Feminist Media Archeological Excavation of the Past, Mapping of the Present, and the Black Future Feminine

In November and December 1929, British colonial officials in Southeastern Nigeria were panicked and astonished as tens of thousands of unclad Igbo and Ibido-speaking women marched in protest against imperial politics that, by impoverishing their gendered position in local communities, impinged on a balance central to Igbo religious cosmology. The protest became known as the Aba Women’s Riot by colonial administrations and Ogu Umunwanyi in Igbo and took the lives of over 50 female warriors. The women used a traditional practice known as “sitting on a man”, which Judith van Allen noted involved strikes and boycotts, consisting of often undressed women who gathered around a man’s house ‘dancing, singing scurrilous songs which detailed the women’s grievances against him and often called his manhood into question’ and sometimes causing damage to his property.¹

90 years later its importance cannot be underestimated and the way the women used their bodies as weapons against oppressive patriarchal power can be effectively used by members of minorities around the world. In the age of the anthropocene, where humans are the dominant geological force annihilating its milieu and its subjugated inhabitants, the affective, feminine forces unchained by the Ogu present us with the possibility to dethrone this white, middle-class and masculine subject as king of the universe.  

This article is a search for these feminine affects in two recent audio-visual works that portray the Ogu and its courageous female warriors: Onyeka Igwe’s three-part project No Dance, No Palaver and the Nollywood production  1929 (2019, Moses Eskor). Igwe, in a series of three short compilation films – Her Name in My Mouth (2017), Sitting on a Man (2018), and Specialised Technique (2018) – utilises colonial footage to excavate female bodies subsumed by history as written by colonisers. On the other hand, 1929  conjures the Ogu through historical drama anchored in Nollywood aesthetics. By conducting a close textual analysis of the films, combined with a film-philosophical and feminist media archaeological approach, we will delve into techniques they use to materialise this history of female uprising, buried under subjugating colonial narratives and discourses. 

The effectiveness of these films in depicting the Women’s War can be analysed by approaching them diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s² concept of nomadic war machine, understood as an assemblage of forces and affects, always exterior to the State, incessantly struggling against it. The force catalysed by the women’s uprising in 1929 persists as spectral affectivity that haunts the linear history of the Empire, functioning like an interval that can disrupt its homogenising narrative. This war machine will be approached through the figure of what I call the Black Future Feminine: one that exists virtually but has had no chance to be actualised. ​

Encountering the Difference: Black Future Feminine

The arrival of Europeans into Africa commenced the creation of negative portrayals of the continent and its people, reinforcing the image of colonisers’ superiority. British officials bolstered this story of Africa as a wild land inhabited by savage, primitive and crude tribes – most prominently through the filmic medium. Consequently, Africans were unable to tell their own story and thus No Dance, No Palaver and 1929, made by members of African diaspora and a Nigerian filmmaker respectively, embody a deep desire to express tales of colonialism from African perspectives. In order to avoid Eurocentrism in approaching these works it is crucial to briefly discuss the socio-historical context of events. 
 
The colonial administration and the concomitant missionary activities in Nigeria caused the traditional balance of gender roles to be subsumed by Western ideas of masculinity and femininity, stripping Igbo women of their previous roles as traders at the marketplace, afia, which was considered sacred. The maintenance of order was a responsibility of the mature women engaged in the majority of the trade and who attended the market. As van Allen noted, by ignoring this cultural milieu, British administration ‘weakened and in some cases destroyed women’s bases of strength.’³ The women’s demands, complaints and their singular agency in organising the protest were dismissed by the British as irrational and not worth approaching as an organised feminist movement with coherent postulates. Moreover, the method of protest – “sitting on a man” – was gravely misunderstood by colonial officials: female nakedness that was terrifying for the British had different significance for the Igbo. Instead of being associated with the excess and transgression it was rather a way for older women to control the sexual development of younger girls, and thus to adhere to Igbo moral values.  ​

The excess of bodily forces that these nude female warriors unleashed, nevertheless, could not be comprehended by colonial administrators whose ideas about gender were shaped by the Victorian image of femininity as confined to domestic space, ephemeral, fragile and thus in need of male protection. As Matera et al. summarise, British officials linked ‘the transgression of European gender roles, the visible presence of female sex organs outside of the practice of normative (reproductive) sexuality, and the disintegration of the proper social order’⁴. Through using their bodies as weapons, the women become warriors and their movement emerges as Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic war machine, conceived in parallel to military combat as thinking that resists territorialisation by the mechanisms of power.  
 
