This volume brings together a variety of studies that are engaged with notions of gender in different African localities, institutions and historical time periods. The objective is to expand empirical and theoretical studies that take seriously the idea that in order to understand gender and gender relations in Africa, we must start with Africa.

This volume investigates alternative epistemological pathways by which knowledge production in Africa can proceed. The contributors, using different intellectual dynamics, explore the existing epistemological dominance of the West-from architecture to gender discourse, from environmental management to democratic governance-and offer distinct and unique arguments that challenge the denigration of the different and differing modes of knowing that the West considered "barbaric" and "primitive." This volume therefore constitutes a minimal gesture that further contributes to the ongoing discourse on alternative modes of knowing in Africa. .

Religion, Gender, and Wellbeing in Africa argues that, in many African societies, ideas and practices of wellbeing and gender relations continue to be informed and shaped by religious epistemologies. The contributors affirm that for many Africans, it is through religio-spiritual frameworks that daily experiences, interactions, and gender relations are understood and interpreted. However, for many African women, religions have functioned as a double-edged-sword. Although they have contributed to the struggle against issues such as colonialism, gender justice, climate justice, and human rights, they have also endorsed and perpetuated sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, and the denial of human rights for a wide variety of people on the margins. The chapters within this collection demonstrate that most religions and religious formations in Africa have not yet positioned themselves as forces for wellbeing, gender justice, and security for African women and children. The contributors challenge simplistic and superficial readings and interpretations of religio-spirituality in Africa and call for deeper engagements of the interplay between Africa’s religio-spiritual realities and the wellbeing of women, particularly around issues of gender justice, reproductive health, and human rights.

This book reveals how conventional anthropology has consistently imposed European ideas of the "natural" nuclear family, women as passive object, and class differences on a continent with a long history of women with power doing things differently. Amadiume argues for an end to anthropology and calls instead for a social history of Africa, by Africans.

This volume investigates alternative epistemological pathways by which knowledge production in Africa can proceed. The contributors, using different intellectual dynamics, explore the existing epistemological dominance of the West—from architecture to gender discourse, from environmental management to democratic governance—and offer distinct and unique arguments that challenge the denigration of the different and differing modes of knowing that the West considered “barbaric” and “primitive.” This volume therefore constitutes a minimal gesture that further contributes to the ongoing discourse on alternative modes of knowing in Africa.

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: gendering knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora -- PART I (Re- )writing gender in African and African Diaspora history -- 1 The Bantu Matrilineal Belt: reframing African women's history -- 2 REMAPping the African Diaspora: place, gender and negotiation in Arabian slavery -- 3 Communicating feminist ethics in the age of New Media in Africa -- PART II Gender, migration and identity -- 4 Transnational feminist solidarity, Black German women and the politics of belonging -- 5 Beyond disability: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and female heroism in Manu Herbstein's Ama -- 6 Reverse migration of Africans in the Diaspora: foregrounding a woman's quest for her roots in Tess Akaeke Onwueme's Legacies -- PART III Gender, subjection and power -- 7 Queens in flight: Fela Kuti's Afrobeat Queens and the performance of "Black" feminist Diasporas -- 8 Women and tfu in Wimbum Community, Cameroon -- 9 Women's agency and peacebuilding in Nigeria's Jos crises -- 10 Contesting the notions of "thugs and welfare queens": combating Black derision and death -- 11 Culture of silence and gender development in Nigeria -- 12 Emasculation, social humiliation and psychological castration in Irene's More than Dancing -- Index

Gender History Across Epistemologies offers broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries - disciplinary, methodological, and national - to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. Essays present epistemological and theoretical debates central in gender history over the past two decades Contributions within this volume to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and approaches The volume demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history suggest surprising crossovers and even the discovery of common grounds

The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

"A distinctive contribution of African feminist and gender scholarship has been a conscious effort to draw from, and simultaneously rethink, concepts, paradigms and methodologies that are often taken for granted both in conventional and in mainstream feminist scholarship. This with a view to enriching them with perspectives sensitive to the encounters, cultures, economic and socio-political predicaments that have shaped and been shaped by gender relations in Africa. This volume brings together essays by some of the leading names on gender studies in Africa, as a major contribution to these concerns. Situating themselves variously in relation to claims and counter claims on the universalisms and particularisms in African feminism and gender studies, the authors debate the relative (de)-merits of Eurocentrism, African epistemologies and cultures, colonial legacies, postcolonial realities, and other current dilemmas and challenges in understanding and articulating African feminism and gender research. Practiced and budding scholars should find this a fascinating read."--Book cover.