Too often, women are erased from history. You grow up hearing the same five names of the same five women, and it can start to feel like there were no other women in Nigeria’s old days. That’s not to mention that the ones you do hear about are flattened into the “first woman to…” stories and occasionally remembered only in Women’s Month.
That’s why we’ve decided to talk more about these women specifically after Women’s Month to continue the conversation. Because behind some of the most fascinating moments in Nigerian history, there is very often a woman people forgot to mention properly. So, if you’re looking for inspiration (because we need some inspiration to keep fighting in these trying times), Nigerian history has no shortage of women to borrow courage from.
- Madam Nwanyeruwa
Have you heard about the Women’s War or, as it’s more commonly but less accurately called, the Aba Women’s Riot? It was not just a riot, and it was definitely not just Aba. In 1929, Madam Nwanyeruwa, a widowed Igbo woman from Oloko, refused a colonial demand to count her household and livestock, which women understood as a sign that taxation was coming for them too. Her resistance helped spark a mass uprising involving thousands of women across southeastern Nigeria, all the way from Aba to Uyo and Abeokuta.
- Nnete Okorie-Egbe
Here’s another woman who played an important role in the Women’s War. Nnete Okorie-Egbe, a princess from Akwete, was one of the key organisers of the Women’s War, helping unite women across Opobo, Ibibio, Andoni, Ogoni, and Bonny (now in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States) against British colonial rule. Her organising helped build pressure strong enough that colonial authorities abandoned the planned tax. She was even sent to prison for two years for her role, like a real badass.
- Charlotte Obasa
A Nepo Baby who used her unique social status to build things that would last and make money while doing it. Born into the prominent Blaize family of Lagos, whose patriarch was one of the richest West Africans of his time, Charlotte Obasa not only established a girls’ school but then went on to found one of Lagos’s earliest motor transport businesses. In 1913, she founded the Anfani Motor Bus Service, one of the first motorised public transport systems in Lagos.
- Oyinkansola Abayomi
Before “girls’ education” became the buzzword for politicians to funnel government funds, Oyinkansola Abayomi was actually doing the work. In the 1920s, she founded the West African Educated Girls’ Club, which helped lay the groundwork for Queen’s College, Lagos, where she also became the school’s only Nigerian founding staff member. She didn’t end there: in 1944, she co-founded the Nigerian Women’s Party, which pushed for women’s political participation and was the first all-women’s party in the country.
- Elizabeth Abimbola Awoliyi
After excelling at Queen’s College, Elizabeth Abimbola Awoliyi earned a first-class medical degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1938 and became the first West African woman to receive a Licentiate from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, which is already powerful. At this time, Nigeria was still under British colonial rule, and higher education abroad, especially professional medical training, was accessible to very few Nigerians, let alone women. After her schooling, she helped shape maternal healthcare policy at the Federal Ministry of Health and helped establish family planning clinics that contributed to the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria. She also led women’s organisations, including the National Council of Women’s Societies, which was the country’s major umbrella body for women’s organisations.
- Omu Okwei
Did you know one of the most powerful business figures in Nigerian history was a woman with a trading empire?
Omu Okwei dominated West African trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dealing in palm oil, textiles, and European goods and becoming one of the wealthiest and most influential women of her time. When she was crowned Omu of Osomari in 1935, which meant she was queen of the market and the apex female authority in the Igbo dual-gender political system, overseeing women’s affairs and representing them in community leadership.
- Alimotu Pelewura
The Markets have always been owned by women, and Alimotu Pelewura is another perfect example of that. A hugely influential fish trader in Lagos, she became a major voice for traders. By 1910, she had already received a chieftaincy title from Oba Eshugbayi Eleko, and she later co-founded the Lagos Market Women’s Association. She led market women’s protests in Lagos against women’s taxation and even endured imprisonment. During World War II, when wartime economic restrictions made life harder, she rallied women to resist policies that threatened their survival.
- Margaret Ekpo
When Margaret Ekpo first ran for a seat in the regional House of Assembly in 1957, party leaders reportedly told her the election was “too crucial” to risk presenting a woman candidate. Which is funny, because by then she was already one of the main political organisers in the country. She had been mobilising women, building political consciousness, and insisting that women had to be active participants in Nigeria’s future. That didn’t deter her anyway. She went on to win election into the Aba Urban District Council in 1958 and then, in 1961, became one of the first women elected to the Eastern House of Assembly.
- Bolanle Awe
Some women lead the protest while others are charged with remembering those women who did. And that is worth remembering in itself. Bolanle Awe challenged the way the archive was built in the first place. As a historian, she argued that writing women into Nigerian history had “hardly begun,” partly because African history was deemed not meaningful in the first place. That means her work is one of the reasons why this article exists in the first place. She co-founded the Women’s Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC) in the 1980s, helping create a resource hub for women’s studies in Nigeria, and she taught and wrote women into Nigerian history as historical actors rather than side notes.
- Molara Ogundipe-Leslie
Some women are not comfortable with just joining the conversation; they must change it. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie was a poet, critic, scholar, and one of the most important feminist thinkers Nigeria has produced. She is especially known for STIWA — Social Transformation Including Women in Africa — a framework that insisted African women’s liberation had to be understood in relation to African realities, not just imported whole from elsewhere.
- Sophie Oluwole
Long before a lot of people were ready to treat African thought as serious philosophy, Sophie Oluwole was already insisting that it was. She became the first woman in Nigeria to earn a PhD in philosophy and later became head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lagos. She spent much of her career arguing that Yoruba intellectual traditions deserved to be understood as philosophy, not as folklore waiting for European approval.
- Adunni Oluwole
If you’re of the school of thought that stubborn women make the most difference, then Adunni Oluwole belongs on your mind. She was an actress, preacher, labour activist, and political organiser who fed striking workers during the 1945 general strike and became such a strong public voice that she was called “workers’ mother.” She later founded the Nigerian Commoners Liberal Party and became known for criticising elite nationalism so sharply that she was accused of being disruptive, which led to her banishment from Ibadan. Which, frankly, usually means she was saying something worth hearing.
- Safiya Hussaini
Not every woman on this list became significant because she chose public life. Some became impossible to ignore because their lives exposed the cruelty of the systems around them. Safiya Hussaini’s case did exactly that. In 2001, a Sharia court in Sokoto sentenced her to death by stoning after she gave birth following her divorce; in 2002, she was acquitted on appeal. Her case drew major international attention and became one of the most high-profile symbols of Nigeria’s position on women that it had no choice but to confront.
- Ladi Kwali
If you grew up seeing the old twenty-naira note, then you have already seen Ladi Kwali. She remains the first and only Nigerian woman to appear on a banknote, which honestly feels like the kind of fact that should come up more often. Born in Kwali in present-day FCT, she learned pottery from her aunt as a child, using the traditional Gwari method of hand-building with coiled clay. Her work later gained global attention through the Abuja Pottery Training Centre, where her traditional techniques met studio pottery methods. She won international awards, exhibited widely, and helped make Nigerian pottery visible on a much larger stage.
Why these women matter
It’s always important to know where you’re coming from and recognise the line of women who came before you. A long, interesting, stubborn line full of women who fought, built, argued, organised, cared, and kept going in spite of Nigeria.
