Between Odinani and the Cross: Decolonizing Gendered Power Through Dual Spiritual Identities in Postcolonial Igbo Women’s Lives”

Abstract

This research situates spirituality as both a historical archive and a contemporary site of agency. My research interrogates the colonial assault on gendered power through spirituality in Igbo communities of Nigeria, by revealing how Christianity, western education, and colonial governance, imposed a rigid patriarchal framework that systematically altered Igbo women’s sacred roles that gave them priority to gendered spiritual power. The concept of gendered spiritual power in this study is not confined to visible political authority but extends into the mystical and symbolic realms, where power is exercised through rituals, nature, the naked female body, pronouncements, blood, narratives, and intergenerational memory. My thesis posits that because of the “assault” on gendered power through spirituality, contemporary postcolonial Nigerian Igbo women have had to exist in a state of “dual spiritual identities, which can be understood as a form of spiritual compartmentalization. In this state of “spiritual compartmentalization”, Igbo women have revealed that they navigate both traditional/Odinani and Christian spiritualities, side by side but separately, to respond to the push and pull that accompanies the goal of colonial modernity, while sustaining traditional existence and utility.

This research draws on an African decolonial feminist approach and explores how historical trauma from colonization reshaped gendered power, relegating Igbo indigenous/traditional spiritual practices to the margins while privileging western forms of religiosity as “civilized.” My analysis situates spirituality as a locus of gendered power and resistance, proposing that the negotiation of dual spiritual identities reflects both the persistence, and adaptability of Igbo cosmologies and their reconfiguration in postcolonial Nigeria. In doing so, this work reclaims the validity of traditional gendered spiritualities and challenges the ongoing coloniality that continues to delegitimize African women’s authority in both spiritual and cultural spheres. Ultimately, this thesis aims to contribute to African decolonial feminist scholarship by reclaiming the epistemic and spiritual legacies of Igbo women. I insist that the unique survival and persistence of traditional Igbo spiritual rituals, serve as acts of remembrance and resistance against colonial erasure, while foregrounding a holistic cosmology where Igbo women are active custodians of spiritual knowledge, agency, and power.