“More Deadly than the Male”: The Women’s War in the British Imagination

Abstract

The accounts of Britons who confronted the women in December 1929 and suppressed their movement contain a number of striking elements that recur throughout their letters, reports, and testimonies before the Birrell Gray and Aba commissions. Perhaps the most puzzling is the failure of officials to mention the single most glaring feature of the disturbances—that they were undertaken exclusively by women—until after the massacre at Opobo. Another emerges from the imagery the men used to describe the threat they experienced at the hands of the women—that of being “swamped” by a “mass” of uncontrollable, shrieking, frenzied women, described alternately as Furies, Amazons, prostitutes, harridans, and viragoes. We think these phenomena are linked to one another, and that they stand at the heart of our ability to understand the behavior of colonial and military officers and the worldview that gave rise to their violent responses.