The Land Has Changed: history, society and gender in colonial eastern Nigeria (review)

Sifting through the complexities of political encounters based on particular forms of agrarian relations between Africans and colonialists, this book maps socio-economic and cultural changes and continuities in a specific historical period by focusing on a people’s relationships with the land and its proceeds. The centrality of land, not only in the reality and articulation of being and meaning among the Igbo of colonial Nigeria, but also in the reconstruction of life and living in the post-colonial era, is adroitly narrated as a prism through which we can understand history, society and gender in a particular socio-cultural formation. This book is a fine example of the uses of agrarian narratives in the reconstruction of African social history.

‘The land has changed!’ is the exclamation that captures the transformations in the agrarian economy imposed by the colonial encounter with its preoccupation with extracting surplus from the colonized territories and peoples. In the colony, this metropolitan (fundamentally fiscal) ambition forcefully reconstituted the ‘traditional’ economies of subsistence (and consumption) into elaborate economies of accumulation, thus producing not only new forms of land use and cropping systems, but also a system of profit squeeze that overdetermined and recomposed all other facets of life in the (post)colony. In the end, the shifting of ‘surplus’ from the (rural) land – due to many factors, including environmental degradation, declining agricultural production, democratic pressures, the post-1970s mono-product (oil) economy, et cetera – to other things and other locations, turned the Igbo into a people on the move, thus changing their attitudes to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. These effects, eventually, also led to what the author describes as ‘considerable transgression of gender norms, [and] changes in the nature of family, kinship, human relations, and work’ among the Igbo.

Igboland, as Chima Korieh demonstrates, is a great template for understanding how agricultural production – and formation – was intrumentalized for colonial governance and discipline, and its wide-ranging ramifications in the post-colonial era. The book elaborates ‘the complex process through which an African society responded to state intervention during the colonial and early post-colonial period’, using ‘agricultural change as a lens through which to view socioeconomic change, political struggle, cultural change, and colonial hegemony’.

However, the book contests the images of Africans – in this case, peasant farmers in the palm oil belt – as passive objects and subjects of colonial intervention and the project of ‘modernization’ and ‘modernity’; the book also reconstructs change and responses to change, and the impacts of these on material and non-material processes, including political consciousness and social struggles. Against this backdrop, the author challenges the received wisdom in development and economic studies that blames agricultural decline in rural areas exclusively on the concentration on cash crop production induced by colonialism. He concludes that African agency and the socio-cultural context constituted the complexity of factors, which provides a more rounded picture of the African past and its implications for the present.

A very valuable intervention by Korieh is his presentation of a gendered understanding of the processes and dynamics of agrarian transformation, particularly in what has been assumed to be a dominantly patriarchal society. He argues persuasively – and provides relevant evidence in the Igbo case – that most scholars working on agrarian change in Africa often either elide the place of gender in socio-economic transformation, or confuse gender relations automatically ‘with women’s subordination’, thus overlooking the composite relationships between men and women, especially in relation to the affects of government policies in rural areas.

The book is significant in other ways. It emphasizes the levels and dimensions of linkages that are critical to understanding the social and agrarian history of a specific African politico-cultural formation. Analysing and conflating relationships between the rural and the urban, the local and the international, the historical and the contemporary, the economic and the cultural, and the determinative...