Susan Kingsley Kent

Mistrials and diatribulations: a reply to Joan Hoff

Abstract Joan Hoffs rehearsal of the plagues of poststructuralism in her article, ‘Gender as a postmodern category of paralysis’, womens History Review, 3, pp. 149-168, breaks no new intellectual ground, but for anti-intellectualism, disingenuousness, and sheer incivility, her article stands apart. What she describes is not an accurate portrayal either of the variety of post-modern theory or of the important and thoughtful criticism that has been brought to bear upon it; she has caricatured and misrepresented the positions gender historians hold. Hoffs claim of poststructuralisms essential misogny, based upon an insupportable association of deconstruction and pornography, is, simply, irresponsible. Moreover, she has ignored the work of scholars who have sought to challenge the view that the poststructuralist critique of the myth of a stable, unitary subject obviates a feminist politics.

“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.

The Nwaobiala of 1925

During a session of the Aba Commission of Inquiry’s hearings on the Women’s War of 1929, Kenneth A. B. Cochrane, then the district officer of Ahoada, was asked to comment on southeastern Nigerian women’s organizational abilities. This issue much perplexed colonial officials in Nigeria and London, since it seemed incredible to them that women could organize mass rallies and demonstrations without the instigation and assistance of men. Cochrane replied that the Ogu “proved they were able to organise, which was a thing that was doubted to a certain extent before.”1 This bald statement seems peculiar when we consider that the same man had been a colonial officer in the Nigerian southeast since 1915 and had authored a 1925 memo to the Owerri Province resident entitled “Women’s Purity Campaign.”2 In his memo, Cochrane, at the time district officer of Bende, reported a recent encounter with groups of dancers, numbering “several hundred women,” in the large market town of Umuahia, the site of even larger demonstrations in 1929. These women had caused a series of disturbances in the Umuahia area, beginning with the denuding of young women in the marketplace and proceeding to seize property belonging to Christian women and certain, unspecified men. Cochrane presided over several court cases resulting from the property seizures and fined the assembled women accordingly.

Conclusion: Resolving the “National Crisis” of 1929–1931

When Labour took office again in October 1929, it faced severe challenges in virtually every aspect of national life—unemployment, finance, international affairs, colonial policy, and political instability at home. Disruption of the international financial markets, as London ceded its supremacy to New York; dislocation of industry and trade, both at home and abroad; struggles over disarmament among the great powers; sharpening nationalist sentiments in the colonies; and the apparent failure of the three-party system to provide effective government—all of them aftershocks of the Great War—gave rise in 1930 to the conviction that Britain faced a “crisis” of grave proportions. In part a reflection of the real problems facing the country, in part a device mobilized in the hope of discrediting the Labour government and effecting a change in political power and policies, the “national crisis,” described by one historian in 1992 as “the greatest peacetime crisis in Britain this century,” transformed the political landscape in Britain.3