The Ngwa region lies in the heart of the Nigerian palm belt. Palm oil is one of the oldest foodstuffs of the region and has also been an export crop, produced mainly by women, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. This 1988 book describes the rise and fall of the oil palm export industry. In contrast to the views of both dependency and vent-for-surplus theorists, it is shown that patterns of export growth and capital investment were heavily influenced by locally inspired changes in food production methods, gender and intergenerational relationships. The processes of change within the domestic and export economies became increasingly closely intertwined after 1924, when African coastal middlemen began to settle further inland and to spread the knowledge of cassava and Christianity. This book draws upon a wide range of economic, botanical, anthropological and historical studies as well as on colonial archives, but its heart lies in the oral evidence and life histories generously provided by Ngwa men and women.

This study examines the interaction between growing palm oil export production and changes in Ngwa patterns of food production and family relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It challenges the arguments of both dependency and vent-for-surplus theorists on the dominance of export-sector developments and the importance of changes initiated by Europeans. Local patterns of export growth and capital investment are shown to have been heavily influenced by independent changes in food production methods, gender and inter-generational relationships. Ngwa producers were affected by falling world prices, trading monopolies and colonial taxation. During the Igbo Women's War of 1929, Ngwa women protested vigorously against government interference and falling incomes, but failed to reverse either trend. The subsequent life stories of Ngwa men and women, set against a background of archival and anthropological evidence, provide the essential link between this historical experience and the current national problems of rural-urban drift and moribund export industries.