Women Who Shaped the Century

Yoruba society gave women institutional political authority before colonial rule, removed it under colonial rule, and spent the twentieth century getting parts of it back through new routes. The single most instructive episode is the Abẹ́òkúta women's revolt of 1946 to 1949, because what the women demanded was not a new right but the restoration of a representation the Ìyálóde office had already provided. Alongside that political line runs a second one: the Yoruba women who were the first Nigerian women in medicine, law, the university and the boardroom, most of them products of the same mission-school system that produced the male nationalists.

This file covers the political organisers, the title-holders and the professional firsts. Scholars are treated at length in the scholars files.

Fúnmiláyọ̀ Ransome-Kuti (1900 to 1978)

Ransome-Kuti is the most consequential Nigerian woman of the twentieth century and one of the very few African political figures of her generation with a genuinely international standing.

She was born Frances Abigail Olúfúnmiláyọ̀ Thomas at Abẹ́òkúta on 25 October 1900 1. Her father was a returnee of Sierra Leonean recaptive descent; the family was Anglican and mission-educated. She was the first female student admitted to Abẹ́òkúta Grammar School, and studied at Wincham Hall School for Girls in Cheshire from 1919 to 1922 1. She dropped the English forename Frances in the 1940s as a deliberate political act. She married the Reverend Israel Olúdọ̀tun Ransome-Kuti, an educator and the first president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers, in 1925 1. She was among the first Nigerian women to drive a car.

The Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union and the tax revolt

She began with the Abẹ́òkúta Ladies Club, a body of educated Christian women, and transformed it. The turning point was her contact with market women who came to her for literacy classes and told her what was happening at the markets: arbitrary seizure of rice and other produce by colonial officials, and a flat tax levied on women traders with no corresponding representation. In 1946 the club was reconstituted as the Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union, open to market women and organised in Yoruba, with dues low enough for traders to pay 1.

The Union's alliance is the point. It joined the traders, who held the older market authority and the numbers, to the mission-educated women, who held literacy, English and organisational technique. Membership reached the tens of thousands.

The campaign ran against the Aláké of Ẹ̀gbáland, Ademọlá II, and the Sole Native Authority structure through which the colonial government taxed women. In November 1947 around ten thousand women marched on the palace, camping outside it for days, singing satirical songs 1. Further demonstrations followed in December 1947 and April 1948, demanding the abolition of the flat tax on women and the Aláké's abdication 1. The tax was suspended in 1948. Ademọlá II abdicated on 3 January 1949 and went into exile for three years 1. Four women, including Ransome-Kuti, were appointed to the reconstituted council.

The demand's shape is worth restating. Ẹ̀gbá women had held formal representation through the Ìyálóde and the market title hierarchy. Indirect rule dealt only with male chiefs and eliminated the women's channel while continuing to tax the women. The revolt targeted exactly that removal.

National and international work

She founded the Nigerian Women's Union and then the Federation of Nigerian Women's Societies, which by the 1950s claimed a membership in the hundreds of thousands and campaigned for universal adult suffrage 1. She was a member of the NCNC and later of a succession of parties, and she was consistently to the left of the main nationalist leadership.

She was elected a vice-president of the Women's International Democratic Federation in 1953, travelled to the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe, and was president of the Nigerian branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom from 1963 1. The Nigerian government withdrew her passport in 1956 on the grounds of her communist associations. She received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1970 and was made a Member of the Order of the Niger in 1965 1.

Kalakuta and her death

On 18 February 1977 soldiers attacked the Kalakuta Republic, the Lagos compound of her son the musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, following his sustained public attacks on the military government. Ransome-Kuti, then seventy-six, was thrown from an upper window. She never recovered and died on 13 April 1978 1. Fela delivered her coffin to the Dodan Barracks gate and wrote Coffin for Head of State and Unknown Soldier, the latter naming the official inquiry's finding that the compound had been destroyed by an unknown soldier.

Her children include Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the physician Olikoye Ransome-Kuti who as Minister of Health ran Nigeria's primary health care and early AIDS programmes and was internationally recognised for both, and the physician and human rights activist Beko Ransome-Kuti 1.

Hannah Ìdòwú Dídẹ́olú Awólọ́wọ̀ (1915 to 2015)

HID Awólọ́wọ̀ is usually described as a politician's wife, which understates a business career that financed a political movement and a period in which she was effectively her husband's political proxy.

