ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the activities organized in and for family groups in African societies and examines the limitations that the organization of these activities placed on family structure. In some ways, ties between spouses were of much the same nature in Africa as in band societies. They depended on each other through the sexual division of labor in procuring and processing of subsistence goods, and sexuality was regulated to the point where spouses primarily depended on each other there, too. African social systems displayed all five major routes of transmission of rights and duties between generations of family members: patrilineal, matrilineal, dual-unilineal, ambilineal, and to a much lesser extent, bilateral. The study of the variation in African domestic cycles is primarily the study of the variations in the domestic cycle of the family's public-sphere activities. These varied along the dimensions of route of transmission, restriction-inclusion, degree of polygyny, and presence or absence of the house-property complex.
