Writing King Ahebi's Life: Methodological Approaches to African Women's Biography

My book, Gendered Politics in a Changing Space Colonialism and the Invention of a Female Igbo King (in process) centers the life experiences of Ahebi Ugbabe, the only female warrant chief and king in all of colonial Nigeria, and arguably British Africa. It fills a considerable gap in African and Gender Studies scholarship by introducing readers to critical perspectives on women, gender, sex and sexuality and the colonial encounter. More innovatively, the biography seeks to encourage new ways of seeing, reading and interpreting African worlds beyond the borders and received categories of analysis. In important ways, it complicates, problematizes and challenges presumptions of a homogeneity within the category of “woman,” “prostitute” and “slave." It does this by offering new theories that recognize African concepts such as female king, female husband; autonomous sex worker and “wife of deity.” There is no comparative biography on an African woman. Evaluating Ahebi’s story against or in dialogue with existing African women’s [auto]biography, and indeed African gender history, therefore completes the story.

I first “met” Ahebi Ugbabe in the summer of 1995. Our “meeting” was not physical, for she had lived and died many years before I was born. Rather, our encounter occurred on the pages of C. K. Meek’s 1934 anthropological report on the people of eastern, Law and Authority in an Igbo Tribe. Page 158 read: “The village-group of Ogurte [] is distinguished by having a female Eze.” Eze is the Igbo word for king. C. K. Meek had not provided this female king’s name, but I already knew that I had uncovered something very important, for not only did the Igbo have no kings, here Meek was referencing a female king. “Writing King Ahebi’s Life…” interrogates my process (especially methodological approaches and choices) of writing King Ahebi’s biography.