Lost history · 1929–1985
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In December 1929 colonial troops shot protesting women by the river at Ikot Abasi. One of them was the mother of a small boy named Egbert. He grew up to be a Chief Justice, and in 1985 he came back to unveil a monument where she fell.
Ikot Abasi sits on the Imo River in what is now Akwa Ibom State, across the water from Opobo. In 1929 it was an important place for the British. It housed a consulate, which is why one of its main streets is still called Consulate Road, and it had a boatyard. This was where colonial power in the area had an address.
That year, the women of the region rose up. Across the region, women protested against what they saw as the excesses of colonial rule, and the feeling that a foreign government was reaching into their homes and lives. Many Nigerians know this as the Aba Women's War. In Ikot Abasi, it ended in blood.
The women came to the consular town to make their case. What happened next is told in more than one way, but the core is not disputed. Soldiers were there. The women moved forward, closer to the troops. According to an account collected from a 1982 symposium in Port Harcourt and published in 1989, it was this movement towards the soldiers that led to the order to shoot.
The troops opened fire on the women by the river. That same account says more than 24 women were killed at the spot. Other figures are higher. Professor M.E. Ekpo put the toll at more than 53 dead and over 50 wounded across Calabar Province as a whole. The exact number at Ikot Abasi may never be settled, and it is honest to say so.
What makes this place different from the other sites of the 1929 revolt is not only the shooting. It is what one family did with the memory afterwards, and how long they carried it.
Among the women who died at Ikot Abasi was a mother whose son was still a small boy. His name was Egbert. A 1995 book published by the National Gallery of Modern Art, with contributions from historians Monday E. Noah, Obaro Ikime and N.U. Akpan, records that she was killed in the shooting.
Pause on that for a moment. A child in a consular town in 1929 lost his mother to colonial soldiers' bullets, during a protest by women who wanted to be heard. It would be easy to imagine that boy growing up angry, or broken, or simply forgotten. Instead, his life became one of the most distinguished in Nigerian law.
That boy grew up to be Justice Egbert Udo Udoma. He became the first Nigerian to earn a doctorate in law. He served as Chief Justice of Uganda from 1963 to 1969, leading the highest court of another African country only a few years after independence. Back home, he chaired Nigeria's Constituent Assembly from 1977 to 1979.
There is a hard, quiet irony in that path. The colonial government that killed his mother had claimed to rule by law. Her son spent his life inside the law, and rose to the top of it, in a free Africa. He helped write the rules of an independent country, the very thing the women of 1929 had been denied.
The protests also left a mark on colonial policy. After the revolt, the British reformed the system of government in the region. A Daily Times issue of 8 March 1933 went so far as to call those reforms "the great charter of liberty for the people". It is worth remembering who paid for that charter, and where.
In 1985, more than fifty years after the shooting, Justice Udo Udoma came back to Ikot Abasi. On 16 December 1985 he unveiled a monument by the river, opposite Opobo, at the spot believed to be where the women were shot.
Think about the man standing there that day. He was by then a retired chief justice, an elder statesman, someone who had sat in courtrooms and assemblies across two countries. And he was also, still, the boy whose mother had died on that riverbank. The monument honoured all the women, but for him it marked something private too.
Ikot Abasi has not forgotten him either. Today a statue of Udo Udoma stands at the roundabout on Consulate Road, the street named after the British office whose soldiers fired in 1929. It is a quiet piece of justice in itself: the consulate is the past, and the son of one of the dead women stands in the middle of the town.
For visitors, the two memorials make a small trail through the history. There is the monument by the water, which marks where the women fell. And there is the statue in town, which marks what came after: a child who survived, grew up, and helped shape the country that came out of colonial rule.
The 1929 women's revolt is often told as one big story about Aba. Ikot Abasi is a reminder that it was also many small stories, one family at a time. In this town, one of them begins with a mother on a riverbank and ends with her son, a judge, unveiling a stone in her memory.
