Rouse of Widowhood

By Uchenna Ejiogu

“Women like myself!” I saluted to a rousing reception.

"We are here!" the women chorused. I stood in the middle of the women. They gathered around me on all sides at the square entrance of Eke-oha market.

“Women like myself!!”

“We are here!!”

“Women like myself!!!”

“We are here!!!” They responded a third time.

"Today, the wind has blown, and we can now see the behind of the fowl. We now know that these white rulers do not like us, and our men do not like us too."

“Who bears nine months of labor pains?”

“We do, we do.”

“Who bears all the labor of housework and raising the children?”

“We do, we do.”

“Who tends the men and nourishes all their desires?”

“We do, we do.”

“Women like myself!”

“We are here!”

“We shall not be counted. We will not pay tax. We will not pay tax because we bear the children and we bear the fire of kitchen coals on our palms.”

“It is the truth, it is the truth.”

"Where the rat eats is where it falls. The men must tell us why the hen must always be spread-eagled for the randy cockerel.”

"Today, we will burn down the courthouse, and we will have their red caps."

The women needed no more prodding. My last statement had aroused their anger. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781649795779

Uchenna Ejiogu

Uchenna Ejiogu is a poet. He was born and raised in Nigeria. He lives in Salisbury, Maryland. Rouse of Widowhood is his debut novel.

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Prologue

Several years ago, on a vegetable plot along the muddy waters of Azumini River, while visiting a female prison under the control of a local constabulary in Aba, Eastern Nigeria, I, W.D. Sutherland, met a fiery young mother and widow. She had recently sojourned at this little-known female prison. Her ways were like none other than I had encountered as a warden of several similar prisons on this part of colonial Nigeria. I listened to her story, and I was fascinated by the rouse of her passion for social justice that led to the development of complex system of market women networks. Before this time, native women had resisted oppression in many ways in eastern Nigeria. As a British colonial officer in Nigeria in 1930, for me she was atypical, and her mannerisms were uncommon. After that, I often wondered about what finally became her lot. Much as investing in local education for many of us colonials was ridden with controversies, I imagined that it was indispensable for the natives, and more so for the security of the colonial government. We met again at Hope Waddell Institute Calabar while under the Scottish principal J.K. Macgregor. Hope Waddell was a modest school that trained the students in diverse vocations. By this time in 1940, it had become a grammar school that also taught teachers and the native working class on administration. Here again, I was an instructor, and she was a uniquely gifted student. Apparently, my illiterate social activist and prisoner of ten years ago had soaked my constant lectures about the power of education to advance the lives of the local population much more than the force of arms. She had taken the time to enroll in primary education classes in a Roman Catholic mission and obtained a standard six certificate. These schools met the colonial office’s needs to introduce Christian converts to our social and economic management practices. I could not but admire her principled repose once again. This composure for a few odd days in 1929 terrorized Aba, Calabar, Owerri, and other riverine and hinterland areas in eastern Nigeria. It was near impossible to win a conversation with her unless you endured pursuing honorable reasoning. As she transited Hope Waddell, I saw a drive toward native philology hollowed in her transcription of the local anguish over colonial governance. Soon after taking up an appointment as a primary school teacher after her schooling with us at Hope Waddell, and passing the Cambridge entrance exam, we had cemented unusual friendship between a colonial officer and a recently educated native woman. I persisted in my challenge that she tells her story about what roused her leadership of the Aba women’s riot in 1929. This rebellion by women in eastern Nigeria to redress social, economic, and political injustices by the colonial administration and the local warrant chiefs succeeded in advancing the lives of women such that soon after the warrant chief system was cancelled and women were appointed into the local customary court systems. It was clear to me that much as this story fascinated me, it was one that I could not tell. In fact, no one could, but Ruth.

