Pestle, Protest, and Power: Re-Interrogating the Aba Women Uprising of 1929 through Uduak's Sculptural Metaphor of Resistance

Abstract

The 1929 Women’s uprising in colonial South-eastern Nigeria –often labelled the “Aba Women’s Riot”, constitutes one of the most significant expressions of collective political resistance in colonial Africa. Although it is often studied as a challenge to indirect rule and a threat to women’s economic and political autonomy, less attention has been paid to how recent public monuments reinterpret that history. This paper interrogates the uprising through a contextual, hermeneutic and iconological reading of Matthew Uduak-Abasi’s Sculptural documentation of the event, in a bronzed-fibreglass sculptural work at Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State. After a hermeneutical reading of its distinguishing features, the article argues that the monument functions not merely as a commemorative object but as a visual philosophy of African women's political agency, condensing complex historical processes into symbolic forms that recover indigenous epistemologies obscured by colonial historiography rather than reproducing historical events literally. The paper further argues that the monument operates as a counter-archive, preserving dimensions of African political history that textual colonial records either misunderstood or deliberately marginalised. By situating Uduak's work within wider debates on monumentality, memory, and visual historiography, this study establishes the sculpture as a significant contribution to contemporary African public art and to the continuing discourse on women's power across the continent.