Africa

120 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY SPRING Africa Claire Robertson Restoring Women to History is a demanding, highly necessary, and wellconceptualized undertaking to develop modules about Third World (no one seems to have come up with a better term) women for use by college teachers. The introduction by the editors, both Africanists, is excellent, lucidly summing up key issues in women's history. For instance, they discuss the theories which assume that women are always victims, the inadequacies of modernization theory, sexuality and reproduction, religion, domestic relations, women's economic activity, political power, culture and networks, the impact of colonialism on women, and women as transporters of culture into new contexts. This is obviously an ambitious project, and it is carried out remarkably well. The editors are to be congratulated for a massive effort in a relatively short time, which will probably earn them very little in terms of standard academic kudos, but which meets a pressing need. The work is aimed especially at those who teach world history survey courses. Due to the relative inaccessibility of many sources on Third World women (a problem that is rapidly evaporating, however, as a glance at the bibliography here proves) and the scarcity of time teachers have to read on new subjects, this work will be highly useful for those who wish to incorporate women at every level into history of all kinds. The language is free of jargon and the level of explanation appropriate for the audience. It is to be hoped that many people use it to illuminate their teaching of world history. Moreover, it will also be useful for those teaching comparative women's history and the history of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The bibliography is up-to-date and comprehensive, a considerable enhancement to its utility. Women of Sub-Saharan Africa Iris Berger and E. Frances White The first part of this collection concerns Africa; it is divided into two sections, eastern and southern Africa by Iris Berger, and western and central Africa by Frances White. The history of Africa, a continent with fifty-two countries which is four times the size of the U.S., with an ancient and complex history, is extremely difficult to reduce to a hundred pages or so, but these essays represent the best attempt I have seen to do a comprehensive survey of the present state of the literature on African women. Berger's approach is characterized by impressive encyclopedic knowledge and an attempt to point out some of the general differences between African ©1989 lOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY, VOL. 1, NO. 1 (SPRING)_____________________ 1989 Review 121 women and others. She proceeds, as does White, chronologically and geographically, which raises the point she herself makes about periodization in women's history. We still do not have a satisfactory way of reorganizing history for women, so to speak. Berger has gotten rid of precolonial standard divisions (but then these have always been problematical anyway) and kept to the usual twentieth-century demarcations regarding the wars. She does a particularly good job on the early kingdoms in the eastern Sudan, an area which is often neglected. She also shows percipiently the precolonial changes in some areas which foreshadowed the massive twentieth-century impact of colonialism. If there is a problem in this section, it lies with the effort to be too broad, inevitably losing some of the specifics at the same time. Both Berger and White are best used in conjunction with a standard text, but it is more necessary with Berger than White. For instance, in describing a famous incident in Kenyan history in the 1920s when a group of women led a protest demonstration in Nairobi against the incarceration of labor organizer Harry Thuku, she fails to mention the fact that many of the demonstrators were massacred by the police shooting into the crowd from one side, while white settlers on the veranda of the Norfolk Hotel shot into their backs from the other. Any Africanist would know this, but a generalist would have to use another text as a supplement. For specific preparation of lectures, then. Berger is best used as reference, not as source. White's bibliography...