Author Description

In late 1929, a remarkable series of demonstrations, protests, risings, and riots involving tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio-speaking women took place throughout southeastern Nigeria. In the course of what its perpetrators called the Women's War, more than fifty Igbo and Ibibio women were killed by British troops and an unknown number were wounded and otherwise traumatized. The Women's War marked a historical high point in West African resistance to colonialism, making an indelible impression on all who witnessed it, Britons and Africans alike. African scholars differ in their interpretations of the Women's War, while others simply dismissed the British actions as yet another instance of the violence that has attended colonialism since the Spanish first set foot in the Americas. They were that, to be sure, but a fuller understanding of how the 'tensions of empire' played out requires the historicization of colonial violence. This book brings together for the first time both sets of actors, analyzing their behaviors from the multiple perspectives of the war's colonized and colonial participants, and examining the various actions of the main protagonists within in a single, gendered analytical frame.