Contemporary

The contemporary position of Yoruba women contains a contradiction sharp enough that any account which resolves it too neatly is misdescribing it. By education, literacy, professional entry and commercial participation, women in the Yoruba southwest are among the best-placed in Nigeria and compare respectably with much of the continent. By representation in elected office, Nigeria ranks among the worst countries in the world, and the trend since 1999 is downward rather than upward.

A society that gave women constitutional office before colonial rule, and whose women organised the most effective anti-colonial mass movement in the country, now elects almost none of them. That is the fact to explain, and this file sets out what is documented before offering the explanations that are on offer.

Politics

The numbers

Following the 2023 general elections, women hold 3 of 109 Senate seats, or 2.7 per cent, and 17 of 360 House of Representatives seats, or 4.7 per cent, giving 20 of 469 seats in the National Assembly, or 4.2 per cent 1. The comparison with the outgoing Ninth Assembly is 8 women in the Senate at 7.3 per cent and 13 in the House at 3.6 per cent, 21 seats and 4.5 per cent overall 1.

Two features of that make it worse than the headline.

The Senate figure has fallen back to what it was at Nigeria's return to democracy in 1999, after seven electoral cycles 1. There has been no accumulation.

And in the March 2023 state elections, no women at all were elected to the Houses of Assembly of 15 of Nigeria's 36 states 1.

Nigeria's 4.2 per cent sits below the African lower-chamber average of roughly 8.6 per cent and far below the global average 1. Candidacy is part of the story: women were only about 9 to 10 per cent of candidates in 2023 2.

The southwest performs better than the north on most gender indicators, but the National Assembly figures are national and the corpus does not have a verified Yoruba-states breakdown to offer. Rather than estimate one, the gap is stated.

Why

Several explanations circulate in the Nigerian political science literature and none is sufficient alone.

Party gatekeeping and the cost of primaries. Nigerian party nomination runs on cash and on control of delegate structures. Women are underrepresented among candidates before any voter has a chance to reject them, which locates the constriction at the primary rather than at the ballot.

The winner-take-all single-member constituency. Nigeria has no reserved seats, no quota, and no proportional element, so there is no mechanism converting general support into seats. Proposals for reserved seats have repeatedly failed in the National Assembly.

The removal of the parallel structure. This is the historical explanation and it belongs to this corpus specifically. Yoruba women's precolonial political authority ran through a separate channel: an office representing women as a constituency, with its own base in the market. Indirect rule dismantled that channel and the post-colonial state did not restore it, so women's political participation was routed into a competitive individual electoral system in which the women's constituency has no institutional expression at all. The Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union of the 1940s was the last mass mobilisation to work the older logic, of women organised as women making demands on a government, and it succeeded. Nothing since has reproduced it. See Women's Political Offices and Colonial Encounter and Women's Resistance.

The Ìyálọ́jà question

The most instructive contemporary case is what has happened to the market title.

The succession of the Lagos market leadership runs from Alimọtù Pelewura, who led the Lagos Market Women's Association through the taxation and price-control fights of the 1930s and 1940s, to Chief Abibatu Mogaji, who succeeded her as Ìyálọ́jà and President-General of the Association of Nigerian Market Men and Women and held the position until her death in 2013 at ninety-six, to her granddaughter Folashade Tinubu-Ojo 3.

State the family relations plainly, because they are the substance of the criticism. Abibatu Mogaji was the mother of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007 and President of Nigeria from 2023. Folashade Tinubu-Ojo is his daughter 3. The office passed from the president's mother to the president's daughter.

The criticisms in Nigerian public debate are that the succession was nepotistic, that the holder lacked the age and market experience the position historically required, that the title's expansion from Ìyálọ́jà of Lagos to a national Ìyálọ́jà-General has no constitutional or traditional basis and no clear approving authority, and that the structure functions as a mobilising machine for a political family among a very large and electorally significant constituency 4. The attempted extension of the title into Edo State in 2024 and 2025 produced protests from market women there and objections from the Benin palace on the grounds that the title is not part of Benin's structure, that the selection process was opaque, and that the exercise was political 5.

