Full Description
Now in this Essential Amadiume edition designed to bring Amadiume's groundbreaking ideas to a new generation of readers, this extraordinary book issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa, one made and written by Africans. Here Amadiume issues a seminal challenge to Western anthropologists to recognize their own complicity in producing a version of Africa that is often little more than a reflection of their own class-based, patriarchal thought.
Amadiume explores how imperialism, violence, patriarchy and class-based social structures - originally imposed by colonialism - have become internalized to result in a contemporary Africa cursed with neo-colonial states. She uncovers the hidden matriarchal history of Africa, which continues to empower women in political struggle throughout the continent. She looks at the masculinization of indigenous African religions, effected largely by the imposition of Christianity and Islam. Ultimately, she provides a guide to the main Afro-centric social theorists, writing a new social history of their continent.
Dedicated to the diasporic African communities in their struggle to construct alternative, anti-racist and anti-imperialist epistemologies of self-representation and self-generated ideals, this is a radical vision of Africa from the powerful voice of an African woman.
Contents
Foreword to the Essential Amadiume Edition
Introduction: Writing Africa
Part I: Rewriting History
1. The Matriarchal Roots of Africa
2. Race and Gender: Cheikh Anta Diop's Moral Philosophy
3. Theorizing Matriarchy in Africa: Kinship Ideologies and Socio-Cultural Systems in Africa and Europe
4. Women's Achievements in African Political Systems: Transforming Culture for 500 years
5. Gender and Social Movements in Africa: A West African Experience
6. Gender and the Contestation of Religion: A Historical Perspective on African societies
Part II: Decolonizing History
7. African Women and Politics: A History of Transformation
8. Cycles of Western Imperialism: Feminism, Race, Gender, Class and Power
9. In the Company of Women: Love, Struggle, Class and Our Feminisms
