By default, python2.7 is configured without --enable-unicode=ucs4: the default for that option is ucs2. The currently-released set of numba wheels do not include Linux binaries which are compatible with this default build (the compatible suffix would be -cp27-cp27m-manylinux1_i686.whl or -cp27-cp27m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl).

Please consider releasing wheels which support the default Python 2.7 build configuration.