44 Copyright © 2017, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 4 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2472-4.ch004 ABSTRACT The principles of restorative justice (RJ) and traditional African mediatory practices share a similar vi- sion about giving social healing to ofenders, victims, and communities in the aftermath of victimization. Regrettably, colonialism drove Africa’s traditional restoration-based justice initiative out by forcefully replacing it with its retribution-oriented alternative. The chapter theoretically examines RJ vis-à-vis women’s experiences of violence in Nigeria. It obtained its data mainly from secondary sources. It argues that culture prevents numerous cases involving the interests of women, as wives or intimate partners of men, from public negotiation especially with or before strangers in Nigeria. This chapter concludes that RJ is an innovative means of returning to and modernizing Africa’s history of social healing to ease access of Nigerians to justice, regardless of gender. INTRODUCTION The pre-colonial people of Africa regulated their behavior using the home-grown normative order, which got its values from an exclusively African ontological metaphysics strengthened by an African belief system (Juma, 2007). At that time, African communities were not under the pressure of intense insecurity. However, to maintain the expansionist passion of Europe to establish legitimacy by coercion, through its colonial policy, it demonized the subsisting indigenous judicial practices of the African people and forcibly replaced them with their retribution-oriented justice option. Using the combined power of the dead and the gods who simultaneously approved the decisions of the living, African elders, men, women, and the youths created a metaphysical environment in which their efforts to resolve social issues make meaning only within the African context (Mqhayi, 1914). In a purely traditional understanding, gender- based violence (GBV) was not a phenomenon that threatened harmonious co-existence and productive interactions between men and women in Africa’s pre-colonial epoch. Restorative Justice and Women’s Experiences of Violence in Nigeria Johnson Ayodele Lagos State University, Nigeria