Similarly, the film body can be utilised as a cinematic war machine which can be immanently encountered through a merging of our body with that of the film. By combining the work of scholars that attempt to resurrect the notion of difference from its subjugation to Manichean systems (Luce Irigaray⁵ and sexual difference unleashed from its subjugation to the patriarchal cult of Phallus; Deleuze and Guattari’s⁶ notion of difference as a singular amalgamation of affects; Édouard Glissant⁷ and difference as opacity; and Kara Keeling’s⁸ queer and racial difference) these female affects and intensities can be seen as creating the figure of what I term the Black Future Feminine. This virtual black feminine has not yet had a chance to actualise herself, being intercepted by the territorialising forces of the transcendental subject: the hu(man). This Western ideal was conceived in the spirit of the Cartesian theory of mind and body duality, where transcendental reason associated with active masculinity subjugates docile, feminine matter. In the next sections we will explore the ways No Dance, No Palaver and 1929 actualise these virtual feminine forces; war machines that can create a new world where the Black Future Feminine may thrive. 

Affective Cartographies and the Question of Access

The British Empire’s creation of maps that embodied the colonialist vision had disastrous effects on the land and its inhabitants, both organic and non-organic. Importantly, this imperial map-making neglected native cartographies based on local metaphysical and cultural beliefs. This disregard to ancestral cartographies was a primary contributor to the 1929 protestors, who saw the land as the body of the female deity Ala/Ani that colonial rule disrespected⁹. In this context, we consider the films as cartographies that expand with each viewing; No Dance, No Palaver and 1929 emerge as the material, the body, which allows the ghosts of the past to materialise as ‘digital signals’¹⁰ in the current age of information. 
 
The shape of these affective cartographies, nevertheless, depends on the embodied and embedded location in which their makers are situated, as well as the national and economic context in which the films are produced. Onyeka Igwe, as a British Nigerian, female, academic residing in London, had time and means to conduct thorough research on the Ogu, which included archival sources as well as conversations with Nigerian family members and friends, and investigating her relatives’ connection to it. Importantly, Igwe’s main historical reference point was the Aba Commission of Inquiry, conducted in March 1930 by the colonial administration to investigate the events of Women’s War, which Matera et al.¹¹ highlighted as the most reliable source. In this context, her reasons to depict the Ogu on screen were not centred on financial profit, but rather on her desire to affectively excavate the archival bodies of female warriors and allow their vital forces to flow through the present. At the time of writing, the project is available on the virtual platform Vimeo and in the past had been publicly screened at film festivals. The lack of a promotional campaign, and limited public knowledge about the revolt, limits the project’s reach to academic or educated cinephiles, thus suspending its capacity to affect Black and minoritarian viewers.

In contrast, 1929, featuring popular Nollywood actresses such as Sola Sobowale and Ireti Doyleand, was produced by Ndy Aka and directed by Moses Eskor, two prominent figures in the Nollywood film industry which, despite increasing numbers of women in production departments, is still a sphere dominated by men. Thus, the depiction of the Ogu in 1929 from its inception was marked by the patriarchal bias of its makers. The stereotypical portrayal of women based on the image of ‘ideal woman…as married with children and submissive. Women are considered dangerous if they are “economically, socially, or politically independent”’¹². Moreover, the film’s form and aesthetics were impacted by the economic logic of Nollywood which stems from the low production values and small budgets.  

In this context, we can assume that the production crew of 1929 did not have sufficient time or resources to conduct deep research of the Women’s War, like Igwe, but instead had to rely on their own mental image of Ogu, shaped by mainstream, patriarchal Nigerian culture. In this context, the film is significant as a cultural affect, revealing the intricacies of power relations that gave birth to the finished film.  

