Revolutionary African Women: A Review Essay of The Women's War of 1929: A History of Anti- Colonial Resistance in Eastern Nigeria

A review essay on The Women's War of 1929: A History of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Eastern Nigeria (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2011, 914 pp., ISBN 978-1-59460-931-2) by Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock. There is an Amazonian puzzle in Africana Womanist Studies. The puzzle is that of the extraordinarily disproportionate revolutionary militancy by Africana women in history compared to women from other cultural backgrounds and sometimes compared to the relative subordination of African men to intolerable oppressions that the women rose against en-masse. My doctoral dissertation on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System touched upon this puzzle and I wish that a book like this was available to me back then to support my intuitive interpretation of this peculiar puzzle. History reminds us that the female Amazon warriors of Dahomey in the present-day republic of Benin, used to mock the male soldiers of the defeated slave raiders by ironically chanting that the opposing army was made up of women. Harriet Tubman was not content to escape from slavery the way most individual male escapees did (except for some men who returned to rescue their own families), but she took the repeated risk to conduct thousands of enslaved Africans to freedom even with a hefty bounty placed on her head by the planto-cracy. At the height of the power-drunk reign of terror by Shaka Zulu, it was his sister that gave the order for him to be put out of his misery and thereby save the lives of more people who were at the risk of being massacred by him. Fast forward to the 20th Century and we encounter the puzzle that British colonial officials were able to impose taxes on Igbo and Ibibio men, but when they attempted to extend the taxation to women, the women declared war on colonialism and its native collaborators. Similarly Taxation without representation was imposed on Yoruba men but it took women led by Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti to depose one of the autocratic chiefs in opposition to the harassment of women for taxes. Again, Kikuyu men were made to perform forced labor but when the policy was extended to Kikuyu women. The result was an uprising by the women, albeit under the leadership of Mr. Harry Thuku, Chief of Women. The apartheid regime in South Africa relatively succeeded in imposing the dehumanizing pass laws on African men but when they tried to extend it to African women they were told by masses of women that when you strike women, you strike the rock. More recently men in Liberia fought a senseless war for years before the women organized to 'pray the devil back to hell' and helped end the war. In all these cases, Africana womanism (Hudson-Weems, 1998) was never separatist by simply advocating on behalf of women alone but insisted on advocating for the whole community quite unlike the gender separatism of Western feminism. Contrary to the suggestion by Isikalu (1988) that the militancy of African women is evidence of the cowardice or complacency of African men in the face of oppression, The Women's War of 1929 assembles and introduces original archival documents of the testimonies recorded during the commission of enquiry to help future researchers to comprehend that the women's struggles were not isolated but were articulated with the general struggles of the people against an unjust colonial exploitation and oppression as I concluded in my book on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation. According to Falola and Paddock, the rallying cry of the women in 1929 was Ohadum, a term that the authors mistranslated as 'women of all communities' but which literally means in Igbo, the entire community, not just the women. More on the authenticity of translations of Igbo terms in the book later in this review. The book is a treasure trove of archival material based on original colonial sources of records capped with insightful introductory, theoretical and methodological discourses that future researchers would be thankful to access in one volume. …