AGAINST THE SILENCING: FEMINIST REVISIONS OF IGBO WOMEN’S ROLES IN NIGERIAN HISTORY

Abstract

This essay challenges the systematic erasure of Igbo women from African historiography, arguing that Eurocentric and patriarchal scholarship has rendered invisible a history of agency, authority, and resilience. Through feminist historiographical intervention, it recovers Igbo women’s central roles across three critical periods. In precolonial Igboland, women exercised economic independence as traders and farmers, wielded political power through institutions like the umuada, and held spiritual authority grounded in cosmologies of gender complementarity, particularly the twin-deity Chi na Eke. Under colonial rule, women resisted systematic marginalisation through the Aba Women’s War of 1929, a mass uprising that successfully challenged British authority and dismantled the warrant chief system. During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), women sustained communities through survival strategies, caregiving, education, soldier protection, and peace-building initiatives. By centring oral traditions, community testimonies, and counter-archives alongside written sources, this work demonstrates that Igbo women were never peripheral to history but foundational to its making. This recovery constitutes a feminist intervention that challenges the epistemological violence of colonial historiography and redefines how African history is written and whose voices it centres.