In November 1929, a man named Mark Emeruwa went to the house of a woman named Nwanyeruwa in Oloko. He was acting on the orders of the Warrant Chief, Okugo. The British had ordered a census of property, and Emeruwa was counting. He told Nwanyeruwa to count her goats, her sheep, her people. She seized him by the throat and asked: Was your mother counted?

This question is the echo that travels from 1929 to 2020, from the market women of Aba to the Feminist Coalition organizing EndSARS protests in Lagos. It is the question of who counts, and who decides who counts, and what happens when those who have been counted without their consent decide to count themselves instead.

Nwanyeruwa went to the market and told the other women what had happened. The market women — the mikiri, the associations that had organized trade across Igbo and Ibibio communities for generations — did what they had always done when men abused power. They gathered. They sang. They danced. They made war on the man.

"Sitting on a man" was the traditional form of protest. When a man violated communal norms, the women would gather at his house or his workplace. They would sing, dance, bang on his walls with pestles, shaming him publicly until he changed his behavior or resigned his position. It was a weapon of the powerless — those who had no vote, no office, no formal authority — but who had collective presence, and the willingness to use it.

Within weeks, twenty-five thousand women had joined. They wore palm fronds and smeared their faces with ash and charcoal — the symbols of war. They surrounded the homes of Warrant Chiefs, demanding the caps of office that the British had given them. They attacked the Native Courts, the physical symbols of colonial authority, destroying sixteen of them across two provinces. They broke open prisons and freed prisoners. They looted European trading stores that had exploited them for years.

The British responded with bullets. At Opobo on December 16, 1929, soldiers fired into a crowd of women, killing at least eighteen. At Utu-Etim-Ekpo on December 18, they fired again, killing at least thirty-two. In total, an estimated fifty-five women died. Many more were wounded. No soldiers were harmed.

The women did not win. The Warrant Chief system continued for years. The taxes the women feared were eventually imposed. The colonial administration survived, adapted, and ruled for another three decades. The women of Aba are not in most Nigerian history textbooks. Their names — except for Nwanyeruwa, whose question survived — are largely forgotten.

But the echo traveled. It traveled to Abeokuta, where Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti organized the market women in 1944. It traveled to the anti-tax protests of the 1930s and 1940s. It traveled to the nationalist movements, where women organized separately from men because they understood that their struggle had specific dimensions — the exploitation of their labor, the taxation of their trade, the exclusion from the rooms where decisions were made.

And it traveled to 2020. To the EndSARS protests, where the Feminist Coalition organized food, medical care, legal aid, and communication networks for protesters. Where women were on the front lines, demanding an end to police brutality. Where the question — who counts? — was asked again, this time of a Nigerian government rather than a British colonial administration.

The connections are not explicit. The women of 2020 did not carry photographs of the women of 1929. They did not chant their names. They did not consciously place themselves in a tradition of female resistance that stretches back through the market women's associations, through the pre-colonial governance structures where women had specific spheres of authority, through the many moments when Nigerian women have said: enough.

But the echo is there. In the method — collective organization around shared grievance. In the target — abusive power, whether colonial or post-colonial. In the willingness to face violence — the women of Aba faced bullets, the women of EndSARS faced the same police force that had killed their brothers and fathers. In the understanding that formal power is not the only power, that the market, the home, the street are sites of political action.

The Warrant Chiefs of 1929 were appointed by the British. They were not chosen by the people. They collected taxes, presided over courts, and enforced colonial law. They were the interface between empire and village, and many of them used their position for personal enrichment. The women who sat on them were demanding accountability from power that had not earned its authority.

The police officers of 2020 were also appointed — through a system that claims democratic legitimacy but often functions through patronage and corruption. They also collected unofficial taxes at checkpoints. They also enforced the law selectively, violently, for personal gain. The women who organized against them were making the same demand: that power answer to the people it claims to serve.

The violence also echoes. In 1929, the British called the women rioters. They called their protest a disturbance of the peace. They sent soldiers to restore order. In 2020, the Nigerian government called the protesters hoodlums. They imposed curfews. They sent soldiers to the Lekki Toll Gate. The language changed — riot became hoodlum, colonial became security — but the pattern was the same: the assertion of state power against citizens demanding accountability, the framing of legitimate protest as criminal disorder, the use of lethal force against unarmed people.

The women of Aba were fighting the imposition of direct taxation on women. They were fighting the Warrant Chief system that had replaced their traditional forms of governance. They were fighting the census that they knew was the prelude to exploitation. They were fighting to be seen as subjects rather than objects, as people who must be negotiated with rather than counted and taxed.

The women of EndSARS were fighting police brutality. They were fighting a system where officers could kill young men and face no consequences. They were fighting for the right to exist in public space without being extorted or assaulted. They were fighting to be seen as citizens with rights rather than as problems to be managed by force.

Both groups were told to wait. To be patient. To trust the system to reform itself. The British promised to investigate the Warrant Chiefs. The Nigerian government promised to investigate SARS. The promises were not kept. The systems did not reform. The women did not wait. They acted.

Nwanyeruwa's question — Was your mother counted? — is a question about dignity. It asks whether the person doing the counting sees the counted as human, as worthy of respect, as someone whose consent matters. The women of Aba answered the question for themselves by refusing to be counted. The women of EndSARS answered it by counting themselves — organizing, documenting, demanding to be seen.

The echo is not repetition. It is not the same event happening twice. It is the persistence of certain questions across time, the recurrence of certain patterns of resistance, the continuity of struggle that official histories often obscure. The women of Aba and the women of EndSARS did not know each other. But they knew the same thing: that power must be confronted, that silence is complicity, that the cost of saying no is sometimes death but the cost of saying yes is always more than you can pay.

Aba, 1929. Lagos, 2020. The dates change. The faces change. The specific grievances change. But the echo remains — of women who would not be counted without their consent, who would not pay for the right to exist, who would not let power operate without witnesses. The echo is the sound of refusal. It travels. It persists. It waits for the next generation to hear it, and to answer.