In the Company of Women

In A Dialogue, a 1974 book by James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (being a transcript of a now viral conversation the two had in 1971), Baldwin stated that ‘The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produce them.’ While this is a noble task, I think it is a challenging one—especially for me, following the years I have spent studying history.

Three years into my undergraduate studies in history, in 2017, I was aware that the next step to getting a Bachelor of Arts degree was to complete a compulsory research project. I spent months thinking of a topic to write on. My favourite thing about history has always been that it accommodates a variety of themes from both distant and recent past. So, I had options.

Then I asked myself, why am I studying history if my hometown has no ‘documented’ history? This inspired my undergraduate research project on the socio-political history of one of the numerous, hidden communities in Ijebuland in Ogun State. The scope of the project spanned from the earliest recorded times until the 1990s.

At the time, I was extremely proud of the work I did. Two years after I submitted that project—while I was in the same department for my master’s degree—I read it again and I couldn’t get over the work I did. It didn’t seem like I had done enough. I felt like I had to overhaul the project and add something new, maybe highlight the role of a group of people or even examine changes in the socio-economic life of the people in contemporary times. Luckily for me, my undergraduate degree supervisor, Professor Ayodeji Olukoju, knew I was back in the department and asked for my plans for my MA research.

The conversation we had helped me clarify what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to build on what we had previously worked on together. In that research project, I looked at the socio-political history of the community from the earliest times till 1990. This time, I wanted to add something on women because women are a core part of my hometown and I felt like as an undergraduate I had failed to give them the spotlight they deserved. And in his ever gracious self, Olukoju handed me a copy of a journal article he co-wrote with Adesola Afolabi in the second volume of the Ogun Journal of Arts, titled ‘Women in the Agricultural Economy of Ogun State: Case Study of the Remo Kolanut Industry (1920-1987)’. That was the motivation I needed to dedicate a chapter of my research to the role of women in the agricultural economy of my hometown since independence.

WRITING WOMEN

Afolabi and Olukoju’s paper examines the changing role of women in the Remo kola nut industry. The authors highlighted how women moved from mere gatherers, processors and retail traders to cultivators, wholesalers and long distance traders, whose commerce reached as far as Northern Nigeria. One reason for the direct involvement of women in kola nut cultivation was to satisfy growing demand and to allow their communities cope with the pressures of the rapidly changing Nigerian society. The active participation of Remo women in the kola nut industry enhanced their social and economic status. In just a few years, women went from gatherers, processors and retail traders to cultivators, wholesalers and long-distance traders to Northern Nigeria. All of these were quite similar to the experiences of many women back in my hometown.

In my hometown, women have long been involved in the harvesting, processing, and marketing of agricultural produce. Just like many towns in Ijebuland, cassava farming and garri production is a core part of my people’s lives. Additionally, most of the tasks connected with food production are led by women. My research looked at the period staring from 1960 when Nigeria was in the transitional process of independence; as such, I drew similarities from Nzemeka Justus Adim’s findings in his 2018 article titled, ‘The Role of Barracks Women in the Nigerian Economy’. Adim explained that the involvement of women in economic development was informed by the fact that most husbands could not provide full support for their wives and dependants.

In my hometown, many women had taken to farming or the processing of the cassava that they purchased from other farmers because their husbands (who had moved to larger cities in parts of Ogun State and beyond) were not able to provide for their families. In other cases, while their husbands were involved in harvesting and transporting cassavas to homes or sheds, the women were primarily in charge of processing into garri and taking them to other markets and villages for sale.

In their work, Afolabi and Olukoju revealed that: ‘Since the 1960s, women experienced transition from being suppliers of supplementary labour on the farm to being owners of kola farms in their own right and employers of labour for cultivation.’ In this time, the women in my hometown transitioned from helping out on farms to owning cassava farms, purchasing them from male cultivators who were not willing to go through the laborious task of processing the crop, and employing young people for cultivation.

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In the Company of Women

WRITING WOMEN

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