Colonial officials viewed the Aba Women's War, first termed "riots" by the colonial order, as a kind of group psychosis. The Aba Women's War started in November 1929, as Igbo women in eastern Nigeria rose up in mass protest against a new British decree that women should be included in the census head-count. They believed this meant they would soon be taxed, an action they feared because they already felt taxes imposed on their men had caused their poverty. They also resented the imposition of Indirect Rule and the chiefs that the British selected to carry out British rule. Prior to this, women had had some voice in the chiefs who were selected; Indirect Rule took away some of their power.
On 24 November, 1929, Igbo women staged protests against taxes and British appointed leaders, using a traditional Igbo form of protest known as "sitting on a man." During the ritual, the women would sing and dance, ridiculing the man they were campaigning against. During the Aba Women's War, around 25,000 women sang and danced, then began looting and attacking symbols of European domination such as trading stores and Barclays Bank. They also broke into the prison and released the prisoners. The war lasted a period of approximately two months.
Kenya's resistance war, Mau Mau, was also relegated to a category of insanity. A colonial psychiatrist, J.C. Carothers, who was born in South Africa and went to medical school in England, wrote a treatise called The Psychology of Mau Mau, describing the efforts of the Kikuyu in Kenya to resist European rule as "'the opposite of hostile in demeanour.'" Carothers further portrayed Mau Mau as a "psychological disturbance." He believed that the "African mind" and behavior (a generalization we now realize would be difficult to apply to an entire African country, much less to the entire continent) was "'governed wholly by the emotions of the moment.'" British propaganda had long portrayed Mau Mau as a small uprising of savages who were experiencing "'some form of mass psychosis, the result of the Kikuyu tribe's inability to cope with the modern world'" (Sandowsky, 104-107).
Some individuals may have been insane, but their danger to colonial officials lay in their ideas and the expression of their ideas, and it was this that got them committed. One such example of this is Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Xhosa woman who was committed to an insane asylum when South African police became nervous about the millenarian movement she started and wished to silence her.
