Widows in African Societies
Widows in African Societies

Author: Betty Potash

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1986-02-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0804766568

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Although widows constitute a quarter of the adult female population in many African societies, they have not been the focus of detailed, cross-cultural research. This is the first comparative anthropological study of widowhood in Africa, comprising ten case studies that cover a broad spectrum of societies in different parts of the continent. This volume shows clearly that widows are not passive objects of male transactions; they have interests and options, and make choices affecting their own lives. Ties to children, access to productive sources, and rights to housing are shown to have particular importance for widows' residential and marital decisions. This book provides a needed corrective both to the male perspective on kinship and to women's studies that deal almost exclusively with the adult married woman. In contrast to the traditional anthropological emphasis on widow remarriage and the functions such marriages have for the maintenance of marriage alliances, these papers deal with the women themselves and the quality of their lives. The introduction surveys the literature, examines the factors affecting the widows' strategies, and shows how accepted anthropological concepts of marriage, affinity, and community look different when considered from the perspective of widows. There is a foreword by Mariam K. Slater.

Black Widow
Black Widow

Author: Leslie Gray Streeter

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 0316490725

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With her signature warmth, hilarity, and tendency to overshare, Leslie Gray Streeter gives us real talk about love, loss, grief, and healing in your own way that "will make you laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page" (James Patterson). Leslie Gray Streeter is not cut out for widowhood. She's not ready for hushed rooms and pitying looks. She is not ready to stand graveside, dabbing her eyes in a classy black hat. If she had her way she'd wear her favorite curve-hugging leopard print dress to Scott's funeral; he loved her in that dress! But, here she is, having lost her soulmate to a sudden heart attack, totally unsure of how to navigate her new widow lifestyle. ("New widow lifestyle." Sounds like something you'd find products for on daytime TV, like comfy track suits and compression socks. Wait, is a widow even allowed to make jokes?) Looking at widowhood through the prism of race, mixed marriage, and aging, Black Widow redefines the stages of grief, from coffin shopping to day-drinking, to being a grown-ass woman crying for your mommy, to breaking up and making up with God, to facing the fact that life goes on even after the death of the person you were supposed to live it with. While she stumbles toward an uncertain future as a single mother raising a baby with her own widowed mother (plot twist!), Leslie looks back on her love story with Scott, recounting their journey through racism, religious differences, and persistent confusion about what kugel is. Will she find the strength to finish the most important thing that she and Scott started? Tender, true, and endearingly hilarious, Black Widow is a story about the power of love, and how the only guide book for recovery is the one you write yourself.

Claiming Union Widowhood
Claiming Union Widowhood

Author: Brandi Clay Brimmer

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-11-02

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1478012838

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In Claiming Union Widowhood, Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and personal scrutiny. Brimmer exposes and examines the numerous attempts by the federal government to exclude black women from receiving the federal pensions that they had been promised. Her analyses illustrate the complexities of social policy and law administration and the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class formation. Expanding on previous analyses of pension records, Brimmer offers an interpretive framework of emancipation and the freedom narrative that places black women at the forefront of demands for black citizenship.

Co-wives, Co-widows
Co-wives, Co-widows

Author: Adrienne Yabouza

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2020-01-01

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1912868857

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'At 49, Lidou is in his prime, a prosperous builder of houses in the Central African Republic and the proud husband of two beautiful wives, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou. The only cloud on his horizon is the recent onset of impotence, for which he persuades a pharmacist friend to get him some pills. The day after his first dose, Lidou has a heart attack and drops dead, which gives his opportunistic cousin Zouaboua the chance to accuse the two newly-widowed women of poisoning Lidou, so that he can snatch his cousin’s property out from under their noses. If they’re going to keep what’s rightfully theirs, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou must fight with all their might against a backdrop of corruption in which bribery oils the wheels of society, eroding decency and loyalty. It’s a weighty topic in many ways, but Adrienne Yabouza writes so lightly and colourfully that this is a delight to read.' Alastair Mabbott in The Herald

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies
The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies

Author: Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2021-10-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783030280987

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This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.

