Farmers, traders, warriors and kings: Female power and authority in Northern Igboland, 1900--1960

This dissertation explores the politics of gender and the evolution of female power in Northern Igboland during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Like Nsukka cosmological structure, the dissertation is organized within a cyclical movement of time and considers the place and evolution of the female principle in both the visible human world and the non-human, inanimate world. Consequently, the study extends beyond the boundaries of conventional research by examining the prominence of the female principle in the spiritual realm, as exhibited in the form of female medicines and goddesses.;The dissertation examines the religious, economic and political structures that allowed women to achieve power, and evaluates how Nsukka women reacted and adjusted to the challenges of European rule. It draws liberally on the life histories of Nsukka women and reveals that while colonialism and Christianity eroded women's pre-colonial religious power, Nsukka women carved out new roles for themselves that mirrored the powerful positions they occupied in the traditional religious order. In the economic realm, the study contends that there was a direct link between Nsukka women's work patterns and their access to economic, political and social power. In politics, the author determines that while the Nsukka political system could be described as a complementary dual-sex system, the daughters of the lineage, umuada, were beyond characterization and featured prominently in both the male and female arms of government as the supreme court of arbitration. The author also argues that Nsukka women transformed their pre-colonial collective resistance strategies into mechanisms for "making war" against the colonial government.;"Farmers, Traders, Warriors and Kings..." also deals with the intersection of personal, political, intellectual and cultural contours of personhood. It critically explores the implications of identity creation and negotiation in our understanding of African women's, gendered and general histories. The last chapter of the dissertation is a case study of Ahebi Ugbabe, an extraordinary Igbo woman, which reveals much about the shifting bases of gendered power under indirect rule and the ways in which Igbo women and men shaped the colonial environment.