How Igbo land’s powerful sisterhood silence women, terrify men – Umuada

In the heart of Igbo society, the Umuada embody a paradox of power. They are daughters of the land who, once married out, retain the right to return and speak with a voice that often eclipses that of men. Across the Igbo landscape, their influence still resounds, sometimes as a shield for tradition, and sometimes as a sword that cuts into dignity and rights. However, as the clash between culture, law, and human rights heightens, GODFREY GEORGE asks if they are timeless custodians of identity, or have become instruments of exclusion and abuse

“A chorom ima (I don’t want to know). You will pay everything, and not one kobo will be left. Okwa onu gi na ga wa wa wa? (You have a sharp mouth, right?) We shall see who is who!”

According to Nneoma, the only surviving daughter of a retired civil servant in Ekwusigo Local Government Area of Anambra State, those were the harsh words flung at her during her father’s burial; they were uncompromising demand of the Umuada.

The Umuada, literally translated as “daughters of the land,” are not just a gathering of women but a formidable institution in Igbo culture. Bound by tradition, they return to their natal homes as custodians of customs, wielding a kind of authority that shapes both the social and spiritual fabric of their communities.

Their presence can sanctify a burial, settle festering disputes, or, as in Nneoma’s case, turn moments of grief into tense negotiations of power.

Nneoma’s eldest sister had died during childbirth, leaving her and two brothers, who work as builders in Delta State, to shoulder the weight of family responsibilities.

Years earlier, when her mother died after a brief illness, her body was taken to Ihite for burial. Some Umuada objected, insisting her marriage rites had not been fully completed and that she could not be regarded as a true wife of the community.

“I didn’t even know my mother was not fully married to my father till that day. It was both shocking and embarrassing to be referred to as ‘children whose legs have not reached the ground,” Nneoma recalled.

The group was split, their voices rising in sharp disagreement. It took relentless pleas, coupled with the payment of fines by the in-laws and the intervention of the Umunna, the male counterpart of the Umuada, before her mother’s body was finally allowed to be lowered into the ground.

Nneoma remembered the day vividly. She and her late elder sister had clashed openly with the women, their grief colliding with tradition.

Though still young, she had refused to cower. Her voice, sharp with anger, rose against the authority of the Umuada.

Looking back now, she admits she might have spoken more harshly than she intended, but at that moment, fear had no place, only defiance.

“I think they took offence and kept a record of me,” she said with a smirk on her face.

So, when her elder sister died in childbirth and was brought home, unmarried to the man who fathered her child, the Umuada again resisted.

This time, not because of family ties, but because she, being the first daughter of her family, refused to associate and identify with the Umuada.

Nneoma’s father and brothers were forced to plead and pay some fines before the burial could proceed. The women, Nneoma noted, were only forgiving because of the circumstances surrounding the young woman’s passing.

“They accused us of failing to pay dues or join in communal chores like cleaning the village square,” Nneoma said.

Living in Lagos, with her sister in Abuja, she struggled to see the relevance.

“My father and aunts mentioned it once or twice at Christmas, but honestly, these women’s practices didn’t sit well with me. I discarded the idea,” she said.

By the time her father was laid to rest, the demands of the Umuada had become relentless, almost suffocating. For two straight days, they turned the family compound into their base, expecting to be catered for at every hour. Morning began with bread and steaming tea; by midday, full meals were required; and at night, nothing less than plates of spicy isiewu would suffice.

One midnight, as the compound lay in heavy silence, they banged on doors and roused her brother from sleep, ordering him to fetch goat meat to satisfy their craving. Their preferences were non-negotiable: a specific brand of chocolate beverage for their tea, a particular malt drink at hand, and a beer brand of their choice to “step down” their pepper soup.

“They just wanted to punish us,” Nneoma said with painful recollection. “It was terrible. We kept paying fine after fine, mostly because I couldn’t hold my tongue.

“…And my father was a very popular man, and these women claimed we abandoned him till he died, alleging that it was the same way we abandoned our mother till her demise.

