Kathleen Sheldon is a specialist on women in Mozambique with a strong interest in urban African women. But perhaps the most direct preparation for this comprehensive textbook on African women from early history to the twenty-first century came from her writing of the single-authored Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, a wide-ranging volume focusing on both individual women and women's organizations. Her new book is welcome and long overdue. As Sheldon notes in the Introduction, the most widely used classroom books are now two decades old, predating pioneering new research on women in precolonial history and an explosion of writing on such issues as marriage, childbirth, sexuality, and gender. The time frame for Sheldon's book, extending into the twenty-first century, allows her to address current topics such as Boko Haram and Ebola. Countering the simplistic but common portrayal of women in sub-Saharan Africa as singularly oppressed, Sheldon emphasizes the variety of women's lives and experiences to offer a ‘more expansive and more accurate narrative of initiative, resilience, and success’ (xvii).
In introducing this long time frame, Sheldon approaches the material chronologically, with some sections of the book organized by region, others more thematically. The earliest chapters are the most challenging for general readers. Sheldon begins by covering African systems of kinship, marriage, social organization, and religion. Her discussion ranges from matrilineal kinship, bridewealth, and bride service to woman-woman marriage, levirate marriage, pawnship and slavery, and goddesses and initiation rites. Interwoven with this discussion are illustrative examples from particular African societies and portraits of a range of women leaders and rulers. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of motherhood, a theme that Sheldon revisits in later chapters. Curiously absent, however, is the idea, argued most effectively in scholarship on Igbo and Yoruba societies, that some precolonial communities lacked gender-based hierarchies altogether.
The narrative flow picks up in the second chapter, which focuses on the rise in commercial activity related to European merchants, slavery and the slave trade, the prominence of women of mixed descent in coastal politics and commerce, and more documentation of women's position in many societies across the continent. Using this information, as well as later anthropological material, the chapter also sketches women's positions and female leaders in a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century communities. Chapter Three, ‘Religion and slavery in the nineteenth century’, presents in-depth portraits of women in Igbo and Luba religion, as well as background on the history of African Islam, which provides the context for case studies presented in earlier chapters. After contrasting the political and religious authority of several nineteenth-century southern African women with the extreme vulnerability and oppression of others, Sheldon emphasizes the book's main thesis: that the ‘idea of African women as a single cohort has been decidedly dismantled’ (90).
The chapters covering the era of ‘intense colonialism’ from 1850–1945 are excellent, presenting clear and cogent arguments for the great variety of changes in women's lives illustrated with descriptions of their political and social movements. The text also incorporates biographies of many women, some of whom are familiar to historians of Africa, others who are lesser known. They include, for example, the late nineteenth century Ndebele queen Lozikeyi Dlodlo and the Tanzanian singer Siti Binti Saad, who broke new ground singing songs in Kiswahili with social and political messages. Indeed these chapters are distinct in the number of relatively unknown biographies integrated into the narrative.
The book's final chapters, ‘Work, family and urbanization, from the 1970s–90s’ (Chapter Seven), ‘Women and politics after independence’ (Chapter Eight), and ‘Women at the beginning of the twenty-first century’ (Chapter Nine), are equally dense and perceptive, covering topics from structural adjustment and land and property to health, polygyny, female genital cutting, and HIV and AIDS. Chapter Seven concludes with a section on prominent women writers, as well as a shorter discussion of music, film, artists, and sports. Chapter Eight, ‘Women and politics after independence’, stresses women's absence from centers of power, but continuity with earlier decades of political activism, new efforts to challenge inequality, and women's involvement in international organizations. The section on war and peace is particularly strong, including not only summaries of late twentieth century civil conflicts, but also a comprehensive historical overview of each country. The chapter concludes with short sections on a range of topics, from trade unions and rotating credit associations to Pentecostal churches and the Wambui Otieno case, which highlighted the legal vulnerability of Kenyan widows in inter-ethnic marriages.
Dense, comprehensive, and impressively researched, African Women effectively intersperses discussion of social and political movements with in-depth portraits of individual women. Relying on a wealth of research, Sheldon effectively makes her main argument about the vast variety of women's experiences and their persistence and initiative in confronting ongoing difficulties in the interests of improving women's lives. This book will be an important resource for students and teachers alike.
