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Not too long ago, when I was researching our episode on Teargassed, the book, Tear Gas from the Battlefields of World War One to the Streets of Today, mentioned a women's uprising in colonial Nigeria with British authorities requesting tear gas in response to that uprising. This mentioned in the book was really brief, just a paragraph in the context of that entire text. And it cited a memo that read in part, quote, Recently In Nigeria, a hostile mob was composed largely of women and the local troops showed the greatest dislike in firing on the crowd when that course became inevitable.

And then that paragraph ended on the note that this was part of what came to be known as the women's war. So that memo was just so evocative to me, like who were these women and why was firing on them inevitable? In the words of the memo, the women's war, which happened at the end of nineteen twenty nine, immediately went on my list for an episode, and that is where we are today.

So the women's war was a response to multiple aspects of British colonialism, which were made worse by British authorities. Total lack of understanding about how the societies in what is now southeastern Nigeria actually functioned. Nigeria was and is incredibly diverse. It's home to more than 250 different ethnic groups and 500 languages, with those languages falling into at least three distinct linguistic groups. So in addition to seeing everything through a British lens, colonial authorities were also failing to recognise that the people and cultures involved were not at all a monolith.

They also weren't the same as societies the British had encountered in other parts of Africa or even within the different regions of the colony they had established and named for the Niger River, although there were other ethnic groups involved in this as well.

Most of the women involved in the women's war were Igbo or Igbo, and the vast majority of writing about the women's war has focused mainly or even exclusively on women. So today we're going to focus primarily on Igbo society, which also, to be clear, was not at all a monolith to start. There are at least 30 different Igbo dialects. By some counts, it's more than 50. Some of these are mutually intelligible to one another and some of them are not.

Although Igbo speakers generally had similar cultures and religious practices prior to British colonialization, they also lived in semi-autonomous communities that could vary somewhat in how they were governed. In some regions, communities were governed similarly to a constitutional monarchy, and in others they were closer to a republic. Even in communities that had similar governing structures, the details could still vary from place to place. For example, in some communities, women were part of the Council of Elders that governed and made decisions, while in others women had a lot of influence on the council but did not directly hold seats.

In general, though, before colonisation, the idea of collectivity and mutual benefit was threaded all through Igbo societies in everything from religion and cosmology to day to day living. Religious beliefs included reincarnation and the idea that ancestors are still present and still part of the community. Whole villages were part of decision making in one way or another, and those decisions were generally focused on the collective good. So, for example, a community might pool its resources to send a student to a university with the understanding that the whole village would then benefit from that student's success.

Social and political power were decentralized and in general, people earned that power through their actions and behaviour and how they contributed to the community. Although a person's wealth, age or family connections could definitely play a part by themselves, they weren't typically enough to establish someone as an authority. Disputes were solved by mutual agreement with a council of elders who had earned the community's respect and trust all coming to a consensus. Then the rest of the community collectively participated in upholding that group's decision.

Gender also influenced all of this in the communities that we are focused on today, men and women had distinct and complementary roles. Families lives together in the husband's compound, with each wife having her own home and her own space. In that compound, men were responsible for providing clothing and food, while women were responsible for actually preparing the meals from those ingredients. While the compounds were considered to be men's domain, markets were more of a space for women. There could really be some fluidity in all of this, which is described in the book Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Gender and Sex and African.

Society, that's by Nigerian anthropologist Eevee Amadeu. But in general, men and women have different spheres of influence. Women also maintained extensive networks with other women, including market networks and family connections. All the daughters from the same lineage were part of a network. Even after they married and moved to another household or even a different village. All the wives within the same lineage were similarly connected, regardless of whether their families were related outside of their marriage.

So the area north northeast of the Niger River Delta has been home to Ebow speaking peoples for thousands of years. And for much of that time, slavery was also part of these communities. Even though Ebow speaking peoples had similar cultures and religious practices, it really wasn't until the 20th century that Igbo people started to see themselves as part of one unifying cultural and ethnic identity, regardless of which region or village they were originally from. So prior to that, when Igbo communities went to war with one another or with non ebow neighbors, they enslaved prisoners of war.

People were also enslaved as punishment for some kinds of crime. And it in many ways, this system of slavery was more like indentured servitude than chattel slavery. As it was practiced in the Americas, enslaved people were still considered to be persons with at least some rights.

