Misty L. Bastian

Great ideas for teaching about Africa

This volume presents a wide range of approaches to teaching students about Africa. Six chapters are devoted to ways of handling such sensitive subjects as ethnicity in Africa, the slave trade, AIDS, and female genital mutilation. Each chapter includes a list of supplementary readings.

Continuities and reconstructions in cross-cultural literary transmission: The case of the Nigerian romance novel

Abstract Contending that current theories of cross-cultural transmission are inadequate, this study examines the reconstruction of the Western romance novel formula by Nigerian authors. It finds that some elements of the Western formula, such as the characterization of the female protagonist, are continuous with the Western model, while others are radically changed. For example, while Western romances center on a single love interest and ‘end happily ever after’, Nigerian romances often involve the protagonist in several love affairs, and may have inconclusive or tragic endings. By analyzing such changes and continuities of various aspects of the romance formula, the study concludes that hegemony theories can explain the initial market penetration of the formula in Nigeria and its physical format, modernization theories can account for the emergence of a readership interested in female-centered love stories, and the persistence of an oral tradition as a story-telling structure can explain the narrative structure of sequential romances and open endings in many of the Nigerian romances.

Acadas and Fertilizer Girls: Young Nigerian Women and the Romance of Middle-Class Modernity

As we might infer from the newspaper opinion pieces above, the perceived shortage of appropriate marriage partners was a subject much on the minds of literate Nigerians during the late 1980s, and this continued as a problem in the 1990s. Most of the elite young women and men of my acquaintance during fieldwork in 1987–88 were exceedingly anxious about marriage and expressed varying degrees of ambivalence toward it as an institution and even as a personal expectation.1 Well-educated, professional men saw early marriage as potentially disadvantageous—especially if they wished to immigrate to the United Kingdom or to the United States for further education or employment. Equally well-educated, would-be professional women aspired to being part of what Agugbuo above calls the “matrimonial class,” but often found their aspirations thwarted by the realities of life in the collapsing Nigerian state economy. Young elite women raised during the 1970s and early 1980s oil boom with the expectation of at least limited hypergamy and an attendant bourgeois lifestyle now found themselves stigmatized by their seniors, peers, and the Nigerian press as “acadas” (academic women) or “fertilizer girls” (a rich but derogatory metaphor I will unpack further below).

“More Deadly than the Male”: The Women’s War in the British Imagination

The accounts of Britons who confronted the women in December 1929 and suppressed their movement contain a number of striking elements that recur throughout their letters, reports, and testimonies before the Birrell Gray and Aba commissions. Perhaps the most puzzling is the failure of officials to mention the single most glaring feature of the disturbances—that they were undertaken exclusively by women—until after the massacre at Opobo. Another emerges from the imagery the men used to describe the threat they experienced at the hands of the women—that of being “swamped” by a “mass” of uncontrollable, shrieking, frenzied women, described alternately as Furies, Amazons, prostitutes, harridans, and viragoes. We think these phenomena are linked to one another, and that they stand at the heart of our ability to understand the behavior of colonial and military officers and the worldview that gave rise to their violent responses.

Pre- and Early Colonial Igbo Worlds

The Igbo-speaking people of southeastern Nigeria have inhabited, for perhaps four thousand years, the territory situated between the Niger and Cross rivers of West Africa, just north and somewhat east of the Niger Delta. For centuries, it appears that they lived self-sufficiently although not in isolation, producing their own food, textiles, and iron goods, and importing only salt and fish from Delta traders and more luxurious items like copper and beads from more distant locales. With the arrival of European mercantilists in the Delta region in the fifteenth century, Igbo traders acted as middlemen in the slave trade, exchanging slaves for local currency (such iron rods and, later, cowrie shells) and sometimes whiskey with Delta slavers, who themselves exchanged their human cargo for European-manufactured products such as textiles and armaments. The Delta towns of Bonny and Calabar became bustling centers of commerce in human beings, many of them being what we would today call Igbo.

