Colonial Power and Relational Being: An Ontological Study of Igbo Women as Presented in Colonial Archives

Abstract

This paper interrogates the ontological construction of Igbo women in British colonial archives, exploring how colonial power not only inscribed but also distorted gendered subjectivities through ethnographic description and photographic representation. Engaging key colonial texts — notably Sylvia Leith-Ross’s African Women (1938) and G.I. Jones’s The Art of Eastern Nigeria (1984) — this study critiques the mechanisms through which Igbo womanhood was rendered legible to colonial authority: not as lived subjectivities but as static figures defined within hierarchical, gendered, and racialised paradigms. Positioned within the broader scope of postcolonial historiography, African feminist critique, and ontological studies, this paper contends that these representations, while attempting to map 'truths' about Igbo culture, in fact reveal profound gaps between colonial knowledge-making and indigenous epistemologies. The project identifies and confronts the reductive and homogenising tendencies embedded within colonial ethnographic discourses, in which Igbo women were often framed as informants, cultural exemplars, or aesthetic artefacts to be catalogued. However, counter-archives such as Mbari houses — richly symbolic, spiritually potent sites of creative expression — present an alternative archive through which Igbo women’s relational being, metaphysical agency, and cultural sovereignty are foregrounded. Through a comparative and interpretive methodology, the paper reveals how such indigenous forms of knowledge resist the ontological violence of colonial representation and instead embody a nonlinear historiography rooted in relational presence, spiritual aesthetics, and communal renewal. Ultimately, this research offers a critical model for decolonising both archival practices and gendered historiographies by centring African epistemologies and indigenous aesthetics.