African Women Who Led
4 women in the archive worked for 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.
4 women in the archive
ModernGrace Alele-Williams
Nigerian mathematician and the first woman to become a Vice-Chancellor of a Nigerian university. She spent her life fighting for girls to study mathematics and science at a time when most people believed those subjects were not for women.
ModernJadesola Olayinka Akande
First Nigerian female professor of Law and Vice-Chancellor of Lagos State University. A respected authority on constitutional law who held the national honours of CON and OFR.
ModernMaimuna Waziri
Nigerian professor of chemistry and the first female Vice-Chancellor of Federal University, Gashua. She emerged from a field of 47 professors to lead the institution in 2021.
Pre-ColonialTin Hinan
Legendary 4th-century Tuareg queen and ancestral mother of the Kel Ahaggar confederacy, whose tomb in the Algerian Sahara remains one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in North African history.