This extraordinary book issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa. The author of the best-selling Male Daughters/Female Husbands here issues a 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.

Professor Amadiume calls instead for a new history of Africa, made and written by Africans. This is such a book.

The book

* 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.

* uncovers the hidden matriarchal history of Africa which continues to empower women in political struggle throughout the continent

* looks at the masculinization of indigenous African religions, effected largely by the imposition of Christianity and Islam

* 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 the beginning of a new vision of Africa, from the powerful voice of an African woman.