In November and December 1929, a series of protests, riots, and demonstrations took place in Igbo and Ibibio-speaking areas of southeastern Nigeria. Known in colonial archives as the “Aba Women’s Riot,” this event marked a turning point in the story of British colonial rule in southeastern Nigeria and left an indelible mark, not only on the colonial perception of women, but also on the broader history of the African anticolonial movement. The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria, written by three scholars specializing in African and British history and anthropology, provides one of the most detailed and multidimensional accounts of the circumstances that led to those events and their impact on the African–colonial encounter.

The book begins with a critical engagement with the politics of nomenclature and the academic and political implications of how diverse groups of people have documented the event (known locally as Ogu Umunwaanyi) since 1929. The authors analyze the relationship between events and its conceptualization, and the politics of knowledge production. Early writers and commentators accepted the colonialists’ framing of the Women’s War as “illegitimate” actions on the part of “disgruntled natives” against the colonial authority. But from the 1960s onward academic writers, notably Africanist scholars, across generations, disciplines, and locations, began to provide revisionist perspectives that restored women’s agency in both the causes and the impact of the war. Eight well-written chapters take readers into the history of southeastern Nigeria, weaving together different strands of ideas to deliver a first-rate historical investigation. The authors argue that “the political and economic factors that gave rise to the Ogu Umunwaanyi cannot be separated from Igbo and other southeastern social systems, which were being transformed by and reacting to their engagement with the tenets of colonial, western society.” To drive home their argument, they “explore local worldviews, the spatial arrangements of the market and the lineage compounds, women’s associations, and the effect of mission Christianity upon women’s contemporary roles in the region, and the changes faced by indigenous women during the 1920s in their position vis-à-vis men and their society in general” (6).

Chapters 1 and 2 provide the most important context for the discussion—an account of the precolonial world of the Igbo and the advent of the missionaries, and the numerous political and economic policies imposed by the British after the “pacification” of southeastern Nigeria. The authors point out clearly that the physical and spiritual lives of the people did not exist in isolation. Rather, they coexisted in a tightly knit manner in various domains such as the compound, family, and marketplace. From the late nineteenth century onward missionaries and British colonialists “changed the land” by disrespecting the customs of the people, introducing new economic policies and transforming the prevailing political institutions to suit their own exploitative agendas. Colonial transformation in particular had a greater negative effect on women than on men because the imperialist enterprise was largely a male-centered and male-maintained endeavor. The core themes of chapter 3 include the ways in which the World War I emergency policies (characterized by forced labor and food shortages) and the demographic impact of the influenza pandemic further fractured the relations between Africans and the British.

When government officials in autumn 1929 ordered a household census in preparation for a new taxation regime for women, they not only broke some significant cultural codes related to gender, privacy, and domesticity, but they also pushed the women to the wall. Chapters 4–8 provide a comprehensive account of the Women’s War itself, the actions of the women who waged the war, and those of the colonial officers who responded to the protesting women with violence. The verbal, symbolic, and physical manner in which the women prosecuted the war clearly revealed that it was not an uncoordinated event without a clear mission, as the British claimed. In appraising the consequences of the war on gender relations, colonial violence, and African nationalism, the authors examine how the public discussion of the event in the metropole, the newspapers, and the legislative houses exposed the contradictions of colonialism as a “civilizing” mission. Hence what appeared at first to be merely a local event in southeastern Nigeria sparked national and global agitation that questioned the legitimacy of colonial rule and the violent response of the government to the women’s legitimate agitation.

The Women’s War of 1929 makes a significant contribution to studies of African women, gender, colonialism, and colonial violence. Matera, Bastian, and Kent retell a familiar story with new sources and insights, and present perspectives that enrich our knowledge of this remarkable event.