She was born Hannah Ìdòwú Dídẹ́olú Adélànà at Ìkẹnnẹ́ on 25 November 1915 and married Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ in 1937 2. She was a trader before, during and after his political career, becoming the first Nigerian distributor for the Nigerian Tobacco Company in 1957 and a pioneer importer of lace and textiles 2. That trading income supported the household while he read for the bar in London and underwrote a substantial part of his early political work, which is the material basis of a political career usually narrated without one.

She coordinated the women's wing of the Action Group and campaigned nationally 2. During his imprisonment from 1963 to 1966 she held the party's western structure together and stood in elections on the explicit understanding that she would vacate the seat for him on his release 2. She held the title Yeye Oòduà of Yorubaland 2. She died on 19 September 2015 and was buried at Ìkẹnnẹ́ on 25 November 2015, exactly a hundred years after her birth 2. Her granddaughter Dolapo is married to Yemi Osinbajo, Vice President of Nigeria from 2015 to 2023 2.

Wúràọlá Adépéjú Ẹsan (1909 to 1985)

Ẹsan was the first woman to sit in the Nigerian National Assembly, and the combination she represented, modern legislator and traditional title-holder, is characteristically Yoruba.

She was born in March 1909 in Calabar to an Ìbàdàn family, the Ojo-badan line, her father a First World War veteran in the line of succession to an Ìbàdàn chieftaincy and her mother a trader known as Ìyá Gbogbo, mother of all 3. She was educated at the Sacred Heart convent school in Ìbàdàn, at Baptist Girls College Idi Aba in Abẹ́òkúta, and took a teacher's diploma at the United Missionary College, Molete, Ìbàdàn 3. She taught domestic science at Àkúrẹ́ from 1930 to 1934.

Her substantive career was in education. Female enrolment in the west was around twenty per cent in 1945, and in 1944 she founded schools of her own to change that, later establishing the People's Girls Grammar School in Ìbàdàn 3.

She joined the Action Group's women's wing and in 1960 was nominated to the Senate by the Western Region, becoming the first woman member of the Nigerian National Assembly 3. She was also Ìyálóde of Ìbàdàn, holding the senior Yoruba women's chieftaincy at the same time as a federal legislative seat 3.

Fọláké Ṣólánkẹ́ (born 1932)

Ṣólánkẹ́ was the first woman in Nigeria to be made a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the country's equivalent of taking silk.

She was born on 29 March 1932 4. She read Latin and mathematics at what was then King's College in the University of Durham, at Newcastle, graduating in 1954, then read law and was called to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1960 4. She began practice in Nigeria in 1962, was appointed the first woman Commissioner in the Western State in 1972, and chaired the Western Nigeria Television Broadcasting Corporation 4. She was conferred with the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 1981, the first woman and the first Nigerian woman to wear the silk gown 4.

In 1994 she was elected International President of Zonta International, the first African and the first non-white holder of that office 4. She remains alive 4.

Bọ́lá Kuforiji-Olubi (1936 to 2016)

Kuforiji-Olubi was the first Nigerian woman to lead a multinational company in Nigeria and the first woman to chair a Nigerian bank.

She was born on 28 September 1936 and became a school headmistress at nineteen in 1955 before taking an honours degree in economics from the University of London in 1963 and qualifying as a chartered accountant in Nigeria and the United Kingdom 5. She was the twenty-fifth president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria and its first woman president 5. She was the first Nigerian woman to become chief executive of a multinational company in Nigeria and was chairman of United Bank for Africa from 1984 to 1990 5. She served as Minister of Commerce and Industry in Ernest Ṣónẹ́kan's Interim National Government in 1993 5. She was made a Member of the Order of the Niger in 1979 and died in Lagos on 3 December 2016 5.

The Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà offices in the modern state

The Ìyálóde and the Ìyálọ́jà are the two senior women's offices in Yoruba town government and both survive into the present, which makes Yorubaland unusual: most West African women's title systems did not survive colonial administration intact.

