Family, Household, & History in Africa

What is a family? What makes a household? These are social units that vary significantly in meaning and composition across time and across space. African households and families have long been the focus of scholarship, not least in colonial ethnographies of the twentieth century. But those works imagined them as timeless. Historical scholarship and later anthropologists have challenged that notion and shown that these were and are complicated and diverse social institutions with specific histories and consequences. Yet, they rarely feature in archives other than at moments of crisis. We will explore how historians have sought to write histories of families and households. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with central debates around the meaning and form of these social institutions and with the critical place of households and families to social and political history in Africa.