Colonial officers are on record as having responded to their encounters with non-militarized societies that did not subordinate women in the way that Europeans considered civilized by advocating ‘making men of the natives’ by creating armies (Mies 1986). What were initially frontier forces used to guard occupied territories from rival occupiers (Brits vs. French vs. German etc) were also used to suppress dissent. Recall that the Women’s Wars in Nigeria were suppressed using colonial forces schooled in misogynistic and ethno-religious contempt– Hausa troops were brought in to gun down Igbo women – a sad theme that was to be repeated in the anti-Igbo pogroms that erupted in the town were I grew up, as Nigeria descended into the civil war.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 21:40:28 +0000
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