1929 and the Opaque Movement-Image

Moses Eskor’s production, despite subverting the narrative norms of Nollywood by centring its story on strong female protagonists, limits its potential as cinematic war machine as it submits itself to a linear storyline conveyed though the genre of historical drama. Drawing on Deleuze¹³, we can consider 1929 as operating according to the sensory-motor model based on habitual synthesis, associated with majoritarian, teleologically-oriented temporality – the movement-image. Such type of image imposes a homogenous temporality in the name of the State, in the case of Nollywood, the patriarchal model of economic imperialism combined with colonialist heritage. ​

​The film foregrounds its patriarchal orientation immediately as white titles appear on a golden background inform us about the Ogu and are interposed with shots of male soldiers fighting in the jungle against taxation reforms imposed on men. Thus, the film simplifies the complexity of Women’s War and its inception, ascribing it solely to the threat of taxation. Moreover, the role women played in resistance against taxation of men cannot be underestimated, given the smaller scale female revolt that occurred in 1925, known as Nwaobiala¹⁴ which some scholars argue, prophesised the events of 1929.   

This sensory-motor regime in the case of Nollywood films experienced by Western viewers, such as myself, unadjusted to the “low quality” aesthetics of the industry, becomes deterritorialised. The technical shortcomings, actors having difficulties remembering lines, and auditory imperfections spark meta-cinematic reflections, which, as a war-machine, displaces the teleologically-oriented story and creates a space for the Black Future Feminine to emerge. Based on this specific aesthetic, we could describe this type of Nollywood’s movement-image as opaque by borrowing Glissant’s notion of opacity as a subversive strategy through which we can resist the Western conceptual regime’s ‘requirement for transparency’ that imposes an ideal subject – the hu(man) – according to which everything must be measured¹⁵. This apparent technical impoverishment allows for the breakdown of the sensory-motor regime and asserts the opacity of Nollywood’s aesthetics. 

In addition, Eskor’s film channels the war machine of Black Future Famine through its actresses and their untameable bodies which resist colonial territorialisation. While we watch the women performing their “sitting on a man”, with the overlayed sound of tribal music, the regime of movement-image becomes suspended as our bodies encounter the affects and intensities catalysed by the actresses movements. The dancing and chanting bodies become channels that conjure an affective surplus, penetrating our bodies; The Black Future Feminine materialised as an unexpected, transgressive surplus of feminine forces.  

Onyeka Igwe and the Messianic Time of Black Future Feminine

he affective emphasis on embodiment is even more pronounced in Igwe’s experimental project No Dance No Palaver. As she noted, she was fascinated with the idea that ‘women carry archives in their bodies’¹⁶. Igwe felt personal connection with the Women’s War through her mother’s birth near Aba, and thus embarked on the search of ‘archival bodies’¹⁷ of its warriors in colonial films. The three-part project eschews coherent story told though linear narrative and instead explores the potential of the tools bestowed by new media in resisting imperial heritage. As Akomfrah noted, digital technology enabled Black film to become more like Black music, grounded in improvisation and reflecting the ‘rhythm of black life’¹⁸. In the words of Keeling: ‘since digital filmmakers can take more footage for less cost, and more easily access a whole variety of editing and post-production tools, they can experiment more with making Black art closer to Black music’¹⁹. Igwe achieves this goal by splitting colonial, homogenous temporality into a multiplicity of micro-temporalities that conjure the ghosts of female warriors through the affective interposition of archival footage with images of the present, including images of Igwe herself. The present merges with the past both inside the image, but also in the comingled filmic bodies as archival footage becomes digitised and inter-acts with digital footage of the present. The temporality that Igwe unleashes can be seen as messianic temporality that Walter Benjamin discussed in his meditation on philosophy of history:  

‘The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on Earth…(We) have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.’²⁰

No Dance, No Palaver can be seen as poetic experimentation with colonial archival material pertaining to Nigeria in the first half of the 20th century, poetically linking divergent filmic bodies through database editing. By fragmenting the colonial narrative, Igwe is able to create Glissant’s ‘poetics of Relation’ which, as Keeling asserted, ‘allows for a fundamental transduction of selves, societies, and values into a multiplicity that, though open and changing, remains powerfully connected to the historical context of its production’²¹. In effect, No Dance, No Palaver emerges as a subversive cartography of the present; the feminist media archaeological excavation of the past in order to probe the future by affective mapping the present. 