The transatlantic slave trade influenced these practices dramatically, and Igbo speakers were both participants in and victims of it. Estimates vary, but Igbo and neighboring Yoruba peoples made up roughly one third of all the people enslaved in Africa and transported to the Americas. Igbo traders in particular were often middlemen, capturing people to sell or trade with people from other African ethnic groups on the coast who then sold them to Europeans. This, of course, was absolutely devastating and destabilizing to African nations and peoples all over the region and incentivized warfare as the European demand for slaves grew.

And it made that warfare worse as Europeans paid for enslaved people with weapons and gunpowder. And to be clear, although there were African people, including Igbo people, who were benefiting from the slave trade by enslaving and selling other people, the European powers that were involved in all this gained far, far more power and wealth than any African nation involved. Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1867 and the U.S. banned the import of enslaved people that same year, with the law going into effect in 1888.

But the slave trade continued long after that point, with enslaved people being transported to nations where it was still legal and to places including the United States, where it was not technically legal. When Britain started colonizing what's now Nigeria in the 1960s, it had previously outlawed slavery in its other colonies. But Britain didn't formally outlaw slavery in Nigeria until 1981, and the practice continued for decades after that. In addition to changes in social structures and governments that will be getting to you in a bit, Nigeria in general and Ebola and specifically went through multiple changes.

During these same decades, palm oil became an increasingly valued commodity. It was used for everything from soap making to machine lubrication. Palm oil production long predated the British presence in Nigeria, and palm oil grown and processed in West Africa was already well established as an important trade good long before any of this. But British demand for palm oil increased dramatically during the Industrial Revolution because of its use as a machine lubricant, the economy of England became increasingly focused on palm oil production generally, with men harvesting the fruit and women and children processing it into oil.

Proceeds from this industry were also divided by gender, with the men getting the oil and the women getting the kernel. Another big change was that the first Christian missionaries were also established in Eberlin during the nineteenth century. The first permanent mission there was established by the Reverend John Christopher Taylor, who was Anglican and born to Igbo parents. His parents had actually been enslaved in Eberlin and then liberated to Sierra Leone. Many of the first missionaries to Ibo land were also Igbo.

Some of them had similarly been enslaved and then liberated to Sierra Leone before making their way back home again. But over time, more and more of the missionaries in Nigeria were white British people who tried to make Igbo culture conform more to British Christian norms. We're going to talk more specifically about Britain's colonization of Niger. And how it led to the women's war after we first have a sponsor break. Hey, it's Bobby Bones, executive producer of Make It Up as we Go, the brand new podcast from Audio Up and I Heart Radio brought to you exclusively by Unilever's Noor and Magnum Brands.

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Britain's colonization of Nigeria escalated during the scramble for Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as I've mentioned on the show before, over about four decades, the major European powers basically divided up the continent of Africa among themselves. About 90 percent of the continent was under European control by the 19 teens. All of this was done without the involvement of the people who were being colonized and without regard to the kingdoms and nations and confederations that were already there.

Britain chartered the Royal Niger Company in 1866, and during the scramble for Africa, it rapidly expanded its holdings around the Niger River Valley. It established multiple protectorates, which it started consolidating in the early 20th century. In the 19 teens, two remained the protectorate of northern Nigeria and the protectorate of southern Nigeria, which Britain consolidated into the colony and protectorate of Nigeria in 1914.

The nations and peoples who were living and all this occupied territory resisted British influence heavily, and the British subjugation of its Nigerian colony was violent and destructive. British forces destroyed or tried to destroy oracles and temple complexes. They used collective punishments in which whole communities or their crops or their markets were completely destroyed as a punishment for a perceived wrongdoing by one or more people in that community. People who resisted were subject to lengthy imprisonment or even execution.

Sir Frederick Ledgard was high commissioner of northern Nigeria. His wife, Flora Shaw, is typically cited as coining the name Nigeria.

A few years before their marriage, Legard first led a campaign to violently, quote, pacify northern Nigeria, and it was later under his suggestion that the two protectorates were merged. In 1914, Ledgard eventually became governor general of this newly created colony, although Britain wanted to stay in control of Nigeria. And it also wanted to keep France from getting any territory in the area. It didn't actually want to spend the time and money that would be required to govern the colony directly in northern Nigeria, Legard had established what the British perceived as a successful system of indirect rule.

The British, at least in theory, roughly replicated the system of local government that was already in place. But with men who were selected by the British placed into positions of power, Legard tried to implement the same system of indirect rule in Ebow land in southeastern Nigeria. Ebow land was divided up into native court regions within each region, led by a warrant chief. The warrant chief was EBOW but was appointed and empowered by the British.

