Herramientas asociadas al desarrollo del sistema SISTCLON

The Women’s War was an important watershed in two respects: fi rst, it captured what had been an emerging trend – resistance to the gendered impact of colonialism within the household; and second, the conclusions drawn from the confl ict profoundly shaped the subsequent direction of indirect rule in the south-eastern provinces. The 1930s were years in which colonial rule decisively embedded itself into local Annang society.

The proliferation of schools, clinics and courts carried with them British normative principles and procedures in education, medicine and justice.

Routines were established as taxes were collected, as weights and measures were checked, and as court fees and fi nes were recorded. It was a period of administrative bureaucratisation and legal codifi cation as the civil service expanded. Colonial rule between the wars has therefore been characterised as a period of social, political and economic stagnation.¹ The 1930s was indeed the decade of greatest stability in colonial rule, though as this chapter illustrates the calm and routine were superfi cial. The economic depression of the 1930s not only affected the markets, it also fostered profound changes in class and gender relations.²

Despite appearances to the contrary, the years between the Women’s War and the outbreak of the Second World War were subject to radical political upheaval within Calabar Province. Reforms in the aftermath of the Women’s War designed to resolve an emerging intergenerational rift and to restore

‘authentic’ rulers instead turned the courts and councils into spheres of intense political contest. The control of local taxation revenue made repre-sentation on the council, like seats on the court bench, a prize fought over by new elites and elders alike, and the ‘committee class’ of young men who made up the ‘vociferous, letter-writing minority’ formed progressive welfare societies publicly to expose corruption within the Native Administration and privately to usurp its perquisites. This decade witnessed new forms of collaborations – of Africans seeking to establish new forms of access to resources and labour, and Europeans looking for local authorities to fi ll positions generated by their conceptions of African societies.³ It was in this context that customary law especially relating to women was redrawn.

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A M E R I C A N S A N D A N T H R O P O L O G Y

The Women’s War of 1929 is rightly recorded as a signifi cant moment in the history of the colonial period in Nigeria and beyond. Within the legacy of indirect rule it has been seen as one of the great revolts against the impo-sition of state authority.⁴ As important to this story, however, are the proc-esses which the disturbances set in motion. Despite the watershed status of the Women’s War the fallout of 1929 has been much neglected, though it was both immediate and long-lasting.⁵ In the fi rst place the confl ict served to heighten colonial anxieties on a range of issues, especially fl uctuations of the palm oil trade, transatlantic trading schemes, and the economic nation-alist rhetoric to which they were linked. In the second place it led directly to the long-term restructuring of the political landscape.

Women’s capacity for political organisation demonstrated in the Women’s War had come as a surprise and a mystery to the government.

After 1929 the slightest hint of agitation, of women gathering in unusually large numbers, or of trade boycotts, was met with a swift response, and a police patrol would arrive within hours. The continued economic hardships caused by the economic slump in producer prices during the depression years meant that DOs were prone to misread local events. They were espe-cially vigilant in the months leading up to tax payment, and there was alarm when, in January 1931, a trade boycott was reported in Uyo and Abak Divisions. No palm fruit was being sold to middlemen or to factories such as Ibagwa mill near Abak, which was run by Nigerian Products Ltd. The rumour within government circles was that producers were holding on to their stocks because an American trader was due to visit Ikot Ekpene and would offer them ‘fantastic prices’.⁶ The price of palm fruit sold at Ibagwa mill had slumped from 2s 9d per gin case to 8d. Indirectly, the price slump was the cause of the boycott, but in fact a number of local chiefs had placed an injunction on palm fruit sales for two months (édíwúk áyôp – palm ban).

The subsequent harvest was to be sold so that the proceeds could be used by the chiefs to pay the next round of taxes due in April. What had appeared to be the beginning of another trade or tax protest was in fact a locally adapted mechanism for paying tax. Palm prices were so low that individuals struggled to raise enough to pay their taxes and the chiefs, as tax collectors, were compelled to underwrite the shortfall. Chief Samson of Ekpene Obon near Etinan, where the boycott began, claimed that he had paid out £30 from his own pocket in the 1930 tax collection.⁷

Tax, therefore, had quickly become a factor around which people ised themselves. Poverty and tax featured prominently in songs of the time:

Wife I do not marry, I have no bicycle,

What shall I take to market?

