Full Description
This extraordinary book issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa. The author of the best-selling Male Daughters/Female Husbands here issues a 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.
Professor Amadiume calls instead for a new history of Africa, made and written by Africans. This is such a book.
The book
* 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.
* uncovers the hidden matriarchal history of Africa which continues to empower women in political struggle throughout the continent
* looks at the masculinization of indigenous African religions, effected largely by the imposition of Christianity and Islam
* 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 the beginning of a new vision of Africa, from the powerful voice of an African woman.
Contents
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
