Nwanyeruwa

Biography

She was a widow in Oloko, in Bende Division of what was then Owerri Province, in the palm belt of southeastern Nigeria. Her husband was called Ojim. She traded, and she processed palm oil, which is what she was doing in her compound in late November 1929 when a man named Mark Emeruwa came to count her household.

That is close to everything anyone knows about her life. There is no birth year. There is no death year. There is no photograph, and no likeness, and the pictures that circulate online under her name are other women entirely. She enters the historical record in November 1929 and leaves it in March 1930, and the record itself was written by the administration she was fighting, in English, through interpreters.

What happened in between changed the government of a region of two million people.

The argument

Emeruwa was not a British officer. He was a local man, mission-educated, working as an agent for Okugo, the warrant chief of Oloko. He told her to count her goats, her sheep and the people in her house.

The women of the region had watched this before. A count had been taken in 1926 without anyone explaining why. In 1928 the men were taxed. Now, in 1929, enumerators were back and this time they were counting women, children and livestock. Nobody needed a conspiracy theory. They needed a calendar.

She refused, and asked him the question the whole thing turns on. Was your widowed mother counted? In another version preserved in the inquiry papers she said she was only a woman, so what had she to count in the way of goats and fowls. Both amount to the same thing: women were not taxed, widows least of all, and he had no business in her yard.

The commission's own report records what happened next in five words. Thereupon Emeruwa seized her by the throat.

Her hands were red and slick with palm oil. She grabbed him back, marking his hands and his clothes, and then she went out to the women already gathered and told them.

Historical Context

Igbo society had no kings for the British to rule through, so the British invented some. The warrant chief system handed a warrant and a Native Court to men appointed by the administration, an office with no precedent in Igbo political life, and by the 1920s it was a byword for extortion. It also pushed aside the women's assemblies, the mikiri, which had governed markets and settled disputes between women for as long as anyone could remember.

The timing made it worse. World palm produce prices collapsed with the markets in late 1929. Women were being counted for taxation at the exact moment their trading income disappeared. Nwanyeruwa told the commission later that she had once been a rich woman, and that Okugo had taken her money until she had none.

What She Fought For

Not being taxed, first. But underneath that, the thing the British never understood they had taken: the right of women to be consulted about the terms of their own lives, which the mikiri had given them and indirect rule had quietly removed.

Major Achievements

The message moved through the markets and the women's councils, carried with young palm fronds passed from village to village as a summons. Three women of Oloko, Ikonnia, Nwannedia and Nwugo, turned one woman's story into a campaign, and it is worth being accurate about this: Nwanyeruwa struck the match, and they built the fire. Her name survived precisely because other women decided to carry it.

Within days about ten thousand women had converged on Oloko. They surrounded Okugo's compound, pulled him out and sat on him, the old Igbo sanction in which women gather at an offending man's house, sing his offences at him and refuse to leave. District Officer Captain Cook gave them a written promise that women would not be taxed, arrested Okugo, and threw his cap of office into the crowd.

It did not stop there. Over the following weeks the war spread across Owerri and Calabar provinces, six thousand square miles and six ethnic groups, Igbo, Ibibio, Andoni, Ogoni, Efik and Ijaw. In Ibibio it is called Ekong Iban. Tens of thousands of women took part, the figure most often given is twenty-five thousand. At least ten Native Courts were destroyed, European factories were looted, prisons were opened and telegraph wires cut.

Then the troops fired. On 14 December at Utu Etim Ekpo, eighteen women were killed. On 16 December at Opobo, sixty-two shots were fired into a crowd and thirty-two people died. Across all the shootings at least fifty women were killed and about as many wounded. Afterwards the administration burned compounds and fined villages under the Collective Punishment Ordinance, which is the half of the story that usually gets left out.

Okugo was convicted in December 1929 and given two years. Two commissions of inquiry followed. The second sat for thirty-eight days and heard four hundred and eighty-five witnesses, and Nwanyeruwa gave evidence to it on 12 March 1930.

The plan to tax women was dropped. The warrant chief system was dismantled and replaced, and Native Court seats were filled by town meetings rather than by warrant. A small number of women were appointed to the courts, although not in the form or the numbers the women had demanded. And in 1933 the administration outlawed sitting on a man, which is to say the reform that answered the women also took away the method that had worked.

Her Impact Today

The British called it the Aba Riots for fifty years, a word chosen to make it sound like weather. It took the work of historians, Judith Van Allen above all, to restore the name the women used themselves, Ogu Umunwanyi, the Women's War, and to show it was fought with a political repertoire that colonial officials could not see because they had already decided women had no politics.

The line runs forward from her: the tax protests of 1938, the oil mill protests of the 1940s, the revolt of 1956. The memorial at Ikot Abasi stands where the shooting was.

There is no monument to Nwanyeruwa. There is no known grave and no known face. The commission that heard her recommended that both the man who grabbed her and the chief who sent him be pardoned. She got nothing, and this is not an oversight in the record, it is the record.