BOOK V
The Women Who Built Africa
Pharaohs, queens, commanders, organisers, scientists and Nobel laureates who shaped the continent and were written out of the summary.
8 entries
Hatshepsut
Pharaoh, builder, trader.
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for around two decades as pharaoh in her own right, presiding over a period of peace, an enormous building programme and a celebrated trading expedition to the land of Punt. Her monuments were defaced decades after her death in an erasure that historians are still arguing about.
EgyptAmina of Zazzau
The queen who walled her cities.
Warrior queen of the Hausa state of Zazzau, remembered in chronicle and oral tradition for campaigns that opened trade routes across Hausaland and for the fortified earthen walls — ganuwar Amina — attributed to her. Her historicity is accepted; her dates and the scale of her conquests are argued.
Hausaland (Nigeria)Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba
Thirty years of diplomacy and war against Portugal.
Njinga Mbande negotiated, converted, defected, allied with the Dutch, commanded armies personally into her sixties and kept a state independent of Portuguese Angola for four decades. She is one of the best-documented African rulers of the seventeenth century, and among the most difficult to sentimentalise.
AngolaYaa Asantewaa
'If you men will not go forward, then we will.'
Queen mother of Ejisu, Yaa Asantewaa led the last Asante war against British rule in 1900 after the governor demanded to sit on the Golden Stool. The rising was defeated and she died in exile in the Seychelles — but the stool was never surrendered, and the demand that provoked her has become the standard illustration of what colonial officials failed to understand.
GhanaFunmilayo Ransome-Kuti
The market women's union that brought down a king.
Teacher, organiser and suffragist, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti built the Abeokuta Women's Union into a movement of tens of thousands, forced the abdication of the Alake of Abeokuta in 1949 over unjust taxation, campaigned for women's votes across Nigeria, and was fatally injured in 1977 when soldiers attacked her son Fela's compound.
NigeriaWangari Maathai
Fifty million trees, planted by women.
The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, which paid rural women to raise and plant tens of millions of trees — and in doing so built a civic network that took on land-grabbing, deforestation and one-party rule.
KenyaMiriam Makeba
Mama Africa, exiled for thirty-one years.
Miriam Makeba carried South African music to the world for three decades of exile after her passport was revoked for testifying against apartheid at the United Nations. She was a major recording artist, the first African woman to win a Grammy, and a political figure whose career was repeatedly damaged by the positions she refused to abandon.
South AfricaEllen Johnson Sirleaf
Africa's first elected woman head of state.
Elected president of Liberia in 2005 after fourteen years of civil war had destroyed the state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf stabilised the country, cleared crippling external debt, oversaw the first peaceful transfer of power between elected Liberian presidents in seventy-three years, and led through the Ebola epidemic of 2014. Liberians' assessments of her remain genuinely divided.
Liberia