In this latest book by the award-winning author of the hugely influential Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Ifi Amadiume propels gender relations beyond dichotomies and discriminations, and towards a power-sharing argument in discourse, contestation and resistance.

Representing the culmination of over 40 years of ground-breaking work on notions of matriarchy at the intersection of the Igbo-African universe and the Western capitalist reality, Amadiume sets forth a blueprint for a bold new matriarchitarianism, critiquing all forms of social injustice with a shared matriarchal-relational humanism.

In each chapter of the book, Amadiume applies these principles to a dazzling array of subjects: from religious leadership, kinship and family relations, to sexuality, creative writing and matters of conscience in race, class and gender. African Possibilities explodes our notions of matriarchy into original and compelling arguments, and offers a radical alternative approach to the world's entrenched injustices.

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.

Why does conflict deteriorate into violence and war? How does collective memory influence healing and social justice in post-conflict situations? What is the role of judicial accountability - Crime Tribunals and Truth Commissions - for past violations of human rights?

This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars, policy-makers, justice workers and social activists to answer these questions. In a creative engagement with issues of human rights in relation to truth, healing and social justice, they look at how people rebuild broken communities and the tensions between reconciliation and social justice in post-conflict situations.

The book is structured round the themes of social justice, the nature of conflict, judicial accountability and the role of truth commissions. Opening with Wole Soyinka's exploration of 'that burden of memory that a continent seeks to exorcise through the strategy of reparations', the first part of the book addresses questions of social justice as both ends and means of healing and reconciliation. The contributors go on to look at the nature and dynamics of conflict while parts three and four consider judicial accountability and the role of truth commissions as approachs to healing and social justice. The book concludes with a chapter on the pursuit of justice as an underlying cause of civil wars in Africa and elsewhere.

Exploring the cases of Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria, Latin America and the former Yugoslavia and including consideration of the gendered elements of conflict, this book is urgent reading for students and academics in peace and conflict and African Studies.

Using the idea of a collectivist, humanist culture of traditional African matriarchal heritage, Ifi Amadiume contrasts daughters of the Goddess to a corrupt and oppressive culture of imperialism that she argues is the heritage of contemporary elite-led women's organizations. She examines the activities of such organizations in Nigeria, making comparisons with those in Britain and South Africa as well as international movements; looking at the 1995 Beijing International Women's Conferences, she explores internationalism as an instrument of class reproduction.

The author provides a detailed account of the structures and workings of local government in Nigeria and Britain as she raises theoretical and policy issues about civic groups, civil society and the nature of the late twentieth century state. Finally, Professor Amadiume draws lessons from her own experiences working in local government to suggest measures for true gender equity and the democratisation of politics in our increasingly multicultural and multiethnic societies. This book asks some hard questions of contemporary feminist movements and provides the most detailed account available of Nigerian women's politics.