How shall I pay my tax?⁸

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During the depression the ability of those communities most severely hit by the fall in palm produce prices was closely monitored and aspects of the tax collection were changed to accommodate them. After 1932, chiefs, although they still collected the tax, were no longer personally liable for prosecuting tax evaders.⁹ It had also become common practice to collect tax during the agricultural season when specifi c communities were most able to pay, and hence in Opobo Division tax was collected from the Ibibio and Anang clans from May onwards at the height of the palm oil season; from the Ogonis from October to December when they harvested their yams; from the Andonis in November so as to interfere least with their fi shing activities;

while collection from Opobo itself continued throughout the year.¹⁰

Rumours circulating during the palm oil ‘boycott’ during 1931 of American traders and their ‘fantastic prices’ point to another aspect of the fallout of the Women’s War: colonial vigilance regarding subversive American infl uences. At the time of the disturbances in 1929 the Resident at Calabar had thought that the protests were linked to ‘quite a lot of agitation from America, as in the so-called Spirit Movement of 1927’.¹¹ The American trader at Ikot Ekpene in 1931 was an agent of the Ibibio Trading Corpo-ration, a body formed in 1929 which sought to negotiate direct shipments of palm oil to North America. During the Women’s War these agents had held a general meeting of the ‘America and Ibibio Co-operation’ on 7 December 1929 at Ikot Ubo at which 4,873 people turned out to hear proposals for the radical new trade scheme. In bypassing the European companies and securing higher prices by trading directly with the US, the Ibibio Trading Corporation promised that economic oppression would be lifted and that

‘we are sure to have ourselves cut off from this slavery’.¹² Offi cials in Calabar were suffi ciently alarmed that this message was being conveyed just as the women’s protests were gaining momentum that the Corporation’s agents were warned against inciting the local Ibibio and Annang population by giving them the idea that they were being robbed by the European fi rms, so that they ‘almost claim independency’.¹³

Two men represented the Ibibio Trading Corporation, Henry Walker, an American, and Prince Peter Eket Inyang Udo, an Ibibio. Henry Walker had been touring villages within the province for several months prior to the disturbances. To gain support for the trade scheme it was thought that he had distributed placards which announced that palm oil producers were being cheated, that they need not pay tax and that American ‘protection’

had arrived.¹⁴ Peter Eket, meanwhile, had received a ‘power of attorney’

from Ibibio chiefs to sell palm oil to the US and was asking for a levy of

£3 per village during these meetings to fi nance the operation (he claimed that fi fty villages had contributed). Walker had returned to the US when the offi cial enquiries were held into the Women’s War in early 1930. Peter Eket, however, was called to give evidence. He was questioned robustly on

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whether he had intended to cause disaffection and discontent in his speech at Ikot Ubo, and whether he had given ‘the impression that the United States was more or less taking over the handling of the affairs of trade in Southern Nigeria’.¹⁵ He denied both these claims, of course, though in the Commission’s fi nal report the Ibibio Trading Corporation’s activities were cited as a ‘minor contributory factor’ among the various causes of the Women’s War.

Eket returned to New York later in 1930 and signed a deal to supply palm oil to the West African American Corporation. By October, however, his New York partners had become impatient and sent an agent, George Macpherson, to Calabar who found that the palm oil supplies had not materialised.¹⁶ Local branches of the Ibibio Trading Corporation had been proposed in Abak and elsewhere to facilitate the purchasing of oil, but those chiefs to whom Eket had presented his plan were reluctant to commit them-selves because they would receive only a 50 per cent advance on the price they were paid. Chief Udo Udong in Ukanafun, for instance, ‘who sends much oil to Opobo’, was approached by the Corporation but was ‘shy of dealing with them’.¹⁷