“That’s not true. On several occasions, we had asked our father to move to Delta State to stay with the boys, but he declined. He insisted on staying back at home after retirement. What were we supposed to do? When my elder sister was still here, we wanted to take him to Abuja, but he refused, saying he didn’t love the noise.”

In the end, Nneoma and her brother had no choice but to comply. They paid the fines, served bread and tea to the women for the two mornings they camped, and ensured there was more than enough refreshment throughout the funeral.

“We were warned by my father before he passed that we must obey the traditions of the land so his spirit would be accepted by the ancestors in the other world,” she explained.

“So, we just did it as part of his dying wishes. Left to me, I would have buried my father in Lagos. Let me see how they would come and drink tea at Ikoyi Cemetery,” she blurted.

Nneoma’s experience is far from isolated. Across many Igbo communities, especially among women, punishments are meted out for alleged infractions, whether neglect, abandonment, adultery, petty crimes, or even something as simple as failing to provide every item demanded during a customary occasion.

Bathed in muddy water

One February morning in a quiet Igbo community, the air heavy with the wails of mourners, an incident unfolded that unsettled many. A woman, long accused of neglecting her mother-in-law while she was alive, had dared to show up at the funeral. Her presence sparked outrage. The Umuada swiftly intervened. They accused her openly before the crowd and declared that she must be punished.

They led her to the village stream, forced her to fetch water with a clay pot balanced precariously on her head, and marched her back along the dusty path. In front of the gathered crowd, she was made to kneel while the Umuada bathed her with the water, then smeared her skin with mud scooped from the ground. Her dignity stripped, she was publicly shamed, the Umuada insisting they were enforcing cultural rights.

Scenes like this are neither rare nor entirely hidden. They speak to the enduring power and controversial role of the Umuada, once revered as custodians of morality and peacemakers in Igbo society.

Traditionally, they stood above factional politics and were known to challenge patriarchy, step into land disputes, and intervene where men’s councils faltered. But in contemporary Nigeria, their actions have become layered with contradiction: part shield, part sword.

Social media is littered with videos of Umuada gatherings where women are doused with dirty water for allegedly neglecting family obligations, some forced to grovel for forgiveness, while others are painted with ashes or mud.

Demands for bread and tea at funerals

Three months later, another episode made the same cultural friction plain. On July 5, 2025, a burial in the South-East went viral after a Facebook post from an attendee complained that a local Umuada group allegedly behaved insensitively at the service of songs held for a 26-year-old woman. They were said to be consuming tea and bread in a way the poster described as “uncaring” and inappropriate for such a young deceased.

The post, the images and video that accompanied it produced hundreds of online reactions with debate centred on what constitutes respectful mourning and the authority of Umuada at funerals.

The incident was reported and dissected by local news sites and lifestyle blogs, framing it as a flashpoint in changing expectations of ritual behaviour.

That episode surfaced a second truth: the same institution that acts as community custodian and mediator can also be seen, by many observers, as having become ritualistic, performative, or out of step with contemporary norms—tensions now amplified and archived on social media.

The pattern on video is familiar: public shaming, forced “cleansing,” and community discipline. Since February and July, reporters, rights groups, and private users have uploaded several short clips fitting two related patterns: crisis-era rites directed at widows, and local enforcement and social sanctioning at weddings and funerals.

Blockade of a monarch’s gate

A viral video from Akokwa in Imo State showing members of the Umuada storming the residence of Eze Okachie after he allegedly locked them out of his palace and refused to grant them an audience recently sparked outrage online.

In the footage, the women, armed with sticks, hurled dirt into his compound and were even seen defecating on the premises as a form of protest. For them, this dramatic display was not just defiance but a way of enforcing their authority in a community where their role remains both revered and feared.

Commenting on the video, social commentator Dr. Uche Nworah noted that while Umuada are recognised as a powerful collective of women born into a kindred or village in Igboland, their methods are often confrontational, sometimes crude, and widely considered excessive. He explained that during burials, marriages, and other ceremonies, many Umuada still insist on practices such as sleeping over in bereaved families’ homes and being served tea in the morning, an ancient tradition that some say has been overtaken by time.

