> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.missingwitches.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # EP 308 MW Queen Idia - A Queendom Not Yet Assured - URL: https://www.missingwitches.com/mw-queen-idia-a-queendom-not-yet-assured/ - Published: 2026-10-15T11:11:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-15T11:10:59.000Z - Description: This is an episode in my season of sovereignty about the power of a Queen Mother. - Author: Risa Dickens - Tags: Podcast, Missing Witches, Black Witchcraft, Activist Magic In this episode, Risa tells a story about an ancient Queen Mother of the sixteenth-century Kingdom of Benin, in what’s now southern Nigeria. A story about her power and the power of all Mothers in all senses of the word: all progenitors of the future. The story migrates through the lore of Idia, her two-world seeing, her medicines, her power as counsel and ancestor, to the colonial theft of the masks, to the women's uprising in Nigeria of the 70s, to the Combahee River Collective, to the more-than-human beings who haunt the mask, calling for our care, calling our liberation further, calling every body home. ## Transcript # **Queen Idia: The Eye That Sees** There’s a face we’ve been looking at for more than five hundred years. A woman's face carved in ivory. Or should I say, a mask, which isn’t the same thing. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that through this mask she has been looking at us. This mask was made in the 1600s, it was worn by a king, not to see through but as a talisman, a way of gathering her power around him. It is the face of his mother. This is an episode in my season of sovereignty about the power of a Queen Mother. The mask watches us and challenges us to remember Queen Mother magic, the way that a mother-being, a creator woman, a person of any sex who allows themselves to be split opened by love, to birth utterly new possibilities by being turned inside out, your love on the outside, to be completely reformed by the fragility of all that is beautiful learning to walk, dancing in the light, so vulnerable, so powerful in their own right. audre lorde [wrote](https://challengingmalesupremacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Man-Child-Audre-Lorde.pdf?st%5Fsource=ai%5Foverview&ref=missingwitches.com): “All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.” ## All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured. Which brings me back to the mask of the Queen, 5oo years ago, looking out at the Queendom not yet assured flowing from her down the generations to you, and beyond. This is the mask of a mother so powerful she shaped the rise and rule of a nation, used her knowledge of plants and of ritual spirituality to help her son negotiate trades and bring about peace, so resonant her mask became a symbol of the creative power of all African nations 450 years later, so powerful her masks were stolen by colonizers and never returned and still they call out from behind the glass of her ‘queendom not yet assured’ but coming coming coming, all around us, a breath away. This is a season of sovereignty, of calling in the missing witch queens, the many faces and songs of the matriarchy. I call in Queen Mother Idia. And look, I’ll say it again because it’s important, we love the word witch, there’s a fuck you in it these days that’s delicious, it declares our allegiance to all oppressed and denigrated people, especially women with power, but just because we play with it doesn’t mean we are actually claiming these people who stories we go looking for would have understood themselves as witches or that the word meant the same thing to them as it does to us. We are the missing witches, we have been longing for more intersectional magic, for more layers and complicated stories so we are endlessly turning with reverence to stories of women and queer people beyond our white settler colonizer culture and we know we’ll inevitably be clunky and biased and we’re coming anyway, arms full of awe and love, just trying to not fuck it up too much. The Mask of Queen Idia is a magical, ritual, spiritual object, and object that connects directly with the ancestor world. Nwando Achebe in “Femal Manoarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa” writes: “African people identify two worlds: The human or physical/visible world is made up of the heavens, earth, and waters. It is the world of human beings and of natural forces and phenomena. The nonhuman or spiritual /invisible world is a world of divine beings, of good and bad spirits, and of departed ancestordIt is the unseen world, the world that we cannot see. These worlds are not separate, but like two halves of a kola nut, they are connected, and made up of one continuous, complete, whole Africa world. The visible and invisible worlds commune and interact with each other.” - 26 This Queen Mother mask wouldn’t have been a mask to wear and look through, the masks have ivory eyes and one eye seems to have been intentionally blacked out. Iron surrounds the pupils. Marks cross her forehead, places where medicine was brought into the skin, piercing the surface of the visible world. And around her head like a crown, are tiny bearded faces and mudfish, creatures that move between water and land, symbols of a ruler that moves between worlds. This is the mask of Queen Mother Idia of Benin. Let’s start with the seeing, that dual, dark and light different-eyed way of knowing. Idia is remembered as a woman whose knowledge had power. She was a political counsellor, a keeper of medicinal knowledge, a woman associated with mystical power, and a strategist who supported her son during wars that helped secure the Benin