However, this was not at all how Ebow communities in southeast Nigeria had been operating before this point. Having one warrant chief was antithetical to the decentralized communal decision making that we talked about before the break. Plus the native court boundaries grouped together villages that were not previously affiliated with each other and separated villages that were connected in some interpretations. Legard really did comprehend that this was going on, but he thought northern Nigeria was more so-called civilized and modern, and he thought making southern Nigeria conform to that same system would have a modernising effect.

So because this system of government was so vastly different from what the Igbo valued in general, the men who accepted appointments as warrant chief either didn't share those values or were just more interested in gaining power by their proximity to the British. Although there were some exceptions, generally, they were not people who had earned a position of power and respect in their communities. So in addition to the British having implemented a system that was radically different from what had previously been in place, corruption and abuse among the warrant chiefs became really widespread.

As we mentioned earlier, there was some variation in how Igbo women were able to exercise their social and political power. But in general, as the British established indirect rule, Igbo women lost rights and power that they had previously had. Since councils of elders had been replaced by a sole warrant chief, they lost much of their voice in community decision making. Also is another example. Women had generally had the right to refuse marriage proposals that they did not want.

But warrant chiefs started selecting wives without regard to the women's wishes. As all of this was happening, British officials and Christian missionaries and Ebola were also trying to influence Igbo cultural and sexual mores. For example, nudity was common among EBOs the. Fighting with girls and young women generally remaining unclothed until after they had gotten married and become pregnant for the first time. And at that point, clothing often involved a loincloth or sort of a skirt around their their waist.

And missionaries tried to move ebow women toward more Western standards of dress. Then as if all of that was not already enough. Men in Nigeria were pressed into service both as soldiers and as porters during World War One. They served under white officers as part of the Nigerian regiment, which made up more than half of the West African Frontier Force. Then came the 1918 flu pandemic, which sickened between 50 and 80 percent of the population of Nigeria and killed at least 500000 people there in less than six months.

So by the early 1920s, the people of southeastern Nigeria had been through a lot. Then, in October of 1925, British officials noted reports of a miraculous birth near the town of Atah. But they didn't really specify what that meant. Ebow sources aren't entirely clear about it either, in part because of nuances in the Ebola language. What is clear, though, is that Ebow women interpreted this birth as a sign that something was seriously out of balance and needed to be corrected.

What followed has been called the Dancing Women's Movement, or the Women's Purity Campaign. Ebow women gathered in the markets singing, dancing and ritually sweeping the space. They stripped unmarried women and girls who had started adopting European style dress. They also outlined a series of demands that were meant to restore gender roles to what they had been before. British colonisation, including making dowry negotiations more transparent and honest and restoring dowry amounts to their earlier levels because they had risen so much by that point that many people could no longer afford to pay them.

Other demands focused on things like reopening old roads and observing old customs.

British officials really did not understand at all what was happening here. They interpreted the symbolic sweeping of the markets and a focus on sanitation as being only about literal cleanliness and hygiene. And they also interpreted the women's focus on purity as being somehow about sex work. The list of demands did include one that was related to sex work. But like that was one thing out of a list of like 25 demands. But from the EBOW women's perspective, it really seems to have been more about restoring order and balance at a social, spiritual and religious level and righting the imbalance that had led to this miraculous birth and basically protecting and preserving women's fertility.

Many historians have interpreted this 1925 campaign as sort of a prelude to the women's war on women, re-establishing their market and kinship networks and using those networks to reassert their own agency and try to reclaim some of the power they lost over the previous decades. But British authorities mostly regarded it as an incomprehensible disruption based on their reaction to the women's war a few years later, which they described as completely unprecedented. It seems as though they pretty quickly forgot about it.

We'll have some more after a quick break. During his time as Nigeria's first colonial governor, Sir Frederick Legard thought taxation could serve as a means to organize and, quote, civilize the people. If you had to pay a tax, you would also have to work to do it. And you could really only do that as part of a purportedly modern economic system. So to that end, there was a census conducted in England followed by a head tax of about five shillings, a person that was levied on men in 1927.

So much about this was totally foreign to the IBO speaking peoples of southeastern Nigeria, as well as other peoples living in the affected region. The idea of counting people was deeply taboo from a religious and cultural perspective. Human beings were not objects to be counted and drawing attention to how many people there were or how large a person's lineage had grown ran the risk of attracting malevolent forces.

Additionally, Igbo languages didn't really have a word or even a completely comparable concept for taxation. The closest thing was basically ransom. So in addition to the financial hardship of suddenly having to pay this tax, people felt like they were having to pay a ransom on themselves. British authorities had also proposed a tax on the land. And this was a similarly foreign concept because how could a person whose family had been custodian of this land have to pay a totally different person a fee for it?