Yet, to avoid conflict, families frequently negotiate with them or pay cash settlements.

As Nworah observed, “They are a very powerful group and play varying roles in society. People don’t like to incur their wrath.”

The beginnings of Umuada in pre-colonial Igbo history

They are born into a house but summoned back to it by duty. The Umuada carry an authority that is at once intimate and public, ancestral and performative.

In the pre-colonial village, according to several scholarly accounts, this authority was intensely practical: they washed the dead, asked the difficult questions, quelled feuds, and shaped the morals of a community in ways that male councils often could not. Their power was not a legal precinct so much as cultural pressure, a mobilisation of daughters that could shame, reconcile, or restructure behaviour overnight.

With the coming of colonial courts and missionary exhortations, many outward trappings of that authority shifted. Some communities saw the Umuada’s rituals curtailed by a new law; others adapted, folding their work into emerging civic roles. Where the colonial state weakened male line stability, the Umuada sometimes reasserted themselves as functioning institutions still able to move families and markets. Their survival was not merely conservatism; it was a capacity for reimagination in the face of new constraints.

The late 20th and early 21st centuries brought another transformation: institutionalisation.

Umuada chapters emerged as organised associations, engaging in education, widow advocacy, and diaspora outreach. They mounted campaigns to secure women’s inheritance rights and represented communal grievances in state fora.

Yet alongside this civic turn, a more troubling continuity persisted. The same mandate that authorised daughters to discipline, ensure a woman honoured her marital obligations, test a widow’s conduct, and regulate ritual propriety could, when unchecked, slip into humiliation and coercion. In practice, the mechanism of enforcement that once held men’s excesses to account can paradoxically become a tool that polices women’s bodies and choices.

The central question for a just modern polity is a normative one: how can customary institutions retain their conflict-resolving virtues without violating inalienable rights?

A considered answer appears in an essay by a former Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ebonyi State University, Dr Ngozi Emeka Nwobia. In her July 2021 piece, “Understanding Gender Complementarity in Igbo Society: The Role of Umuada and Umunna in Peacebuilding”, Emeka Nwobia, who served as the Southeast regional consultant for the Nigerian Women Trust Fund on a Ford Foundation-backed project, argues that gender roles and relations in Igbo peacebuilding are essentially complementary, though popular misconceptions have obscured this fact.

Of note is the portrayal of Igbo women by some early scholars as subservient, voiceless, and merely appendages to men. Quoting G. T. Basden, Emeka Nwobia reproduces a sentiment that has long coloured outsider accounts of Igbo life:

“Women have but few rights in any circumstances and can only hold such property as their lords permit. There is no grumbling against their lot; they accept the situation as their grandmother did before them, taking affairs philosophically; they managed to live fairly contentedly.”

Basden’s opinion, however, has been critiqued by later scholars, notably Akachi Ezeigbo, as misleading and rooted in a limited understanding of Igbo sociopolitical relations.

Barely eight years after Basden’s observations, Igbo women rose to confront colonial policies during the anti-colonial Aba Women’s Riots of 1929. That these same women, earlier represented as powerless, could mobilise so forcefully suggests they already possessed deep social clout.

Ifi Amadiume, as cited by Emeka Nwobia, captures the flexibility of gender construction among the Igbo. She notes that women can occupy roles conventionally assigned to men in particular situations, acquiring statuses such as “male daughters” and “female husbands.”

The practice of designating a “male daughter” is often adopted when a man has no male heir: a daughter may remain in her father’s household to produce male children who will carry his name. Parents may arrange or accept a lover for her, or the daughter may choose one herself. Similarly, the role of “female husband” can be assumed by a woman who is childless or widowed and who wishes to ensure the continuity of a lineage. A female husband may marry women who will bear children in her husband’s name, or she may acquire sufficient wealth and authority to assume public power akin to that exercised by men.

This explains why some Igbo names celebrate continuity. Examples include Amaefuna/Amaechina (“my compound will not go desolate”) and Ahamefula (“my name will not be forgotten”). The “female husband” status can thus be achieved either through strategic family arrangements or by amassing wealth and public influence. In both cases, the practice illustrates the adaptability of Igbo social institutions and how women have long negotiated power within customary frameworks.

