A History of African Motherhood

This is the first book-length treatment of the history of motherhood in precolonial Africa. This book takes a new approach to longue durée African history through a focus on a highly gendered social institution, and changes our understanding of social and political organization in a region depicted as intensely patriarchal. It argues that even for times when we cannot identify individual actors, we can still trace historical agency in the way people reformulated and mobilized...
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This is the first book-length treatment of the history of motherhood in precolonial Africa. This book takes a new approach to longue durée African history through a focus on a highly gendered social institution, and changes our understanding of social and political organization in a region depicted as intensely patriarchal. It argues that even for times when we cannot identify individual actors, we can still trace historical agency in the way people reformulated and mobilized ideologies of motherhood to sustain their communities.