Women spent thirty hours a week fetching wood, and only when co-wives were sisters, or an aunt or niece, were they expected to work together regularly.
Although co-wives hold equal status, relations between them are expected to be adversarial.
Families were usually polygamous, with the first wife accorded a special status among her co-wives.
In one popular story, envious of being outdone by each other, the co-wives begin to quarrel.
Third, by the device of an incomplete wedding it makes the two co-wives more unequal in status and power than a first and second wife inevitably would be.
Colonial intervention institutionalized instability in marriage by legitimizing a multitude of mediational domains for the domestic disputes that characterize relations between husbands and wives, and between co-wives and female in-laws.
Only men and women with whom the woman was familiar had access to this space : her husband, family members, agemates of her husband, co-wives and other women friends.
