The Nineteenth Century
What the century of wars did to Yoruba women: as captives and ransomed persons, as provisioners and arms dealers, as slaveholders and traders, as returnees building a new elite, and what it did to their position overall.
The nineteenth century was the most violent period in Yoruba history and it changed women's position in ways that pulled in opposite directions at once. The wars made large numbers of women into captives and enslaved people. They also created the commercial conditions under which a small number of women accumulated fortunes and political power on a scale no earlier period documents. Both are true of the same decades, and often of the same towns.
The general narrative of the wars is in The Nineteenth-Century Wars, and the biographies of Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà and Ẹfúnróyè Tinúbú are in The Ìyálóde. This file treats the century as it bore on women collectively.
Women as captives
The largest single thing that happened to Yoruba women in the nineteenth century was that a great many of them were captured.
Warfare and enslavement were tightly linked. The American Baptist missionary Thomas J. Bowen recorded in the mid-1850s that all prisoners taken in a Yoruba war were slaves, and if not redeemed by their countrymen were set to work by the captors or sold to dealers . An Ìjẹ̀ṣà song quoted by Ọlátúnjí Ojo puts the same logic in the tradition's own voice, that a broken pot becomes a potsherd and a war captive becomes a slave .
Ojo's demographic work on Ìbàdàn establishes that slaveholders selected by ethnicity, sex and age, and that the enslaved population there shifted over the century from Hausa to Yoruba speakers, from western to eastern Yoruba, from male to female, from adults to children, and from soldiers to farmers and manufacturers . The shift toward women and children is the important one and it has a stated mechanism: enslaved men were given wives from among the enslaved women by their masters, and the children of those unions belonged to the master . Female captives were therefore valued not only for labour but because they reproduced the holding.
That is the hard centre of the century for Yoruba women and it should not be softened by the accounts of powerful women that follow. The women who became Ìyálóde were a handful. The women who were captured were numerous enough to reorganise the demography of the region's largest city.
Ransoming
Ojo's study of ransoming is the best evidence on what happened between capture and enslavement, and it documents a large institution that operated on market terms with non-market exceptions.
Ransoming restored a captive to freedom on payment and prevented the transition into slavery, and captors supported it because it fetched more than selling the same captive . Ojo's finding is that market forces together with the ethnicity, gender, religion, class and skill of a captive were all central to whether ransoming succeeded .
The prices are documented. At Ìbàdàn around 1870 the average ransom was ten bags of cowries or a prime slave . In 1859 Ìjàyè forces seized about two hundred and forty Ọ̀yọ́ citizens and set ransom at ten bags of cowries, twice the price of a prime slave for the period . In 1881 the family of an old woman at Ejio near Kétu ransomed her by substituting a prime female .
Three of Ojo's cases show women in the system from different sides.
A woman as captor: in 1883 at Abẹ́òkúta, Madam Ẹfúnpọ̀róyè Tinúbú seized a man whose relative had slept with her female slave and demanded the value of two and a half slaves in ransom, vowing otherwise to sell him. The captive's family borrowed the money and pawned eight of its members to service the loan .
A woman as ransomer: in 1871 the wife of a Lagos trader detained at Porto Novo paid ten heads of cowries to chiefs to plead her husband's case and twelve bags of cowries and eight cases of gin for the ransom itself .
A woman as the object: around 1838 a civil war at Abẹmọ produced captives, and Ọlúyọ̀lé of Ìbàdàn accepted a beautiful female captive as a gift in appreciation for his peacemaking. Her mother invoked kinship, telling him "she cannot be your wife for she is your relative; we also are of the Basorun descent like yourself," and he released her on receipt of fifteen heads of cowries, a sub-market figure functioning as a fine for what would have been incest .
Ojo also documents two ritual routes out of enslavement that were available to women. Ọ̀yọ́ custom held that worshippers of Òrìṣà Oko could not be enslaved, so an adherent taken captive was released without ransom, and the cult's spread from Ọ̀yọ́ into Ẹ̀gbá districts carried that protection with it; female devotees were identified by a small flat piece of white and red clay on the forehead . Cult membership was, among other things, insurance.
Read together, ransoming shows a society in which a woman's fate after capture depended heavily on whether a lineage with money would act for her, which is another way of saying that the natal lineage tie described in Marriage from the Woman's Side was, in this century, sometimes the difference between freedom and sale.
Women in the war economy
The wars did not only consume women. They created a war economy, and women held large parts of it.
Yoruba armies operated far from home for long periods and had to be fed, supplied and financed. The provisioning of camps, the movement of goods along routes that ran through contested territory, and above all the import and distribution of firearms were the commercial substance of the century, and women were principals in all three.
Bọ́lańlé Awé's central argument about the Ìyálóde follows directly from this: the office's nineteenth-century prominence was in defiance of what was customary . The office did not become powerful because tradition provided for it but because the war century vastly expanded women's commercial and logistical role, and the Ìyálóde was the constitutional channel through which that new economic power reached politics. On this reading the most celebrated institution of Yoruba women's authority is a nineteenth-century product of the wars, not an ancient inheritance.
The arms trade is the specific mechanism. Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà's political leverage at Ìbàdàn rested above all on supplying the city with arms and military equipment . Tinúbú traded enslaved people for firearms with Brazilian and Portuguese merchants and supplied arms to Abẹ́òkúta during the war with Dahomey . In a state whose entire constitution was organised around war, the person who supplied the weapons held power no formal title conferred.
