"We Protest Against the System Adopted" - The Market Women of Colonial Nigeria

I love history. Anyone who spends any time with me in person will soon realize how much I love history. (Hint: it’s a lot.) I sometimes refer to myself as a history evangelist; stand still long enough, and I’ll explain, in depth, why history is awesome, why it’s nothing like how they teach in elementary school, and why everyone needs to read more history. If you ever want to listen to me talk for a very long time, with a lot of passion, just ask me about my research. 😉

Why do I love it so much? I believe studying history helps us to understand how our present-day world was shaped. Historical research can help us disrupt the assumptions and biases that have been handed down to us from previous generations. I’m in the process of becoming a professional historian because I want to write about stories that aren’t always known in the mainstream, stories that empower people today. I want to write history that anyone can read.

This is the first in a series of history articles I plan to share on Steemit, edited from academic papers I’ve written. My hope is that they won’t be too inaccessible, and that people who are not professional historians will read and enjoy them. I welcome any feedback in the comments—please let me know if this was boring or difficult to understand!

Colonization radically reordered societies across the African continent. The process wasn’t a straightforward matter of European nations imposing control, however; instead, colonization should be understood as a constant negotiation between the intentions of colonizing nations on one hand, and the actions of African people on the other. The mainstream image of Africans—particularly women and children—as passive victims can be countered by an examination of the ways that women participated in the remaking of their communities.

This essay examines the role of Nigerian women in the marketplace, before and during colonial rule. In the 1800s and early 1900s, most Nigerian women placed a high value on economic autonomy, and many considered the marketplace their social realm. As a result, trading and the marketplace played a large part in conflicts between Nigerians and the colonial administration. The British government sought to control and tax market activity, and Nigerian women resisted such control.

The Importance of Markets

Prior to the colonial period, many women in West Africa used trade to sustain and support their families and wider communities (George 122-23). Among the Igbo, market associations served as the seat of women’s political power. If there was a conflict between women and men, or a case involving unacceptable behavior by an individual or specific group, women met to decide on a course of action. They used a network of markets and women’s market associations to spread the word about meetings and group decisions (Van Allen 401-02). These market associations empowered working women to share their opinions and make their voices heard in local government and society (George 123). Such collective decision-making continued into the colonial period, giving women a strength in numbers which they utilized in however they could.

Before and during the colonial period, working women frequently defied laws which interfered with their trading activities. The women used a variety of tactics to resist encroachment on their market rights, adjusting to each specific situation. When men in one village tried to ban women from traveling to the markets, out of fear they were having extramarital sex, the women responded by going on strike. They left their husbands in charge of making food and caring for the children; the men were overwhelmed by trying to do the work their wives normally completed, and within two days they reversed the ban (Van Allen 402).

The Women's War

Igbo women frequently used an indigenous practice called “sitting on,” or “making war on” the offending party: women banged pots and sang sexually demeaning songs outside the homes of men with whom they were displeased, or destroyed their property. In the 1920s, Igbo women used this practice of sitting on a man to protest colonial taxation and the exclusion of women from the market economy. Across the country, the women refused orders, publicly mocked colonial administrators, and set fire to colonial court buildings. The government branded them rioters, and at least 100 women were killed or injured when soldiers shot into the crowds to disperse them (Van Allen 403-05). When this tactic failed, market women convened meetings and chose representatives from amongst themselves to testify about their position in the courts. These women representatives brought the demands that the women had collectively identified before colonial administrators (Bastian 262-64).

Women not only fought for their own causes, but expressed solidarity with Nigerian men against the colonizers. During the 1945 Nigerian General Strike, many women supported the railroad workers who were striking for family wages. These women lowered prices for food and other necessities at the markets, and many women married to rail workers provided the sole income in their households for the duration of the strike (Lindsay 797-98). The strike relied heavily on the labor and support of women to sustain the community while the unions negotiated with the government for better wages.

A Ban on Children Street Hawking

In 1943, colonial administrators issued a ban on child street hawkers in Lagos, yet women continued to send their children out to hawk (George 204-06). While the ban was not explicitly targeted at girls rather than boys, how it was crafted and enforced reveals strong gender biases. Higher numbers of girls hawked goods (George 133), police and officials overzealously enforced the ban on girls (George 177-80), and authorities frequently stopped girls from traveling into Lagos, sending them back to their points of origin, even if they were not planning to hawk in the city (George 209-10). Since children hawking did so most often at the direction of a mother, aunt, or other woman in their life, and the funds were generally held and controlled by women (George 123), the ban had an inherent gender bias.

Additionally, there were serious class and religious problems created: in the city, many households could not be sustained on the wages of a working man, so hawking provided a vital second source of income (Lindsay 799-801). While women of many different economic levels sold goods, and many employed child hawkers to assist, the loss of child hawking would naturally effect impoverished households to a far more significant degree (George 122-23). Children hawking goods were also necessary to the seclusion of women in “pious Muslim communities” (George 116), which may have been another motivating factor for the elite (Christian) women who called for a ban on hawking.

For the working women of Lagos, street hawking was a necessary part of girlhood, one which served several purposes. Hawking brought in additional income, which was usually controlled by mothers and was used to offset the costs of child-rearing and pay school fees, among other things (George 131-32). It provided funds for a daughter’s dowry, and taught girls skills they would need to run their own households after marriage (George 207-08).

Hawking served as a kind of street school which prepared girls for the lives parents expected them to lead. Mothers trained girls to hawk, and controlled how the money they earned was spent (George 121-23). This income was vital to household maintenance, and a ban on girl hawkers was likely seen as an attack on the very structure of these households. Arrest records show that many families blatantly ignored the law: they continued to send girls out to hawk goods, and simply bailed them out of jail whenever necessary (George 204-05).

While many families continued to function as they had, ignoring the ban as far as they could, some elites spoke out against the practical effects of the ban. A coalition of women’s groups published a petition in the Daily Service to publicly show their disagreement with the ban. In letters and articles, Lagosians decried the effects of the ban on boy scholars, lamented the disempowering restrictions placed on girls, and called on administrators to modify or remove the law (George 206-210).

With the rise of nationalism and the independence of the Western Region of Nigeria in the 1950s, the ban on child hawking was denounced in newspapers as an imposition of foreign thinking counter to indigenous ways of life. In the independence era, authorities in much of the region stopped arresting and policing child hawkers, and the ban became a unique feature of Lagosian life; eventually, official attention on child hawking fell away entirely, even though the practice persisted (George 217-21).

The colonial period in Nigeria, as elsewhere, changed gender roles and structures of power. Rather than see this as a one-sided imposition of British control, it is important to critically examine how Nigerians participated in this transformation, and how they opposed it. The market women of Nigeria refused to accept impositions that limited their economic autonomy, and used various methods of protest to undermine colonial control of their livelihoods.

Works Cited

• Bastian, Misty L. “‘Vultures of the Marketplace’: Southeastern Nigerian Women and Discourses of the Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women's War) of 1929.” In Women in African Colonial Histories, edited by Jean M. Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musasi, 260-81. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
• Cooper, Barbara M. “Women and Gender.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, edited by John Parker and Richard Reid, 338-58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• George, Abosede A. Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.
• Lindsay, Lisa A. “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike.” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 783-812.
• Van Allen, Judith. “‘Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” In Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation, edited by Roy R. Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, and Christopher Steiner, 399-410. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Thanks for reading! This post is adapted from a paper originally written for an undergraduate course about women and gender in African history.

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