Princes of Igboland: inchoate feudalization, feudal masculinity and postcolonial patriarchy in Ifeoma Okoye’s radical feminist narratives

ABSTRACT

Space for emancipatory projects during military rule in Nigeria shrinks considerably (1983–1999, with short interruptions). This affects anti-feudalist initiatives and radical feminist movements equally. Ifeoma Okoye, the preeminent socialist-feminist writer of Igboland, publishes novels and short stories in these years that deal with women’s lives and that attack post-colonial patriarchy. Her novel Men Without Ears also uncovers the mechanisms by which processes of feudalization come to characterize ethnic Igbo regions that hitherto had had no traditional rulers. Okoye in the novel weaves a narrative around a particularly toxic kind of masculinity, feudal masculinity, which imprints the newly instituted faux Igbo royal and faux Igbo feudatory. In Okoye’s world, Nigerian mainstream academic feminists, criminal uncles who try to disinherit orphans, and Igbo royalty with invented ranks but with very real thugs in their employ, all represent the comprador class that directs the developmental failure of Nigeria under military rule and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Ifeoma Okoye
• African Feudalism
• Nigerian Marxism
• African Socialist-Feminism
• feudal masculinity
• Igbo royalty
• African chiefs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Important texts on Okoye include: Mayer (2018), Ogunyemi (1996), Ogbazi (2010), and Osofisan (1996). Osofisan includes Okoye among the most prominent ‘warriors of a failed utopia,’ meaning that she, along with Osofisan himself, was a socialist artist and a radical thinker.

2. This is all the more important as she herself quotes Sklar (the most important theorist of Nigeria’s early party formation) (Sklar, 2004) on the historical role of African chiefs by way of his reference to the Alake of the Egba and the marabouts of Senegal (Baldwin, 2016, p. 20).

3. The Brenner Debate mostly touched on effects of agrarian capitalism in Europe and kicked off in 1976 with Brenner’s article on the eponymous subject (Aston & Philpin, 1987). Rodney Hilton focussed on the exclusively European world historical origins of capitalism. Ellen M. Wood does the same (Wood, 2017). The historiographic Eurocentrism of these authors received elegant criticism by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu in How the West Came to Rule through Trotskyist theory, explained also by Andy Wynne in relation to World-Systems Analysis and other schools of thought (Wynne, 2017). The Anderson-Thompson Debate (Neale, 1981) on Althusser’s claim that Das Kapital was the starting point of scientific history as such (Neale, 1981), Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (Thompson, 1978), Hindess and Hurst (1977), and Perry Anderson’s magnificent Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism all addressed topics that touched on Marxian concepts of social formations, including feudalism.

4. Basil Davidson for one uses the concept of African feudalism throughout the continent historically, over his entire oeuvre. Walter Rodney ditto (see especially Rodney, 1973). We may of course safely say that Davidson and Rodney were no Stalinists.

5. Regularly, Nigerian Law distinguished and still distinguishes, between three tiers of government: federal, state, and local. Under local governments, the level of autonomous communities is sometimes still designated as a fourth tier of government today (2019), although this is sometimes made less explicit. Even the existence of a particular autonomous community is often hotly contested within a given state’s local politics and that can affect the allocation of resources.

6. Mayer has written about her The Fourth World (her last novel) in which a young Nigerian slum dweller finds her way out with the help of socialist community organizers and the emotional and material solidarity of the shanty (Mayer, 2018).

7. The term La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) is borrowed here from the title of Honoré de Balzac’s collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the ultraconservative Bourbon Restoration (1815–1830) and the bourgeois July Monarchy (1830–1848).

8. Similarly to South Asian and South Asia related ‘feudal masculinity theory’ such as (Daechsel, 2006) and (Das, 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Mayer

Adam Mayer is a West Africa researcher /Assistant Professor in International Relations at Széchenyi István University Győr, Hungary; and the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (Pluto Press, London, 2016).