In November 1929, Nwanyeruwa of Oloko in Bende Division was approached by Mark Emeruwa, an assistant to the local Warrant Chief Okugo, asking her to count her goats, sheep and people — interpreted as the prelude to direct taxation of women, four years after the 1926 head-count of men had produced the first colonial income tax in the Eastern Provinces. She refused, summoned the Oloko women's meeting, and within days the agitation — Ogu Umunwanyi (the Women's War) — had spread through Owerri, Calabar and Rivers Provinces, encompassing an estimated 25,000 women across 6,000 square miles.
The women's tactic was 'sitting on a man' — the customary Igbo sanction of surrounding a Warrant Chief's compound, dancing, singing satirical songs and, where necessary, destroying property. Sixteen Native Courthouses were burnt; European trading factories at Aba, Imo River and Opobo were looted. On 16 December 1929 at Opobo, Lieutenant R.J.M. Hill of the Royal Niger Constabulary ordered his men to open fire on women pressing against the District Office: 32 were killed on the spot, 21 more died of wounds, and two drowned trying to escape into Opobo Creek. A second incident at Utu Etim Ekpo killed eighteen more women.
Lieutenant-Governor Sir Cyril Alexander Lyle Buxton convened the Aba Commission of Inquiry (1929) and the Birrell-Gray Commission (1930). Both returned the same official death toll — 55 women killed, more than 50 wounded — and exonerated the soldiers. No officer was charged. The 1933 reform replaced Warrant Chiefs with 'Native Authorities' but preserved the structure of indirect rule that the women had attacked; that structure survived into independence and was inherited by the 1976 Local Government Reform.
The Aba Women's War remains the foundational event of organised Nigerian women's politics. It was directly invoked by Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti's 1947 Egba revolt, by Margaret Ekpo's Aba market women's NCNC mobilisation of the 1950s, and by every subsequent women's movement up to #BringBackOurGirls (2014) and the women's bloc of #EndSARS (2020). The colonial template — peaceful protest, state shoots, commission whitewashes, no prosecutions — is the template the Lekki Toll Gate massacre of 2020 reproduced almost exactly.