Amina Mama

Amina Mama (b. 1958) is a feminist scholar, author, networker, film producer, and program builder. Mama belongs to a small but influential group of African diasporic intellectuals who came of age in the euphoric, turbulent early years of African independence, which began with the transition of Britain’s colony of the Gold Coast to the independent and sovereign nation of Ghana in 1957. Transnationally grounded and ranging across many sectors, the hallmarks of Mama’s oeuvre are dedication to the grand ideals of African anti- and decolonialization, yoked to the realization that without rigorous work to unshackle women from economic inequalities and from large- and smaller-scale violence, political liberation is a shoddy farce. Born in England as her father was completing medical school, Mama and her family returned to her father’s hometown of Kaduna, Nigeria, after the country received its independence from Britain in 1960. They lived a comfortable life alongside a family that extended to the rural villages of Niger state. Her mother was a teacher, art potter, and community development volunteer. As a child, Mama played soccer with the boys and learned about the strength of women and their networks from her father’s six sisters. When political violence came to Kaduna in 1966, presaging the coming Biafran War, she and her brothers were sent to England; after a short stint back in Nigeria, she returned to endure a school career in parochially narrow British settings. Mama’s interest in psychology led her to earn a BA Honours in psychology from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1980, an MA from the University of London in social psychology in 1981, and a PhD in organizational psychology from Birkbeck College, University of London in 1987. Her PhD thesis examined the historical subjectivities of black British women from a wide, diasporic, and participatory research-based perspective. Mama’s subsequent academic career unfolded in gender and women’s studies departments in the Netherlands, in England, and, notably, with leadership positions in universities in South Africa, the United States, and Ghana. She served on the board of the Global Fund for Women from 2000 to 2010 and was the founding editor of the pioneering journal Feminist Africa. Mama’s monograph is Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (1995, cited under Race and Psychology in Britain). She is a coauthor of the influential volume Engendering African Social Sciences (1997, cited under Embedding Feminist Studies in the African Academic Canon), the author of twenty-two book chapters, more than thirty journal articles, and the producer of two documentary films.