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JAMAICA Nyabinghi, the "hidden queen" fought to free Africans from English slavery and rule. Also called Queen Muhmusa or Tahtahme, she inspired the Nyabinghi underpinnings of Rastafarianism. Nanny of the Maroons was born in Ghana, and folk history says that she came to Jamaica with the express purpose of becoming a high priestess and leader of her people, never having been a slave. She was an obeah-woman who led the eastern Maroons based in Moreton, and forged an alliance with another group led by Cudjoe. (The name Maroons comes from the Spanish cimarron,meaning "gone back to the wild.") The Jamaican Maroons were the first people to force the English to sign a treaty with their subjects, on March 1, 1738. The lands conceded in this treaty formed a base for the Maroon's independent survival. One of these communities was named Nannytown after the female Ghanaian leader. Maroon country was so feared by the English that it became known as the "Land of Look-Behind." WOMEN BEAT BACK SLAVE CATCHERS In the summer of 1848, eight or ten people made it across the Ohio river in their northward flight from slavery. The slave catchers tracked them into town, but the bounty they were after turned out to be elusive: "The women began to gather from adjoining houses until the Amazons were about equal to the [slave-hunters]-- the former with shovels, tongs, washboards and rolling pins; the latter with revolvers, sword-canes and bowie-knives. Finally the beseigers decamped, leaving the Amazons in possession of the field, amid the jeers and loud huzzahs of the crowd." GHANA "If you the men of Ashanti will not go forward, then we will. We the women will. I shall call upon you my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight until the last of us falls in the battlefield." ---Ya Asantewa, an Ashanti queen who led the resistance to British colonial rule in Ghana. She succeeded in the short run, but the Ashanti were heavily outgunned. THE "WAR OF THE WOMEN" The Aba rebellion in southeastern Nigeria grew out of a traditional female rite of the Igbo. People were outraged at the colonial government's plan to tax women, "the trees that bear fruit." In protest, Ibo women bound their heads with ferns, painted their faces with ash, put on loincloths and carried sacred sticks with palm frond wreaths. Thousands marched on the District Office, dancing, singing protests, and demanding the cap of office of the colonial chief Okugo. When he approached one woman to count her goats and sheep, she had retorted, "Was mother counted?" This protest spread into a vast regional insurrection. The Ibo women's councils mobilized demonstrations in three provinces, turning out over 2,000,000 protesters. The British District Officer at Bende wrote, "The trouble spread in the 2nd week of December to Aba, an important trading center on the railway. Here there converged some 10,000 women, scantily clothed, girdled with green leaves, carrying sticks. Singing angry songs against the chiefs and the court messengers, the women proceeded to attack and loot the European trading shops, stores, and Barclay's Bank, and to break into the prison and release the prisoners." Elsewhere women protestors burned down the hated British "Native Courts" and cut telegraph wires, throwing officials into panic. The colonials fired on the female protesters, killing more than fifty and wounding more. Marches continued sporadically into 1930. These mass actions became known as the Aba Rebellion of 1929, or The War of the Women. It was one of the most significant anti-colonial revolts in Africa of that day. Diola women led similar protests against French attempts to exact a tribute from their rice harvest in Senegal, an event dramatized by filmmaker Ousmane Sembene. http://www.suppressedhistories .net/articles/africanqueens.ht ml Shamanic Priestesses of East Africa Muhumusa She appears in the early 1900s as a widowed Rwandan queen mother who fled with the heir to the throne into Ndorwa, in what is now SW Uganda. She was a chief who refused to acknowledge the usurper mwame Musinga, who was allied with the German colonials. In 1911 Muhumusa proclaimed "she would drive out the Europeans" and "that the bullets of the Wazungu would turn to water against her." She roused a military resistance which was stamped out within months, and she spent the rest of her life under detention, first by the Germans and then at the behest of the British (1912-1945). Muhumusa became the first in a line of rebel priestesses fighting colonial domination in the name of Nyabingi. The British passed their 1912 Witchcraft Act in direct response to the political effectiveness of this spiritually-based resistance movement. The graphic above shows a few of the bagirwa mentioned in colonial reports in the second decade of the 20th century. In August of 1917, the "Nabinga" Kaigirwa engineered the Nyakishenyi revolt, with unanimous public support. British officials placed a high price on her head, but no one would claim it. One commissioner remarked, "These fanatical women are a curse to the country." In January of 1919, colonial forces attacked the Congo camp of Kaigirwa, her husband Luhemba, the male mugirwa Ndochibiri and others. The men died in battle, defiantly breaking their rifles and cursing their enemies. But Kaigirwa and the main body of fighters managed to evade the army and escape. However, the British captured the sacred white sheep, which they carefully burnt to dust before a convocation of leading chiefs. They lectured this captive audience "not to listen to Kaigirwa who will only lead them to trouble." But a series of disasters afflicted the District Commissioner who killed the sheep. His own herds were wiped out, his roof caved in and a mysterious fire broke out in his house. Kaigirwa attempted another rising, then went into the hills. She was never captured. One official wrote "that a very serious general rising had been most narrowly averted," and another referred to "the narrow escape from a serious native outbreak" and the danger of "this Nabingi propaganda." Others would follow. The most serious was the 1928 Rebellion, which began with the killing of puppet chiefs and "large, excited and armed gatherings in the hills" and what one British source described as "armed witchcraft dances." After this, the political dimension of the bagirwa gradually fades, and the underlying healing culture reasserts itself. The missionaries were finally making headway in converting people to Christianity, which had political dimensions. Some converts were not above pressuring people into baptism by declaring that pagans would be under suspicion for political subversion.
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