‘Highly dangerous!’: Women, the 1940s dysentery epidemic, and the politics of control in Eastern Nigeria

By June 1940, British colonial officials were increasingly unsettled by the surge in gastrointestinal and other bowel-related diseases across the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. Medical reports, terse yet urgent, identified the Arochukwu district as the principal locus of contagion, a designation that quickly drew government attention as morbidity and mortality figures climbed. What first appeared as a discrete medical crisis soon revealed itself as a site where authority, public health, and gendered responsibility were contested and renegotiated. This article examines the colonial state's attempts to contain the dysentery epidemic in Arochukwu and the ways local actors, particularly women, engaged, challenged, and reshaped these interventions. Drawing on archival records from the National Archives of Nigeria in Enugu and contemporaneous newspaper accounts, we trace how Arochukwu women confronted inadequate sanitation and resisted the heavy-handed tactics characteristic of colonial governance. Using gender as an analytical category, the study illuminates how these women exercised collective agency to influence sanitation technologies, such as the salga latrines, and to shape public health measures. In doing so, the article uncovers a moment when epidemic disease became a crucible for rethinking women's resistance beyond the socioeconomic frame that has long dominated interpretations of women's encounters with colonialism.