Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture

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.

Table of 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

About the Author :
Ifi Amadiume is a award-winning poet and a political activist as well as an academic. She has lived in Nigeria and the UK and is currently associate professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover. There, she teaches in both the Department of Religion and the African-American Studies Programme. Professor Amadiume is author of the influential Male Daughters, Female Husbands (Zed Books, 1988) which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award in 1989. Ifi Amadiume is a award-winning poet and a political activist as well as an academic. She has lived in Nigeria and the UK and is currently associate professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover. There, she teaches in both the Department of Religion and the African-American Studies Programme. Professor Amadiume is author of the influential Male Daughters, Female Husbands (Zed Books, 1988) which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award in 1989.

Review :
Serve[s] to expose and and promote awareness of disciplinary rootedness in ethno- and andro-centrio bias and offer[s] positive directions for a revision of scholarship... provocative and occasionally damning. A new understanding of Africa is the clear call expounded in this excellent book... [The author's] work skilfully points out to what she believes to be the most urgent project in African scholarship: deconstruction, demystification and decolonization of received colonial African history.