***

November 1929

Aba women’s riot was a successful venture. The white man did not know what hit him. I was there and active with woes we loaded on them. My name is Ruth Isuochi Ukadike. I led the group of women who challenged, the leadership of the colonial officers in 1929. In the central district market of Eke-oha at Aba, an unprecedented uproar was brewing, enveloping the entire town as we were indeed hungry to set it on fire. A sprinkling of our voices had emerged three days ago from a little section of the market, soon it became a broom, sweeping the entire town. The colonial district commissioner at Aba, Mister Windtacker, stood with his two hands inside the back pockets of his bright white trousers, by the east wing of a shade blue government lodge. The lodge faced a newly constructed golf course, clubhouse and swimming pool. Our movement was the most recent happenings in the town, and for Mister Windtacker, our audacity had been most dismaying, if not out-rightly bizarre. He was in between thoughts; to proceed to the course for his evening golf practice, or to walk back into the lodge for his waiting family. He was not a good golfer, but had gone ahead to commit some sweet measure of the district purse to the venture. He invested in the course mostly out of the need to improve on his pedigree. It would prepare him to better mix up with his peers in old Cambridge when he retires back to England within the next two years. Though the course was not at par with the lush green courses of old Cambridge, it was dotted with some majestic looking tall palms, pleasantly spaced to lend it some bit of grandeur. The golf course was a parting present for him as well as the rest of the serving colonial officials. Windtacker felt that officials truly needed to cultivate a bit of grace away from acculturating native simplicity.

The week was lame with excuses and fraught with anxiety as was common with our districts colonial master’s practices. Mister Windtacker said that he did not know that some of his warrant chiefs in the communities had asked the local women to pay tax. Well, he had denied that by sending different information that he did not ask the women to pay a fee. But the situation for us was very unbearable and had gotten out of hand. We were already in the roads of Abangwa. The district commissioner’s office said that we were harassing people, including white colonial officers, and innocent businessmen and palm produce merchants. But we are the people – more than twenty thousand of us, and so the people he mentioned were not our main target. We sought to properly inform members of the Aba community of the genuineness of our position. To reinforce our points, we had to set fire to all warehouses filled with wooden produce caskets along the Azunmini River, and had broken the mighty Barclays Bank. We also aimed to burn down the district court-house. Mister Windtacker wondered why Mister Stitchgood, his District Officer at Mpidi, did not turn up for the evening golf practice yesterday. Mister Stitchgood was his most regular golf playing partner in our district. People often saw them together hitting and chasing after those little balls most weekends and even on week days. He needed Mister Stitchgood primarily to provide a bit of explanation about me; the young woman from his district, whom according to his own words had turned to become the central terror amongst the lot in Aba. Earlier that day, he sent out an urgent order to the constabulary to arrest me – Madame Ruth Isuochi Ukadike and her group of rebels for rousing the women’s tax riot! By the way he raised his head, he must have wondered a second time why Mister Stitchgood had failed to turn up two days before for their evening golf practice. He motioned to the waiting native handyman, who immediately flung his master’s golf bag across his shoulders as he trailed him toward the golf course.

My direct aide, a short fair swarthy woman, was the first person in the group to sight the approach of the constables. Alero was her name, and her husband – a Sierra Leonean descendant of the Yoruba tribe, in the western end of the country, was a junior tax officer, and the most zealous of the lot within the entire district. Alero was glad in the relief of being counted amongst her colleagues in the market women’s movement. She had been cladded in the exertions of being taunted a tax officer’s wife, in the market, for a long time. We immediately lay flat on our stomachs below a tall brush embankment near the undeveloped northern edges of the district golf course facing the men’s approach.

The riots began from Achara; then, it moved to Mpidi, and on to Aba. Before the riots began, those of us in Aba had gone for mass mobilization. At the onset of the disturbances at the market, the second place that we beseeched with our voices was the native council headquarters building on Park Road. But we were immediately repulsed by a combination of kotuma, and patrol officers of the constabulary. Unlike the prisoners housed within the high walls of the districts prison yard, we were not intimidated by the D.C.’s tough medicine and superior firepower. For us, a new power had taken over the Lordship of our lives and wellbeing. Jesu Kristi, a force that would exact justice for both men and women on equal terms. We went back to regroup with every weapon at our disposal. Some women were sent out with gongs to beat the news all over – asking all women in the town to gather at Eke-oha market the next day. The criers also asked the women to come with food and drinks and some money for we anticipated that our cause may take some time to realize. The women marched out in high numbers. I was chosen to lead the group because of my youth, and because I could present our case well. And I was allowed the freedom to choose my group of warriors. I said to them, We will not pay tax. It is not right because we are the ones who bear the children. I addressed the women for a few minutes short of an hour, before a brief interlude where other women were given a chance to bare their mind. Then after I was chosen to lead them into the battle, I gave the final expression of their feelings.

Women like myself! I saluted to a rousing reception.

We are here! the women chorused. I stood in the middle of the women. They gathered around me on all sides at the square entrance of Eke-oha market.

Women like myself!

We are here!

Women like myself!

We are here! They responded a third time.

