Power Through Spirituality: Confronting the Legacies of Colonization in Igbo West Africa

This paper was presented in Dakar (Senegal) at the international conference on Africa and its diasporas’ contributions to world civilizations in October 2023. Through a critical decolonial feminist approach, my work challenges the dominant/contemporary depiction of Igbo women as powerless, subjugated, and docile. I do this work by investigating how traditional Igbo spirituality/Odinani is a unique site of power that Igbo women use to negotiate power in contemporary Igbo society. Most specifically, my work investigates the connections between the colonial encroachment of Igbo West African communities and the subsequent and sustained decline of the status/power of Igbo women by interrogating how unique modes of power, specifically spiritual power, utilized by Igbo women, were subsequently diminished through the three-pronged approach of colonization, western religion, and western education. In contemporary Igbo society, the position, status, and power of Igbo women are intricately linked to their role as wife and mother, and their place in Igbo society is understood and elevated mostly through their affiliation with the men in their lives. The construction of power is articulated in masculinist, androcentric, imperialist, and rigid ways that often depart from the ways in which African women have historically negotiated power. Ultimately, my work posits that gendered power exists in the quiet, the mysterious, the taken for granted, the hidden, the unorthodox, and the unexplained.