There was also the issue of the money itself. British authorities would accept only British currency, which most of the local people did not have access to, and we're not using in their own lives. One of the demands of the women's purity campaign had even been to get rid of British currency entirely. Local currencies included things like Khoury's and brass rods. But even if the men had the equivalent of five shillings, most had no way to exchange any of that for British currency.

And the reality was that many men didn't have the money, so their wives had to help make up the difference. This got worse after the Great Depression and other factors led palm oil prices to drop while the amount of tax stayed the same. So Captain John Cook, who was stationed in Bendat while filling in for a district officer who was on leave, decided to redo that district's census in October of 1929, this time also counting women and animals. On November twenty third, census taker Mark Amarula approached a woman named Juan Urara on her husband's compound and told her to count the compound's women and animals.

And according to testimony that was later given before a commission that investigated all of this, she said, quote, Are you still counting? Last year, my son's wife, who was pregnant, died. I am still mourning the death of that woman. Was your mother counted in her account? He grabbed her and she smeared red palm oil onto his shirt while trying to get away in his account. She smeared him with palm oil intentionally to both insult him and ruin his clothing and then chased him out of the compound.

Nuria Ruah either went to or was summoned to the warrant chief go. Okay. And their accounts also differ in hers. He was dismissive and insulting, threatening her and telling her in no uncertain terms that she would be paying the tax. In his version, he was reassuring and told her it was all just a mistake.

One went to the market and told the women there about what had happened at her husband's compound. And soon rumors were spreading that women were about to be taxed. Along with the men, the women passed palm fronds from person to person through their market and lineage networks as a signal to gather. And this led about ten thousand women to meet at the district administration office on November 24th. They demanded written assurance that they would not be taxed. A big part of what followed involved a long established method for Igbo women to hold men accountable for their behavior and get restitution for wrongs, which was known as sitting on a man.

If a man wronged someone, particularly if he wronged a woman, or if he otherwise violated community standards in a way that was considered to be part of the women's domain, they would gather at his home, often late at night, and do things like dance and sing songs that shamed him, detailing his wrongdoing and insulting his masculinity. They would pound on the walls of his home with the pestles. They used to pulverize yams. In extreme cases, they might pull the roof off his hut or slather its exterior with mud.

Now, they would basically do this until the man in question admitted that he was wrong and made restitution. But when the women sat on the warrant chief in November of 1929, not only that, he refused. To admit any wrongdoing, but he also had people from his compound assault, some of the women, one of them said that she had had a miscarriage as a result.

So the women took their grievances to District Officer John Cook, protesting the census, the tax and the warrant chief's behavior. The warrant chief was ultimately removed from his post put on trial on December 4th, 1929. More than 1000 women attended that trial at which he was convicted and sentenced to two years of imprisonment.

So news that these women had successfully gotten the warrant chief removed and in fact sentenced to prison really spread beyond the district. Women and other communities similarly started sitting on their warrant chiefs and British office officials to demand assurance that they wouldn't be taxed and to demand the removal and punishment of corrupt warrant chiefs. As this movement spread and grew, women also started damaging colonial telegraph lines, railroads, roads and even buildings. At first, British authorities were baffled and appalled by the women's demonstrations.

Many of the women were mostly naked, wearing palm fronds around their foreheads or waists and carrying sticks adorned with palm leaves, which was shocking to British sensibilities about nudity and dress. But it wasn't until December 13th that the British started to see the uprising as really threatening. Instead of just disorderly and shocking. That day, women attacked government buildings and factories in a very province after a doctor deliberately drove his car through a group of demonstrators. This seems to be the turning point that made firing on the women from the British point of view an inevitability.

On December 14th, police cleared an assembly of women in Šabac by firing their weapons into the ground and moving the women along with the butts of their rifles. It doesn't appear that anyone was killed during this, but it is also not clear how many people were injured since a lot of women who were probably would not have come forward. Then on the 15th, police in ETIM Ekpo fired on a crowd of women, killing 18 and wounding 19 others. A day later, in a public, police again opened fire on a group of demonstrating women, this time killing 31, along with a man who happened to be passing through the area.

Eight other women were pushed or fell into a river as the crowd was fleeing and drowned among the EBOW and other African women who had been part of this.

