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

Promotional Information

Challenging western anthropologists to recognize their own class-based, patriarchal thought, Ifi Amadiume, the author of

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.

Reviews

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.
*Journal of African History*

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.
*New People*