ABSTRACT
University of Ilosho is a highly stratified community, combining some of the features of a colonial caste society with those of traditional status systems in indigenous societies. The parallel with the estates of pre-industrial Europe is far from a close one, yet the term “estate” seems less misleading than either “class” or “caste.” Nigeria, like all of the world’s societies is male-dominated, but in the South, women in the “traditional” sector probably have a wider degree of sexual and economic independence vis a vis men than in most Western industrial societies. Traditionally, there was little if any “double standard” of sexual conduct, such as was introduced to the detriment of women by the Victorian Protestant mission schools which trained “elite” women. The subsidization of schooling, which is in turn the passport to social mobility, is the most common, indeed a nearly universal, form of expressing family solidarity.
