Mabel Dove Danquah

Biography

Mabel Ellen Dove was born in Accra in 1905 to Frans Dove, a prominent Sierra Leonean-born lawyer who became the first President of the Gold Coast Bar, and Eva Buckman, an Osu businesswoman. From age six she was educated at the Annie Walsh Memorial School in Freetown, Sierra Leone, then in England at an Anglican convent school in Bury St Edmunds and at St Michael's College, Hurstpierpoint, where she completed a secretarial course. Back in West Africa she worked for eight years as a shorthand-typist with Elder Dempster and other trading firms, respectable work that concealed a subversive pen.

From 1931 to 1934 she wrote the "Women's Corner" column in The Times of West Africa under the pen name "Marjorie Mensah," using wit and satire to urge women to fight for their rights and to needle the colonial establishment. Other papers and other masks followed: "Dama Dumas" in the African Morning Post, "Ebun Alakija" in the Nigerian Daily Times, "Akosua Dzatsui" in the Accra Evening News. In September 1933 she married the statesman-scholar J. B. Danquah; they had a son and divorced in the mid-1940s. In 1951 Kwame Nkrumah appointed her editor of the CPP's Accra Evening News, making her one of the first women to edit a newspaper in Africa. Then, in June 1954, she stood for the Convention People's Party in the Ga Rural constituency and won, becoming the first woman elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Gold Coast, and the first African woman elected to any African legislative assembly.

She was also an accomplished fiction writer, with stories including "Anticipation," "The Torn Veil" and "Payment" (1947), "Invisible Scar" (1966) and "Evidence of Passion" (1969), anthologised by Langston Hughes in "An African Treasury" and by Margaret Busby in "Daughters of Africa." Blindness from 1972 curtailed her writing. She died in 1984.

Historical Context

The Gold Coast of the 1930s to 1950s was the crucible of African anticolonial politics: a literate coastal elite, a vibrant African-owned press, and after 1949 Nkrumah's mass-based CPP driving toward self-government. Journalism was overwhelmingly male and politics entirely so; the elections of the early 1950s were the continent's first major experiments in African electoral self-rule. Dove operated at the exact intersection of press, feminism and nationalism, and got to the ballot before any other woman on the continent.

What She Fought For

Women's right to a public voice and to political office; an end to colonial rule; and the idea, radical in her time, that African women should draw inspiration from the suffragists and "break with form." Her columns argued in print what her 1954 election proved in fact.

Major Achievements

• Pioneered the "Marjorie Mensah" women's column in The Times of West Africa (1931–1934), among West Africa's first female political columnists.
• Published "The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for Mr Shaw," a satirical riposte to George Bernard Shaw (1934).
• Editor of the Accra Evening News (1951), among the first women to edit a newspaper in Africa.
• First woman elected to any African legislative assembly, winning Ga Rural for the CPP (1954).
• Landmark short fiction anthologised in "An African Treasury" (1960) and "Daughters of Africa" (1992).
• "Selected Writings of a Pioneer West African Feminist" (2004) restored her work to the canon.

Her Impact Today

Dove Danquah is regarded as Ghana's trailblazing feminist writer, the forerunner of Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, and the symbolic starting point of women's parliamentary representation in Africa. The Dove Foundation for Global Change was founded in her honour, and her Shaw satire featured in the British Library's "West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song" exhibition. Every African woman parliamentarian sits in a line of succession that begins with her 1954 victory.

Sources: Wikipedia (Mabel Dove Danquah), GhanaWeb, ModernGhana, British Library exhibition records, "Selected Writings of a Pioneer West African Feminist" (eds. Newell and Gadzekpo).