The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe

Nkowa / THE INTRODUCTION: Unspoken, Blame the Mouth; Unheard, Blame the Ear

C Nkowa / The inTroDuCTion unspoken, Blame the Mouth; unheard, Blame the ear The remembered history of the people of Nsukka Division from the earliest times can be sorted into a series of memorable events, definite landmarks or, put differently, “public disasters of the greatest magnitude”1 that have been passed down orally from one generation to the next. In some cases these events were recorded by the first British administrative agents to have converged on to the area. In 1934, one such officer, J. Barmby, charted these remembered epochs in an intelligence report on the peoples of the Igbodo group of Nsukka Division in the following manner: (1) The founding of the village by a traditional ancestor (2) Petty raids by surrounding towns of which there are no details (emphasis added) (3) The coming of the Government in the person of a white man nick-named Otikpo, the destroyer (4) The influenza (1919) (5) The Ochima Patrol (1924) (6) Taxation 19282 Barmby’s documented delineations most certainly provide the historian of Nsukka Division, Igboland, and arguably colonial Nigeria, a rare opportunity to gain insight into historical reconstructions from an indigenous point of view. Nevertheless, I would argue that in the case of Enugu-Ezike, it does not tell the entire story. In important ways, it unintentionally skews the measured perspective of the indigenous knowledge being expressed. Thus, a modification of his reading in particular locations to account for this oversight is necessary. Barmby’s first identified cataloging of how indigenous memory constructed and privileged the founding of a village by a traditional ancestor is not only sound but firmly centered on Enugu-Ezike consciousness. The people of EnuguEzike recall in various tellings the founding of their town by an ancestor known as Ezike, a point that I will expound upon shortly. I would 20 THE FEMALE KING OF COLONIAL NIGERIA propose an addition here, though, that would allow for the centering of the “naissance of the [extended] family”3 as an addendum to that of the village, thus giving prominence to the collective histories of the individuals who make up the village group. I am convinced that such an elucidation is necessary because in these Igbo parts, the conventional wisdom is that the foundation of the village or village group extends from the family—a unit through which the social, political, and reliMap Intro. 2. Nsukka Division and Surrounding Regions. Remote Sensing & Geographic Information Science, Michigan State University. NkOwA / THE INTRODUCTION 21 gious organization of Igbo communities can be traced.4 C. K. Meek, another European documenter of Barmby’s time, supports this point of view when he argues in his 1930 report that “the basic social unit” in all Igbo communities “is the group of patrilineal relatives who live together in close association and constitute what is known as umunna i.e. the children of a common forefather.”5 The term umunne (children of one mother) is also used to delineate one or more distinct but related extended family—families that make up what anthropologists have called a kindred. It is this kindred or, more precisely put, several kindreds living in close proximity, according to Meek, that occupy an area that can be described as a village. Furthermore, the unity of the village group is “based on a sense of common ancestry [i.e., the extended family], the possession of a common territory, and home, [as well as] common customs .”6 It is from this reading that my case for this initial modification of Barmby’s conceptualization is extended. In response to Barmby’s assessment of the importance of “petty raids . . . of which there are no details” to Nsukka’s indigenous reconstruction of history, I take exception to his reduction of the interwar Map Intro. 3. Nsukka Division. Remote Sensing & Michigan State University. 22 THE FEMALE KING OF COLONIAL NIGERIA period7 to a phase of “petty raids,” as well as the second half of his statement, by arguing that in the case of Enugu-Ezike, as was true of most Igbo towns of the period, the minutiae of these so-called “petty raids,” in actuality, inter-village slave-raiding, kidnapping, and warring, were not only remembered, but have, in fascinating ways, complicated the way in which each community’s collective history materialized. The outcome of this pillaging of human beings, was the adoption of survival mechanisms that were constructed by each community to help “fight the slave...