Africa: Crude Continent: The Struggle for Africa’s Oil Prize Paperback

Demonstrates shortcomings in Western feminist conceptualizations, and shows how insights from African feminist thinking may enhance understandings of gender, both in and beyond Africa.

Winner of the 2012 gender research award KRAKA-prisen.
This book is about gender politics in Mozambique over three decades from 1975 to 2005. The book is also about different ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism, through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about men, women and gender relations. But to what extent do such assumptions fit the ways in which rural Mozambican men and women see themselves? A major line of argument in the book is that gender relations should be investigated, not assumed, and that policies not matching people’s lives are not likely to succeed.
The empirical data, on which the argument is based, are first a unique body of data material collected 1982-1984 by the national women’s organization, the OMM [when the author was employed as a sociologist in the organization] andsecondly data resulting from more recent fieldwork in northern Mozambique.
Importantly inspired by African post-colonial feminist lines of thinking, the book engages in a project of re-mapping and re-interpreting ‘culture andtradition’. In this context, the book investigates in particular matriliny [c. 40 per cent of Mozambique’s population live under conditions of matriliny] and female initiation. The findings open new avenues for gender politics, and for rethinking sexuality and gender – in Africa and beyond.

The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade explores the fascinating history of the transatlantic slave trade on Ghana’s coast between 1700 and 1807. Author Rebecca Shumway brings to life the survival experiences of southern Ghanaians as they became both victims of continuous violence and successful brokers of enslaved human beings. The era of the slave trade gave birth to a new culture in this part of West Africa, just as it was giving birth to new cultures across the Americas. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade pushes Asante scholarship to the forefront of African diaspora and Atlantic World studies by showing the integral role of Fante middlemen and transatlantic trade in the development of the Asante economy prior to 1807.