Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture by Ifi Amadiume
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.
