Amina Mama

Amina Mama (born 19 September 1958) is a Nigerian-British writer, feminist and academic. Her main areas of focus have been post-colonial, militarist and gender issues. She has lived in Africa, Europe, and North America, and worked to build relationships between feminist intellectuals across the globe.

Mama was born in northern Nigerian in 1958 in a mixed household. Her father is Nigerian and her mother is English. According to Mama, her eclectic family background and upbringing has shaped her worldview. In 1992 she married Nuruddin Farah, with whom she has two children.

She grew up in Kaduna, an ethnically and religiously diverse town in northern Nigeria. Her ancestral roots on her paternal side trace back to Bida. Several members of Mama's family were involved in the development of the post-colonial local educational system. In 1966, she left her community in Nigeria due to anti-Muslim riots.

Mama moved from Nigeria to the UK and pursued further education at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (1980, Bachelor of Science, with Honours, in Psychology), at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London (1981, Master of Science in Social Psychology) and at Birkbeck College, University of London, where in 1987 she received her doctorate in organizational psychology with her thesis entitled "Race and Subjectivity: A Study of Black Women". Some of her early work involves comparing the situations of British and Nigerian women. She moved to the Netherlands and then back to Nigeria, only to encounter more upheaval in 2000. Then she moved to South Africa, where she began to work at the historically white University of Cape Town (UCT). At UCT, she became the director of the African Gender Institute (AGI) and helped to found its journal Feminist Africa. Mama remains the editor of Feminist Africa.