African Women Who Fought for Women in Power
7 women in the archive worked for women's political leadership. 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.
7 women in the archive
ModernBaleka Mbete
South African politician and poet. ANC veteran; first woman Speaker of the National Assembly; Deputy President; advocate for women's representation and the arts.
IndependenceCarmen Pereira
PAIGC political commissar who commanded the southern front of Guinea-Bissau's liberation war and, in May 1984, became the first woman ever to act as head of state of an African country.
ModernElisabeth Domitien
Businesswoman and politician who in 1975 became Prime Minister of the Central African Republic, the first woman ever to lead a government anywhere in Africa, and who lost the job within a year for telling Bokassa to his face that he should not crown himself emperor.
ColonialLilian Ngoyi
Anti-apartheid leader who became the first woman elected to the ANC executive. Led the 1956 Women's March against pass laws and was tried in the Treason Trial.
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.
ContemporaryNkosazana Dlamini-Zuma
South African politician and physician who served as the first woman Chairperson of the African Union Commission, having previously led South Africa's transformation of its healthcare system as Minister of Health.
ContemporarySylvie Kinigi
Economist who became Burundi's first female Prime Minister in 1993, survived the coup that killed the president three months later, and as acting head of state held a shattered government together long enough to hand power back to an elected successor.