Throughout the 1930s Eket tried to evade the close scrutiny of the Nigerian authorities, but he was rarely out of their reports. In September 1930 the District Offi cer in Opobo sent a road labourer to spy, under cover of work, on the activities of a number of men clearing and levelling a site in Opobo town. Though the DO’s spy was exposed, it emerged that the building work was for a clerk of Eket’s ‘American and Ibibio Co-operative Society’ who was establishing premises, possibly a factory, from which to buy palm oil for sale in America. A later US State Department investigation into the deal found that only about 600 out of an intended 50,000 tons of palm oil had been exported, that Eket’s backers had lost $8,000, and accused him of being ‘the African version of a confi dence man’.¹⁸

The Nigerian Government’s suspicions of Eket Inyang Udo were linked to both his dubious commercial dealings and, more signifi cantly, his political ideas and connections. He was born in 1897, the youngest son of Inyang Udo Ataku, a wealthy chief in the village of Ikot Ataku seven miles from Eket. He had lived in North America and Great Britain for seventeen years and had served in the British Navy during the Great War.¹⁹ By the late 1920s he had made contacts with several of the most prominent West African ‘political entrepreneurs’ and nationalists of his generation, including Herbert Macaulay and Wilfred Tete-Ansa. Tete-Ansa (1889–1941) was the most prominent ‘nationalist entrepreneur’ of colonial British West Africa.

Born in the Gold Coast, he studied in the United Kingdom and the US during the 1920s and, on his return to West Africa in 1928, established ‘the most coherent and ambitious programme of economic development that had so far been drawn up by a West African’.²⁰ Eket had worked for

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Ansa’s ‘West African Cooperative Producers’ in 1928, and had founded the ‘Ibibio Trading Corporation’ under Tete-Ansa’s tutelage as part of his wider scheme to link farmers’ co-operatives (including cocoa-producing co-operatives in southern Ghana) with the New York-based ‘West African American Company’, which Tete-Ansa had set up.

The police in Nigeria considered bringing charges of trading under false pretences against Eket, but the interests of aggrieved shareholders were not the Government’s main concern. Their concerns were twofold: one was to maintain the status quo among palm oil producers and the European trading companies, and the second was the fear that the nationalist rhetoric which Eket and Tete-Ansa introduced to south-eastern Nigeria would fi nd an audience. In 1931 the Lagos press had carried an article by Tete-Ansa in which he called on readers to ‘release yourselves from economic bondage, always bearing in mind that every independent nation must have its own Economic Freedom’.²¹ When Eket and Tete-Ansa opened a branch of the Nigerian Mercantile Bank to fi nance their schemes in 1932 both the police and the United Africa Company (UAC) secretly sent informants to its inau-gural public meeting in Aba. The UAC was worried that the outfi t would be offering higher prices to producers. The police believed the venture to be

‘entirely bogus’ since they knew that the men who had pledged large sums to the venture were already heavily in debt to European fi rms.²² Of greater concern to the authorities was the network of ‘agitators’ at the meeting, the means of propaganda they now owned and the political rhetoric they expressed. The committee of the Mercantile Bank included H. Bowari Brown, J. B. George and Obadiah Wilcox, disgruntled commercial and government clerks and former schoolmasters of twenty years’ service. They each claimed that they had learned from bitter experience that the Euro-peans’ intention for the African was ‘to enslave him’.²³ Their message was carried across the south-east in pamphlets and newspapers printed on Tete-Ansa’s new press and distributed by his companies.

From 1929 the colonial authorities had been wary of American trading interests within south-eastern Nigeria, and the network of radical nationalist entrepreneurs engaged in commercial schemes across the Atlantic. The ventures of Tete-Ansa and Eket emphasise that economic independence was an important cornerstone to the development of an agenda for political independence.²⁴ Intelligence on ‘The West African American Corporation of New York’ and the various Nigerian bodies affi liated to it (including the Ibibio Trading Corporation) formed the bulk of a fi le held in Port Harcourt labelled ‘Subversive Infl uences’ and which included, among other things, threats of communist sedition, Mahdist propaganda and the literature and lecturers linked to the other main American ‘import’, religious revivalist literature.

