Emergent Masculinities
NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES
SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN,
AND DEREK R. PETERSON
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Ndubueze L. Mbah, Emergent Masculinities
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mbah, Ndubueze L., 1985- author.
Title: Emergent masculinities : gendered power and social change in the Biafran Atlantic age / Ndubueze L. Mbah.
Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028629 | ISBN 9780821423882 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780821423899 (paperback) | ISBN 9780821446850 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex role--Nigeria, Eastern--History. | Slave trade--Social aspects--Nigeria, Eastern. | Slave trade--Political aspects--Nigeria, Eastern. | Masculinity--Social aspects--Nigeria, Eastern. | Igbo (African people)--Africa, Eastern--Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC HQ1075.5.N6 M33 2019 | DDC 305.3096694--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028629
Preface and Acknowledgments
This project has evolved from a dissertation on Ohafia-Igbo gendered sociopolitical transformations between 1850 and 1920 into a broader historical ethnography of gendered Atlanticization in the Bight of Biafra and West Africa between 1750 and 1920. I am indebted to the generous support of many people and institutions. Funded by a Wenner-Gren Fieldwork Grant, I conducted much of the original research between 2010 and 2012, including 170 oral interviews with Ohafia-Igbo men and women as well as archival research at the Nigerian National Archives, British National Archives, and National Library of Scotland. Emergent Masculinities was conceived amid a vibrant Africanist intellectual community at Michigan State University, where Dr. Peter Alegi directed my general African historiography, Dr. Walter Hawthorne introduced me to a rapidly maturing field of African slavery and Atlantic history, and Dr. James Pritchett guided me through the robust field of African anthropology. This enabled me to situate the Ohafia-Igbo within the scholarship on the south-central African matrilineal belt and to foreground the sociopolitical and ideological conflicts among individuals, and between individuals and structures, as pivotal to gendered social transformations. Most importantly, in addition to very generous graduate mentorship, Dr. Nwando Achebe imparted a rigorous Afro-feminist methodology that enabled me to question prevailing assumptions that patriarchy and egalitarian social norms were timeless features of Igbo culture and history. Thank you Professor Achebe and Professor Folu Ogundimu for providing me a home at MSU. Daalu!
The dissertation had revealed the distinctive dual-sex sociopolitical systems of the Ohafia-Igbo, where women developed and maintained relatively more powerful institutions of political rulership, constituted a class of agrarian breadwinners, and were central to the social reproduction of the dominant matrilineage systems until the second half of the nineteenth century. Examining what such a system meant for Ohafia-Igbo men required reconciling diverse gendered local narratives with the literature on female power and authority in West Africa, as well as with the nascent scholarship on African masculinities. The scholarship of Ifi Amadiume, Sandra Greene, Nwando Achebe, Ugo Nwokeji, Emily Osborne, and Stephan Miescher inspired me to explore how the Atlantic slave trade and its repercussions facilitated Biafran male dominance in cash crop productive and exchange economies, Biafran mens mobilization of missionary and colonial institutions, and Biafran womens contestation of marginalization through slaveholding, slave and commodity trading, politicized divination, and the practice of becoming female husbands. It was thus necessary to situate the novel forms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality that became prominent in the early twentieth century within a
