Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture

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.

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.