Today, the wind has blown, and we can now see the bottom of the fowl. We now know that these white rulers do not like us, and our men do not like us too.

Who bears nine months of labor pains?

We do, we do.

Who bears all the labor of house work and raising the children?

We do, we do.

Who tends the men and nourishes all their desires?

We do, we do.

Women like myself!

We are here!

We shall not be counted. We will not pay tax. We will not pay tax because we bear the children and we bear the fire of kitchen coals on our palms.

It is the truth; it is the truth.

Where the rat eats is where it falls. The men must tell us why the hen must always be spread-eagled for the randy cockerel.

Today, we will burn down the courthouse, and we will have their red caps.

The women needed no more prodding. My last statement had aroused their anger. We went into the streets, and the riots commenced. The women sang the last lines of my speech as we went, waving palm fronds along the way.

Where the rat eats is where it falls.

Tell us, tell us, tell us.

Why the hen must be spread-eagled.

For the randy cockerel.

By the next day, like a harmattan flame, the rest of the markets in Eastern Nigeria were roused by angry rioting women, from Calabar, Owerri, Onitsha, Bakana hinterlands, and to the core river-rines. The all-women commando group had been formed two days before at the height of the riots. We were painted in a slippery camouflage of indigo dye. We came to the present battle-ready location through the newly surveyed Milverton Avenue. The road had its first brush cut ever, since being designated a district grade ‘B’ roadway. The laborers did not turn up for work, and I and my group of commandoes then had uninterrupted access to our ambush.

Soon a band of prisoners from the Aba district central prison yard passed by. They were led from behind by two white wardens in baggy shorts. The prisoners were singing songs and swooshed their cutlasses in the air, in tune with their songs. They were heading out to cut grass at the newly constructed golf course, a short distance away. Two unleashed canines barked in their own tunes between the prisoner’s songs. Each warden held a short wooden baton in one hand, and commanded the barking dogs with the other. They did not need to supervise the prisoners whose spirit they had carved and whose bodies they had broken. Their wards knew their routine and would not dash for the bush even if they were left alone for an entire day.

Onye riwe

Onye gbuwe

Onye akpola ibeya onye ikoli

But what is the rouse of these women, I imagine, Mister Windtacker wondered, as unknowingly he came to a nearer reach of our ambushing group. We were horrified that as women, we were being forced to pay taxes. Notwithstanding that the fees that our husbands paid had recently being used to cultivate common Bahama grass at the golf course, amongst other oddities. We were astonished that the town councils produce unit preferred to pay us small amounts for our prime cash crops. The products were then shipped abroad by the Wasa Delmas shipping lines, through the seaport at Ebocha. About sixteen years before this time, Ebocha, was re-christened Port Harcourt by Baron Frederick Lugard in honor of Lewis Vernon Harcourt, the Secretary of State for the Colonies. We were equally overwhelmed by the price of services in the town. The warrant chiefs have gone berserk ceasing our properties and land. The cost of items kept increasing with the passage of each new season. This economy operated without a proportionate rise in our standard of living. A phenomenon that until then was entirely alien to us. We could not understand why we had to sell off everything we owned to send a single child to the mission schools. Without the schools, the children could not get employed and earn a decent living. We were suddenly conscious that we were being manipulated by beings who were just like ourselves – people who were really no different from us. And worst of all, most women were frightened by the fallen faces of their husbands, lords of their individual compounds, whose manhood were evidently being torn. The Aba town council headed by Mister Windtacker, must be crazy.

The commandos waited still in ambush. Sssh…everyone be still, and keep quiet. I ordered for complete silence. I looked from all sides of our covered niche. As the prisoner’s songs finally also passed on. Mazi Samson, the messenger from the Whiteman at Mpidi, who we had adopted as our sergeant major, had assured us that there would be no problem. Samson showed us the route to the district head office. Initially, the District Commissioner sent information that he had not ordered women to pay tax. It was an error by the local chiefs. But Samson came from the District Officer at Mpidi with a piece of different information.

They truly want women to pay tax too. Do not believe them. You must stand up, and say no. He motivated us with the news that the women at Mpidi had attacked and successfully run over the Igwe of Mpidi in his palace and ceased his beautiful crown. The Igwe escaped into the bush. Then, I led the group into a quick round of prayers. After each chant of worship, they chanted, Amin!

And may their arrows of destruction return back to them, gbam!

Amin!

And may Jesu clip their wings and today, and hand them in to our hands, kpichikom!

