Our New Husbands Are Here — 2011 ·

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

“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

“Emily Osborn gives us a deep and fascinating insight into the important inland center of Kankan which has been sadly and strangely neglected in the historiography and anthropology of West Africa. She makes an enduring contribution to African history with ripples into the political science and anthropology of household and gender.”

David Robinson — Michigan State University

“Pathbreaking in its findings and approach, this elegantly written study explores the intimate relationship between household-building and state-building in West Africa over a span of three centuries. Through a sophisticated interrogation of oral and archival sources, Osborn has produced a new understanding of statecraft that bridges the artificial divide between the precolonial and colonial and anchors women firmly at the core.”

Elizabeth Schmidt — Loyola University Maryland

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.