kingdom. He relied on her on, she was on an equal footing to the male chiefs who surrounded him, he trusted her counsel, her calm, her vision, and she saw them through. After his victories, in honour of her wisdom and the role he felt all queen mothers should play in the balance of the kingdom going forward, Esigie created the title of *Iyoba*, Queen Mother, in her honour. The office carried real political authority, including a separate residence and staff, it still does today. The Queen Mother then wasn’t an ornamental figure. She was part of the architecture of sovereignty. And she became an icon for African nations that would resist their cultural obliteration by colonial oppressors. She still looks at us with iron eyes. The forehead bears two vertical depressions, understood by some scholars as references to medicine-filled incisions associated with Idia's metaphysical power. The hollow back and openings in the mask suggest that it might have held powerful materials, making it more than an image of a woman. It could function as a charged object of protection. This is ritual technology. The image isn't there only to represent Idia. It carries plant spirits, spirit wisdom. It protects. It remembers. It sees beyond. There’s a story that sometimes circulates about Idia having only one eye, or having lost an eye. This is interesting and makes a kind of body sense, how disabilities can bring a heightened attunement along with their challenges. But it isn't an established historical fact, and I can also imagine that the blacked out eyes on the Queen Mother masks coul dhave symbolized instead a split vision of the world, the living and the spirit world, an acknowledgement of the way she saw beyond. What we have is an extraordinary image of a woman's gaze. And a record of her spiritual power and her leadership, her wisdom. There are many ways of seeing, aren’t there? Daniel Kish lost his eyes to retinal cancer when he was just 13 months old, and taught himself echolocation, making sharp clicks with his mouth and listening to the sound waves. When he worked with researchers studying his brain waves in an fMRI machine, they expected to see activity in his auditory cortex (the part of the brain that processes sound) but instead, The Calcarine Cortex the primary section of the visual cortex that typically processes light from the eyes—lit up intensely when processing the echoes. \[[1](https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2137821&ref=missingwitches.com),[ 2](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3102086/?ref=missingwitches.com),[ 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AofvXF6UQvc&t=177&ref=missingwitches.com),[ 4](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-brain-on-sonar-how-blind-people-find-their-way-around-with-echoes?ref=missingwitches.com)\] Without data from the eyes, the brain completely rewired itself. It treated the audio echoes as if they were raw visual information. WIthout eyes, Daniel Kish had taught himself to see. There are layered ways and layers of waves, there’s first sight, second sight and maybe countless beyond. There’s detail noticing, watching like a bird from above, like a prey animal from the ground, moving your perception around power geometries. There’s the seeing of the healer, the way pain ripples across the skin and certain plants hold a light. The strategist who reads the wind, the changing tides, the glances of courtly intrigue. The vision that comes from the belly that knows what’s coming. The person who has known danger and who recognizes danger before everyone else does. The person who can read a room, a body, a dream, a season, a political structure. The seeing that comes from having lived long enough to recognize a pattern. The seeing that comes from being the one who remembers. This is one of the powers of ritual: Ritual teaches us to attend to layers of waves over time, divinatory practices of all cultures invite us to watch for what is just beneath and beyond, to notice what ordinary systems of knowledge expect us not to notice. Idia's story begins there. With a woman of vision. ## **The Queen Mother** Idia lived in the sixteenth-century Kingdom of Benin, in what’s now southern Nigeria. She was the mother of Oba Esigie, giving birth to a boy raised her to the role of Queen Mother, and the way she lived and ruled transformed that title for generations to come. Oba Esigie ruled in a hundred+ year arc of Obas who were lionized, historicized with dedicated altars and bronze sculpted heads created by the exceptional artisans of Benin in a world that had worked metals and carved ivory for thousands of years. Oba Esigie ruled during a period of military expansion and political struggle. The histories of his reign credit the Queen Mother Idia with providing counsel, medicinal knowledge and mystical support during his campaigns against the Igala. Her son established the official position of *Iyoba*, Queen Mother, in recognition of her role. The Queen Mother raises, protects, shapes the ruler, and through the ruler, the kingdom. She raises the future leaders, and so she can teach the nation kindness and justice, wisdom or cruelty. She becomes an ancestor in a pantheon of power, advocating for us on the other side. The Queen Mother is mother in the biological sense, but she's also mother in a much larger sense. The person who feeds, who teaches, who tends. The person who knows the medicines. The person who remembers the names, who keeps the fire, who gathers the people. The person who knows that survival is not the same thing as obedience. Care can produce an extremely fierce political intelligence. If you’re responsible for the lives of other people, it