1929 ABA WOMEN’S WAR AS AN ORGANIZED WOMEN MOVEMENT IN NIGERIA

1929 ABA WOMEN’S WAR AS AN ORGANIZED WOMEN MOVEMENT IN NIGERIA

INTRODUCTION

Throughout history, the fight against male dominance has been seen in different forms at different levels.  Towards the very end of 1929, the women of Nigeria stood against the then British colonist and their major decisions. Over the years this particular uprising now stands as the “women’s war” a coordinated effort that drove into one of the most notable riots in history. Many historians are however of the opinion that the word ‘riot’ does not do justice to the coordinated effort of the 1929 outbreak, to some, it seems better if the events were addressed as the 1929 women rebellion.

Rioting against the power of British-imposed Warrant Chiefs, women from the Igbo ethnic community congregated in their thousands, re-mobilizing the traditional practice of ‘sitting on a man’ as a form of anti-colonial and anti-corruption collective action. Ostensibly a revolt against the imposition of a tax specific to Nigerian women, whose marketplace activities allowed them a level of financial independence from their husbands at the same time as supporting their families, the causes of the revolt can be traced back to the imposition of Indirect Rule in Nigeria under Lord Lugard in 1914. The Women’s War was a coordinated strategic rejection of British colonialism, and led to reforms in the way the colony was ruled, as well as the abolition of the women’s tax itself.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 

By the mid-nineteenth century, formal British policy in what later became Nigeria was designed to protect British interests in the expanding trade activity in the Nigerian hinterland. By 1861, British administration was formally established in the colony of Lagos and the Niger Delta region. Through a series of treaties and military expeditions designed to end internal slavery and facilitate trade in such commodities as palm oil and kernel (palm produce), present-day Nigeria came under effective British control by the beginning of the twentieth century.

The women’s protest arose in the palm-oil belt of Southern Nigeria. The Igbo and Ibibio lived largely in mini-states where men and women exercised varying degrees of political power. Meetings of the village council involved adult males and were held in the common cultural center and the abode of the community’s earth-goddess. Important laws of the village council were ritualized with the earth-goddess and given a sacerdotal sanction. Their violation was seen as an act of sacrilege that needed ritual purification to restore the moral equilibrium of the society and save humans from infertility, famine, and other calamities.

Women had their own sociopolitical organization. They held weekly meetings on the market day of their community, and made and enforced laws that were of common interest to them. But British colonialism brought fundamental changes that eliminated women’s political roles in precolonial Igbo and Ibibio societies. Women, however, saw themselves as the moral guardians and defenders of the taboos of the earth-goddess, believing that they naturally embodied its productive forces. The cosmology of the women, and the moral outrage they expressed over the intense economic and social changes that occurred during colonialism, are helpful in understanding not only the roots of the Igbo Women’s War, but the unusual solidarity and frenzy the women displayed during the crisis.

1929 SETTING BEFORE THE RIOT

lord  Lugard was widely the brain behind indirect rule system , a ruling policy that made use of selected indigenous persons .The British handpicked local African elites who were friendly to colonial rule as ‘Warrant Chiefs’, responsible for the day-to-day running of the colony, and in particular the administering of the law, the organization of labour, and the levying of taxes. The appointment of the Warrant Chiefs was not only an attempt to have ‘colonialism on the cheap’ on the part of the British, but also to impose British notions of colonial hierarchy including changes to the gender relations of the people. While in Igbo culture, women and men worked collectively, the British imposed systems of forced labour and taxation that pushed women into what they considered their rightful place: the domestic sphere. When they attempted to tax women’s economic activities (the selling of palm-oil) in 1929, rioting and protest ensued.

Before the British colonized southern Nigeria in 1884, Yoruba and Igbo women in the region had powerful political, judicial and religious roles within dual-sex systems of female and male authority. Power was shared between men and women in such a complementary manner to promote harmony and the well-being of the societies. In pre-colonial Igboland, social roles and responsibilities were the channels through which power diffused, and hierarchical relationships were determined by age, experience, ability, marital status and rites of initiation. Women exercised direct political power (though less than men) through all-female organizations, which included women’s courts, market authorities, secret societies and age-grade institutions. They wielded collective and individual power both as members and as heads of these organizations. However, the colonial period brought about the marginalization and even erosion of female political power and authority in the region.

ORGANIZATION AND COLLECTIVITY IN 1929 WOMENS WAR

The women of the ‘Aba Women’s Riots’ (as they were known by the British) cleverly fused traditional forms of protest with collective action against the colonial state. They embarrassed the local Warrant Chiefs by ‘sitting on’ them – a ritual action involving dance, lewd gestures, songs and noise. At the same time, though, they attacked Native Court buildings, cut down telegraph wires, and damaged banks, post offices and factories – all seen as manifestations of white colonial oppression. Thousands of women were involved, and many more suffered from the reaction of the British, who burnt down villages as collective punishment, and fired into crowds of protesting women. In one incident at Opobo on 16th December eighteen women died at the hands of colonial troops, leading to questions in Parliament back in Britain.

Female protesters involved in the Women’s War were savvy and determined. They wore palm leaves as a link to the economic roots of their discontent, they mobilized traditional practices of protest through marching, singing and dance, and they disrupted the administrative mechanisms of the colonial state. Despite attempts in the British press to put this down to female ‘hysteria’, the Women’s War is an example of collective and organized female political and economic action. The British introduced reforms to the Warrant Chief system in an attempt to curb corruption, and abolished the women’s tax itself. Women also became involved in administration, but continued their action when necessary in future disputes such as the Tax Protests of 1938 and the Oil Mill Protests of the 1940s.

