Scholars like Ifi Amadiume, Tariku Farrar or Robert Edgerton have all tried to recover aspects of pre-colonial gender relations differing from those established under European patriarchal regimes. In her book (Male daughters, female husbands), Amadiume argues that, in pre-colonial societies, sex and gender did not necesserily match, and that roles were neither rigidly feminized nor masculanized.
European conquerors, missionaries, and trades were unable and unwilling to recognize this. In order to place bodies in hierarchical structures,and to map the genealogy of humanity as a tree with the "inferior" races on the lower branches, these Western powers needed to generate reliable "facts" about bodies, such as their races, their gender, and their sex. Classification system based on mutually exclusive gendered and racialized binaries spread: white women and people of color were/are said to be closer to nature, less rational and so forth.

— Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century