Conclusion: Accumulation, Resistance and the Reproduction of Stratification

The discourse on gender, male/female roles and the division of labour which links 'farm-food-female' as a gender marker appears essentially the same today as it was forty years ago. The context, however, has changed significantly in association with increasing integration of the local economy into the world market. This can be characterized as a situation of increasing commodification, including but not limited to privatization of land, and an associated increase in economic stratification. In these changing material conditions, gender discourse, which makes women responsible for providing food but does not give them control over productive resources, leads to increased inequality, marginalizes and impoverishes women, and endangers food self-sufficiency. Demands on women's time and labour have greatly increased over the last four decades while their access to land has been threatened. At the same time new opportunities, including education and access to paid work, have opened up new avenues of opportunity for some women. While women as a category have been disadvantaged by commodification and the spread of the market economy, they have also become multi-vocal, with distinctions based on criteria other than age and seniority becoming increasingly important in determining their life position and chances.

As both the national State and the Nso' elite continue to pursue hegemony, it is important to pinpoint the mechanisms by which the national elites constitute and validate themselves, and to locate forms of local resistance (Bayart 1979 and 1981; Geschiere 1986). The women's voices with which I opened this paper form one discourse of counter-hegemony. In the refusal of a number of women to underwrite their husbands' lives and projects, and in their decisions to acquire their own symbolic capital, lie further modes of resistance to male power. Ultimately it is in marriage strategies that we will be able to locate both the formation of elites, and also a form of resistance which will challenge the composition of gender categories, the structure of gender relations, and the hegemony of male power.