Our New Husbands Are Here — 2011 ·

Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

By Emily Lynn Osborn

“Original and stimulating, Our New Husbands Are Here challenges traditional historical accounts of gender and tests new concepts and frameworks that promise insightful openings in African studies.”

Mamadou Diouf — Columbia University

“This refreshingly bold and provocative study of Kankan…draws upon a broad range of sources…. By tracking the constantly shifting means through which households and wealth have been constructed over time, the author sets the reader up extremely well to appreciate the radical shift in the understanding of marriage, households, and gender that was introduced under French colonial rule.”

American Historical Review

“Emily Osborn has written a highly accessible and well composed social and political history of Kankan covering the period up to the First World War. She explores and impressive variety of sources: oral history, local manuscripts, and archival texts. This work is an important contribution to debates in the social history of West Africa and to gender studies.”

Journal of African History

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In Our New Husbands Are Here, Emily Lynn Osborn investigates a central puzzle of power and politics in West African history: Why do women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period, and then vanish altogether with colonization? Osborn addresses this question by exploring the relationship of the household to the state. By analyzing the history of statecraft in the interior savannas of West Africa (in present-day Guinea-Conakry), Osborn shows that the household, and women within it, played a critical role in the pacifist Islamic state of Kankan-Baté, enabling it to endure the predations of the transatlantic slave trade and become a major trading center in the nineteenth century. But French colonization introduced a radical new method of statecraft to the region, one that separated the household from the state and depoliticized women’s domestic roles. This book will be of interest to scholars of politics, gender, the household, slavery, and Islam in African history.

Emily Lynn Osborn is an assistant professor of history at University of Chicago.