An African Widow’S Journey
An African Widow’S Journey

Author: Tabitha Manyinyire

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2018-07-02

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 1543491189

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This book was inspired by real-life events experienced by one young widow from Southern Africa, who at the age of thirty lost her husband. She felt as though she had been abandoned by the wayside holding three young children. She had no tangible support from the family she was married into. As she traversed through this lonesome, slippery journey, she encountered a myriad of storms that forced her to totally surrender everything, including herself and her children, to the Lord. Through this simple act of giving up and submitting all her circumstances to the Lord, she was granted wisdomwisdom with which to handle the grim challenges and storms that confronted her. From the very onset she soon learnt that the relentless hate and hurtful situations that she faced were to be responded to with heartfelt forgiveness, love, and humility. The Lord also provided this widow with a measure of faith much bigger than the size of a mustard seed. She did not just see mountains being moved; storms were conquered and oceans were opened for her and her children to go through. She and her sons were raised from the bottom of the lowest dump heap and raised to levels that she could have hardly even ever dreamt or imagined possible. An African Widows Journey drives home the message, Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning (Ps. 30:5).

Praisesong for the Widow
Praisesong for the Widow

Author: Paule Marshall

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1984-04-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0452267110

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From the acclaimed author of Daughters and Brown Girl, Brownstones comes a “work of exceptional wisdom, maturity, and generosity, one in which the palpable humanity of its characters transcends any considerations of race or sex”(Washington Post Book World). Avey Johnson—a black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls—has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel—and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed. “Astonishingly moving.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

Masterful Women
Masterful Women

Author: Kirsten E. Wood

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-12-15

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0807863777

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Many early-nineteenth-century slaveholders considered themselves "masters" not only over slaves, but also over the institutions of marriage and family. According to many historians, the privilege of mastery was reserved for white males. But as many as one in ten slaveholders--sometimes more--was a widow, and as Kirsten E. Wood demonstrates, slaveholding widows between the American Revolution and the Civil War developed their own version of mastery. Because their husbands' wills and dower law often gave women authority over entire households, widowhood expanded both their domestic mandate and their public profile. They wielded direct power not only over slaves and children but also over white men--particularly sons, overseers, and debtors. After the Revolution, southern white men frequently regarded powerful widows as direct threats to their manhood and thus to the social order. By the antebellum decades, however, these women found support among male slaveholders who resisted the popular claim that all white men were by nature equal, regardless of wealth. Slaveholding widows enjoyed material, legal, and cultural resources to which most other southerners could only aspire. The ways in which they did--and did not--translate those resources into social, political, and economic power shed new light on the evolution of slaveholding society.

Black Widow White Widow
Black Widow White Widow

Author: De Wet Potgieter

Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa

Published: 2014-06-16

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0143531379

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When in 2013 he first published a report on the active presence of Al-Qaeda in South Africa, all hell broke loose for investigative reporter De Wet Potgieter. He was forced to retract before a second, substantiating article could be published. Then the massacre at Westgate Mall hit Nairobi, which made the involvement of the so-called White Widow - operating on a legitimate but illegally acquired South African passport - front-page news. Suddenly the world's media was beating a path to Potgieter's door. Now, for the first time, he tells the full unsettling story of Al-Qaeda's presence in this country. Not only is the veil lifted from this mysterious British woman, but the identity of another is disclosed: an Afrikaans-speaking counter-terrorist operative known as the Black Widow.The book shows how, taking advantage of corrupt state machinery, Al-Qaeda factions launch attacks in other countries. It discloses the location of a terrorist training camp in the Karoo and reveals disturbing details of the support they receive from various local extremist groups. Based on investigations spanning two years, Black Widow White Widow paints a frightening picture of the all too real possibility of future attacks from, or on, South African soil.