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As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s was the first book I encountered when I started to critically engage with Western feminist scholarship as a Master's student in the UK.
This book made a major intervention by challenging theories of gender in Western social sciences and questioning their relevance to African societies. I especially loved the book because Oyěwùmí offered a detailed presentation of gender realities in the Oyo-Yorùbá society of Nigeria that paid attention to human relations holistically and situationally and did not assume gender inequality on the basis of female/male bodies.
A must-read analysis for anyone working to decolonize gender theory.
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.
As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
Saba Mahmood’s book is an intellectually stimulating and insightfully written study of a grassroots women’s mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt.
Speaking to a North American audience, Mahmood challenged secular-liberal theorizations of human agency and views that depicted Muslim women in patriarchal societies as without agency. Her nuanced and multi-dimensional study evidenced a considerably more complex picture of moral choice, agency, and Islamist politics that centered on the women’s own understandings and interpretation of a complex religious and political landscape.
It is Mahmood’s balanced and reflexive approach that makes this book a deeply educational study for students and scholars alike.
Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements. Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension…
As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
Laura McClusky’s investigation of conjugal abuse among a Mayan community in Belize is one of the most ethnographically compelling books I have read on lived experiences of domestic violence.
McClusky was motivated to write this book because most domestic violence research had been clinical or sociological and had focused solely on the experience of violence, often approaching the phenomenon in a “peopleless manner.”
Refreshingly, McClusky decided to focus on the emotions, desires, motivations, and personal experiences of living women more holistically, thus overcoming tendencies to reduce women to the experience of violence and granting them the recognition as agents of actions that they deserve.
Marriage among the Maya of Central America is a model of complementarity between a man and a woman. This union demands mutual respect and mutual service. Yet some husbands beat their wives. In this pioneering book, Laura McClusky examines the lives of several Mopan Maya women in Belize. Using engaging ethnographic narratives and a highly accessible analysis of the lives that have unfolded before her, McClusky explores Mayan women's strategies for enduring, escaping, and avoiding abuse. Factors such as gender, age inequalities, marriage patterns, family structure, educational opportunities, and economic development all play a role in either preventing or contributing…
As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
Talal Asad’s genealogical analysis of the concept of religion in Western thought is a classic.
Asad, a Saudi-born anthropologist, proposed that it was the unique product of Western modernity and secularism to perceive religious discourse in the public arena as a disguise for power, which created a bias towards it in public life. This bias was then internationalized through the transposition of an inherently ethnocentric concept of religion.
Among other insights, Asad stressed the need to approach religious traditions in reference to the experience of the believers and the texts or traditions they invoke in their everyday life. A seminal piece of work that can provide a point of reference for anyone working to decolonize religious studies.
In "Geneologies of Religion", Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation-from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign-is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is…
I began my career as a journalist, including working as a reporter on an international newspaper. I left full-time journalism to write fiction where I can combine an interest in international affairs with stories of characters and issues of the heart which drive individuals and often shape events. Over the years I’ve worked and traveled with international organizations, serving as Vice President of PEN International, and on the boards and in other roles focusing on human rights, education, and refugees. I’ve been able to travel widely and witness events up close, walking along the edge of worlds and discovering the bonds that keep us from falling off.
This was one of the first novels I read in the late sixties as I began reading African writers and studying the novel form and possibilities. Chinua Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo, a warrior in the late 1800s as he tries to resist the British political and religious powers encroaching on his home. Okonkwo is in conflict with his community as they allow the intrusion and succumb to the British.
Through his proverbs, rhythmic prose, and poignant storytelling, Chinua Achebe brings to life this story without polemics and the drier narrative of history books but instead through the passion of a man and his world. As I studied how novels could affect this empathetic magic, I looked to books like Things Fall Apart.
Africa can easily become an obsession: an extraordinary continent, blessed with breath-taking beauty and wonderful people, yet cursed by climate, corruption, war, and… crime. This continent is the most incredible setting for stories about people driven to crime, victims of crime, the detection of crime.
Based in the UK, but a frequent visitor to Southern Africa, having written many non-fiction books, South Africa (and Cape Town in particular) was always going to be my choice of setting for my crime novels. For me, a good novel – within any genre – transports the reader into an unfamiliar world, absorbs them in the lives of the characters, and reveals insights which touch on their own lives.
Visceral, immediate, and engrossing, Adenle’s debut novel features two main characters embroiled in a murder in Lagos. British journalist Guy Collins, an alien in a dangerous, fast-paced city is implicated in a gruesome crime. Amaka, a woman who has devoted herself to the protection of the city’s working girls, speaks for him, hoping that her intervention will be re-payed by Collins in the form of global publicity for her campaign against the people traffickers and body-parts smugglers. Both out of their depth, at great peril, and at the mercy of Nigeria’s mega-city and its huge cast of characters, they find themselves caught in a maze from which there appears no escape.