The corpus's position is that these are reported criticisms in Nigerian public debate, not established findings, and they are labelled as such. What is not in dispute is the structural point. The Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà were achieved offices resting on an independent economic base and answerable to the women who produced that base. The contemporary title is conferred, and it is conferred within a political system. When an office that once represented women to power becomes an office through which power reaches women, its direction has reversed. That is the single most important thing to understand about the survival of the women's titles, and it is why a list of contemporary Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà is not evidence that the institution described in file 01 still exists.

Education

The southwest's figures are strong and the gender gap is the narrowest in Nigeria.

Adult literacy in the South West zone, from the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, stands at 89 per cent for men and 80.6 per cent for women 6. The comparison that matters is regional: North West literacy is 59 per cent for men and 29 per cent for women, and North East 50.5 for men and 31.8 for women 6. The southwest's female literacy is roughly two and a half times the North West's, and its gender gap is about eight points against thirty 6.

The Yoruba female-education advantage is a historical artefact with a traceable origin. The CMS and Baptist mission schools of the mid-nineteenth century, concentrated in Abẹ́òkúta, Lagos and Ìbàdàn, admitted girls from early on, and the returnee communities treated girls' schooling as normal. The professional firsts follow directly: Stella Jane Thomas (1906 to 1974), Nigeria's first woman lawyer in 1935 and first woman magistrate in 1943 7; Elizabeth Abimbola Awoliyi (1910 to 1971), Nigeria's first woman physician, qualifying from the University of Dublin in 1938 8; and Felicia Adetowun Omolara Ogunsheye, born 1926, first woman graduate of Yaba College of Technology in 1948, Nigeria's first woman professor at the University of Ìbàdàn in 1973 in library and information science, and the first woman dean at any Nigerian university from 1977 to 1979 9.

Ogunsheye's biography contains a detail worth pausing on: she has held the chieftaincy title of Ìyálàje of Ile-Oluji since 1982 9. The combination of a professorship and a traditional women's title in one career is characteristically Yoruba, and it recurs through the whole twentieth-century record. The two systems of standing have run in parallel rather than displacing one another.

These individuals are treated at greater length in Women Who Shaped the Century.

Business and the professions

Women's dominance of retail trade continues and is visible in any southwestern market. What changed in the twentieth century, and has not changed back, is the position of that trade in the overall structure: expatriate and then Lebanese firms took over wholesale distribution, so that Yoruba market women increasingly operated the retail end of a chain whose upper reaches they did not control 10. The women's institutions survived; their place in the hierarchy of trade did not.

Above the market, Yoruba women are well represented in law, medicine, academia, banking and the media relative to Nigerian averages, and this is a continuation of the mission-school and Lagos-elite line rather than a recent development. Bọ́lá Kuforiji-Olubi and Fọláké Ṣólánkẹ́ are among the documented cases, treated in Women Who Shaped the Century.

The corpus does not have verified current figures for women's share of Nigerian board seats, senior partnerships or professorships broken out for the southwest, and does not estimate them.

The diaspora

Two distinct diasporas bear on this subject and they should not be conflated.

The historic Atlantic diaspora. In Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and their extensions into the United States, women hold religious authority in Yoruba-derived traditions at the highest levels. The iyalorixá or mãe-de-santo is the head of a Candomblé terreiro, and the most celebrated houses of Bahia have been led by women in unbroken succession. This is a stronger institutional position for women than the equivalent in Nigeria in some respects, and it is one of the sources of pressure on the Ìyánífá question treated in Women in Yoruba Religion. The diaspora traditions are covered in section 08.

The contemporary migration. Yoruba women are a substantial part of the professional Nigerian migration to Britain, the United States and Canada from the 1980s onward, particularly in nursing and medicine. The remittance economy and the transnational household are now ordinary features of southwestern family life. The corpus does not have verified figures for the gender composition of this migration and does not supply estimates.

