Despite (sometimes valid) stereotypes of Africa as a continent where women are often politically and socially marginalized, the region’s long and diffuse history shows an array of spaces and settings where women have served as political, social, or religious leaders. These range from northern to southern Africa, across traditional African religions as well as those introduced by Europeans, and across many spheres of influence.
The Context of Women in Africa
As in other regions, many of these women become legends in their own right and take on mythical and legendary qualities in popular memory. At the same time, women globally remain underrepresented in professional historical accounts, a fact that is changing in bounds.
As the world’s second-largest continent—and boasting one of the longest records of human existence—Africa’s human history is as diffuse as its topography and linguistic diversity.
While recent programs such as Viola Davis’s The Woman King and Netflix’s new series on Queen Njinga have highlighted the life of one particularly fascinating figure, they can provide the idea that women such as Njinga are outliers—unique in their ability to exert power on the spaces around them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Across the continent’s varied histories, women leaders in various spheres and from all areas of the continent have indelibly affected the societies in which they lived and set up social, political, and religious legacies for those yet to come.
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Religious Leaders From Nana to Nontheta
Within structures of Traditional African Religion, women have often served as healers, and at times as organized religious leaders. With the early introductions of Christianity and Islam to the continent, they have also served within Abrahamic spaces.
1. Perpetua
As a woman in Carthage (now Tunisia) under Roman occupation, Perpetua earned an education and became an outspoken advocate for her people under Roman rule. After converting to Christianity, she was martyred and symbolizes for many people both an early critic of colonial rule as well as an early leader in the faith. As did many people awaiting their deaths, Perpetua wrote a Passion, or account of her life and thoughts about her impending fate. Felicity, an enslaved woman martyred with her, has less documentation on her life but often appears in iconography alongside Perpetua.
2. Nana Asmau
In the ancient Sokoto Caliphate, Nana Asmau emphasized the importance of teaching women to read and write and founded several education enterprises. As a poet and author, she wrote about the legacies of living in a large empire and of being an empowered and devout Muslim woman. Many West African women see her as an example of the possibility of feminism within a Muslim sphere.
3. Nontetha Nkwenwke
During the early 20th century, Nontetha lost several family members to World War I or the influenza epidemic in its immediate aftermath. Following her own bout with the disease, she believed she received a vision from God. Alongside other millenarian movement leaders, she soon became a target of colonial forces, who believed she was interested in overthrowing the government. Nontetha spent her last years in an asylum, and it took researchers and her family decades to repatriate her remains. Her devout followers, however, continued to view her as a prophet and messenger to oppressed peoples.
Cultural Leaders From Makeba to Maathai
It is hard to conceptualize a space without women serving as cultural leaders. Three prominent women in this dynamic worked to Africanize their spheres of influence and to popularize African cultural production in the wider world.
4. Miriam Makeba
The South African singer boasted a diverse career, with much of it centered around Freedom Songs or those in protest of the government’s apartheid policy. Alongside fellow musician Hugh Masekela, she is often viewed as a leader in utilizing arts for public discourse. She lived in exile for much of the last three decades of her life, and during that time, she popularized African music for Western audiences, performing widely in the United States and Europe.
5. Winnie Madikezela-Mandela
Known as “Ma Winnie” or as a type of South African Lady McBeth, Mandela’s life and career went through its own ups and downs. A nurse by training, she met and soon married her future husband, Nelson Mandela. Shortly thereafter, his imprisonment left her and their two daughters in their Soweto house. Mandela continued her activism, and the apartheid regime banned, imprisoned, and generally harassed her. She weathered a period of the 1990s and early 2000s where allegations of infidelity, her divorce from Nelson Mandela, investigation before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, expulsion from cabinet, and accusations of being involved in killings led to almost inevitable cancelation. Post-mortem, however, she remains one of South Africa’s most prominent leaders, with many in younger generations proclaiming that she is the inheritor of radicalism in a party that they view as too neoliberal.
6. Wangari Maathai
A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maathai was the first woman in Eastern and Central Africa to obtain a Ph.D. Though she taught veterinary medicine in her academic life, she soon became most prominent for starting the Green Belt Movement, which encouraged tree planting and reforestation as an antidote to modern demands of urbanization. Maathai Africanized conservation movements, in contrast to many environmentalists who viewed African wildlife as threatened by people and their needs.
7. Alek Wek
Born in Sudan, Wek and her family fled due to war when she was 14. She launched a modeling career in the UK and became a supermodel, working globally in Europe and the US. As one of the first dark-skinned models to grace magazine covers in the 1990s, she became part of the conversation about race and beauty standards. She also remains an outspoken advocate for human rights and for refugee families, helping many people in the Global North to better understand the personhood behind people seeking new homes.
Political Leaders From Shanakdakhete to Sirleaf
Women have often played a pivotal role in influencing how Africans interact with the world. This is true in the realm of politics. Many pre-colonial societies, particularly in West Africa, practiced matriarchy, and the standing of women across the continent often looked historically different from the ways in which Europeans conceptualized gender roles and from the way those roles look on the continent now. There have been notable women who were political leaders from ancient times to periods leading up to and following colonialism.
8. Shanakdakhete
It is unclear whether Shanakdakhete served as the first or second woman to lead Meroe/Kush, but she became one of its most expansive. Shanakdakhete chose to rule without a king. She constructed or expanded temple buildings and writing in the ancient kingdom, meaning that much of what we know about it originates from artifacts during her reign.
9. Cleopatra
As mythologized as she was real, Cleopatra grew up in a royal household. She formed alliances with several Greco-Roman figures, leading to a cultural exchange between their societies and Ancient Egypt. In doing so, she warded off Egypt’s political decline—at least in part—during its later years.
10. Njinga of Mbandu
Also raised in a royal household, Njinga quickly became her father’s favorite child and the one most likely to attend military exercises with him. She feuded with her siblings to eventually become King of Mbandu. After doing so, she utilized diplomatic and military tactics to try to ward off Portuguese influence in the kingdom. Njinga often adopted mannerisms of the men around her, preferring to be called King, as a means of gaining social and political capital. Unlike many later leaders in the infamous Scramble for Africa, Njinga managed to forge an uneasy relationship with both Mbandu people and some European administrators.
11. Helen Suzman
Suzman served in the United Party, later the Progressive Party, of South Africa as the lone opposition representative to the National Party during the apartheid era. She became more radical throughout her tenure, consistently casting the only vote in elections to oppose apartheid. While her efforts did not result in large-scale political or social change, her outspokenness—and inability to be censored due to being a Member of Parliament—provided a glimpse at solidarity to South Africans disenfranchised from political power and to astute observers from the international community.
12. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Following (and in some ways preceding) decades of political instability in Liberia, Johnson Sirleaf became the first woman elected as a head of state in Africa. An economist by training, she focused on attempting to incorporate Liberia into global economic spheres. As a regional leader, she also became the first woman to serve as head of the Economic Community of West African States. The Nobel Peace Prize winner remains a popular speaker on global circuits.
Women as key players in African history represent wide geographic ranges, skill sets, ideologies, and personality differences. Africa’s long and diverse history means that women across time and space have had a variety of experiences as religious, cultural, and political leaders. During many of the continent’s historical eras, they have proven as antidotes to the narrative that men dominate political or cultural spheres, even outside of traditionally matriarchal societies.
