Dr Lilian Lem Atanga, Senior Lecturer, Gender and Discourse Studies, Department of African Studies, University of Dschang, Cameroon

“This book comes as a thirst quencher by showing that, far from occupying marginal positions, Cameroonian women played a central role in the history of Cameroonian and African politics. Meredith Terretta has shown, in her analysis of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women (UDEFEC) that Cameroonian women, although largely illiterate, PETITIONED FOR OUR RIGHTS AND FOUGHT FOR OUR NATION.  THEY served as intermediaries between the burgeoning collective imagination of emancipation from foreign rule and the practical realization of that emancipation. The UDEFEC women – working at home, in the markets, in the fields, in city shops, colonialists’ households, or schools – actively helped to reshape social ideology until the nationalist message became something “thinkable” even in the humblest village home. They contributed to the fight for independence through petitions written to the United Nations, through their organization of street protests, through their participation in political meetings. Cameroonian women contributed to socio-economic as well as political change in independence era Cameroon.”

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