Guy Collins, a British hack, is hunting for an election story in Lagos. A decision to check out a local bar in Victoria Island ends up badly - a mutilated female body is discarded close by and Collins is picked up as a suspect. In the murk of a hot, groaning and bloody police station cell, Collins fears the worst. But then Amaka, a sassy guardian angel of Lagos working girls, talks the police station chief around. She assumes Collins is a BBC journo who can broadcast the city's witchcraft and body parts trade that she's on a one-woman mission…
I am invested in how women juxtapose the day-to-day with the bizarre. I am curious about how women balance their lives with the insoluble and how this contributes to the fluidity of their identities. I live with women, I work with women, I shop with them, eat with them, sit next to them on the bus, I am friends with women, laugh with them, I pray with them, I am these women. In whichever format my work takes shape–whether subtle or direct, either as a performer, writer, designer, or community catalyst, I am committed to intentionally making space for womanhood. Please enjoy my book list.
I’ve read this book at least twice. The specificity of Sefi Atta's language makes me feel like I can reach into the pages and sit next to the characters as their lives unfold.
Her writing is very immersive, drawing you in and making everything in that world real and imaginable, painful yet livable. In this book, she explores the complexities of womanhood, even with certain privileges and regardless of status.
Everything Good Will Come introduces an important new voice in contemporary fiction. With insight and a lyrical wisdom, Nigerian-born Sefi Atta has written a powerful and eloquent story set in her African homeland. It is 1971, a year after the Biafran War, and Nigeria is under military rule—though the politics of the state matter less than those of her home to Enitan Taiwo, an eleven-year-old girl tired of waiting for school to start. Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Enitan’s brother, allow her friendship with the new girl next door, the brash and beautiful…
When I decided to familiarize myself with eighteenth-century authors of African descent by editing their writings, I didn’t anticipate becoming their biographer. In annotating their writings, I quickly became intrigued and challenged by trying to complete the biographical equivalent of jigsaw puzzles, ones which often lack borders, as well as many pieces. How does one recover, or at least credibly speculate about, what’s missing? Even the pieces one has may be from unreliable sources. But the thrill of the hunt for, and the joy of discovering, as many pieces as possible make the challenge rewarding. My recommendations demonstrate ways others have also met the biographical challenge.
English enslavers called Ancona Robin Robin John and Little Ephraim Robin John “princes” because they were literate English-speaking members of one of two ruling African slave-trading families in present-day southeastern Nigeria.
The lives of the Johns illuminate the surprisingly complex relationships among the participants in the transatlantic slave trade, when African suppliers of enslaved Africans often had as much economic and political power as their European customers.
The English allies of the rival family captured the two men during a trade war between the families in 1767.
They were taken to the Caribbean and North America, with several escapes and recaptures, before being brought to England, where they successfully sued for their freedom. They returned to the family business in Africa.
In 1767, two "princes" of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes, Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors-and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience.
Randy J. Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes' correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it. They were transported from the coast…
I grew up in Tanzania, where I discovered the importance of learning first-hand from ordinary people about their lives by accompanying my mother, who was an anthropologist, when she carried out participant observation among coastal people. Much later in my own research, I could see how essential it was to interact with people face-to-face and learn about their aspirations, joys, fears, daily struggles, and creative ways of coping with the challenges of an economy in free fall. I learned to look beyond the “economic data” to more fully appreciate the humanity of the people involved. All of these books I selected are by people who learned about the real urban economy in this way.
In this riveting account, Agbiboa dispels the myth that corruption is a culturally accepted norm in Nigeria.
He spent months behind the wheel as a minibus conductor in the informal settlements of Lagos, Nigeria, and experienced first-hand the stark realities of the corrupt interactions between drivers, police, and members of the transport workers union.
Nigerians reject, and simultaneously have little choice, but to participate in the petty corruption that arises from the systematic, violent, and exploitative relationship between the state and union on the one hand, and transport operators and passengers on the other.
Agbiboashows that binary understandings of formality/informality, public/private, and legal/illegal derived from Western thought do not adequately capture the way that petty corruption is embedded in the state and is driven by elite corruption.
This resonated strongly with my research on the informal economy in Tanzania.
Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with…
I’m a novelist and game designer from Bangalore. I’ve been a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy. Growing up, I almost never encountered futures that included people like me—brown women, from a country that isn’t the UK/ US, and yet, who are in sync with the rapidly changing global village we belong to. Over the last decade, though, I've found increasing joy in more recent science fiction, in which the future belongs to everyone.The Ten Percent Thiefis an expression of my experiences living in dynamic urban India, and represents one of our many possible futures.
This book delves into several themes that scare me about the present, including identity and personhood, surveillance states, and capitalism.
It’s set in futuristic Nigeria, now run by Ultimate Corp, a global corporation that reads like a billionaire tech bro dream-come-true, AKA bad news for everyone else. We follow Anwuli Okwudili, a disabled young woman with cybernetic prosthetics who’s on the run from the law. With a relentless pace, this book effortlessly weaves between the deeply personal struggles of its protagonist and big, world-changing ideas. It forces readers to confront terrifying questions about where we're heading.
From Africanfuturist luminary Okorafor comes a new science fiction novel of intense action and thoughtful rumination on biotechnology, destiny, and humanity in a near-future Nigeria.
Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world…
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