ABSTRACT
The West African colonial record documents other women’s wars of resistance in nearby Eastern Nigeria and Western Cameroon. Ifeka-Moller, especially, argues that in the Igbo and Ibibio cases, where women were associated with subsistence farming, their trading wealth was seen as illegitimate and threatening. The highly formalized dual-sex political structure has been dealt a series of severe blows, beginning with the colonialists’ unwillingness to deal with women. Ondo’s political integration has been torn asunder by such things as re-aligned trade routes, new products, new need for as well as new sources of cash, enforced peace, abolition of slavery and tolls, and the disruption of tributary and judicial payments. Ondo Town’s dual-sex political institutions have always been invisible to those in charge of Nigeria’s state apparatus, hence no direct lines of the communication existed between the governor and the women chiefs.
