Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town, (Paperback)

The histories of Africa's encounter with the West are incomplete without a comprehensive analysis of the gendered nature of that encounter. Semley's work is a welcome addition to a growing literature on gender and the European encounter with African societies. Using an array of sources, she presents a historical account of gender, elite power, and authority in Ketu, Benin. Semley (Wesleyan Univ.) situates the colonial history of Ketu and its gender dynamics within pre-European history and the history of the Atlantic slave trade.... Ketu men and women participated in politics, drawing on a variety of social status and gendered relations. The author explores their actions and, in depth and with elegant style, describes the economic, cultural, and social conditions through which they interacted with French colonial authority. The book's Atlantic context is welcome. This work is a poignant, timely reminder that women were central to the making of African colonial societies because they infused indigenous ideologies and forms of resistance against colonial restructuring. Semley points to the ability of women of various classes and status to draw on indigenous economic and political ideologies to define and achieve economic, political, and ritual power within a hegemonic colonial society. Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate libraries. --Choice C. J. Korieh, Marquette University, 9/1/11