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Series

New African Histories

Description

This social and intellectual history of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria reveals the importance of gender to the study of nationalism and poses new questions about Nigeria’s colonial past and independent future.

In the years following World War II, the women of Abeokuta, Nigeria, staged a successful tax revolt that led to the formation first of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and then of Nigeria’s first national women’s organization, the Nigerian Women’s Union, in 1949. These organizations became central to a new political vision, a way for women across Nigeria to define their interests, desires, and needs while fulfilling the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship. In The Great Upheaval, Judith A. Byfield has crafted a finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making that not only tells a story of women’s postwar activism but also grounds it in a nuanced account of the complex tax system that generated the “upheaval.” Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in Nigeria’s postwar period and illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism. She thus offers new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state. Ultimately, she challenges readers to problematize the collapse of her female subjects' greatest aspiration, universal franchise, when the country achieved independence in 1960.

Awards: 2023 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, 2022 Martin A. Klein Prize in African History

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821446904

Publication Date

2021

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Women, Nigeria, Abeokuta, Protests, Political Activity, Women's Rights, Tax Revolt

Disciplines

African Studies | Ethnic Studies | Political Science | Women's Studies

Comments

Freely available online through a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships Open Book award.

The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria

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