The anti-colonial tone of ‘subversive and American’ religious tracts

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during the 1930s was especially associated with the Faith Tabernacle and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses).²⁵ The teachings of these churches attacked the essential bases of the colonial ideology. In some instances the effects were felt at a personal level. Shortly after arriving in Okigwe, for instance, a police constable embraced the Faith Tabernacle and was summarily dismissed because he refused to swear on oath in giving evidence before the DO.²⁶ In other instances these teachings assumed a broader anti-colonial scope. During 1931, for instance, W. R. Brown, a preacher from Jamaica, gave lectures at Native Court houses in the south-east. Senior fi gures in the administration agreed that ‘His utterances, are disguised as religious teaching, but they are intended to subvert all forms of constituted authority’ and that in particular they had ‘a decided anti-British Government tone’.²⁷ He displayed tracts of the Bible with the aid of a magic lantern. One passage in particular impressed audiences. Brown explained that God had created seven world powers: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome and the British Empire. He predicted that British power would fall within months, along with the mission churches which, he said, were suppressing the poor.²⁸ He sold Jehovah’s Witness books written by their president, J. F. Rutherford, in which the British Empire was referred to as part of ‘Satan’s Organisation’, and in which chain stores in America and England sought to control the food supply.²⁹ These topics – imperi-alism, agricultural production and economic exploitation – were, of course, particularly sensitive in the aftermath of the Women’s War, and the Resident of Owerri Province judged that Mr Brown’s lectures would cause unrest amongst the ‘semi-educated classes’.³⁰

Throughout this period stories circulated in the north of the province of itinerant white American preachers who called meetings and asked for land to build Spirit Movement churches.³¹ As a result, during the 1930s the authorities maintained a much greater vigilance over new religious move-ments, including revivals of the Spirit Movement, and over faith healers and itinerant preachers who were infl uenced by American churches of ‘Christian Scientist leanings’. In December 1933, for instance, over 2,000 people were attracted to the faith healings performed by Sambo of Mbiabong Ikono, and an entirely new village of shelters and palm mats was established on the outskirts of Mbiabong in Uyo Division.³² Another faith healing settlement sprung up near Ikpe Ikot Abiat, fi ve miles south of Ikot Ekpene.³³ Neither was found to be politically subversive but such settlements were kept under surveillance by plain-clothes police, and were to be discouraged so as to prevent ‘hysterical breaches of the peace’, ‘nocturnal orgies’ or anything approaching the ‘Spirit shaking’.³⁴

By the late 1930s offi cials and missionaries were alarmed at the poten-tially subversive effects of the distribution of religious tracts from the likes of the Faith Tabernacle, along with a range of other American religious

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‘imports’. Post offi ces across southern Nigeria had set up a blacklist of persons and fi rms from around the world engaged in ‘charlatanistic publica-tions’. One of these mail order suppliers was R. K. Wester of Chicago whose price list indicated that he could supply various ingredients and materials for the production of ‘hoodoo’ love and luck charms.³⁵ These American suppliers introduced a range of items and ideas that were appropriated in local ritual practice, especially by ídíbn, and in due course the language of American ‘hoodoo’ would be used to legitimate and defend ídíbn practice against colonial opposition. The most serious threat that these particular American imports posed to imperial rule at the time, however, was the possibility that Wester could satisfy local requests for keys to open all of the government offi ces in Nigeria.³⁶

The association between magic, medicines, drugs and crime that emerged in the 1930s also fell under the expanding scientifi c orbit of the colonial machinery and its medical and pharmacological departments. Criminal investigations in Calabar in the 1920s had depended on informer’s evidence (from a ‘Yoruba warrior’) for information on ‘hashish and other stimulant drugs’ which included ‘ikiya’ (the giver of courage) and ‘agosa’ (the

The association between magic, medicines, drugs and crime that emerged in the 1930s also fell under the expanding scientifi c orbit of the colonial machinery and its medical and pharmacological departments. Criminal investigations in Calabar in the 1920s had depended on informer’s evidence (from a ‘Yoruba warrior’) for information on ‘hashish and other stimulant drugs’ which included ‘ikiya’ (the giver of courage) and ‘agosa’ (the