Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture - Tapa dura

'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 '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

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.