with male chiefs, and the electoral system that succeeded it has produced the representation figures in Contemporary.

The honest summary is that Yoruba women's economic power was real, was institutionally organised, and was capable of exercising a veto over a town's economic life, and that it was systematically prevented from converting into the durable forms of standing, land and office, that male wealth converted into. Both halves are needed.

The twentieth-century associations

The Lagos Market Women's Association and Alimọtù Pelewura

Pelewura (c. 1865 to 1951) is the most consequential Yoruba market leader of the colonial period and the clearest case of market organisation used as a political instrument.

She was a fish trader, the daughter of a fish trader, and held standing among Lagos market women by 1900. Ọba Eshugbayi Eleko gave her a chieftaincy title in 1910. She led the Ereko market in the 1920s, and from the mid-1920s until her death in 1951 she was Ìyálọ́jà of Lagos and president of the Lagos Market Women's Association, founded in the 1920s with Herbert Macaulay's support 16.

The 1932 tax campaign. Pelewura led protests against direct taxation of women, served on a committee that marched to Government House, and was subsequently appointed the women's representative on the Ilu Committee, an advisory body 16. A protest converted into a seat.

The mid-1930s detention. She was detained after physically attempting to block the relocation of the Ereko market, and was released following solidarity demonstrations by market women 16.

The 1940-41 income tax campaign. This is the best-documented episode and its chronology is worth setting out, from Cheryl Johnson's and Nina Mba's scholarship as compiled in the Global Nonviolent Action Database 17:

The Income Tax Ordinance of March 1940 established a two-tier levy: women earning less than £50 a year paid a flat £5, and women earning £50 or more were taxed at 3 pence per pound. Over the following months 70 women received assessment notices 17.

On 10 December 1940 Ọba Falolu denounced the ordinance at a chiefs' meeting, on the ground that taxing women violated local custom 17.

On 16 December 1940 the women closed the Lagos market and marched to the Commissioner's office. Estimates of numbers diverge sharply and instructively: newspapers reported about 10,000 participants, the government claimed 100 17. Pelewura and other market leaders addressed the Commissioner on household economic hardship, and a petition bearing 91 thumbprints, drafted by Herbert Macaulay of the Nigerian National Democratic Party, was presented to Governor Bourdillon, who refused to reverse the ordinance 17.

On 18 December 1940 a public meeting was held at Glover Memorial Hall, attended by between about 1,000 and 7,000 people depending on whether the government's or the press's estimate is taken 17.

On 12 January 1941 market leaders and the Commissioner negotiated finally at the ọba's palace 17.

The outcome was that the government raised the taxable threshold to £100, which officials maintained most market women did not reach, and the campaign ceased 17. A second account puts the raised threshold at £200 16; the discrepancy is unresolved and both figures are given rather than one being chosen.

The wartime price control fight. From 1941 the government imposed price controls on produce under wartime inflation. Pelewura led the Association's opposition on the ground that controls would deprive women of needed income 16. This is worth noting because it cuts against a simple reading of market women as an anti-colonial popular force: their position here was a traders' interest against a consumer-protection measure, and it is better understood as a commercial constituency defending its margins.

Party politics. Pelewura was an executive member of the Nigerian Union of Young Democrats from 1939, aligned with the NNDP, briefly joined Oyinkan Abayọmi's Nigerian Women's Party, and spoke at NNDP rallies despite women being disenfranchised 16. The alliance with Macaulay is the significant thing: Nigeria's earliest nationalist party organisation was built partly on a market women's constituency that could not vote.

Two features of the whole Pelewura record deserve emphasis. The tactics were the traditional market instruments, closing the market and marching in a body, applied to a colonial state. And the demands were framed as the defence of custom against innovation, with the ọba himself arguing that taxing women violated local custom, which is the same argument the Abẹ́òkúta women would make a few years later.

The Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union

The larger and more successful case is treated in full in Colonial Encounter and Women's Resistance. The point that belongs here is structural: the Union's decisive move was the alliance of market traders, who had the numbers and the existing organisation, with mission-educated women, who had literacy, English and access to the press and the courts. Neither group could have done it alone.

The line into the present

The Lagos leadership passed from Pelewura to Chief Abibatu Mogaji, who held it from the 1950s until her death in 2013, and then to her granddaughter Folashade Tinubu-Ojo 18. What has happened to the office in that succession, and the criticisms it has attracted, is treated in Contemporary.