http://www.gutenberg-e.org/geh01/geh13.html
Women's "cultivating community" had vital consequences in terms of their access to arable land. Formal grounds for belonging to the political community of the chiefdom—and thus rights to means of subsistence, as enjoyed by vinyi va tiko—were, according to custom, more numerous for men than for women. Officially, for a woman to enjoy the status and land rights of a n'winyi wa tiko she had to have been born in or married to a member of the chiefdom. Men, on the other hand, could move fairly readily from one chiefdom to another, becoming an owner of the land simply by pledging allegiance, through the procedure of kukondza, to authorities where they decided to settle. Nineteenth-century travel accounts reveal that itinerant women were not unusual in the Magude area even before migrant labor and Portuguese colonialism generated ever growing numbers of "women without men." Yet an unattached woman who suddenly appeared in a rural community was more likely to be met with suspicion by customary authorities than if she arrived in the company of a man. According to women's version of tradition, though, an unattached woman seeking to settle in a new location had a good chance of gaining acceptance if she could claim kinship of some kind with a local individual or family. Informal networks of land-based kinship and community thus made the boundaries of the tiko permeable to women in a way patriliny did not, because a woman who could establish a foothold on the land—by obtaining a field from a woman with whom she shared vuxaka,even just vuxaka bya matinyo—could, through her habitual interaction with members of the cultivating community, solidify her claim to belonging to that community.
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