Hythloday has been on many voyages with the noted explorer Amerigo Vespucci, traveling to the New World, south of the Equator, through Asia, and eventually landing on the island of Utopia. He describes the societies through which he travels with such insight that Giles and More become convinced that Hythloday would make a terrific counselor to a king. Hythloday refuses even to consider such a notion. A disagreement follows, in which the three discuss Hythloday's reasons for his position. To make his point, Hythloday describes a dinner he once shared in
England with Cardinal Morton and a number of others. During this dinner, Hythloday proposed alternatives to the many evil civil practices of England, such as the policy of capital punishment for the crime of theft. His proposals
meet with derision, until they are given legitimate thought by the Cardinal, at which point they meet with great general approval. Hythloday uses this story to show how pointless it is to counsel a king when the king can always expect his other counselors to agree with his own beliefs or policies. Hythloday then goes on to make his point through a number of other examples, finally noting that no matter how good a proposed policy is, it will always look insane to a person used to a different way of seeing the world. Hythloday points out that the policies of the Utopians are clearly superior to those of Europeans, yet adds that Europeans would see as ludicrous the all-important Utopian policy of common property. More and Giles do disagree with the notion that common property is superior to private property, and the three agree that Hythloday should describe the Utopian society in more detail. First, however, they break for lunch.

Back from lunch, Hythloday describes the geography and history of Utopia. He explains how the founder of Utopia, General Utopus, conquered the isthmus on which Utopia now stands and through a great public works effort cut away the land to make an island. Next, Hythloday moves to a discussion of Utopian society, portraying a nation based on rational thought, with communal property, great productivity, no rapacious love of gold, no real class distinctions, no poverty, little crime or immoral behavior, religious tolerance, and little inclination to war. It is a society that Hythloday believes is superior to any in Europe.

Hythloday finishes his description and More explains that after so much talking, Giles, Hythloday, and he were too tired to discuss the particular points of Utopian society. More concludes that many of the Utopian customs described by Hythloday, such as their methods of making war and their belief in communal property, seem absurd. He does admit, however, that he would like to see some aspects of Utopian society put into practice in England, though he does not believe any such thing will happen.

http://www.sparknotes.com/phil.....mmary.html

Nations of Nineteen Eighty-Four

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.....ighty-Four

Excerpt by Ifi Amadiume

Cheikh Anta Diop’s position is that matriarchy is specific, not general, given the influence of ecology on
social systems. He therefore put forward his hypothesis of a double cradle and went ahead to argue two geographical zones of North and South, using Africa to illustrate his argument, while patriarchy originated in the North, being nomadic.  The middle belt was the Mediterranean basin, where matriarchy preceded patriarchy. Whereas, inWestern Asia, both systems were superimposed on each other.

Comparing these North and South cultures on the basis of the status of women, systems of inheritance, dowry and kinship affiliation, Diop shows how the Northern Indo-European cultures denied women rights and subjugated them under the private institutions of the patriarchal family, as was argued by Engels.  The Northern patriarchs had women under their armpit, confining them to the home and denying them a public role and power. In this system, a husband or father had the right of life and death over a woman.  The traveling out of women for marriage compounded this patriarchal control.  This Northern system was characterized by dowry, fire-worship and
cremation.

In contrast, in the matriarchal culture of the South, typified by the agricultural system and burial system, husbands came to wives. Wives were mistresses of the house and keepers of the food.  Woman was the agriculturalist.  Man was the hunter. Woman’s power was based on her important economic role.  This system was also characterized by brideswealth and the strong tie between brother and sister.  Even in the marriage, where a woman traveled out, this bond was not completely severed. Most of the funeral rules prescribed the return of a wife’s corpse to her natal home.  Funeral exchanges also indicated compensation for the loss of a woman.

This Southern matriarchal system was also marked by the sacredness of the mother and her unlimited authority.
There were oaths invoking the power of the mother, that is, the ritualization of that matricentric, mother and child, ‘closest bond of love’ even in Eumenides.  This is the ‘spirit of common motherhood’, generally symbolized in African religions. 

Thus, Diop was able to present two polar systems of values for his North and South cradles.  Africa, as representative of the Southern cradle of matriarchy, valued the matriarchal family, territorial state, the emancipation of women in domestic life, the ideal of peace and justice, goodness and optimism.  Its favored literatures were novels, tales, fables, and comedy. Its moral ethic was based on social collectivism.

