In one of the largest demonstrations staged in South African history, twenty thousand women of all races marched to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956 in protest against the compulsory carrying of passes by African (black) women. This march was significant for its multi-racial mobilization and the direct challenge it presented to the apartheid […]
In Lomé, Togo, Ewe market women undertook similar types of political action and resistance as their Nigerian and Ghanaian counterparts. However, the Ewe herstory is little known. Between 1932 and 1933, the market women were provoked into action by a vacuum of power created by a political stalemate between three male-dominated political groupings that were […]
Kom women in the Bamenda Grassfields of North West Cameroon launched a three-year period of revolt between 1958 and 1961 known as the Anlu Rebellion, which was provoked by the colonial imposition of vertical contour farming. Through public singing, verbal insults, dancing, demonstrating in public and seizing control of resources, women intensified their anti-colonial protest […]
An important act of women’s resistance in Nigeria’s history is the Igbo women’s ‘war’ of 1929, which centred around market women’s opposition to unfair taxation and indirect rule in southern Nigeria by the British colonial authorities. Before the British colonised southern Nigeria in 1884, Yoruba and Igbo women in the region had powerful political, judicial […]