contribution to food production was limited to the clearing of farms. This confinement to a single task is in contrast to women’s work which was continuous and extended over the whole food production cycle. Along that cycle, farming the land, weeding and harvesting the food, was all incumbent upon women.

Hay (1976) reached the same conclusion on the theoretical division of labor in British colonies surveyed from Africa. For instance, in addition to doing most of the planting, weeding and harvesting of crops in Kenya, women in the Luo community were also responsible for housework and childcare and for storing and caring for the food supply. In contrast, Luo’s men had a very specific and time-sensitive task and limited responsibility with respect to agricultural production. In addition to pastoralist activities, their contribution to food production was limited to clearing the fields and breaking the surfaces for first cultivation.<sup>11</sup> Hay’s work also highlights how Luo’s women adjusted to the changing economic conditions created by the advent of colonialism. In particular, they engaged in agricultural experimentation such as change in agricultural crops, and techniques of production. They adopted labor-saving and innovation techniques to reduce the time allocated to food production, a process that enabled them to reinvest the released time to other economic opportunities. This process was particularly important as women often faced competing demands on their time and had to consistently operate under time constraints.

A number of studies have established that the division of labor along gender lines in the agricultural sector was not always clear-cut, but determined by local conditions [Baumann (1928)]. Though men consistently played a role in the initial phase of agricultural production by clearing the farm, there are a number of societies where they also participated either directly or indirectly in other aspects of food production, especially with the transition from shifting cultivation (hoe culture) to plough culture. In light of this contrasting picture, Baumann (1928) took the first attempt at mapping out the contours of gender division of labor in the African hoe culture.

Figure 1 highlights two contrasting pictures of gender production: a Sudanese East African, and a West African, which later appear to expand a little to the South East. Although women’s work continues to be prominent, there are geographical areas where men actively participate in the whole cycle of agricultural production, as illustrated by the vertical lines. This is particularly the case in the steppes and savannas of the Sudan and East Africa where the man shares the work of hoe culture. The husband hoes the ground, sows, weeds and harvests, alone or with women. In a few cases, for instance in the North East, men actually play a more prominent role as reflected in the thicker vertical lines. However, in the Central and West African regions, all the man does is to clear the ground, leaving all the rest of the work to the women, hence the proliferation of horizontal lines.<sup>12</sup>

> 11 However, this theoretical division is also affected by socioeconomic status. While wealthy men scorned work in the fields, poor men often helped their wives with most of the agricultural tasks [Hay (1976)].

> 12 At the same time, a number of authors have attributed the sexual division of labor to physical endowment. In this line, Schmidt (1923) distinguished two kinds of soil cultivation: ‘forest clearing’ and ‘actual soil cultivation’. ‘Forest clearing refers to

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