The contrasting Northern cradles, as exemplified by the culture of Aryan Greece and Rome, valued the patriarchal family, the city-state, moral and material solitude.  Its literature was characterized by tragedy, ideals of war, violence, crime and conquests.  Guilt and original sin, pessimism, all pervaded its moral ethic which was based
on individualism.

Diop, having thus contrasted one system with the other, went on to provide a general history of both cradles and their areas of influence. In order to prove his point that African women were already Queens and warriors, participating in public life and politics, while their Indo-European contemporaries were still subordinated and
subjugated under the patriarchal family, Diop presents us with an array of powerful ancient African Queens and their achievements.  In Ethiopia, there were Queen of Sheba and Queen Candace, who fought the invading army of Augustus Caesar. In Egypt, there was Queen Hatshepsut, described as ‘the first queen in the history of humanity’. Cleopatra was titled ‘Queen of Kings’.  Even in the huge and powerful empires of Ghana in the 3^rd century A.D., matriarchal values were the norm.  It was the same in the Mali Empire.

It can however be argued that as a result of the basic matriarchal differences in social values, centralization and feudalism in Africa would throw up ‘Queen Bees’, sitting comfortably on their female selves, while Indo-European patriarchal values and centralization would produce the Boadiceas and iron maidens, generally alienated from their female selves.

This debate was also taken on by Diop, when he deconstructed the classical Amazon myth, showing how it was derived from the Eurasian cradle, where ‘a ferocious patriarchy reigned’.  It is the patriarchal malice against women,
fabricated in the classical Amazon myth, which led Diop to make this statement:

‘Matriarchy is not an absolute and cynical triumph of woman over man; it is a harmonious dualism, an association accepted by both sexes, the better to build a sedentary society where each and everyone could fully develop by following the activity best suited to her/his physiological nature.  A matriarchal regime, far from being imposed on man by circumstances independent of his will, is accepted and defended by him’.

As Diop says correctly of militant or military female contingents in Africa, ‘the hatred of men is foreign to them and they possess the consciousness of being ‘soldiers’ struggling only for the liberation of their country’.

What is important to us today is not the legacy of warrior queens, but a thorough analysis of the primary system of social organization around an economically self-sufficient or self-supporting matricentric cultural unit and a gender free or flexible gender linguistic system, which is the legacy of African matriarchy.  We need to understand its associated goddess-focused religions and culture which helped women organize effectively to fight the subordinating and controlling forces of patriarchy, thereby achieving a kind of system of checks and balances.

This is basically what the so-called monotheistic and abstract religions of Islam and Christianity ruling Africa today subverted and continue to attack. The fundamental question to those proposing these religions as a possible means of achieving a pan- African unity of federation is this:  are these religions able to accept and accommodate our goddesses and matriarchy, that is, African women’s true primordial cultures in the present politics of primordialism, manipulated by nationalists and fundamentalist?

Hinterland Africa proper which had such structures which favored the rule of goddesses, matriarchy, queens, etc., is indeed still present with us today.  But, these systems are facing erosion, as elite African men manipulate the new and borrowed patriarchies to forge a most formidable ‘masculine imperialism’, yet unknown in our history.  How are we every going to subvert this, since the first casualty has been the autonomy and power of the indigenous women’s
organizations?

In contrast to the seeming collusion of present-day African daughters of the establishment, the issue of women’s role and status in society, far from being a 19^th century debate, has since the 60s gathered a new force in Western Feminist literature and scholarship.  In Germany, for example, inquiry into matriarchy is taken very seriously.  In the U.S. and Latin America, women’s search for spirituality predominates.  In Britain, it is a search for ancient goddesses. There is also a revival of witchcraft cults.  The whole Green and Ecological movement derives its concept and ideology from the so-called African animism, which is now being acknowledged as a worship of nature.  In all this, African ethnography serves as a databank, but with little acknowledgement from the users.  Did the history of Greek appropriation of African philosophy and science in the nineteenth century repeat itself at the eve of the 20th Century?  

Because Diop took on the fundamental issue of matriarchy from an Afrocentric perspective and interest, as opposed to a compromised struggle for women’s rights in patriarchal systems, what scholar will match the Feminism of Cheikh Anta Diop?  For him, matriarchy is an ‘ensemble of institutions favorable to womanhood and to mankind in general’.  As he said, male controlled social science has only seen in this ‘dangerous freedom which is almost diabolical’.  One wonders why Western matriarchy theorist do not cite the work of Diop?   

http://www.morehouse.edu/facst.....Africa.pdf