Guna Yala: The Islands Where Women Make the Rules

The Gullah Geechee worked in tandem and in mutual aid. The owners who had had them chained and stacked left them on the island on their own. Owners distanced themselves from the evidence of the fetid hold, the salt-soaked death on their skin, satisfied with the proceeds of their labor: indigo, rice, cotton. This absenteeism was common on the Sea Is

Ultimately, this is the story of individuals and groups fighting for control over the world’s most valuable resource: other people. If patriarchal ways of organising society happen to look eerily similar at opposite ends of the globe now, this isn’t because societies magically (or biologically) landed on them at the same time, or because women ever

Since myths, rather than biology, define the roles, rights and duties of men and women, the meaning of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ have varied immensely from one society to another.