| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Heidi Gengenbach. Binding Memories: Women as Makers and Tellers of History in Magude, Mozambique. New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Electronic Book. Site access $49.50.
Magude was a dangerous and difficult place to work when Heidi Gengenbach arrived there in 1995. It took some courage to undertake nearly eighteen months of fieldwork in this part of southern Mozambique so soon after the end of the civil war. It also took some courage to compare the discipline of history as it is taught in American universities with the way the past is conceived by elderly women in this part of rural Mozambique. The book's electronic format provides exciting sound bites and visual images but it also challenges existing narrative traditions. Its unorthodox approach will appeal to the adventurous but it might prove frustrating for those in search of the social history of a global underclass.	1
The thirteen elderly women at the center of Gengenbach's eighty-odd informants stressed the importance of female networks and family ties in their view of the past. Unlike their male partners, they showed little concern for politics, work, or chronology. Gengenbach attempts to capture this worldview in chapters that may be read independently of each other. The structure of this book does not turn around documents that "recapture" the past or a narrative that "unfolds" seamlessly. It views the records of missionaries and colonial officials, and even the oral testimony of male informants, as expressive forms that share few of the concerns with the past held by Magude's women. Professional historians are also guilty of arranging oral or textual evidence into narratives that follow their (male, western, elite, professional) concerns with the chronology of economic and political change, impersonal structures, and modernity rather than those of the rural women at the center of the study. These women talked about the past in ways that served to reinforce social ties of kinship and experience; and they inscribed their memories in activities such as pot making, naming, tattooing, and life storytelling.	. . .

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