Africa Today articles from July 1996

Africa Today archives from July 1996

Postmodern feminism and knowledge production: the African context.(Reconceptualizing African Women: Toward the Year 2000)
July 1, 1996... This article examines the implications of what may now be seen as a postmodern trend in feminist scholarship regarding the study of African women. It argues primarily that the rigorous critiques emerging from postmodern feminist debates have not...

Perceiving women as catalysts.(Reconceptualizing African Women: Toward the Year 2000)
July 1, 1996... Images and stereotypes of women, particularly African women, abound. Indeed, African women have long been perceived as docile, "bound to home and hearth," submissive to male authority, and even politically inert or passive.(1) Jomo Kenyatta,...

Swahili women since the Nineteenth Century: theoretical and empirical considerations on gender and identity construction.(Reconceptualizing African Women: Toward the Year 2000)
July 1, 1996... This article aims to (1) analyze and update the theoretical discussion on the link between gender and identity and (2) show how a group of African (Swahili) women dealt with this link in practice. The empirical study reinforces certain...

Women and the social construction of gender in African development.(Reconceptualizing African Women: Toward the Year 2000)
July 1, 1996... Orthodox Marxists claim that capitalism is progressive because of its capacity to develop the world, especially for its role in transforming the ancient economies to their feudal and, eventually, capitalist economic structures. Although Marx and...

Gender, democratization, and associational life in Kenya.(Reconceptualizing African Women: Toward the Year 2000)
July 1, 1996... The quest for democracy is the quest for freedom, justice, equality and human dignity.... It is a far-reaching and wide-ranging movement, encompassing the liberation of citizens from local despots and tyrants, women from domestic and social...

Reconceptualizing gender and reconstructing social life: Ugandan women and the path to national development.(Reconceptualizing African Women: Toward the Year 2000)
July 1, 1996... In recent years, developing nations have undergone dramatic economic changes that have tended to result in a deterioration of life conditions for the majority of citizens. Analysts have pointed to the differential response to these changes by...

Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective.
July 1, 1996... Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective is a collection of eleven socio-biographical studies of thirteen Nigerian women. Most of the essayists are historians. The book begins with an interpretive introduction, followed by the chapters, each...

African Women - Three Generations.
July 1, 1996... Mother-Child Households in a South African Ghetto might have been a better title for this interesting book. The success of Wild Swans(1) and Love Medicine(2) may have inspired Mathabane to write about his sister, Florah, his mother, Geli, and his...

The Heritage of Islam: Women, Religion, and Politics in West Africa.
July 1, 1996... The Heritage of Islam integrates the work of two scholars, each of whom specializes in a particular region of Islamic West Africa - Barbara Callaway in northern Nigeria and Lucy Creevey in Senegal. This book is a comparative study that...