The Women’s War Breaks Out

To the British officials in Nigeria they were the Aba Riots. But the Igbo and Ibibio women involved called them Ogu Umunwaanyi, the Women’s War.

There had been tremors of discontent in 1925: in April some 3,000 women had protested against newly imposed market tolls, and in November the Nwaobiala or Dancing Women’s Movement swept through the region demanding a return to traditional values.

Then, in 1927, the British began taxing men in southeast Nigeria for the first time. The price of palm oil and palm kernels – the region’s primary commodities – collapsed, falling by up to 12 per cent in 1929 alone. The British then launched a census of women, who feared it was a prelude to a tax on them too.

Precisely what happened on 23 November 1929 in the Igbo village of Oloko is contested. Okuga, the local warrant chief appointed by the British, had delegated census duties to Mark Emeruwa, a mission teacher. Emeruwa approached a compound where a woman, Nwanyeruwa, was preparing palm oil. Within minutes their hands were at each other’s throats, hers red and sticky with the oil. Emeruwa retreated, his clothes ruined. Nwanyeruwa fled to a large group of women meeting nearby, the latest in a series of gatherings to discuss the tax. It has begun, she told them.

They marched first on Emeruwa’s compound and then on that of Okuga, singing and dancing in the open spaces around them, carrying palm fronds, their bodies marked in white chalk. The British district officer, Captain John Hill, tried to placate them, imprisoning Emeruwa and Okuga. But it only inspired the women further. They wanted, in the words of one group, ‘that all white men should return to their country so that the land in this area might remain as it was many years ago’.

Over the following weeks, the so-called native courts, through which the warrant chiefs applied a notionally British kind of justice, were attacked. Factories too. On eight occasions troops opened fire: 55 women were killed. But the warrant-chief system and the native courts were dismantled. The women had won. If the British thought they had quelled the discontent, however, they were wrong.