The Art of Nigerian Women by Chukwuemeka Bosah is a tightly packaged tome--an astonishingly delightful companion to a meme that was broached in the author's A Celebration of Modern Nigerian Art: 101 Nigerian Artists, published in 2010. In the current volume, Bosah marshals the intellectual capacity of some of the best scholars and curatorial impresarios in the field to contextualize the diversity of works of the artists featured. This work is a feat that must be acknowledged by students of Nigerian art for a number of reasons. First, this book contributes significantly to our knowledge of Nigerian art by its lasered focus on Nigerian women. Second, the author brings to the fore, in the process, a smorgasbord of creative enactments and analyses in an assortment of media by our womenfolk. Third, while Nigeria now boasts of a budding tribe of scholars on the visual arts, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that a book of this type has been published. And this brings us to the fourth reason: this book is the irrefutable demonstration of the maxim about lions having their own historians to obviate distortions that hunters would bring to the history of the hunt. This is a pioneering work, one that deserves a prominent place on the shelves of corporate, institutional, college, and personal libraries. Bosah deserves our admiration for the courage and resources ploughed into this work.

In analysing a range of materials that testify to the wide spectrum of women's experiences in Nigeria, this groundbreaking collection seeks to draw attention to neglected aspects of women's lives in Nigerian society as a whole. Exploring the historical, developmental and socio-cultural experiences of women across Nigeria's cultures, it reappraises their role as historical actors and helps to facilitate a more encompassing view of their place in society and their still underestimated contribution to social development.

While providing critical perspectives on women, gender, sex and sexuality, and the colonial encounter, she considers how it was possible for this woman to take on the office and responsibilities of a traditionally male role.

The moving story of a group of Nigerian women which follows their lives from their schooldays together through the trials and tribulations of their adult lives. Through their stories we see some of the universal problems faced by women everywhere: the struggle for financial independence and a rewarding career, the difficulties of relationships, and the dilemmas of bringing up a family, often without a partner. Set against the background of a developing Nigeria, this novel shows Nwapa at her finest.

This social and intellectual history of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria reveals the importance of gender to the study of nationalism and poses new questions about Nigeria’s colonial past and independent future. In the years following World War II, the women of Abeokuta, Nigeria, staged a successful tax revolt that led to the formation first of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and then of Nigeria’s first national women’s organization, the Nigerian Women’s Union, in 1949. These organizations became central to a new political vision, a way for women across Nigeria to define their interests, desires, and needs while fulfilling the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship. In The Great Upheaval, Judith A. Byfield has crafted a finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making that not only tells a story of women’s postwar activism but also grounds it in a nuanced account of the complex tax system that generated the “upheaval.” Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in Nigeria’s postwar period and illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism. She thus offers new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state. Ultimately, she challenges readers to problematize the collapse of her female subjects' greatest aspiration, universal franchise, when the country achieved independence in 1960.

The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

Ogunyemi uses the novels to trace a Nigerian women's literary tradition that reflects an ideology centered on children and community. Of prime importance is the paradoxical Mammywata figure, the independent, childless mother, who serves as a basis for the postcolonial woman in the novels and in society at large. Ogunyemi tracks this figure through many permutations, from matriarch to writer, her multiple personalities reflecting competing loyalties. This sustained critical study counters prevailing "masculinist" theories of black literature in a powerful narrative of the Nigerian world.