African Possibilities

Ifi Amadiume is a tenured full Professor at Dartmouth College, USA, where she has taught both in the Department of Religion and the African and African American Studies Program. She has taught courses cross-listed in many departments and programs such as Women and Gender Studies Program, and the Anthropology Department. She is also a writer and an award-winning poet of many books. Amadiume is the author of several books and articles, including the influential Male Daughters, Female Husbands (Zed Books, 1987; new edition 2026), which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award in 1989 and was listed as one of "Africa’s Best 100 Books of the 20th Century," an internationally judged, curated list formally announced in 2002.

• AcknowledgementsDedicationNew essay, "African Indigenous Women's Thought"PREFACEINTRODUCTIONPART I: VOICINGChapter 1: Prophecy, Authenticity, Oppositional Models of Resistance inAfricaChapter 2: African Perspectives on Religious Conscience and the GlobalEconomyChapter 3: Culture and Religious Traditions of Gender and Development inAfrica: Gendering Civil Society and the StateChapter 4: The Endogenous Project And A Struggle for Culture and VoicePART II: ALTERNATIVESChapter 5: Citizenship, Rights and Freedoms in Contesting ReligiousNarratives of Gods and GoddessesChapter 6: Mama Asta: an African Muslim matriarchy in SenegalChapter 7: Bodies, Choices, Globalizing NeoColonial Enchantments: AfricanMatriarchs and Mammy WaterPART III: POSSIBILITIESChapter 8: Gender, Culture and the Family in AfricaChapter 9: Matriarchy and the Postcolonial: Possibilities and DisenchantmentsChapter 10: Sexuality, African Religio-Cultural Traditions and Modernity:Expanding the LensChapter 11: Writing for Justice, Seeking Inclusiveness, Implicating the WorldPostscript or Afterword: Progressing with Matriarchitization

Contrary to feminist theories that presuppose an almighty patriarchy that is hegemonic globally, Ifi Amadiume has been theorizing, over and over again, the reality that white supremacist imperialist patriarchy never succeeded in wiping out indigenous knowledge systems and women’s agency in toto. Rather, wherever there is patriachiality, careful research methodologies are bound to reveal oppositional matriachiality and vice versa. Drawing from her background in the cultural studies of religion, the inspirational poet-activist intellectual reminds us in African Possibilities that the world would be a more humane place when the marginalization of the immense contributions from poor women and Africans is ended to make way for the democratization and decolonization of economic, political, educational, technological, family, and spiritual institutional leadership in the interest of all.