Women as slaveholders and slave traders
This has to be stated plainly rather than edited around, because the record of Yoruba women's authority is not a record of moral superiority.
Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà, second Ìyálóde of Ìbàdàn from 1867 to 1874, is credited with approximately two thousand enslaved people and multiple farms, a traditional round number that should be read as an estimate. She traded agricultural produce, tobacco, enslaved people, local cosmetics and kìjìpà cloth on routes running to Porto-Novo, Badagry and Ikorodu .
Ẹfúnróyè Tinúbú used her second husband's connections to build a business at Badagry exchanging European salt and tobacco for enslaved people from Abẹ́òkúta, is credited with over three hundred and sixty personal slaves, and continued slave trading covertly after the 1852 treaty abolished the Atlantic trade at Lagos .
Both were destroyed politically by men: Ẹfúnṣetán deposed by the Àrẹ̀ Látòóṣà on 1 May 1874 and killed in her sleep on 30 June, Tinúbú exiled from Lagos by a British consul in 1856 . The historiographical dispute over whether Ẹfúnṣetán's recorded offence was cruelty or insubordination is set out in The Ìyálóde, where the argument that the cruelty narrative served the legitimation of the man who had her killed is examined against Foluke Ogunleye's work and Akínwùmí Ìṣọ̀lá's play.
What belongs here is the structural point. Slaveholding was the normal form of wealth-holding in nineteenth-century Ìbàdàn and Lagos. Women who accumulated wealth accumulated it in the same form men did. There is no separate women's economy in this century that was innocent of it, and any account that presents the great Yoruba women traders as opponents of slavery is contradicted by the evidence. The popular framing of Tinúbú as a repentant slave trader who helped end the practice circulates widely and this corpus rejects it .
There is a second structural point, from Karin Barber's Okuku material, that explains why so few women reached that level. "Big Women" could not convert wealth into reputation the way "Big Men" did, through land, wives and many children, and a woman who displayed wealth as a man did would be accused of àjẹ́ . The Ìyálóde title was one of very few legitimate conversion routes from female wealth to public standing, which is part of why the office mattered so much and why competition for it was fierce. See Àjẹ́ and Our Mothers.
Women in the Saro and returnee communities
From the 1830s Sierra Leonean recaptives of Yoruba origin, the Ṣàró, began returning to Yorubaland, followed by Brazilian and Cuban returnees, the Àgùdà. They settled principally in Lagos, Abẹ́òkúta and Ìbàdàn, and they brought literacy, Christianity, European commercial connections and a different model of family life.
Returnee women occupied a distinctive position. They were traders, often with access to European credit and goods that indigenous traders lacked, and they were the first cohort of Yoruba women in mission schools, which made them the pool from which the twentieth century's educated women leaders were drawn. Fúnmiláyọ̀ Ransome-Kuti, born at Abẹ́òkúta in 1900 to a father of Sierra Leonean recaptive descent in an Anglican mission-educated family, is the direct product of this community, and her career is treated in Colonial Encounter and Women's Resistance .
The most important scholarly treatment of what happened to women in this community is Kristin Mann's Marrying Well (Cambridge University Press, 1985), a study of marriage among the educated elite of colonial Lagos . Mann contrasts the two forms of marriage the elite practised, Yoruba and Christian, and examines their conflicting legal rights and duties, domestic roles and attitudes to polygamy and monogamy. Her conclusion is the one that matters for this section: the sexes responded quite differently to marriage, because Christianity, Western education, and colonial legal and economic changes affected the roles and opportunities of women and men differently .
The direction of that difference is set out in Colonial Encounter and Women's Resistance. In short, Christian marriage and the ordinance form that went with it merged a couple's economic interests under the husband, in a society where a wife's separate trading capital had been the basis of her independence. Educated Lagos women gained schooling, status and access to a new elite, and lost the economic separateness that had made a Yoruba wife a principal in her own right.
Did the wars raise or lower women's position?
The evidence supports a specific and somewhat uncomfortable answer: the century simultaneously produced the greatest documented concentrations of female political and economic power in Yoruba history and the greatest documented mass victimisation of Yoruba women. These are not in tension. They have the same cause.
The case that it raised women's position. Awé's argument that the Ìyálóde's prominence was a war-century development, achieved in defiance of custom, is the strongest version . The wars expanded the commercial sector women dominated, made supply and arms into the decisive strategic variables, and gave a small number of women leverage no earlier structure had offered. Tinúbú has been described as the first woman to play a part in resistance to British rule .
The case that it lowered it. The great majority of women affected by the wars were affected as captives, as the enslaved, as pawns given to service ransom debts, and as the reproductive base of slaveholdings. Ojo's Ìbàdàn demography documents the shift toward female captives with the reproductive rationale stated . Set against a handful of Ìyálóde, this is the larger fact.
The synthesis. Both effects flow from the militarisation of the economy. War concentrated commerce in the hands of those who could finance and move goods under conditions of danger, which rewarded a few women enormously, and war produced captives, of whom women were an increasing share. The century did not have a single effect on women because it did not treat women as a single group: it sharply advantaged a small commercial elite among them and catastrophically disadvantaged the rest. That is a class outcome inside a gender category, and reading the century as either a golden age of Yoruba women's power or as unrelieved victimisation misses it.
One further consequence carried into the next century. The wealth and the offices built in this period were built on a base, the arms trade and the slave trade, that colonial rule removed. The Ìyálóde survived as a title into the twentieth century without the economic function that had made it powerful, which is part of why the office declined even before indirect rule finished the job.