| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Nwando Achebe. Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960. (Social History of Africa Series.) Portsmouth: Heinemann. 2005. Pp. xii, 274. $29.95.
The 1929 Aba "women's war," in which Igbo (eastern Nigeria) women applied physical sanctions to a British-appointed warrant chief, has long been a central motif in the scholarship on African women. Drawing on extensive oral research, Nwando Achebe enriches the portrait of Igbo women that has emerged in the eighty years since those colonial authorities famously misunderstood women's power. Her focus is on a different area of Igbo country, the northern-most Nsukka District. The core of the book consists of three chapters on women's religious, economic, and political activities, respectively. Those chapters are flanked by the two best chapters, both previously published. The first introduces the author and her methods, while the last provides an extended case study of Ahebi Ugbabe, the only woman ever made warrant chief.	1
Born in Nigeria and reared in the United States, Achebe is simultaneously insider and outsider, Nigerian and American, Igbo from the south researching northern Igbo country. She honors her "collaborators"—those individuals she interviewed—by using extensive quotations and employing their markers to order historic time: the period before the white man came, the time of the missionaries, the time of the Great Influenza Epidemic, and so on. Her commitment to alternative indicators of time often muddies her narrative, for she also refers to her 1900–1960 time frame as a three-fold precolonial period up to the 1920s, middle colonial period from the 1920s to the late 1940s, and final decade before independence (1960). Achebe rarely aligns these systems for reckoning time. Sometimes she uses the Igbo phrase (untranslated, which forces the non-Igbo reader to a footnote or the glossary) when she could easily also specify dates. Elsewhere, she vaguely terms practices "precolonial" when greater specificity would have been possible.	. . .

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