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The Female King of Colonial Nigeria, Ahebi Ugbabe. By Nwando Achebe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 201 1 . Pp. 306.
This is a welcome contribution to the growing field of Igbo studies from the pen of Nwando Achebe, the daughter of Chinua Achebe. An historian, Nwando Achebe carefully illuminates and documents the life and times of a remarkable Igbo woman, unveiling a hitherto little known, albeit important, detail of Nigeria's colonial history. The carefully researched and well documented story also contributes to a wider scope of inquiry: African studies, anthropology, ethnography, women's and gender studies, memoirs, autobiography, oral history, life histories, cultural studies, area studies, oral literature, linguistics, sociology, political economy, field research methods, and much more.
Achebe's account of one African woman's life, her "female masculinity" and her "performance of gender" evolves from earlier studies by Halberstam, Butler, and Ebron, and corroborates Ifi Amadiume's important findings on gender in precolonial Igbo culture,1 "where gender and sex did not coincide. Instead, gender was flexible and fluid, allowing women to become men and men to become women" (p. 23). It was a culture in which gender was re-constructed and performed according to social need. Achebe furthermore sets out to introduce "the concept of "wife of a deity" and extends the analytical category of "autonomous sex worker" as models through which to engage with continuities and change in conceptions of female enslavement as well as competing and overlapping definitions of prostitution in an African context"(p. 3). The author situates her biography of The Female King to complement earlier African women's autobiographies, especially of the elite.
Ahebi Ugbabe was not only an outstanding woman with an extraordinary life history, but also a highly controversial historic figure: She was a "slave" married to a deity, a runaway, a sex worker, a headman, a warrant chief, and ultimately a female king. She was a strong leader of her people, yet also a collaborator empowered by and serving the British colonial regime in Nigeria. Reminiscent of the Okonkwo character of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ahebi was an economically and politically successful non-conformist, and moreover- like Okonkwo- out of character with the most prominent Igbo cultural values: balance and democracy. Ahebi amassed wealth and power, but ultimately fell from grace when...