Her Name In My Mouth: a Novel Choreography of Africa

Her Name in My Mouth revisits the Ogu though conjoining the archival with gesture and embodiment. The film begins with Igwe’s hand gently striking the Dutch wax, ‘an omnipresent feature of traditional clothing worn across West Africa’²². The close image of the black hand on the colourful material in conjunction with the sounds of its caressing endows the sequence with a haptic quality that activates our bodies and invite us to conjoin our skin with the skin of the film. This gesture is paralleled later, when Igwe portrays herself reading the report produced by the Aba Commission of Inquiry, or rather encountering it as a body filled with the spectral presence of the women. It is a living testimony – a body with the power to affect and be affected. The way Igwe portrays this encounter with history points us to an ethical mode of interaction with historical objects – embodied, embedded and affective. An encounter as becoming-other.

The film subsequently cuts to archival footage of Africans being forced into colonial labour, their bodies extracting from the Earth precious resources for the Empire. The looping and remixing editing techniques utilised by Igwe brings our attention to the imperial choreography of the bodies that compels them to rape their own land. The database editing can be seen as a way to create a novel choreography which Igwe herself – as a female member of African diaspora – designs. Wearing a white t-shirt with the photograph of one of the 1929 female warriors she seems to be merging with her body.  

Sitting on a Man: The embodied Dance of heterogeneous Temporalities

In Sitting on a Man Igwe intended to ‘enact accountability and responsibility for those captured by the colonial camera…[and] to visually express what it might look like to be sat on’²³. The film employs the screen as a background for a smaller screen to merge with the disparate images, combing archival footage of dancing African women, appropriated from the ethnographic films made by missionary George Besden in the 1920s, with images of contemporary dancers who translate these dancing movements into their own experience and position. 

The film embodies the cinematic war machine as female voices that guide us through it, subverting the colonial predilection for British, male narrators that explicate the story for “cerebrally inferior” African viewers. Moreover, when the movements of dancers in the individual micro-screens mingles together, it reveals the messianic time of Black Future Feminine. As we observe this affective dialogue between temporal dimensions, our bodies become a part of it; our own embodied and embedded temporality inextricably linked with those unleashed by the film. ​

Specialised Technique: the Splitting of Colonial Meaning-Making Practice

Specialised Technique attempts to catalyse embodied viewing experience as a refusal of the colonial conception of African audiences. The title of the film refers to the theory of African spectatorship established by William Sellers, a health official in Nigeria in 1920s, that framed Africans as incapable of appreciating the sophisticated language of Western film. Sellers²⁴ insisted that films for African audiences should follow a simple narrative, without using flashbacks or excessive camera movements. Igwe experimental film sabotages Sellers’ method with a highly complex temporal architecture, that allows for the creative merging of different filmic bodies including animation, archives, titles, and consequently – our own body as we partake in the filmic universe.

A female, machinic voice over repeats commands – ‘hold and pose’ – that allude to the agency of native people, especially female, concealed by colonial rule. In order to bestow these colonised people with decision-making power, Igwe intends to split the colonial meaning-making practice by revealing the layers of which this practice is composed. A continuously appearing titles ask: ‘What happened when you looked down the lens? Or did they tell you not to? Do you not want me to see your face?’. Who is asking and who is responding if the film and audience become one? This mode of viewership highlights that native people captured in colonial film were never asked, and thus endows them with agency. This agency peaks in a sequence in which Igwe is filmed wearing a skirt that becomes a background for the projection of the colonial film. Women come to live on her own body, as if emerging from her womb – the people still to come and the Black Feminine of the Future.  ​

Women’s War against the Teleology of Progress

Once a global superpower, covering approximately 25% of Earth’s land, the British Empire today exists as a spectral trace of the past, despite its dissolution. This process of mumification was grounded in the carefully crafted colonial, homogenous narrative which presumed the superiority of a Western subject who became the hero of the imperial story.  
 