Ìyálóde, from ìyá ní ilé òde, glossed as "mother in charge of the outside", is a town-wide chieftaincy over women's affairs, historically carrying a seat in council and jurisdiction over disputes among women, and in the nineteenth century real military and fiscal weight 6. Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà, second Ìyálóde of Ìbàdàn, who died on 30 June 1874, was among the wealthiest people in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, a large-scale trader and slaveholder who maintained her own armed following 6. Madam Efúnrọyẹ Tinúbú held equivalent power in Lagos and then as Ìyálóde of the Ẹ̀gbá. Their nineteenth-century careers are treated in the earlier files; what matters here is that the office they held was not abolished, and that women such as Wúràọlá Ẹsan held it while also sitting in a modern legislature.

Ìyálọ́jà, "mother of the market", is the head of the market women's associations, with authority over pricing disputes, market allocation, levies and discipline 7. In modern Lagos the office is politically substantial because the market associations are large, disciplined and mobilisable, which makes the Ìyálọ́jà a real electoral actor rather than a ceremonial one. Abíbátù Mọ̀gàjí held the Lagos office for decades until her death in 2013; Fọláṣadé Tinúbú-Ojo was installed as Ìyálọ́jà General of Lagos on 29 October 2013 and has used the position for public health advocacy among market women alongside its established political role 7. The overlap between that office and national politics is a matter of open public comment in Nigeria.

The general point is that Yoruba women's political authority was rooted in control of trade. Where that control persisted, the office persisted, and the modern Ìyálọ́jà is the direct continuation of a precolonial institution rather than a revival of one.

Firsts in law, medicine and the university

Name	Dates	First
Stella Jane Thomas	1906 to 1974	First woman lawyer in West Africa; read law at Oxford, called to the bar 1933; first woman magistrate in Nigeria, 1943. Yoruba Nigerian of Sierra Leone Krio descent 8
Elizabeth Abímbọ́lá Awóliyì	1910 to 1971	First woman to practise medicine in Nigeria; qualified 1938; first West African woman to hold the Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin; second president of the National Council of Women's Societies from 1964 9
Kòfoworọlá Adémọlá	1913 to 2002	First Black African woman to take a degree at the University of Oxford, St Hugh's College, 1935; educationist and campaigner for girls' education; wife of Sir Adétòkunbọ̀ Adémọlá, Chief Justice of Nigeria 10
Adétóún Ògúnṣeye	1926 to 2021	First Nigerian woman to hold a professorship in library studies and the first woman dean of a faculty at the University of Ìbàdàn 11
Bọ́lánlé Awé	1933 to 2023	First woman appointed to the academic staff of a Nigerian university, in history at Ìbàdàn, and Nigeria's first woman professor of history. Treated at length in the scholars file 12
Fọláké Ṣólánkẹ́	born 1932	First woman Senior Advocate of Nigeria, 1981 4
Bọ́lá Kuforiji-Olubi	1936 to 2016	First Nigerian woman chief executive of a multinational in Nigeria; first woman chairman of a Nigerian bank 5

Two women appear regularly on Nigerian lists of firsts and are not Yoruba. Agnes Yewande Savage, who qualified in medicine at Edinburgh in 1929 and is the first West African woman to qualify in orthodox medicine, was born in Edinburgh to a Gold Coast father and a Scottish mother, and is properly a Ghanaian first 9. Grace Alele-Williams, the first Nigerian woman to earn a doctorate and the first woman vice-chancellor of a Nigerian university, at Benin in 1985, was from Warri and of Itsekiri background, not Yoruba.

Two exclusions and two omissions

Ladi Kwali, the potter whose portrait is on the twenty naira note, is frequently listed in Nigerian roll-calls of women achievers. She was Gwari, also written Gbagyi, born about 1925 at Kwali in the Northern Region and dying on 12 August 1984, and she is not Yoruba 13. Her work belongs to a northern Nigerian ceramic tradition entirely distinct from Yoruba pottery and she is noted here only to prevent the misattribution.

Dora Akunyili, Director-General of NAFDAC from 2001 to 2008, was Igbo, born on 14 July 1954 at Makurdi to a family from Nanka in Anambra State, and is not covered in this corpus 14.

Two names sometimes given in lists of pioneering Yoruba women, Olúfúnmiláyọ̀ Adékọ́ya and Tinúọlá Dedeko, could not be attached to a verifiable biography in accessible sources during the preparation of this file. They are named here so that a later researcher can pick them up, and no claims are made about them.