can sometimes tune you to recognize the systems that threaten those lives. And sometimes, you become impossible to suppress. ## **The mask** The mask associated with Idia was made for her son. It was worn by the Oba during ceremonies, including rites connected to spiritual renewal. Ivory carried ritual meanings in Benin, associated with purity, Olokun, wealth and fertility. The mask's imagery brings together the Queen Mother, the sea, foreign traders who were managed and profited from, political power and spiritual protection. The face the mask shows is glowing with calm and strength. Idia isn't smiling. She isn't performing sweetness. She looks directly outward. And the eyes are surrounded by metal. Iron represents resilience, endurance, and spiritual power in Benin courtly art. There’s information here for working with ritual objects: We can gather power through material, intention, repetition, relationship. A piece of jewellery can become an amulet because we sing to it, whisper incantations into it, anoint it, fill it with meaning, and because a community agrees, through generations of practice, that this meaning has consequences. As the years go by, her people see her face on the body of their divine leaders, see her calm and gather strength from it, its outlines become encoded in the symbol systems and neural pathways of minds and memories. Dr. Sandra Huber told me she thinks of ritual like carving grooves in a record, slowly over time we change the song, the resonance of the world. The Oba wore the mask. The king's body became the place through which her image returned. Her authority moved through another body. Her sovereignty became a symbol. And for generations her symbol survived. \-- In 1897, more than three hundred years after Idia's life, British forces invaded Benin City. The palace was sacked. The Oba was deposed. The invaded looted thousands of sacred and royal objects, the altars that kept the visual history of hundreds of years of the Obas, of the Edo people, were deconstructed and the oral history keepers massacred and so the stories we get are tainted and shattered. Among the stolen art and ritual artifacts were the ivory pendant masks associated with Idia. They were removed from Benin during the British military expedition. One entered the collection of the British Museum. One is at the Metropolitan museum in NY. Colonialism didn’t only seize land. It brutalized memory, sense of self, personal and cultural sovereignty. It removed the things through which a people could hold their own history, philosophy, cosmology. British looters took sacred objects out of their context, their homes, their spirit maps, their pantheons of ancestors, the ritual systems that gave them meaning, and placed them inside the white boxes of distant museums, private collections, and European systems of classification. The exhibition preview for "HEROIC AFRICANS: LEGENDARY LEADERS, ICONIC SCULPTURES" organized by the METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, presented from Sept 20, 2011 through JANUARY 29, 2012 whitewashes the terms of its existence by saying, in the opening paragraph: “Our inability to name and envision specific African leaders from earlier times is an accident of history.” Nwando Achebe, in Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa says it better: “...Africa was the site of some of the worst external abuses, a reality which resulted in a production of knowledge that has almost exclusively been shaped by these influences… the inconceivable and arbitrary violence born out of slavery and colonial discourse has produced an African canon that is as dehumanizing and silencing as brute force. From Muslim traders and travelers of the seventh to fifteenth centuries documenting African worlds in their travel logs, to the accounts of European and Arab slavers, travelers, missionaries, and colonists writing African worlds during the age of exploration, international slave trades, and conquest… historical perspectives (...) were variously skewed, incomplete, and/or ethnocentric in their leanings. It is these narratives that have propelled the very nature of Africanist scholarship in the present day”… Achebe asks “whose stories, whose histories, whose archives.” But somehow even decontextualized and violated, the mask has this other power, the mask is material, the mask holds her face, is etched with her magic, her two eyed vision, her knowledge of the worlds, for hundreds of years no matter the frame that contains it, the mask kept working its way to the people. In 1977, the image of Queen Mother Idia became the official emblem of FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. Over 15 000 artists from over 50 countries in Africa and the diaspora came to this massive arts festival organized by the government of Nigeria, and they converged around the image of the Mother Queen. In order to celebrate, Nigeria requested the original mask from the British Museum. The museum refused the loan, citing “conservation concerns.” The British offered a replica, but instead Nigerian artists created their own versions of the mother mask, the queen and her markings, her spirit vision. And in this way, the mask was reclaimed. A queen whose sacred image had been taken from her country became the face of one of the great celebrations of Black and African culture in the twentieth century. The object had been stolen. The image reverberated LOUDER. But nothing is black and white, or maybe it's better to say everything is, the heroic is always right up against the heartbreak. Fela Kuti, legendary Nigerian artist, was originally part of the planning committee for FESTAC, but he withdrew in frustration. He felt the committee was undemocratic, and they frustrated his attempts to make the festival meaningful to everyday Africans. He saw it as a propaganda exercise for the military rulers of Nigeria, and called it "one big hustle". So he set up a counter festival at his music venue, The Shrine, with free performances and lectures that explicitly and loudly criticized the military junta, who warned international attendees and artists to stay away from Fela’s Shrine to music and a better world. Instead, the opposite happened. Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, delegates from around the world —abandoned the official government-sponsored events at night to hang out and jam with Fela at The Shrine, coming together in joyful resistance. And then February 18, 1977—just six days after FESTAC ended— 1,000 armed soldiers raided Fela’s commune, the Kalakuta Republic and burned it to the ground and they found his 76 year old mother there, and they threw her out of a second floor window and she died from her injuries. \[[1](https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/05/festac-77-feature/?linkId=38297478&ref=missingwitches.com),[ 2](https://www.facebook.com/BackInHistoryBIH/videos/1000-soldiers-vs-one-musician-why-the-military-hated-fela-kuti-so-much/972289558565792/),[ 3](https://www.facebook.com/officialhistorydaily/posts/on-february-18-1977-just-days-after-festac-77-kalakuta-republic-a-communal-compo/754000677385214/)\] [Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funmilayo%5FRansome-Kuti?st%5Fsource=ai%5Fmode&ref=missingwitches.com) was a revolutionary African leader, a mother who raised up a wave of women, a nation of resistors. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti definitely wasn’t a queen like Idia, she was a socialist who rejected the puppet leaders put in place by the colonizing forces. But I call her in as a Mother full of power, a mother who women and changed the nation, through women's associations, a club that became a Women’s union that moved like a rising song through the market women, coming together to refuse the brutal taxation of a colonial government. During and after the Second World War, colonial economic policies placed brutal pressure on women, who dominated much of the internal trade. Funmilayo understood that the struggle couldn't be separated. Economic justice was political. Political representation was gender justice. Colonialism lived in the local structures through which power was enforced. She documented women stripped bare in the streets, women imprisoned for failing to pay market taxes with their children, newborns 9 days old. In 1946 and 1947, the Abeokuta Women's Union organized a massive campaign against taxation and the Native Authority puppet government. Women gathered at the Alake's palace. When they first came the military turned them away, denying their right to protest, so they said, ok it’s not a protest, it’s a picnic. And the next time they gathered, 10 000 women came. They sang. They mocked, they sang dirty songs about the puppet king’s tiny dick. They endured arrest and intimidation. Ultimately they forced the Alake, Ademola II, into exile and won major concessions for the people. This was resistance magic. Not because we need to pretend these women were witches. Because magic, in its oldest and broadest sense, spirit power, is about changing material conditions through intention, relationship, symbol, repetition and collective action. These women changed the political weather. They gathered their courage, their bodies, until their gathering became power. They sang until singing became undeniable political speech. They refused until refusal became law. They made themselves immovable, impossible for the state to ignore. This was the woman they threw out of the window in their rage at her resistance, at her son’s defiance, at the music they raised that rose in waves around the world and shamed undemocratic brutal power. Fela Kuti died of AIDS related complications 2 years before the end of military rule in Nigeria. We call in all the mothers and the parents and all the witches full of heartbreak and hope, rage and sorrow, loss and and the strength that makes us get up and tend to the children even when we are terrified and broken, and we make them lunch and make them laugh and make the world as safe and beautiful for them as we can and we always will, and piece by piece we stitch care into the fabric of the world in honour of all those children we have lost, including ourselves. Feel them around you, full of song, ten thousand generations strong, all those who gave birth to our hard fought sovereignty and who call us forward now. ## **The body as resistance** Systems of control that diminish and brutalize life and the planet begin with the body. With our bodies, with women’s bodies, with queer bodies, with the imposition of gender roles that diminish possibilities for all beings. They start with what you can wear, When you can speak and who believes you when you do. Where you can go and at what hour; What you can buy or sell or inherit or own. Whether you can vote. Whether your labour is recognized. Whether your sexuality belongs to you. Whether your children belong to you. Whether your body is respectable, attractive, disgusting, dangerous, disposable. Whether you’re allowed to gather. Whether you’re allowed to say no. But know this - resistance comes back through the body too. Feel it rising in you, in your body exactly as it is. We stand together. Incant together, sing, march, vote, shriek in the night, weep, keen, gather, refuse. We refuse to be silenced, refuse to be invisible, we insist upon our vision, we make ourselves seen. We make ourselves undeniable, problematic, ungovernable, we wield our power in the streets and in our minds, seeing paths to freedom, dancing together and down alleyways where you’ll never see us coming. We call in the queen *mothers, the witch mothers*. Not only biological mothers. Mother as ancestor, elder, teacher, healer, organizer. Mother as keepers of memory, progentiors of memory. Mother as the person who makes a table large enough for everyone, who feeds the movement, who knows where the bodies are buried, the keeper of songs. Mother is the voice from the mask that says: *You are not alone.