Trailblazing scholar Ifi Amadiume returns to the fore with African Possibilities, a compendium at once retrospective and forward-looking. African Possibilities argues for not just the liberatory possibilities of feminism as practiced in precolonial societies across the continent, but also, for its necessity in confronting present-day global polycrises. Amadiume – author of the seminal text Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987) which examined everyday practices of gender flexibility in precolonial Igbo social structures – extends her past theoretical contributions by conceptualizing an overarching framework of ‘matriarchitarianism.’ In Amadiume’s words, matriarchitarianism ‘recognizes a flexible gender bending that facilitates role and status sharing, unlimited by biology’ (Amadiume 2024, 207). Amadiume applies the concept of matriarchitarianism to her studies of political economy, literature, language, and religion in the continent and African diaspora across twelve chapters divided into three parts.
Part One, ‘Voicing,’ calls for the troubling of disciplinary siloes and rigid political ideologies that pit individualism against collectivism by examining the ways in which societies throughout the continent have been historically pluralistic, accommodating and even encouraging balance and difference. The stakes around this tension could not be higher, as African feminist scholar Minna Salami attests in Can Feminism be African? (2025): a frequent critique among ruling elites in the continent and Global South at large is that feminism is an individualistic Western import, foreign to indigenous ‘tradition.’ To this end, Amadiume’s ‘Voicing’ helpfully defines key terms that appear throughout African Possibilities, notably ‘tradition’ and ‘African.’
By tradition (or traditional), Amadiume rejects colonial lineages that view the terms as synonymous with ‘backwards,’ ‘static,’ or ‘uncivilized.’ Instead, she conceptualizes tradition as a liberatory dynamism that can be deployed in the postcolonial present, particularly through the lens of gender flexibility and complementarity. Her past research on the Nnobi Igbo people of present-day southeastern Nigeria serves as a frequent case study, alongside examples from South Africa and Senegal. Likewise, Amadiume invokes the term ‘African’ strategically to refer to ‘local knowledge and values’ (Amadiume 2024, 79), drawing on pan-African feminist liberatory politics and praxis. African feminist scholars such as Siphokazi Magadla (Reference Magadla2023) have heeded and further developed some of the critiques touched upon in Part One of African Possibilities by challenging the scholarly hyper-focus on male leaders in South Africa’s history of anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggle.
Part Two, ‘Alternatives,’ builds on the foundation laid out in Part One with closer investigations of emancipatory gender discourses and practices in African religions. Amadiume’s analysis of plurality and contestation of Earth and Sky deities among northern and southern Igbo societies in Chapter Five, ‘Citizenship, Rights, and Freedoms in Contesting Religious Narratives of Gods and Goddesses,’ is of particular note. Drawing on linguistic analysis and oral history alongside religious and literary close readings, Amadiume emphasizes that syncretism is part and parcel of African precolonial spiritual worldviews: change and difference are at the heart of traditional expressive culture and practice.
Part Three, ‘Possibilities,’ concludes the monograph, with essays on gender flexibility, women’s pleasure, and the liberatory possibilities of Africana women’s literature. Drawing on historical and ethnographic case studies stretching from West to East, Central, and North Africa, Part Three is an ambitious and rewarding bookend. It is particularly refreshing to see Amadiume’s inclusion of North Africa in Chapter Eight among her case studies demonstrating that marriage did not necessarily align with sexual orientation in a variety of precolonial African societies. My own work on gender multiplicity as deployed by enslaved and freed practitioners of Bori spirit possession in Ottoman Tunisia in the early 19th century reinforces the contemporary case studies on Zar-Bori examined by Amadiume.
Amadiume invites readers from the outset to ‘get comfortable with the term [matriarchitarianism], practice its diction, and mix in a matriarchitarian construction into our everyday language usage for a more holistic representation of belonging’ (Amadiume 2024, xii). The call for epistemic rupture – to dismantle and transform patriarchal violence and inequality wrought by colonial and postcolonial state formations in word and in practice – is a clarion one, with monumental stakes for Africans and citizens of the world at large. The liberatory vision of African Possibilities is slightly dimmed by a dense and occasionally repetitive sentence structure. It would also have been instructive to explicitly note in the introduction that each chapter was drawn from essays and conference papers initially written in the 1990s and 2000s. Despite this, African Possibilities is a necessary text, distilling, challenging, and advancing scholarship in Gender Studies, African/a studies, Religion, Literature, Political Economy, and Decolonial Theory. Whether you have been an admirer of Amadiume’s since Male Daughters, Female Husbands or are new to Amadiume’s prolific scholarship, African Possibilities stewards an emancipatory collective vision for all.
