A free history archive · 201 women · 34 articles
The women history forgot to teach you.
201 African women who ruled, fought, built and wrote, and were left out of the textbooks. Every profile sourced, free, no paywall.
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Five regions, 44 countries
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Short, ordered sets chosen by our editors. Twenty minutes each.
One event
The Aba Women's War, in five livesIn 1929, thousands of Igbo women shut down British rule in Eastern Nigeria over a rumoured tax. The colonial record called it a riot. Meet the market world that made it possible and the women who carried its method forward, from Abeokuta in 1949 to Chibok in 2014.Start →
Start here
Five women to start withOne per era, one per region. If you only ever read five profiles, read these: a queen who fought Portugal for forty years, a queen mother who besieged the British, a guerrilla who faced the guillotine, a Nobel laureate who planted a forest, and a village girl who became president.Start →
One era
Queens who ruled before the colonisers arrivedThree thousand years of African women who held real power: a pharaoh, a Kushite queen who fought Rome to a treaty, a Berber commander, a Benin queen mother, a Hausa conqueror and an Angolan strategist. Read them in order and the map fills in.Start →
One cause
The women who ended apartheidFrom a 1913 anti-pass protest to the 1990 release, six South African women in the order they took up the fight. One founded the movement, one led 20,000 to Pretoria, one voted no alone for 13 years, one was killed by a letter bomb, and two held the country together while the men were on Robben Island.Start →