It was just unfathomable that their actions, which drew from this long standing and socially appropriate practice of sitting on a man, would be met with any kind of violence against their persons. But in the end, more than 50 women were killed and at least that many were wounded. On December 29th, 1929, British authorities reported that the situation in Ebow land was under control, but sporadic demonstrations followed after that. By the time it ended, the women's war had ranged over more than 6000 miles of southeastern Nigeria.

At this point, the Jilian Whaleback massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre in India, was still pretty fresh on the minds of British authorities. We mentioned that massacre in our previous episode on tear gas. After that massacre, there had been people who supported the British troops that had fired on unarmed demonstrators. But the massacre had also sparked outrage in the British public in the House of Commons, fearing a similar response to what had happened in Nigeria. The secretary of state for the colonies, Sidney Webb Lord, passed field, ordered an inquiry.

This inquiry was not particularly thorough, though the commission itself was made up exclusively of British people, 36 witnesses were interviewed, none of whom were women who had been part of the demonstrations, or even people who knew enough about their position to be able to really understand and explain their interests. A report issued on January 27th totally exonerated the British response. Lord Past Field knew this would not satisfy the British public or members of parliament or the people of Nigeria.

So he ordered a second investigation in March of 1930. The British were calling this uprising the above riots. And this commission, which was known as the ABA commission, convened for three months. This time, the commissioners included two Nigerian barristers, as well as British lawyers and government officials, and they interviewed 500 Nigerian and British witnesses.

This time, the commission found that the killings had been avoidable, but the massacre didn't spark the kind of outcry that Lord Parkfield field had feared, so he didn't pursue the matter further. The soldiers and police who had fired on the women were ultimately exonerated and no one was directly punished, although some of. Officials were removed or transferred from their posts after this uprising was over. British authorities use the same tactics that they had previously used to, quote, pacify Nigeria, including levying large fines, seizing people's property and burning villages, including, again, using collective punishments against whole villages where demonstrating women had lived.

Women's forms of advocacy, including sitting on a man, were outlawed as vigilante activities.

But by 1933, British authorities also made significant changes to their system of indirect rule in southeastern Nigeria. Warrant chiefs were replaced with masked benches, which were panels of judges selected by villages, with the villages also determining how many judges to have. Districts were also redrawn so that court areas more closely aligned with precolonial groups of villages. In general, women had a say in who was selected to serve on a mass bench, but it was comparatively rare for women to actually serve on one.

As we noted at the top of the show, we've primarily focused on Igbo women in this episode. But women from other cultural and linguistic groups were also involved in this uprising. And afterward, women's networks and greater community networks started to become a little more cross-cultural in southeastern Nigeria, with women of multiple ethnic and linguistic groups sort of thinking of themselves as part of a great council of all women or all wives, or even a great council of everyone. Of course, Nigeria in general and Igbo people specifically have a long and complicated history from this point.

But the women's activism in 1929 has been cited as inspiration for multiple uprisings and demonstrations that followed, including tax protests in 1948 and 1956, oil mill protests in the 1940s, and demonstrations at oil loading docks and pumping stations in the early 2000s. There's also a novel called I Saw the Sky Catch Fire that focuses on the women's war. And a Nigerian film called 1929 came out just last year in twenty nineteen. I think you can actually get that film here in the US on some streaming services, but I wasn't able to watch it before doing this episode.

I also have a little bit of listener mail. Yeah, yeah, for the listener, e-mail is from Terry, who says Goodey from Australia. I have just listened to The Sims Theory of Concentric Spheres podcast. It was very interesting, particularly when you consider the concave earth theory. This theory states that we're not on the outside of the earth, but inside. And it makes perfect sense. We are on the inside of the globe. The stars are lights from cities on the other side of the globe.

When we look at the horizon, we look up. If we were on the outside of the globe, we would look down, think of how planes take off, they go up. But if we were on the outside, they would go down and the Bermuda Triangle and similar areas, their exhaust fans for the planet. But all makes sense. You may have guessed that alcohol was involved in the formation of the theory. I hope it brings some joy to your day.

Terry from Australia. Terry did bring some joy to my day. And it also reminded me of a thing that I found while researching the episode that did not make it into the episode because I couldn't quite wrap my head around it. And it was also. Ancillary, it was like beside the point, and that is that in the 1980s, there was an Egyptian mathematician named Mustapha Abdulkadir who wrote some papers detailing a mathematical model for a concave earth with us on the interior of it.

Which seems like a super interesting thing to be looking at mathematically, but like I said, I couldn't quite like get my mind wrapped around it.

So anyway, thank you. I was indeed amused by that email, and I'm glad that it gave me a chance to kind of bring up that, like one of the little tidbits that didn't make it into that episode.

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