Feminist scholarship by Yoruba women

Yoruba women have produced one of the most substantial bodies of African feminist theory, and its defining characteristic is a refusal of the terms offered by Euro-American feminism combined with a refusal to abandon the critique of women's subordination. Naming the positions is more useful than summarising them together, because they disagree.

Molara Ogundipe (1940 to 2019). Born in Lagos, educated at University College Ibadan and Leiden, professor at the University of Port Harcourt, founding member of AAWORD in 1977 and of Women In Nigeria 11. Her Re-creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (Africa World Press, 1994) proposed STIWA, Social Transformation in Africa Including Women, and her stated reason for the acronym is the important part: "The reason for the acronym was to move us away from defining feminism and feminisms in relation to Euro-America or elsewhere and from declaiming loyalties or disloyalties" 11 The move is to make the object of theory African social transformation, with women's inclusion as a condition of it, rather than to make the object women's liberation defined elsewhere and then applied. Her position on the comparison is direct: precolonial Yoruba women "had more private and public spaces and respected roles than pre-feminist American middle-class women" 11

Mary Modupe Kolawole. Of Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ University, a founder member of the Network for Women's Studies. Her Womanism and African Consciousness (1997) argues for a womanism rooted in African values and not organised around the questions of sexuality central to Western feminist theorising, and she has written on women and Yoruba culture and on re-conceptualising African gender theory through what she calls the arere metaphor 12.

Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi. Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women (University of Chicago Press, 1996), developing an African womanism distinct from Alice Walker's usage. Ogunyemi is Igbo by birth and worked within Nigerian literary studies; she is named here because she is unavoidable in this literature and is frequently read alongside the Yoruba theorists.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. The Invention of Women (1997) is the most internationally influential and the most contested, and the dispute with Bibi Bakare-Yusuf is set out in full at Gender. Her later work on motherhood extends the argument, holding that the mother is the primary and constitutive category of Yoruba social organisation and that reading Yoruba society through "woman" and "wife" imports the wrong primary term.

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf. The most detailed critic of Oyěwùmí and, separately, the founder of Cassava Republic Press, which is itself part of the story of contemporary Nigerian women's cultural production.

Oyeronke Olajubu. Of the University of Ilorin, whose Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere (SUNY Press, 2003) is the standard work on its subject and takes a position between Oyěwùmí's and her critics', arguing for complementarity and duality rather than either equality or subordination 13. Treated in Women in Yoruba Religion.

What they share and where they split. All of them reject the transposition of Euro-American feminist categories onto Yoruba material, and all of them insist that the precolonial position of Yoruba women is misdescribed by both the colonial account and the Western feminist account. They split on whether the correct conclusion is that gender was not an organising category (Oyěwùmí), that it was but was relational and less rigid (Nolte, Olajubu, and in a different register Amadiume), or that the search for a pure precolonial baseline is itself methodologically unsound and masks contemporary subordination (Bakare-Yusuf). A reader should not treat "African feminism" as a single position.

The state of the institutions

Taking the institutions covered in this section one by one.

The Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà survive as titles and have lost the achieved character and the independent base that constituted them. See above.

Women's market organisation remains real and remains capable of collective action, but operates within party structures rather than against government as it did in 1947.

Women's religious offices in òrìṣà practice survive and in some traditions are vigorous, and the Ìyánífá question is live and unsettled; see Women in Yoruba Religion. The larger context is that the great majority of Yoruba people are now Christian or Muslim, and women's religious leadership in the Aládùrà churches and in Pentecostalism is where the numbers are.

Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ was inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 and is performed, with the difficulties of a festival whose funding base and belief context have both shifted; see Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́.

Ẹkún ìyàwó and the women's oral genres are documented but their performance context has largely gone; see Women's Oral Genres and Voice.

Customary inheritance and widowhood have been substantially reformed by statute and by the courts, though the reform is uneven in practice; see Marriage from the Woman's Side.

The honest summary is that the informal and economic bases of Yoruba women's authority have proved more durable than the formal and political ones. A market woman in Ìbàdàn today occupies a recognisable version of a position her great-grandmother occupied. The office that carried that position into the council does not function as it did, and nothing has replaced it.