With the proliferation of women's and gender studies research in Africa since the 1980s, more scholars in various disciplines began to explore the voices and stories of African women who had been largely written out of colonial narratives. Nwando Achebe and Claire Robertson's Holding the World Together draws from decades of scholarship by the contributors and other scholars to provide a compendium on African women's history. It presents a multidisciplinary perspective on women's contributions to precolonial and colonial Africa as well as the contemporary challenges that confront them. The book is comprised of sixteen chapters and four parts. As is frequently the case with such comprehensive volumes, it is difficult to do justice to the book in its entirety. For the purposes of this review, I will discuss the chapters under three broad categories to convey their wide-ranging contributions in a succinct manner. The themes that feature prominently are gender stereotypes, women's legacies in political and social movements, and ongoing challenges regarding health care, education, the economy, and gender-based violence. In what follows, I will consider these themes, respectively.
From the onset, Achebe and Robertson frame the arguments in the volume by pointing out that ‘African women’ are not a monolithic group but represent a diverse category that often defied binary classifications and gender norms, many of which were imposed under colonial rule (6). Multiple chapters highlight this position. Elizabeth Perego observes in Chapter One, for instance, that the category ‘African women's writings’ is useful for highlighting writers’ defiance to monolithic colonial representations of African women's experiences (22). Signe Arnfred explores these variabilities and contestations of gender and sexuality in more details in Chapter Fourteen, where she discusses how colonial and postcolonial writers (anthropologists, feminist scholars, postcolonial critics) have approached the study of gender in Africa.
Various chapters highlight efforts by scholars to debunk stereotypes and generalizations about African women that are premised on the experiences of their European counterparts. Drawing from representations of women by contemporary African women authors, Perego's chapter highlights African women's representations of their own experiences, juxtaposing African women's depictions of themselves with colonial-era representations. In the following chapter, Cajetan Iheka adopts the same approach in the analysis of films, while also incorporating a discussion of African men's cinematic representations of women. Similarly, Chapter Three counters colonial stereotypes of passive and downtrodden African women by historicizing their roles as politico-religious leaders, female kings, heads of households, and soldiers. Emphasizing the ‘dual-sex’ complementary leadership structure in African societies, editor and chapter author Nwando Achebe discusses ancient rulers like Pharoah Hatesheput and the female rulers of Meroe, as well as precolonial and colonial-era rulers of Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, to demonstrate the antiquity of female leadership on the continent. In Chapter Seven, Aili Tripp builds upon Achebe's comprehensive entry by exploring women's postcolonial political participation through case studies from Niger, Senegal, Botswana, Rwanda, and Tanzania. She attributes the resurgence of women's political leadership roles in the 1990s to political liberalization, the expansion of women's coalitions, international pressures from donors, and a decline in armed conflict (149).
Other chapters build upon the debunking of stereotypes by addressing the frequently underemphasized roles of women in political and social movements. Kathleen Sheldon's Chapter Four highlights African women's resistance to colonial policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as their combatant and non-combatant roles in anticolonial or liberation movements in Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. In Chapter Five, Oussina Alidou presents religious fundamentalism as a form of political movement. Departing from conventional interpretations of political movements as nationalist struggles, she argues that religious fundamentalism springs from socioeconomic insecurities and reflects a desire for change in the political economy. She demonstrates, for instance, how Christian fundamentalism in South Africa was directed at the apartheid state in the 1970s, although it later embraced a pro-apartheid militaristic and racist theology in the 1980s. In Nigeria, she shows how the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the North was a political statement against forces of liberalization and neoliberalism and the economic or political imbalances that followed them. She highlights women's roles in these fundamentalist movements and their cultivation of agency in largely patriarchal spaces. With examples from Nigeria, she demonstrates how Islamic fundamentalism in some northern states targeted women and other gender minorities, triggering protests from Nigerian women writers, including Muslim women. Alidou also establishes the roles that women have played in engendering fundamentalist movements, especially in African universities.
A significant part of the book explores the contemporary challenges that African women face in the health, education, and economic sectors. In Chapter Sixteen, for instance, Karen Flint examines the implications of colonialism and colonial practices on African women's health and nutrition. She argues that colonial-era economic and political changes continue to affect women's health and access to health resources, despite advancements in the postcolonial period. She addresses important issues like childbirth, female genital cutting, and the higher prevalence of HIV/AIDS (61 per cent) among African women than men (346). In Chapter Twelve, Cassandra Veney makes an important contribution to the book by highlighting the experiences of immigrant African women in the diaspora, especially in the United States, and how issues of race, gender, class, and immigration status shape diasporic women's encounters as new immigrants. She emphasizes these women's high rates of participation in the diasporic workforce and how they formed pan-Africanist partnerships with women of the historic African diaspora to overcome various challenges.
While the themes of gender stereotypes, women's roles in political and social movements, and contemporary challenges are the book's three strongest thematic strengths, there are many others, including women's economic roles. Important to note in this regard is Chapter Nine where co-editor Claire Robertson discusses enslaved women's economic and social contributions to various African societies. She points out that the majority of enslaved people in Africa were women, particularly because of the economic and social services that they provided as well as the view that they were more assimilable. Robertson connects new forms of slavery — as seen in women's trafficking and factory labor — and the contemporary challenges that they pose for women's rights to the shortcomings of the world capitalist economy.
The variety of themes that this volume addresses and the accessible language in which the chapters are written makes it an excellent course material for undergraduate and graduate classes and an invaluable reference for people interested in grasping an overview of scholarship on African women.
