“You have your say, we have our way”: women’s resistance and educational taxation in late colonial Nigeria

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article highlights how the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria’s first indigenous university, revealed the fractures and tensions in late colonial Nigeria rather than the vision of unity espoused by the university’s founder, Nnamdi Azikiwe. Drawing on archival records in Nigeria, the article demonstrates that the University of Nigeria elicited resistance and protest from women’s groups and politicians alike with the perception it invoked of inequitable appropriations within the region of Eastern Nigeria. Rather than representing a unified Nigeria, the university demonstrated that village residents viewed the Igbo-dominated Eastern government as a source of oppression no less severe than the British colonizers had been. The article shows that the transition to Nigerian independence, exemplified by the University of Nigeria’s establishment, was neither smooth nor universally acclaimed.