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The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria. By Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastían and Susan Kingsley Kent. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Pp. xiii, 278; map. 5 b/w illustrations. $32.00 paper.
Across the last months of 1929 a series of marches by Igbo-speaking women took place in the southeastern part of the British colony of Nigeria. While the women engaged primarily in forms of symbolic and ritualistic protest, on several occasions as a mass they did confront colonial officials and then break into riot, destroying administrative offices, courts, and commercial trading establishments. British colonial officials responded with force to the confrontations, in a number of instances ordering troops to fire their guns into the crowd of women before them. Mounting casualties among the women led to the gradual dissipation of the marches. The marches were over by the end of the year.
The "Aba Riots," as they were labeled by British colonial officials, or the Ogu Munwaanyi, the "Women's War," as Igbo speakers named it, and historians have followed, is the subject of this joint study by Marc Matera, Misty Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent. The Women's...