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Summary
Society has grown accustomed to stories of trailblazer women. Yet, there are women who reshape the future in their own way. These are the memorable women.
When we decided the theme of the third issue of The Archivist would revolve around the exploits of women in Nigerian history, I immediately thought of my mother. As a child, my mother was the centre of my world. All I wanted was to make her burden lighter, even when there wasn’t much I could do about it for a long time. That admiration hasn’t faded as I’ve grown older. In times of trouble, I often ask myself, “What would Mercy do?”
Why centre my mother in a conversation about Nigerian history? Her name doesn’t ring as the widely recognised Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who fought unfair taxation of women and dethroned a king; or Margaret Ekpo, the trailblazing women’s rights activist who made her mark in Nigerian politics; or Gambo Sawaba, who endured repeated imprisonment fighting for voting rights for women in the North. Mercy who?
It’s a fair question. My mother didn’t break a colonial officer’s gun into two with her knee, openly rebel against a brutal military regime, or achieve any of the headline-grabbing accomplishments that land women in the history books. But she did protect me from becoming a child bride at 15, even when her circumstances and community encouraged it. She, like so many women, made history in the quiet, everyday ways that rarely get recorded but shape lives nonetheless.
In exploring the history of Nigerian women, we don’t want to stop at the stories of popular figures like Ransome-Kuti, Ekpo and Sawaba who achieved landmark feats. The way history is often told implies that only norm-defying women deserve recognition. Still, memorable Nigerian women abound everywhere we turn—women whose names may never be printed in textbooks but whose choices, sacrifices, and defiance have shaped generations.
Ultimately, this issue seeks to explore the full experience of Nigerian women across different eras: who they have always been, what they have always been capable of, what they have done, and what new generations of women can learn from the old in navigating the modern world.
What’s the connection between a women-led anti-tax protest in 1947 and the #EndSARS protests of 2020? What’s similar or different between the experiences of a woman running for political office in 1992 and another in 2023? What social problems were most pressing for Nigerian women in 1954 or 1972, and how much has changed about those problems in 2025?
The Archivist will explore these over the next few weeks through multimedia stories that reinforce one undeniable truth: Nigerian women—whether celebrated or overlooked—have never needed permission to shape the world.
This article was first published on Archivi.ng as part of its issue series.
