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out by Igbo men – disrupted the activities and responsibilities of Igbo women, the women acted to correct them, assaulting the institutions of British colonialism through which those disruptions took place. In 1929, Igbo women saw in colonialism a dire threat to the existence of their very lives and that of their entire society. They had to do something to keep it from occurring. The women assumed that British officials would comprehend their actions, recognizing that their grievances were readily apparent and just; the British, however, lacked the conceptual apparatus to recognize the women’s behavior as an explicitly gendered, political performance.
British actions that led to the outbreak of the Women’s War in 1929 and the reactions of colonial officials to the disturbances derived from a worldview in which gender played out in an entirely different framework. Like virtually all stories Westerners told themselves about the way the world worked, the British imaginary about Africa depended upon the creation of distinct binary opposites for its structure and comprehension: of civilization versus “the wilds,” of morality versus savagery, of reason versus superstition, of north versus south, and of order versus chaos. In each instance, gender often served to represent these binaries, sexuality to articulate their manifestations. Africa and Africans, in the minds of the British, signified unalterable, fundamental difference from European social and gender roles, morals, mores, customs, values, and traditions; these differences were usually expressed by means of a disordered gender system and promiscuous sexuality attributed to Africans, and especially to African women, by writers and explorers.
British perceptions of and reactions to the demonstrations and protests of the Igbo and Ibibio women in 1929 flowed from their ideas about African women and sexuality. Lt. Col. P.F. Pritchard, for example, told the commission appointed to investigate the killings that the women with whom he came into contact were led by “an old woman who had no clothes on, except some leaves round her neck. The women seemed to be under the influence of this woman, and they were acting in a strange manner. Some lay on the ground and kicked their legs into the air, some passed most offensive remarks and made obscene gestures.” The medical officer at Opobo, Edward James Crawford, testified that the women who protested there had come from the town of Doctor’s Farm – “the women there are mostly prostitutes, there must be hundreds of them,” he claimed – and that they had arrived at Opobo “stripped” of their clothing. “I have been five years in this country,” he went on, “and I have never seen such a truculent crowd before in this country. The women normally wear a great deal of clothing and nearly all wear jumpers and none of them carry sticks. This morning the majority were stripped to the waist.” A commission report, accepting uncritically Crawford’s unsubstantiated and false claim that the “women of loose character” from Doctor’s Farm attacked and looted warehouses, then made its own conflation of sexually immoral women and assault and asserted, wrongly, that the women at Opobo demanded, in addition to the abolition of taxation, that prostitutes not be arrested. “The solicitude [for prostitutes] thus shown throws a light upon the class of women of which the ringleaders were composed,” its authors stated. The commission reported that “the greater part, if not all, of the women were armed with stout cudgels and in place of the voluminous clothing usually worn by the native women in Opobo, were for the most part stripped to the waist and wore only loin cloths…. It was therefore [my italics] manifest that their intentions were hostile and that their attitude was far removed from that of women who were going to have a peaceful meeting with the District Officer.” Colonial officials regarded the women’s nudity as prima facie evidence that their “intentions were hostile” (Kent, 2009: 167, 168).
The colonial encounter of Westerners and West Africans produced a series of misrecognition of actions and intentions based on the gendered worldviews of each respective party. Western concepts of gender map onto sexual difference, and assume a whole host of binaries, especially that of a public/private split for men and women; they often present relations between men and women as a battlefield from which one gender must necessarily emerge victorious, and regard victory in terms of privileges associated with masculinity in European and North American society. A historical ethnography of both the colonized and the colonizers reminds us that gender is not universal, natural, or static, but rather articulates meaning systems particular to each.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
1 Bastian, Misty, Matera, Marc, and Kent, Susan Kingsley (2012) The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
2 Beattie, Cordelia and Stevens, Matthew Frank, eds. (2013) Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwestern Europe. Suffolk: Boydell Press.
3 Brown, Wendy (1988) Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
4 Caspi‐Reisfeld, Keren (2002) “Women Warriors during the Crusades, 1095–1254,” in Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert, eds. Gendering the Crusades. New York: Columbia University Press, 96–97.
5 Clark, Anna (1997) The Struggle for the Breeches. Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley: University of California Press.
6 Colley, Linda (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
7 Erickson, Amy Louise (1993) Women and Property in Early Modern England. London: Routledge.
8 Hall, Kim F. (1995) Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
9 Herbert, Eugenia W. (1993) Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
10 Hunt, Lynn (1992) The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
11 Kann, Mark E. (1998) A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics. New York: New York University Press.
12 Kent, Susan Kingsley (1987) Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
13 Kent, Susan Kingsley (1999) Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990. London: Routledge.
14 Kent, Susan Kingsley (2009) Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
15 Lacey, W.K. (1986) “Patria Potestas,” in Beryl Rawson, ed. The Family in Ancient Rome, New Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
16 Leduc, Claudine (1992) “Marriage in Ancient Greece,” in Pauline Schmitt Pantel, ed. A History of Women in the West, Volume I: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
17 McNamara, JoAnn and Wemple, Suzanne F. (1977) “Sanctity and Power: The Dual Pursuit of Medieval Women,” in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds. Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
18 Miescher, Stephan F., Manuh, Takyiwaa, and Cole, Catherine M. (2007) “Introduction: When Was Gender?” in Stephan F. Miescher, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Catherine M. Cole, eds. Africa After Gender? Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
19 Monter, E. William (2012) The Rise of Female Kings in Europe 1300–1800 New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
20 Moore, Lindsay R. (2019) Women Before the Court: Law and Patriarchy in the Anglo‐American World, 1600–1800. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
21 Oyewumi, Oyeronke, ed. (2005) African Gender Studies: A Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
22 Pateman, Carole (1988) The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
23 Pitkin, Hannah Fenichel (1984) Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli. Berkeley: University of California Press.
24 Prezzano, Susan C. (1997) “Warfare, Women, and Households: The Development of Iroquois Culture,” in Cheryl Claassen and Rosemary A. Joyce, eds Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 88–99.
25 Rothschild, N. Harry (2008) Wu Zhao, China’s Only Woman Emperor. New York: Pearson.
26 Scott,