Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Ifi Amadiume (Dartmouth College, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Zed Books Ltd
Dimensions:   Width: 13.60cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 21.40cm
Weight:   0.220kg
ISBN:  

9781350509207

ISBN 10:   1350509205
Pages:   224
Publication Date:   19 February 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of 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

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 *

Author Information

Ifi Amadiume is an 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, USA. There, she teaches in both the Department of Religion and the African-American Studies Programme.

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