The Women's War: The Aba Rebellion of 1929
Gender, Taxation, and Resistance in Colonial Nigeria

About this book:

In November 1929, a census taker asked an Igbo widow to count her goats. Her blistering retort—"Was your mother counted?"—ignited a rebellion that engulfed six thousand square miles of the Niger Delta. Tens of thousands of women mobilized through ancient market networks, wielding palm fronds as summons and "sitting on" warrant chiefs with ritual ridicule, song, and collective power. The British called it the "Aba Riots"—a dismissive label for what the women themselves named *Ogu Umunwanyi*: the Women's War. This book reveals the sophisticated anti-colonial campaign hidden behind imperial condescension, rooted in a dual-sex political system the colonizers never saw.

Drawing on deep archival research and indigenous perspectives, *The Women's War* reconstructs the world the British shattered: a society where women controlled the palm oil trade, governed markets, held judicial authority through the *Umuada* and *Otu Alutaradi*, and shared spiritual kinship with the earth goddess *Ala*. When Lord Lugard's indirect rule imposed alien warrant chiefs and direct taxation, it didn't just threaten livelihoods—it violated the cosmic and constitutional order. The uprising that followed was no spontaneous riot but a strategic dismantling of colonial symbols: Native Courts burned, factories raided, and the warrant chief system collapsing under the weight of women's testimony.

From the first confrontation in Oloko to the massacres at Opobo and the inquiry that forced imperial reassessment, this is the definitive account of a resistance that reshaped colonial policy and seeded Nigerian nationalism. *The Women's War* restores agency, intellect, and political sophistication to the women who stood down an empire—and won.