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Series
Ohio Short Histories of Africa
Description
An unapologetically African-centered monograph that reveals physical and spiritual forms and systems of female power and leadership in African cultures.
Nwando Achebe’s unparalleled study documents elite females, female principles, and female spiritual entities across the African continent, from the ancient past to the present. Achebe breaks from Western perspectives, research methods, and their consequently incomplete, skewed accounts, to demonstrate the critical importance of distinctly African source materials and world views to any comprehensible African history. This means accounting for the two realities of African cosmology: the physical world of humans and the invisible realm of spiritual gods and forces. That interconnected universe allows biological men and women to become female-gendered males and male-gendered females. This phenomenon empowers the existence of particular African beings, such as female husbands, male priestesses, female kings, and female pharaohs. Achebe portrays their combined power, influence, and authority in a sweeping, African-centric narrative that leads to an analogous consideration of contemporary African women as heads of state, government officials, religious leaders, and prominent entrepreneurs.
Copyright Statement
Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa © 2020 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Language
eng
ISBN
9780821440803
Publication Date
7-14-2020
Publisher
Ohio University Press
City
Athens
Keywords
Women in Africa, Gender in Africa, Feminism in Africa; African Women's Studies, LGBTQ in Africa, African Women in History
Disciplines
Africana Studies | African History | African Studies | Ethnic Studies | History of Gender | Political History | Women's Studies
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Achebe, Nwando, "Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa" (2020). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 50.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/50
Included in
Africana Studies Commons, African History Commons, African Studies Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, History of Gender Commons, Political History Commons, Women's Studies Commons