Book Details

Re-inventing Africa issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa. Ifi Amadiume shows how conventional anthropology has consistently imposed European ideas of the "natural" nuclear family, woman as 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, how imperialism, patriarchy and class-based social structures have become internalized. The author argues for an end to anthropology. She calls instead for a social history of Africa, by Africans. 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, it is the beginning of a new vision of Africa, from the powerful voice of an African woman.