| Conclusion
This paper has sought to provide a glimpse of the role of women as ritual leaders, as powerful sisters, as petty chiefs and, for the Lovedu and perhaps the unknown denizens of Mapungubwe, rulers in their own right. The feminine aspect of divine kingship has been relatively neglected in the literature. Royal women in southen African ethnography, with the exception of the rain queens and the Swazi ‘queen mothers’ are most often recorded as wives and mothers, and not as powerful beings in their own right. Power for these women, I have tried to show, lay in their ability to command of trade and tribute which would have been linked to ritual authority as well as the fertility of the land and its people, seen above all in the mystical ability to command life giving rain.
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