Amin!

Nike na obara Jesu!

Amin! They chorused in whispers.

I lay flat at the front with my late husband’s bayonet rifle on the itching undergrowth’s of the brush land. I was equally fitted snuggly in his old military uniform complete with the shone epaulettes – calling on his inner strength to overwhelm me. I had grown some flesh and looked, unlike the lite framed young maiden who married a war veteran a few years before. Some of the women were equally fitted with farm machetes and their husband’s government Public Works Department assigned cutlasses. Not a few carried pestles and a good number held wooden soup ladles. Most of the women wore blouses and wrappers tied firmly around their waist. No one was allowed to give moments whisper to a plundering colony of climbing red ants that seemed to have been angrily awoken by our unusual entrance. But I and my group were defiant. Like the quite of the moonlight, the women lay and waited for my command, to capture Mister Windtacker, the District Head of the colonial office at Aba.

Chapter 1

The story behind our movement began four decades before I became a member of the Achara society in 1925. The story cuts across two centuries; the last quarter of the nineteenth, and the first quarter of the twentieth century – across the anguish of the First World War in Europe, and its collateral effects on the European colonies of West Africa. I choose to mention this war because of how it defined the destiny of the man who became my husband. And how his life and fate also influenced mine. I was five years old when they conscripted my husband to be, Mazi Ukadike, into the First World War in 1915, a year after the union of the southern and northern Nigerian protectorates by the colonial government under Lord Frederick Lugard. However, the main events that fashioned my role in the women’s movement occurred between 1927 and 1928. Let me begin with Iheme, two years before the Aba riot. It was a Saturday, an nkwo market day, on October 15, 1927.

Usually toward the evening hours, when the dusty easterly wind of the harmattan seasons flows at Achara, the sun hid behind tall trees, occasionally peeping in between leaves, signaling that her power was getting weak. Cocks and hens lost interest in each other, and both headed home in habitual directions. Tethered cows and sheep beckoned on their owners. Toads, frogs and crickets felt the chill of the evening. They had rested enough during the day. Their sapped energy was replenished, and they began to rehearse their songs for the night. Never-say-die farmers hurried to clean their hoes and their machetes. Lizards were positioning and pinning their claws on convenient walls and cleavages.

However, to Iheme, this particular evening was like no other night that he had ever known. At the age of forty-seven, he had known many. It was just twelve days into the harmattan, but curiously the clouds were already unrestful. The cold wind cried out like a night masquerade; it howled the birth of rain. Iheme shook his head as noisy crickets interrupted his thoughts.

Iheme stood straight at six feet and two inches like a veteran palm tree. His slight stoop confirmed that the wind had also taken its pleasure of him from all sides. His abundant black hair was finely matted to his scalp by Ikwudie’s loving and jealous fingers. Only Ikwudie had the privilege to braid her husband’s curls. To Ikwudie, Iheme was a totem of the gods! Iheme’s cat-like eyes confirmed the village maidens’ gossip that he was a gift of the Otanmiri river goddess. It sparkled, and it was sometimes known to mew. Iheme poured himself a shot of spirit, from a full bottle embossed with a Johnny Walker label. The gin was given to him by an Izunta man, whom he recently rendered some little service. His skin responded to the gin and the evening with yet more goose pimples. The cold wind was as gentle as a catspaw, but that did not dither a group of musing cockerels from their evening philandering. The cockerels were packing away from their day time abode under Iheme’s low mud shrine walls. They moved toward his inner courtyard in search of a sanctuary and shelter. His squadron of hens was already well quartered and sheltered with their broods fully protected. The cockerels ran in as if they were cocksure that the leaden sky portended a crazy storm.

Iheme watched the birds from a corner of his eyes. The darkness of the night could, however, not shroud the brightness of his white eyeball, and the glow of his well-kept countenance. Much of the shine was from too much consumption of gin and too little food. After the first guzzle of the gin, Iheme romped about, starry-eyed and unsteady. This time his movement was influenced more from the effects of his troubled mind than the alcohol. He knew that most of his age mates, like my husband Ukadike and Mazi Okeke, would be busy at Akukalia’s bar by that hour. Still, he was not a man for such collective revelry and open events. He drank wine quite well, as a mark of respect to his elders at the village meetings where it was required for communion. At other times, he drank when he felt it was expedient to do so: to conform his spirit to his purposes or to keep its errant wavering in check. Wine was even more essential under such a situation as today when he engaged in propitiatory rites to refine his covenant with his ancestors and to seek the favor of the gods.

