"As individuals, women had much less power than men in Igbo society. As a group, in communitas with the ancestors, women wielded a collective performative power that men respected, indeed feared. This balance changed when alien ships landed on Igbo shores and invaders exiled the spirits and rewrote the narratives of their lives… in 1929 women too the first collective action to resist the colonizers an their Igbo collaborators by performing ogu ndem… Feeling in mortal danger they fired on women engaged in satiric ritual, killing fifty women and wounding fifty more. The Igbo were shocked and horrified by the barbarity of the British. The colonizers seemingly lacked a fundamental sense of theatre and were unable to tell the difference between 'ritual' or 'play' action and 'real' action." (You truly have to read Hairston's whole speech to get a feeling for the depth she brings to this clash of cultures, in which no side ever behaved according to the simplistic narratives that history has assigned to them.)
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