Place of Women in Traditional African Societies: Case of Koongo Woman

Abstract

At the root of the social construction of nations, there are almost always founding mythologies supposed to explain the advent of this or that fact and/or phenomenon. The Koongo nation is no exception. It has a mythology that relates how the muuntu, the primordial being, in its primitive uniqueness, split into two individual entities, each retaining its specificity, and, at the same time, the trace of this ontological split. From this ontological split in primordial being came man and woman. The aim of this paper is to show how, from this ontological split, the symbolism of the woman, who has become the most prominent social figure in Koongo civilization, has imposed itself to the point of structuring the entire Koongo imaginary, so that the man is reduced to the role of stooge, charged with magnifying and dignifying the image of the woman.