THE WOMEN AND POLITICAL ADVOCACY

‘A feature of the disturbances was that women were the actual aggressors’, noted a shocked correspondent for The Times in January 1930. ‘The trouble was of a nature and extent unprecedented in Nigeria’, continued the correspondent for Nigeria in August of that year. ‘In a country were the women throughout the centuries have remained in subjection to the men, this was essentially a women’s movement, organized, developed, and carried out by the women of the country, without either the help or permission of their menfolk, though probably with their tacit sympathy.’ The Commission sent to investigate the revolt, and the reactions of British troops in particular, came to many conclusions. Perhaps the most interesting for us in the current context is this: ‘More attention  should be paid to the political influence of women.’

The initial protest was sparked off in Oloko in Bende Division of Owerri province, where in 1926 the colonial government had counted the number of men without indicating that the figures would be used in taxing them in 1928. Thus, when on November 18, 1929, the British-appointed Warrant Chief Okugo asked a teacher to count his people in keeping with the directive of the British district officer, women who feared that they would be taxed began to protest against the census. The women dispatched palm fronds to other women in Bende Division, summoning them to Oloko. The meaning of the palm fronds vary according to circumstances, but in this case palm fronds signified a call to an emergency meeting, and people were forbidden to harm those who bore the fronds. Within a short period, thousands of them had assembled in the compound of Okugo, “sitting on him” (Warrant Chief Okugo), a traditional practice involving chanting war songs and dancing around a man, making life miserable for him until the women’s demands were met, and demanding his resignation and imprisonment for allegedly assaulting some of them.

CAUSES OF THE 1929 WOMEN’S WAR

Diverse views have been offered to explain the causes of the Women’s War. Some colonial apologists described the war as “riots” carried out by African women who failed to appreciate the “blessings” of British rule. Colonial apologists also forwarded spurious theories of female biopsychology to justify their views, arguing that the “riots” were rooted in “irrational mass hysteria” resulting from “a sudden flow of premenstrual or postpartum hormones”(Echewa 1993, p. 39)

Another school of thought that emerged during the decolonization period of Nigerian history offered a conflicting analysis and blamed the Women’s War on the warrant chief system the British imposed on the peoples of southeastern Nigeria. Although the warrant chief system contributed to the Women’s War, a more holistic analysis of the war’s underlying causes is necessary, and a more fundamental issue must be considered: an economic one.

The imposition of direct taxation and the economic upheaval of the global depression of the 1920s saw a drastic fall in the price of palm produce and a high cost of basic food stuff and imported items. Thus the women’s protest was precipitated, in part, by the global depression. The protests occurred when the income women derived from palm produce dropped, while the costs of the imported goods sold in their local markets rose sharply.

.Another important cause of the protest was rooted in the political transformation resulting from the British indirect-rule policy. According to some historians, the Women’s War stems from the military occupation of the Igbo area by the British in the early 1900s and the “warrant chiefs” they appointed to administer the various communities. The society’s traditional authority holders, who feared that they would be punished for resisting the invaders, did not come forward to receive the “certificates” or “warrants” the British issued to appointed chiefs. As a result, the majority of warrant chiefs were young men who were not the legitimate authority-holders in the indigenous political system. The appointment of warrant chiefs as representatives of the local people was contrary to the political ideology and republican ethos of the Igbo people.

IMPACTS AND CONSEQUENCS OF THE 1929 WOMEN WAR

The British government authorized civil and military officers to suppress the disturbances, and district officers were granted the right to impose fines in the disaffected areas as compensation for damages to property and as a deterrent against future riots. On January 2, 1930, the government also appointed a commission of inquiry to investigate the roots of the disturbances in Calabar province.

The commission submitted a short report on January 27, 1930, but due to the report’s limited scope, the government appointed a second commission on February 7, 1930, to cover Owerri and Calabar provinces. The commission began its work at Aba on March 10, 1930, and submitted its report on July 21. The report convinced the government to carry out many administrative reforms, including the abolition of the warrant chief system, a reorganization of the native courts to include women members, and the creation of village-group councils whose decisions were enforced by group courts.

The achievements of the Women’s War are remarkable, and an analysis of the roots of the protests indicate that the women were concerned about the abuses of the warrant chief system, the rapid pace of social change, and the fear that they would be taxed. Their solidarity was reinforced by their common religious ideas and values and the moral revulsion they expressed over acts of sacrilege

CONCLUSION

Although the government suppressed the protests ruthlessly to avoid future disturbances, Igbo women mounted similar protests during the 1930s and 1940s against the introduction of oil mills and the mechanization of palm production, which undermined their economic interests. A discussion of the Igbo Women’s War provides a broad picture of British colonialism in Africa, the difficulties involved in imposing a foreign administration on indigenous peoples, and the crucial role women played in a primary resistance movement before the emergence of modern Nigerian nationalism.

Photo Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8-6NikVHmw

REFERENCES

Afigbo, Adiele E. The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929. London: Longman, 1972.

Allen, Judith . “Aba Riots’ or Igbo ‘Women’s War’?” In Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay, 59-85. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976.

Allen, Judith. “‘Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 6 (2) (1972): 165-181.

Echewa, T. Obinkaram. I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Gailey, Harry. The Road to Aba: A Study of British Administrative Policy in Eastern Nigeria. New York: New York University Press, 1970.

Ifeka-Moller, Caroline. “Female Militancy and Colonial Revolt: The Women’s War of 1929, Eastern Nigeria.”In Perceiving Women, edited by Shirley Ardener, 127-154. New York: Wiley, 1975.

Leith-Ross, Sylvia. African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria. London: Faber and Faber, 1939; Reprint, New York: Praeger, 1965.