Umuada vs. Ụmụnna

Emeka Nwobia notes that the dynamics of complementarity and power relations between Igbo men and women are visible in two transgenerational institutions, Ụmụada and Ụmụnna groups, whose legacies are passed from one generation to another.

She describes the term Ụmụada as derived from two Igbo words: Ụmụ (children) and Ada (a generic name for all first daughters, though it may loosely be used to refer to every female child of Igbo ancestry).

According to her, the Ụmụada is an association of daughters of the land from the same natal community. They are ever-present forces in their natal homes, as opposed to their matrimonial homes, where their powers are limited. They assume juridical and peacemaking roles and regularly perform purification as well as funeral rites for deceased members of their lineage.

The term Ụmụnna is derived from two Igbo words: Ụmụ (children) and Nna (a generic name for all sons). It is a group of men from the same family or sharing the same ancestry.

Like in most African societies, the extended family includes parents, grandparents, children, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins, and even extends to their children. This has given birth to neologisms such as “cousin-sister” and “cousin-brother” to emphasise affinity and blood ties with a cousin.

According to Emeka Nwobia, these are common terms used to describe kinship relations and show endearment and closeness.

“The duties of members of the family include education, training, and the transmission of family values, legacies, skills, and knowledge systems (such as medicine, architecture, vocation, craft-making skills, apprenticeship, trades, etc.) to the younger members of the families, who in turn transfer them to their younger ones.

“Thus, the family unit in Igboland is a transgenerational platform for the conveyance of values. The elders ensure that these transgenerational knowledge systems are effectively transferred and inculcated in the younger ones. That is why skills such as traditional orthopaedics, healing/medicine, craft-making, and artistry run in certain families. These skills are learned or transferred through participant observation and Igba boyi (apprenticeship),” she noted.

Umuada membership

Membership of Ụmụada, Emeka Nwobia noted, comprises both married and unmarried females of a particular community, though some communities in Igboland do not welcome unmarried Ụmụada into the group.

“The unmarried daughters (those who have reached marriageable age) are not as powerful or outspoken as the married ones, as they are sidelined or easily dismissed as ‘Nna ga-alụ’ (literally meaning ‘father will marry’) or ‘Ọtọ n’aka Nne’ (‘abandoned in the hands of the mother’).

“Indeed, staying unmarried as a fully grown girl in Igbo traditional societies was a burden, and such unmarried ladies were largely treated as social outcasts. That is why, though they are daughters, their married counterparts are considered more respectable. One of the primary aims of the Ụmụada association is to enable women to sustain their matrilineal ties.

“This implies that every Igbo female at birth is socialised into automatic membership in the Ụmụada and Ndi Inyom, while upon marriage she becomes a member of both Ụmụada and Ndi Inyom / Nwunye di (a group of married wives in a particular community).

As a married woman, she performs a dual function as daughter (in her natal home) and wife (in her matrimonial home),” she noted.

According to the scholar, the association is a formidable sociocultural and political organisation in Igbo communities.

Umuada as peacekeeping pillar

The powers of Umuada can be observed in their natal homes, where they exercise power and influence, as well as contribute to informal peacemaking and peacebuilding. Decisions reached by Umuada are considered final, even by the Umunna, although their domains of operation are almost the same.

Emeka-Nwobia noted that the Umuada deploy various strategies to ensure the preservation of their cultural heritage and peaceful coexistence within the community and with their neighbours.

In traditional Igbo society, family and land disputes, as well as inter- and intra-communal conflicts, are resolved or adjudicated upon by traditional institutions like the Umunna and Umuada.

She noted, “Their influence and power have survived in contemporary society, mainly because of the bias and lack of trust in inherited Western legal systems whose methods of adjudication are expensive, time-consuming, and tend to reward winners and punish losers without leaving space for reconciliation.

“Also, the courts mostly offered temporary relief, and conflicts tended to be reignited by the little provocation. Again, in the colonial era, it was common knowledge that the court clerks collected bribes to slant judgment in favour of erring parties.