mselves and that groups and individuals further a complex strategy. Women play a crucial role in this process, since they gather and control other women as wives and companions for brothers, sons, and husbands. A husband chooses his first wife with care, since she is responsible for training all subsequent wives and organizing them, older children, clients, wards, and, in the past slaves, into an agricultural work force. The senior wife is responsible for producing the agricultural wealth of the household, and if her warrior husband is absent or preoccupied for long periods of time, it is she who often functions as the effective head of household. Even though a husband may marry younger, more beautiful wives, he continues to regard his big wife with great respect and consideration (Rosaldo). In Mende, the head wife in a large polygynous household is given much religious as well as economic power. She organizes the agricultural work force, and stores and markets economic surpluses. Because of these roles, Mende head wives are seen as authority figures, and occasionally a chiefs head wife will succeed him in office even though she resides virilocally in his chiefdom and has no genealogical right to rule in the village of his kin (Tucker). Jealousy, while not an inevitable consequence of polygyny, is reported in many polygynous societies. Tension is common when women are competing for goods and services from the husband and since each wife attempts to build a uterine family at the expense of her co-wives children (Rosaldo). Among the Kanuri of Bornu (part of a centralized Muslim state), women are married very young, often to middle-aged men. A womans ability to control a husbands dominance depends on her ability to withdraw food and sexual services. A second wife is a considerable threat to her, resulting in less attention for her as well as for her children, and she loses some of her ability to gain compliance from her husband. However, M...
