Re-inventing Africa: matriarchy, religion, and culture

Challenging western anthropologists to recognize their own class-based, patriarchal thought, Ifi Amadiume, the author of ‘Male Daughters, Female Husbands’, issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa. Amadiume shows how conventional anthropology has consistently imposed European ideas of the ‘natural’ nuclear family, woman as a passive object, and class difference on a continent with a long history of women with power doing things differently. She uncovers the hidden matriarchal structure of Africa and shows how it has been systematically ignored, how Africa today is cursed with neo-colonial states, and how imperialism, patriarchy and class-based social structures have become internalized. The author calls for an end to anthropology. She calls instead for a social history of Africa, by Africans. This is such a book. Dedicated to the diasporic African communities in their struggles to construct alternative, anti-racist and anti-imperialist epistemologies of self-representation and self-generated ideals, it offers a new vision of Africa, from the voice of an African woman.