* And then gathers the others. The fierce power of the mother can be soft and it can bare sharp teeth, stand in front of the machinery of power singing, loving the people enough to fight for the world they deserve. Funmilayo understood this. Idia has come down to us through a political and ritual tradition that understood it too. The mother can be a source of sovereignty because she is bound to the continuation of life. And sovereignty, at its deepest level, is about the right of a person and of a people to determine the conditions under which life continues. Queen Idia is a talisman for mother power, a mask through which to imagine we can see that future queendom where all people are free. The Combahee River Collective wrote in 1977 that the systems of racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression are interconnected, and that Black women's liberation can’t be separated from the destruction of those systems. Their famous formulation was that if Black women were free, everyone else would have to be free, because their freedom would require the destruction of all the systems of oppression. If the people most constrained by overlapping systems become free, then the systems themselves have to change. The cage can't remain intact. That idea IS CORE to our witchcraft. Because resistance magic isn't only about protecting ourselves from power. It's about changing the conditions that make some people less free than others. A protection spell might keep harm from the door, but a justice spell, a spell that cuts the cords of patriarchy that binds our thoughts and limbs and language, this kind of witchcraft aims to sever the chains of imperialism that leave scars across all our lives, it send roots flowering up through cracking systems and lifts us all. A liberation practice asks who built the house, who has the keys, who is allowed inside, who cleans it, who owns the land beneath it, and who has been told for generations that they should be grateful for its scraps and leavings. This is where Black feminist thought gives ritual practitioners something essential. Justice has to become practice. It has to become relationship. It has to become material. And to do that, it has to tell complicated truths. Queen Idia is a complicated ancestor for a liberation altar, during her era the Oba (King) of Benin traded in enslaved people, especially women from neighbouring tribes captured during military campaigns. They outlawed the sale of men, those were the kings property, valuable to the kingdom, but the women could be sold for profit. Benin wasn’t a major slave trading kingdom, the majority of their exchange economy was focused on the work of their master artisans, but still, Idia was attended by enslaved women and eunuchs. Our ancestries are full of injustice, complicated people, all light and dark, both side of the kola nut, and I want to call on the weird, cliff’s edge power of not forgiving or cancelling but drawing up into my veins, my stories, the truth, that electricity, the messy and that evades oversimiplification, that goes walking one step at a time, slowly, steps forward and back, spiraling. I want to scale out a little more, spiral out a little further because there’s another queen being in this story who we haven’t called in, another life we haven’t honoured and death we haven’t mourned, though she was right here with us with her children her people. As witches we’re defined by a way of seeing that allows itself to be distracted, looking past the noisy people and their politics, to see the trees, and the spirits standing in the tall grass, the animals, the living world breathing, the context, the ground alive behind the human egos carving their way violently across space and time. I want to call into the source behind the ivory masks, the generations of ivory carved by master craftspeople, the being whose was killed to make the mask of Idia, Queen Mother, the being whose gentle massive soul looks at us through it too, haunting behind the human face, obfuscated by layers of form and history and art.. I call in the elephant queens. Elephant mothers carry maps in their bodies. Maps made from decades of walking, through drought, birth, loss, migration. Elephant matriarchs hold sacred ecological and social knowledge, and that knowledge can become a matter of survival. During the severe Tanzanian drought of 1993, researchers found that family groups that left the national park following the elephant matriarchs to places they remembered from decades before, experienced much lower calf mortality than groups that remained. Older females are better at distinguishing familiar elephants from unfamiliar ones, they keep a social map, they tell their people when they’re safe. And when these mothers are killed, it rips apart the fabric of the community. Research on elephants affected by poaching, culling and other forms of social disruption has found that the loss of the matriarch leads to physiological stress and sickness, lower reproductive success, more fragmented family groups, more violent young male bull elephants, and less decisive movement. The people without