Family Lineage

Bemba family lineage follows the matriarchal line. This means that that a child's mother is their mother in the sense that we understand the word, but also all of her sisters and her mother are mothers to her child. When a man marries a woman he leaves his family to go stay with the family of the wife. Any children they have together belong to the wife's family. Their biological father is not their father in responsibility, that falls the mother's brother (our uncle on the mothers side). He becomes responsible for deciding cases of marriage and other such life decisions. The biological father is still a part of the child's life to take care of the day to day needs and provide for the family but the main decisions in a child's life are made by their uncle. Also, if something should happen to end a marriage the child would usually stay with the mother's family. The head of a family is typically the brother of the oldest mother (for example, a great uncle on the mother's side). He would become the "headman" of the village where the family stays. Traditionally a "village" is really just a family group but as population has grown they have come to include many families. Got all that?

Extended family systems like this are beneficial in a number of ways, especially where scarcity of food is a common problem. One family member's abundance can always be used to make up for a defecit in the harvest of another. It can also be damaging as there is an expectation that family members share everything hurting the incentive to accumulate anything or add fields to cultivation on top of a family's immediate needs.


This is my friend Ba Shimuyembe's family. The children are both his, his brother's, and his daughter's but they are all treated as if they were from the same parents.