We Made the World: Five Centuries of Queens, Warriors, and Other Foremothers

Summary

Make Way: Five Centuries of Black Women Who Made the World traces five centuries of history through twelve extraordinary women of African descent—from queens and warriors to artists and activists—weaving together collective memory, oral tradition, and personal grief into a landmark work that places Black women at the center of world history.

In 1949, a seamstress from a small coastal town in the Gold Coast colony stood up in a room full of men and voted to split from the most powerful political party in the country. Her name was Hannah Kudjoe. She spent the next decade organizing the women who would win Ghana's first democratic election and help deliver the first black-majority nation in Africa its independence from Britain. When Nkrumah published his autobiography, she wasn't in it.

Make Way does for twelve women what it does for Hannah Kudjoe. It finds the woman who was in the room, who was essential to the room, and whose name was removed from the record the moment her usefulness to powerful men was exhausted.

We're talking about Queen Njinga of Angola, who fought the Portuguese to a standstill for forty years and died at eighty still a sovereign. Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who saved a Nairobi forest by walking upstream through a river at dawn to plant trees while the police watched. Brenda Fassie, the queer Black pop icon who sang South Africa through the end of apartheid and whose music still stops a room on any continent.

The author traveled to nine countries to write this book. She gathered oral histories from descendants and community keepers across four continents. And she wrote it while losing both parents—her mother partway through, her father near the end—which means this book knows in its bones what it costs to carry someone's memory, and what it costs not to.

Make Way is five hundred years of history rewritten from the inside. It is the book that asks what we have lost by not knowing these women's names, and begins the important work of giving that back to us all.