The patriarchal mode of slavery that Southern U.S. and Caribbean slaveowners attempted to establish often clashed with the familial structures enslaved people themselves constructed. Some of these family structures had roots in West African societies. The Akan society of the Gold Coast, for example, was largely matrilineal and composed of individual “clans or lineages,” descended from a single mother. Mandé society, while more often organized along patrilineal lines, exhibited some matrilineal lines and generally reserved powerful positions of political and household authority for women. In Igbo society, women were “most celebrated” for their roles as mothers and wives, but also participated in independent market activity and in communal defense. As a sizable proportion of enslaved people transported to the New World in the trans-Atlantic trade originated from Akan, Mandé, and Igbo societies, some historians have noted a connection between the matrilineal elements of these West African cultures and the centrality of women and mothers in enslaved peoples’ family units. These alternative modes of structuring household and family life among enslaved people threatened some planters’ intentions to serve as the solely acknowledged "pater familias" of their households.