their mother are sick, angry and lost.These effects can persist for decades. Poaching kill old elephants because their massive tusks are valuable. Culling removes elders in the name of population management. Colonialism removes people from land, interrupts transmission, renames places, takes sacred objects and breaks the continuity through which knowledge travels. The result is the same wound. A younger generation is left trying to navigate the world without those who know how to read it. So when we call in the Queen Mother, I want to call in the elephant mother too. To weep with her and honour her. The one who remembers the water. The one who knows when to leave and when to stay. The mother as keeper of the route home. ## **The season of sovereignty** This is our season of sovereignty. And sovereignty isn’t a solitary figure on the throne. Sovereignty is the capacity to belong to ourselves while remaining accountable to one another, all of each other. Idia's power came through relationship with her son, her kingdom, her ancestors, her medicines, her spiritual world. The women of Abeokuta built alliances across class. They brought market women and educated women into the same movement. This is a kind of ritual technology we can practice anywhere. Gather. Name what’s happening. Tell the complicated truth. Share resources. Learn the history. Make the invisible visible. Sing. Feed each other. Protect each other. Refuse shame. Refuse isolation. Sing! Refuse the story that says you are powerless. You aren't only one person. You are a node in a network. You are someone's ancestor. You are a witch queen. You are a herd. ## **The eye that sees** Look at Idia, trace the iron in her eyes, to the woman whose image survived the destruction of the palace. To the Queen who could see otherwise, recognize the pattern, know when the truth has entered the room, witness the first small shift before the structure begins to fall. We hold the mask aloft and call in all the Queen Mothers, Idia and the elephants, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The sovereign women, complete in their power, We call in the queen mother, the witch mother, the creators of the world forever being born. The mother who sees us, who says: **We are still here.** And then calls every body home. BFB. ## Sources ## Works Cited Achebe, Nwando. *Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa*. Ohio University Press, 2020\. [https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/50/](https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/50/?ref=missingwitches.com). Beard, Mary. *Women & Power: A Manifesto*. 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Foley, Charles, et al. “Severe Drought and Calf Survival in Elephants.” *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*, vol. 276, no. 1658, 2009, pp. 1079–1086.[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article-abstract/4/5/541/49864/Severe-drought-and-calf-survival-in-elephants](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article-abstract/4/5/541/49864/Severe-drought-and-calf-survival-in-elephants?ref=missingwitches.com) Johnson-Odim, Cheryl, and Nina Emma Mba. *For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria*. University of Illinois Press, 1997\. [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p066139](https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p066139&ref=missingwitches.com). McComb, Karen, et al. “Matriarchs as Repositories of Social Knowledge in African Elephants.” *Science*, vol. 292, no. 5516, 2001, pp. 491–494\. [https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1057895](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1057895?ref=missingwitches.com). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Pendant Mask of Ìyọ́bà Idià.” *The Met Collection*. [https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/318622](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/318622?ref=missingwitches.com). Thaler, Lore, Stephen R. Arnott, and Melvyn A. Goodale. “Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts.” *PLOS ONE*, vol. 6, no. 5, 2011, e20162\. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020162](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020162?ref=missingwitches.com). The British Museum. “Pendant-Mask; Regalia.” *The British Museum Collection*, registration no. Af1910,0513.1\. [https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E\_Af1910-0513-1](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E%5FAf1910-0513-1?ref=missingwitches.com). The British Museum. “Collecting Histories.” *The British Museum*. [https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/collecting-histories](https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/collecting-histories?ref=missingwitches.com). ## Further Reading Johnson-Odim, Cheryl. “Ransome-Kuti, Funmilayo.” *Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History*, 2018\. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.269](https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.269?ref=missingwitches.com). Lorde, Audre. *Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches*. Crossing Press, 1984\. [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198292/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198292/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/?ref=missingwitches.com). UNESCO. *Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Women's Union of Abeokuta*. UNESCO Publishing, 2015\. [https://shop.unesco.org/products/funmilayo-ransome-kuti-and-the-womens-union-of-abeokuta](https://shop.unesco.org/products/funmilayo-ransome-kuti-and-the-womens-union-of-abeokuta?ref=missingwitches.com). ##