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By Salawu Jide
Writing about the Women’s War of 1929 often carries a familiar hazard: history can overwhelm the poem.
Chioma Chika Ibekwe avoids that imbalance. Sitting On Okugo does not
commemorate an uprising from a safe historical distance. It inhabits its moral landscape, drawing upon communal memory, ritual, and indigenous justice rather than the language of official
record.
The poem feels less like an account of resistance than an act of cultural recall.
Its opening settles in the domestic sphere, where “the palm oil clings like amber grease to the mortar’s lip.” The image does quiet but substantial work. Palm oil carries labour, sustenance,
trade, and inheritance. Before the machinery of colonial administration enters the poem, daily life has already established its own order.
The household is the first political ground. he arrival of “a census-man smelling of dry ink and bad math” shifts the atmosphere at once. It is a superb piece of compression. “Dry ink” evokes paperwork drained of human feeling, while “bad math” points to a deeper failure than arithmetic. Colonial administration sought to count what it never truly knew. Ledgers, taxes, and census forms appear not as neutral instruments but as tools that flatten a living society into manageable figures.
Nwanyereuwa’s response gives the poem its first pulse of movement. She spits, yet her answer travels not through speech but through “a green frond passed hand to hand,” gathering force
“through the dust of seven market days.” News moves along older networks than those built by empire. It passes through trust, custom, and shared obligation. The poem captures political
organisation without reducing it to slogans or speeches.
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From there the rhythm quickens. “By dawn, ten thousand feet are stamping outside the chief’s gate,” and the crowd arrives with the certainty of weather. Ibekwe never turns these women into
an anonymous mass. Their strength lies in collective purpose, carried by “the old songs that make the thatch rot early.” This is an astonishing image. Song carries the slow patience of rain,
wearing away structures that once appeared permanent. Power does not collapse under a single blow; it yields to voices that have outlasted generations.
The imagery keeps one foot in the material world. The women paint walls “with the grey mud of the gutter,” wrap their heads “in vines,” and drum “on the ribcage of the night.” These details
never drift into folklore for its own sake. Earth, mud, vine, and darkness stand beside the women rather than behind them. Landscape enters the protest without fanfare.
The poem reaches its political centre in a single line: “A Warrant Chief is only a man made of paper and British gold.” Few contemporary historical poems dismantle colonial authority with
such economy. The chief possesses neither ancestral standing nor communal consent. His office rests on documents and patronage, exposing imperial rule as an administrative construction rather than an organic social order.
The closing lines carry unusual assurance. “Watch how quickly his crown slips when the earth begins to dance” gives motion to the ground beneath him, while “They will sit on his shadow until the sun forgets his name” stretches justice beyond the immediate moment. The target is no longer only the man but the illusion of permanence attached to his office. Even sunlight
withdraws recognition.
If there is a reservation, it lies in the balance between the collective and the individual. Beyond Nwanyereuwa, the women remain largely a chorus. A fleeting glimpse into another voice might
have added another layer of emotional texture. Even so, the choice serves the poem’s larger design. This is a history carried by many bodies rather than one.
What lingers after the final line is the poem’s confidence in its own cultural ground. Ibekwe does not lean on colonial frameworks to validate Igbo political life. She lets its customs, symbols, and
social ethics generate the poem’s movement from within. Sitting On Okugo reminds us that empire kept its records in ledgers, but communities carried their authority in memory, ritual, and
the unbroken circulation of shared life. That distinction gives the poem both its historical depth and its enduring artistic force.
