African Women Who Fought for Women's Education
6 women in the archive worked for women's education. They came from different countries and different centuries, but each of them saw a wrong that others accepted and set out to change it. Read their stories to see how the same cause looked from very different lives.
6 women in the archive
ColonialCharlotte Maxeke
First Black South African woman to earn a university degree. Founded the Bantu Women's League and fought pass laws. Called the 'Mother of Black Freedom in South Africa'.
ColonialFunmilayo Ransome-Kuti
Nigerian activist who led the Abeokuta Women's Union, fought colonial taxation, and became the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria. Mother of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti.
IndependenceGambo Sawaba
Nigerian activist who fought for women's right to vote in Northern Nigeria at enormous personal cost, arrested over 17 times and imprisoned repeatedly for defying the political establishment.
ColonialMabel Dove Danquah
Ghanaian journalist and satirist who, in 1954, became the first woman elected to any African legislative assembly, after two decades of skewering colonial power in the press under a rotation of witty pen names.
ColonialMadam Yoko
Mende leader who rose from celebrated Sande dancer to Paramount Chief of the Kpaa Mende Confederacy of fourteen chiefdoms, wielding the greatest political authority ever held by a woman in Sierra Leone up to her time.
Pre-ColonialNana Asma'u
Scholar, poet, and educator in the Sokoto Caliphate who built one of the earliest known systems of women's education in West Africa, training female teachers who carried learning into rural communities.