What the Women Wrought

In the wake of the Women’s War, British authorities in Nigeria faced the immediate problem of (re)pacifying the country and finding ways to prevent outbreaks of protests against them in the future. Women continued their demonstrations against British authority throughout 1930 even as patrols of police and soldiers took punitive action, imposed collective fines, seized property, and burned down whole villages, seeking through an extraordinary show of force both to punish wrongdoers and prevent any further attempts at resistance to British rule. Officials regarded the burning of houses as “the quickest, surest and the most humane [our italics] way of making the people see reason.” Under the Peace Preservation Ordinance, district officers and police officials utilized powers they did not ordinarily possess to act against areas thought to have participated in the Women’s War. This strategy was applied to a variety of transgressions ranging from the “sullen activity” of Africans and their hiding in the “bush,” to a delay in payment of fines, under the Collective Punishment Ordinance, levied on village inhabitants who may have had nothing to do with the disturbances. Authorities imposed exorbitant fines amounting to up to six times the annual tax assessment of a given settlement on villages, expecting them to be paid within 24 hours; failure to make the payment might result in the razing of the village.

The Ogu Umunwaanyi

In late 1929, a new movement involving tens of thousands of women swept through Owerri and Calabar provinces in southeastern Nigeria. The participants’ grievances stemmed in large part from local warrant chiefs’ abuses of power and women’s declining political and economic position since the advent of the British-imposed native administration. Far more than the Nwaobiala dancers in 1925, their actions targeted the infrastructure and the symbols—even the sartorial trappings—of the colonial government and European businesses increasingly understood to be the instrument of their dispossession. Erupting first in the Igbo-speaking community of Oloko, the Women’s War saw the mobilization of vast numbers of southeastern Nigerian women from different linguistic groups on the basis of an inclusive gender identity and in response to a variety of threats to their interests.

The Twin Traumas of War and Influenza

In 1921, Frederick Lugard, now retired but still an influential member of the Colonial Service, published a review essay in The Edinburgh Review entitled “The Colour Problem.” One of the books in Lugard’s review, The Rising Tide of Colour, by the American Lothrop Stoddard, raised the prospect of “a pan-Coloured alliance for the universal overthrow of the white hegemony at a single stroke, a nightmare of race-war beside which the late struggle in Europe would seem the veriest child’s play,” a possibility Lugard did not dispute. Encouraged by Bolsheviks, who purportedly welcomed miscegenation as a means of bringing about communist revolution, “admixture with alien races” would bring about “the deterioration of the Nordic race-type” and ultimately annihilate the white races. “The union of opposite types, such as the Negro or Australoid with the Nordic,” Lugard noted, explaining Stoddard’s thesis, “rapidly tends to the elimination of the latter, owing to the prepotency of the black race.” As befitting a servant of empire, Lugard took the occasion of the review to pronounce “the true conception of the interrelation of colour: complete uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in the paths of knowledge and culture, equal opportunity for those who strive, equal admiration for those who achieve,” but, in the realm of the physical and the material, of the social and racial, “a separate path, each pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own racepurity and race-pride.”

The British View: The Chaotic World of Southeastern Nigeria

Igbo social, political, religious, and economic practices baffled Britons, who saw in the heterarchical nature of their institutions and systems a manifestation of chaos and disorder. Their first instinct was to contrast Igbo ways with those of northern Nigerians, using gendered language to articulate the differences and to express the shortcomings, as Britons saw them, of southeastern Nigeria. Inevitably, Igbo and other southeastern Nigerian peoples took on the trappings of a messy, alien, ultimately dangerously sexualized femininity, as distinct from the ascetic, masculine order, control, and familiarity of the north. In British accounts of the colonization of Nigeria, we find unmistakable signs of the gendered meaning systems that informed the imperial enterprise and evidence of the profound gender and sexual anxieties their interactions with colonized peoples generated.

The British Suppression of the Women’s War

Following the counting incident in Oloko on November 25 and the initial rising of local women there, the situation appeared to colonial officials to have returned to relative calm. Captain Hill left Oloko on November 29, feeling confident that he had resolved the problem. Quite to the contrary, however, the confrontation at Oloko only confirmed the women’s suspicions regarding the intentions of British officials and their African male representatives. Thousands of predominantly Igbo and Ibibio women spread the Ogu throughout much of southern Nigeria in the weeks that followed, including large portions of Owerri and the Bende division of Calabar province, much to the dismay and horror of colonial officials. What most of the British took initially for a minor incident quickly became a threat beyond administrators’ means to control or even comprehend. They would continue to misinterpret the women’s movement as a series of anti-taxation riots.