These male, colonial heroes can still be encountered in British public spaces, immortalised as statues and monuments. In order to shatter these colonial memorials, we urgently need a proliferation of counter-narratives, alternative stories that feature different heroes and heroines, such as the warriors of the 1929 Ogu. Although the female warriors did not see their demands met or acknowledged by colonial officials, who imposed on the Igbo communities deadly repercussions and burning whole villages, their legacy is alive. Over 90 years after the Ogu, the spectral presence of 1929 is embodied in contemporary Nigerian women who still organise naked protests, using their bodies as weapons in their struggle against the patriarchal impoverishment of their lives. For instance, on the 23 July of 2020, the women from Kaduna in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, neglected by the government, marched in naked protest against the threat posed to their communities through continuous killings. 
 
The films we explored in this paper allow us to grasp the affective forces unleashed by the warriors of Ogu as they invite our own bodies into affective participation. Like the Igbo women in 1929, these audio-visual works launch the war machine that annihilates the hu(man) and the illusion of unified identity this ideal Western subject begets. If acknowledged and appreciated by Western minoritarian activists, the Igbo’s nude revolt could help envision novel, creative strategies for the struggle with patriarchal, teleological narratives of progress, grounded in incessant extraction of vital forces from people and lands colonised by the global capitalism. 

Fragments of this article were initially developed at the University of St Andrews “Screening the 1929 Igbo Women’s War: Feminist Media Archaeological Excavation of the Past, Affective Mapping of the Present and the Black Future Feminine.” 16 December 2020.

 ​Footnotes

1. Judith van Allen, “”Sitting on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women”, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 6/2 (1972): p. 170. 
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, (London: Continuum, (2005 [1980]), 351-424. 
3. Van Allen, “Sitting on a Man”, 165. 
4. Matera et al., The Women’s War of 1929, 216. 
5. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke & G. C. Gill, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, (1993 [1984]). 
6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell  & H. Tomlinson, (London: Verso, 2009 [1991]). 
7. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 
8. Kara Keeling, Queer times, Black Futures, (New York: New York  University Press), 2019. 
9. Matera et al., The Women’s War of 1929, 17-21. 
10. John Akomfrah. “Digitopia and the Spectres of the Diaspora”. Journal of Media Practice 11/1, 2010, 5. 
11. Matera et al., The Women’s War of 1929, 2-3. 
12. Aje-Ori Agbese, “Setting the Agenda for Women’s Liberation and Empowerment in Nigeria through Movies: An Analysis of Women’s Cat, Women in Power and The Bank Manager”, in Nigerian Film Culture and the Idea of the Nation: Nollywood and National Narration, edited by James Tar Tsaaior and Françoise Ugochukwu, London: Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd., 2017, p. 103; Adedayo Ladigbolu Abah, “One Step Forward, One Step Backward: African Women in Nigerian Video film”, Communication, Culture & Critique, 1, 2008, 339.
13. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image , trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2013a [1983]). 
14. Matera et al., The Women’s War of 1929, 119. 
15. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. 
16. Onyeka Igwe, “Being Close to, With or Amongst”,  Feminist Review 125, no. 1 (July 2020), 44.  
17. Igwe, “Being Close to, With or Amongst”,  44. 
18. Akomfrah, “Digitopia and the Spectres of the Diaspora”, 22. 
19. Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, 121. 
20. Walter Benjamin,  Illuminations, trans. By H. B. Jovanovich. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 254. 
21. Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, 196. 
22. Igwe, “Being Close to, With or Amongst”,  47.  
23. Igwe, Being Close to, With or Amongst, 48. 
24. William Sellers. “Films For Primitive People”, Documentary News Letter. September, 1941, 173-174. 
    

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Filmography

1929. [Motion Picture]. Directed by Moses Eskor. Viensa Productions and Filmone Distribution: Nigeria. 2019.

Her Name in My Mouth. [Motion Picture]. Directed by Onyeka Igwe. UK: LUX. 2017.

Sitting on a Man. [Motion Picture]. Directed by Onyeka Igwe. UK: LUX. 2018.

Specialised Technique. [Motion Picture]. Directed by Onyeka Igwe. UK: LUX. 2018.