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Housewives at Husbands’ Throats: Recalcitrant Wives and Gender Norms in a West African Nation, 1961–72

‘House-wives have, in down-right cold blood, inflicted inhuman tortures to their husbands . . . have a look around our hospitals and the stories would tell themselves’, decries Ruff Wanzie in her December 1965 women’s advice column for the Cameroon Times.1 For evidence, she cites the death of a man bitten by a snake while sleeping at a neighbour’s after his angry wife barred him from the house. ‘These cases become a sort of show-case’, she claims, saying people flocked to his hospital bed ‘to see and know how wicked wives could be to their husbands’.2 Comments such as Wanzie’s reflected concerns among some urban Anglophone (English-speaking) Cameroonian elites that married women increasingly subverted responsibilities associated with predominant notions about womanhood during the 1960s and early 1970s. Within this context, Wanzie denounced wicked wives’ attempts to evade prevailing ideas about gender relations and patriarchal authority in urban Anglophone Cameroon. Located in West Africa, Cameroon borders Nigeria, Chad and the Central African Republic. Today, Cameroon, predominately a French-speaking country, encompasses a minority of English-speaking towns, reflecting former British administrative legacies.3 The Cameroon Times was one of many English-language newspapers that circulated in Anglophone towns in the 1960s, following independence.4 Most had a ‘women’s corner’, such as Wanzie’s column, which featured writings like hers and readers’ letters asking about courtship and social norms. Cameroon resembled countries in colonial and postcolonial Africa in that the educated urban elite – including journalists like Wanzie – saw themselves as defining cultural customs. Through advice columns, female journalists and letter writers tried to protect African cultural identity and authority by regulating women’s domestic, economic, social and political activities.5 This article addresses these privileged elites’ debates about educated married women’s (and men’s) normative social conduct in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions. This article focuses on examples of Anglophone elites mostly from the modernday Southwest Region of Cameroon and on their cultural practices regarding marriage that were prevalent through much of urban and rural West Africa since the late nineteenth century.6 Most precolonial West African societies recognised polygynous