Iheme walked from his ancestral hall to his shrine of dense shrubs, ‘oha’ and ‘ogbu’ trees. He cleared his throat in stifled grunts in the process and took the second guzzle of gin. He drank from one of his priceless drinking-glasses; a dwarf and limbless cup, made from translucent porcelain material. He spat the remaining contents in his mouth out on the shrine head. Often, he wondered that if the shrine head could complain of the sputum it had withstood, one could not imagine what it would say. Perhaps, it would merely utter a curse. At heart, Iheme is a funny man whenever a cocky spirit had mastery of him. His eyes rolled within its sockets as if in preparation for a cockfight.

Then Iheme spoke, My ancestors, it is me, Iheme Onyekanwa, your son, your own. Your blood, whom you left fighting your battles all alone in the land of the living. Without a father, without a mother, not even a brother or a sister. Yes, without kin and all alone. Entirely alone, tufiaa!

He took one step backward and two forward as if drunk with overflowing emotions, and continued. Do not be displeased that I have slapped tradition by knocking on your door at this hour when you require silence. When Nnachi would hold Agadi and Agadi would hold Nnachi. Yet, must you sleep when the only fire you have left burning in the land of the living is about being extinguished by a conflagration of streams? I say wake up and stand by Iheme, a tree surrounded by tree cutters does not sleep with his eyes closed. Open your eyes and see. I have finished my talk. He threw the remainder of the cup contents on the beleaguered shrine-mask and then wiped his lips with the very last dreg. Then Iheme sauntered off to sit at the far end of his obi facing the shrine, satisfied that he had said his mind. His soul was appeased for the moment, but his mind still wandered. Iheme, of recent, had become a distraught man. The vast maze he had made of his compulsions were finally straightening up to his displeasure and fear. Indeed, he was also a man in love with a heinous trade. Prying life out of people without a trace of evidence was his craft and lofty service. Iheme was a herbalist, but the deep line between healing illness and enabling death had been long filled up and become indivisible in his mind. He had become an herbalist and dibia all in one. He had the power to cure and kill with herbs. His trade was of service to the gods. To Iheme, the gods would testify to his fidelity because he killed for good. He killed to pay evil with its own seed. Often, he would not seek any reward for his exertion and expertise. The thrill of seeing his patient come back to life or his victim wince and asphyxiate to death was enough compensation. Even the spasmodic heaving of his prey usually made his day. On such days, he would not bother to eat his food; and that infuriated Ikwudie. Ikwudie would haul invectives and raise tantrums about wasting her effort to prepare the meal and then crash down any unfortunate article that happened to be on her way. Ikwudie was about twenty-five years my senior – and so I kept my distant respect. But admired her ability to have things happen the way she wanted.

Iheme loved to kill; either with the teeth of his bush traps for animals or the tools of his trade on other beings. The thrill of a kill was simply mind-boggling and had the instantaneous effect of filling his bowels with sap. He would then pick up his flute and emit a dirge. His songs advised and cautioned people on the benefits of keeping on the path of good deeds and the disastrous results of being on the wrong lane. He adjured people to abhor and reject evil. He would go on and on, with a steady smirk written all over his fair countenance. But this fiendish Sunday night had undoubtedly wiped out the remnants of those smirks. Despite the shrine-call, his legs were still twitching. He must steady his nerves. He reached out for his raffia bag hung carelessly on a palm leaf petiole rafter. He rummaged fretfully inside the bag stuffed with fetish articles of his trade for his snuffbox. The snuff box was one of his many gifts from his group of needy merchants. These merchants came to seek for success in their trade. He grabbed the box, as if being aware of it for the first time in his life and proceeded to uncork the lid. He then dropped extravagant quantities directly from the container to the backside of his left palm, raised the tobacco to his wide-open nostrils and drew the lot in one breath. The pupils of his eyes dilated in instant response to excitement. Just as they turned reddish, Iheme thundered out a snort that rang loud into the dead quiet of the night. Udueze’s snuff is always good. It was quite unlike the evil grains sold by that loud mouth Chiekwe. After the dusty inebriant had done his bidding, he rose languidly from the carved stool.

Good stuff! he exclaimed.

Chapter 2

Iheme was born the fifth child in a family of five boys. His father, Kanu Onyekanwa was a man of many talents. He was a great hunter, a mask carver and an avowed musician. He had fair colored skin, and was of average height. Against the grain of