African Mythology: The Darassa and the Shift of Power
A Darassa origin myth recounts how women held sole dominion in the early days—as rulers, officials, and elite—while men performed domestic labor. The narrative traces the transfer of power to men through political conspiracy: a male rebel's wife kills him at the queen's command, then the reorganized men engineer the queen's death and eliminate her heir, establishing male rule as permanent law.
There were very few women in the early days of the Darassa, and so the men were forced to do all the household work: they fetched firewood and drew the water and attented to the gardens, work which is now done by women. All the elite within the society were women.
The rulers were women, the officials were women. Ako Manoya was the last queen among the Darassa. She had named no heir apparent from her followers at the time, although she was childless. Ako governed alone, giving orders to the officials and hearing their reports and inspecting their works. The men, during this time were beginning to complain about their tasks and the way in which they were forced to serve women.
The leader of the men was married; he had a beautiful wife. But he also had a mistress, and the mistress revealed his agitation to the queen. The queen summoned the wife and told her that she knew how her husband was subverting the men and plotting against her rule. ‘He must die,’ said Ako Manoya. ‘How he dies is your choice. If you bring me his head, I shall make you my heir and you shall rule after me.’
That night, the wife served a big meal for her husband, so that he fell asleep after dinner. Then she took a knife from the kitchen and cut his throat, and when he was dead she cut off his head. She took the head to the queen in the morning, and was named the heir apparent to the realm. The loss of their leader disheartened the men for a time, but then they reorganized. They decided that the queen must die, and they selected the time, place and means. The queen would have to leave the town for a festival, they knew, and so they dug a pit along the road, a dead-fall trap. They covered the pit with branches and leaves, and then over the leaves they scattered earth and clay.
When the day came and the queen left the town, the men rushed about her on the road so that she was forced to walk over the pit, and she fell in. Furious, she pronounced her last words: she would be the last queen of the land. Then the men buried her in the pit. They also wished to stone the heir, the young wife, but she climbed into a tree and clung to it, and so instead they killed her with spears. Since that time, in that region, men alone have ruled.
By ANU of Afrographics
This piece emerges from a period of renewed interest in African epistemologies and pre-colonial social structures, particularly matriarchal or gender-balanced systems whose suppression by colonial and post-colonial forces remains under-examined. The Darassa narrative sits at the intersection of myth, historical memory, and moral philosophy—asking what stories a culture tells about power, gender, and the legitimacy of rule.
The piece challenges the assumption that male dominance is natural or unchanging by grounding it instead in a specific historical rupture—one driven by masculine grievance and collective male violence. Read now, it invites reflection on how origin myths encode and naturalize power shifts, and on the role of women's complicity (the wife's hand, however coerced) in their own dispossession. It remains a quiet, unsettling meditation on how the 'natural order' is manufactured.