The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe

Notes

NOTES Ekene / acknowledgments 1. After the publication of my first book, Farmers, Traders, warriors, and kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005), Professor A. E. Afigbo wrote the following e-mail message to me: “Dear Nwando, Greetings. First this mail comes to wish you A Happy and Prosperous 2006. I am sure it will see you and your affairs to greater and still greater heights; [i]n the second place I would like you to know that I have now had a detailed look at your book on women in Nsukka. Not only did I find it interesting, I also found it elucidating . I can see that scholars have already put it in the pigeonhole for gender studies. Perhaps you went into the study to make a contribution in that field. There is no doubt that that ambition was more than fully achieved. From my perspective, however , its special merit lies in the field of Igbo Studies. Long after gender studies would have followed similar intellectual fashions into the garbage heap of History as another passing cliché, your book will continue to stand out as one of the few works which bring out how women actually lived their lives in Igbo society. This is not because you gave Igbo women voice as Professor Ekechi suggested, but because you made manifest the voice they have always had. You highlighted a reality that had always been there but which many before you were unable to see or highlight. Congratulations!!” A. E. Afigbo, e-mail correspondence, January 2, 2006. Nkwado / The Preparation 1. C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigeria Tribe: A Study of Indirect Rule (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 158. 2. In a recent conversation, Claire Robertson brought to my attention the existence of a Kikuyu woman chief, Wangu wa Makeni, whom the British recognized as chief in 1901. Wangu was said to have passed away in 1936. As chief she was particularly emphatic about education and farming and helped establish the Church Missionary Society in her area. She was never referred to as warrant chief, however, nor did she seem to have the range of responsibilities—for instance, she did not sit in judgment of cases as a member or president of a court—that the British-imposed warrant chief Ahebi did. Therefore, Wangu sounds more like a British-recognized headwoman. Many thanks to Claire Robertson for this information. Claire Robertson, telephone conversation with author, October 5, 2009. See also Evelyn K. Mungia and Joy Awori, eds., kenya women Reflections (Nairobi: Lear Publishing Company, 1984), viii–x. 3. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 4. Ibid., xi. 5. Ibid., 4. 6. For more on this, see Nwando Achebe, “‘And She Became a Man’: King Ahebi Ugbabe in the History of Enugu-Ezike, Northern Igboland, 1880–1948,” in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, ed. Stephan F. Miescher and Lisa A. Lindsay (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003), 52–68. 226 NOTES TO PAGES 2–5 7. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); as well as Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–282. 8. See Paulla A. Ebron, Performing Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). Lisa A. Lindsey has also adapted the concept in working with Gender: wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003). 9. See Stephan Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) for a Ghana case study of this. 10. For Mandinka (Gambia) and Asante (Ghana) case studies, see Paulla A. Ebron, “Constituting Subjects through Performative Arts,” in which she argues that gender is both “self-consciously and unself-consciously” performed and suggests that the notion of performativity of gender can illuminate our knowledge about social class, the “possibilities of development projects and global economic inequities.” In Africa After Gender, ed. Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 171–190. 11. Male femininities can also be performed in Igboland, making men into female priestesses. For more on this, see Nwando Achebe, “‘[T]he Real Rulers of [Nsukka] Town[s] are the Ancestors or Spirits . . . ’: Understanding the Female Principle in Igbo Religion,” in Igbos in the Atlantic world, ed. Toyin...