There are a number of women’s rituals, such as uzo-iyi (virginity testing) and ije akpaka (ritual declaration of war); political resistance strategies such as ibo ezi (strike and boycott) and ikpo mgbogho (social ostracism); and material culture practices such as the raising of ancestral pot monuments (ududu), are simultaneously, contemporary performances of female power and authority, and gendered memorializations of the past. They center women in Ohafia-Igbo history, as “culture producers and social actors.” These practices elucidate women’s vision of Ohafia-Igbo social identity.

Uzo-Iyi is a ritual that reinforced the social perception of women as the guardians of public morality, in the pre-colonial period (before the introduction of Christianity). It was celebrated every two years between January and February. It began on an Eke market day in Elu, the most senior village, and the celebration lasted for eight days, and was taken up by other villages in succession. To hand over to the next village, one village sang and danced to the boundary of the next, and there the women engaged in verbal criticisms of each other’s village (ikotu onu). Each group of women pointed out the failings of the other in guarding their community’s morality and checking the abuses of men. This exercise lasted four days.

The second phase began with the rite of ije ugbo. Here, adolescent girls who had experienced menstruation were distinguished from those who had not. The latter, known as uke oluwere went and lived in the homes of the former, offering labor services such as fetching firewood. Only girls, who had experienced menstruation, and thereby attained womanhood, participated in ije ugbo. Ije ugbo began with wrestling competitions among adolescent girls, through which the girls were said to have “become as men.”

This lasted two days and at the end of each bout, the ugbo virgins would bear a little girl on their shoulders with a celebratory song. The next day (day seven), the ugbo virgins sang and danced around the village, and afterwards, they went to their community yam barns to eat yams roasted by older women, while all stranger-residents in each village were sent out to clear the path to the river where uzo-iyi would be performed. Upon reaching the yam barns, the girls ate their yams in a hurry, rushed to the river to take a bath, and rushed back to the venue for their virginity and purity screening. Disqualified girls included: a girl who lived with her mother after the said mother had had twin babies; a girl whose mother was not from the village in question; a girl who started menstruating at the very last moment of going to ugbo; a girl who had engaged in sexual intercourse. As the screening went on, the ugbo virgins sang.
As the ugbo virgins sang, uke oluwere (girls who had not experienced menstruation) responded, “Iyoo!” When an ugbo aspirant was disqualified, her relatives wailed, while successful ones were celebrated.

Successful candidates then undertook a long journey through the forest, led by matrons who sang mellow lyrics instructing the girls on the virtues of chastity and the woes that accompanied promiscuity. On this journey, the girls maintained a ritual silence, their mouths sealed with omu (palm frond), until they reached the uzo-iyi river, where amidst the cheering of other female participants, they stripped naked, and took an oath, thus, “Ekidi, if since I was born, any man had ever touched me, may Ekidi kill me.

The priestess of Ekidi then sealed off the strait through which water flowed into the pond, and the girls began the exhausting task of bailing out water from the pond until only mud remained. If a girl had lied under oath or was “impure,” the water would not cease flowing, until the individual was identified.
The rite of ije ugbo aimed to keep girls chaste, until they were married. According to, it was the responsibility of ikpirikpe to ensure that the chastity of girls were maintained, and that was why they exacted grave penalty against any man that sexually assaulted a woman in the pre-colonial period.

Men placed great value on female chastity, such that “If a husband slept with his bride on the first night after marriage and found her a virgin, he would send a goat to the girl’s mother the following morning in appreciation. If on the other hand the proof of her virginity was lost, the husband sent a machete to indicate that someone had already cut wide the ‘bush’.”
The virgin girls who took part in the uzo-iyi ritual were rewarded with fertility. Thus, the ceremony concluded with a rite where the young girls returned to the mud pond to either look for fish or nzu (white chalk). In the case of the former, every girl would catch a fish and put it back in the water for others to catch, and each successful candidate was said to have caught her future baby and was celebrated; and in the latter, when any of the girls found nzu, she shared it with her colleagues, to ensure that they would all be blessed with fertility.

Uzo-iyi provided ikpirikpe an avenue to check the moral conducts of men in their society. On the day of ije ugbo, the rest of the women stayed at home and nobody went to farm. In various sections of the village, women held discussion sessions (iku asiri) in which they gossiped about the various ills that men had secretly committed in their community, over the last two years.
The next day, ikpirikpe selected four qualified virgin girls and spent time instructing the girls on these scandalous secret atrocities committed by men of their village. Then, mounting a podium in the center of the village square, each girl shouted out the various atrocities and abominations committed by the identified male elders of her community. Thus, thieves, wife beaters, bribe takers, and murderers were exposed.

However, for this exercise of iko onu to be successful, the virgin girl had to begin the criticism with her own parents and other members of her family, as the Ohafia say, “Oko onu a zi onwe ya” (the abuser begins with herself). If she did not do this satisfactorily, she was asked to come down from the podium, and another girl took her place. The purity of Ohafia virgin girls after ije ugbo, vested them with the oracular power and authority of the Ekidi goddess, enabling them to out and publicly condemn any man, irrespective of his social status. These girls and their ikpirikpe matrons remained immune to any harm or challenge throughout the period of uzo-iyi.

SIGNIFICANCE

Uzo- iyi constituted a public court of condemnation against various forms of atrocities. Through this ritual, young virgin girls assumed the oracular power of a goddess (ekidi). Through the ritual, Ohafia-Igbo women distinguished indigenes from strangers, thereby defining what may be regarded as legitimate citizenship. They also differentiated between slaves and freeborn, childhood (uke oluwere) and womanhood (ugbo virgins, who had experienced menstruation), and sexual chastity and sexual impurity. Arguably, through these ritual definitions of social identity, they defined public notions of “moral imagination.” Women shaped discourses of these forms of identity through a combination of rituals, gossip, and rumors. Through memorialization rituals, women portray the Ohafia as a matrilineal Igbo society, dominated by powerful female political institutions, and female breadwinners.

This differed significantly from Ohafia-Igbo men’s vision of their society as a land of noble warriors, a vision that they commemorate through performances such as the war dance. Thus, Ohafia-Igbo women’s socio-cultural practices are not just re-enactments of age-long rituals. They are sites for the definition of social identity, and the contestation of gendered power. These practices, when compared to male performances of ufiem (masculinity), emerge as contested gendered definitions of socio-political visibility, which shaped indigenous notions of the political relevance and power of men and women.