This book is a revised version of Nwando Achebe's 2000 Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA. In five chapters, using a life-history approach, Achebe examines the power and authority wielded by Nsukka women and the female principle through their various occupational responsibilities as farmers, potters, weavers, traders, priestesses, diviners, healers, warriors and female monarchs from the inception of British colonial rule in 1900 to the achievement of independence in 1960. With three examples of female deities and medicines that served variously as warriors, supreme courts, and fertility and morality goddesses, and five human case studies, Achebe demonstrates the religious roles of Nsukka women and the female principle within the spiritual and human realms. She also explores how the power and influence of these female deities and religious functionaries declined considerably as they encountered Christianity and European colonialism. In Achebe's examination of the various ways Nsukka women responded to Christianity, she states that while some of them established Africanized Christian churches where they syncretized Christianity with African religious practices, others immersed themselves in it.

Achebe delineates Nsukka division into four major economic zones of farmers, cotton weavers, potters and traders. Using six case studies, the author examines how women acquired wealth from these economic activities that they used to satisfy their familial, social and community responsibilities. Achebe does a fine job in her analysis of the complexities of female political power in precolonial Nsukka, emphasizing the complementarity and fluidity of the system. She divides Nsukka political structures into two: the spiritual divinities, where women and the female principle played a prominent role; and the executives, where both men and women wielded, for the most part, separate but complementary power and authority. The author notes that, as in the precolonial period, women employed such resistance strategies as strikes, boycotts, sit-ins or sleep-ins and nudity to challenge colonial authority and its agents.

Another interesting aspect of this book is the author's examination of the life history of Ahebi Ugbabe of Enugu-Ezike, who after a long sojourn in Igalaland came back to her hometown in the first decade of the twentieth century to become a warrant chief and later a female monarch (eze), positions that were made possible by the British colonial government. Although the author tries to explain how Ahebi ended up in Igalaland, it is my view that answers to questions surrounding the circumstances of how she went to Igala will for now remain a matter of conjecture, as scholars who have studied the subject have not been able to reach any consensus. As Achebe states, Ahebi was well-armed to wield enormous political authority and influence over her people. Backed by her British colonial allies and her insatiable quest for power, Ahebi became very autocratic and ignored all the fabrics that sustained the community-based political structure of precolonial Enugu-Ezike. The result was that after many years of her infamous rule, Ahebi's people challenged her authority in court and won. Consequently, Ahebi's power and authority was drastically reduced, a situation from which she never recovered until her death in 1948.

In spite of the above contributions, this book has major and easily noticeable flaws. There is the author's unique research method relying on interviews with either a subject, or, in some cases, the subject's relative, without any corroborative evidence. The absence of such evidence raises serious questions as to the historical value of the materials derived from such sources. There are, for example, the claims that the author allows to some Nsukka women healers and diviners: that they had given children to the childless, husbands to the husbandless, wealth to the destitute, sight to the blind, and other cures and healing. Yet, the author did not see the need to interview even one of the supposed beneficiaries of these ‘miracles’ in order to lend credence to the claims made by the religious practitioners.

Along the same lines, Achebe does not validate, by using other sources, the claims by her research subjects regarding their wealth and how they invested it. Moreover, one does not have any idea what the average monthly or annual income of any of the six subjects was. An analysis of the estimated quantities of their produce and their respective unit prices over the period covered in this study is also missing. And where are the husbands of the women discussed in this book? At best, these men are so obscured by Achebe that one gets the impression that they did not contribute in any way to their wives' successes. Nor does one see the historical or even methodological relevance of the author devoting so much space to how each interviewee received her or the social conventions that preceded each interview. This is complicated by the manner in which the primary materials are presented – in some cases, without any interpretation.

Achebe's reliance on conference papers to document claims about the economic and political role of Igbo women gives a false impression of the paucity of information about the subject. She ignores the growing number of publications by other scholars (including the reviewer) on this subject, some of them published while she was writing her dissertation and others that should have been read in preparing her book manuscript. For instance, the reviewer's 1995 doctoral dissertationFootnote ¹ is a major work on the subject which the author failed to acknowledge.

I would quarrel with treating the entire colonial period as one block of time, without recognizing the changing dynamics of a period of so much change and adaptation. Thus, the author does not take into account the impact of the two world wars on the economic activities in Nsukka. It is evident, from my own research and that of other scholars, that the activities of the foreign trading companies (a big omission in this book), imports and colonial economic policy that emphasized palm produce for export and ignored any meaningful industrial development adversely affected the indigenous economy. The two wars, I would argue, changed the colonial focus: the insecurity in shipping occasioned by the wars, coupled with the loss of the Far East to the Axis forces, created import shortages; the shortages, in turn, led to the encouragement of local production, including revival of local crafts and industries.

In the concluding chapter, Achebe discusses the role of African women in politics since the 1960s, but without relating this discussion to the subject-matter: female power and authority in northern ‘Igboland’. The disconnection is magnified by her failure to pay any attention to the role of Nsukka or even Igbo women in the decolonization politics. Moreover, the book suffers from some omissions. For instance, Achebe has discussed the importance of such towns and places as Apkoto (a non-Igbo group), Nike, Idoha and Ukehe – to mention but these four – to the history of the Nsukka Igbo. Yet, these places are omitted in the maps. Moreover, there are unnecessary repetitions of all sorts, as well as hasty editorial work that resulted in wrong spellings and missing words in sentences. The same haste made for some untidiness: for example, it is not clear who actually coronated Ahebi Ugbabe: Attah Ameh Ogonyi (p. 208) or Attah Ameh Obonyi (p. 209). The index has its own problems. In addition to citing some of her sources in the index, key words such as ‘daughters’, ‘female principle’, ‘gender’, ‘male’, ‘calabash’, ‘songs’, ‘dance’, ‘rituals’ are missing; and there is a mix-up of pages.

In spite of these pitfalls, I think there is some freshness in the presentation of the diverse and complex roles of Nsukka women of northern Igbo. More particularly, this book should enable scholars and other readers to understand the multiplicity of female manifestations in the Nsukka political system and religious practices. It is therefore a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that shows that, before the encounter with Europeans, Igbo cosmology was so structured that both men and women were endowed with extraordinary powers to fill major leadership positions through their economic, social, political and spiritual engagements.