Untold Histories of Nigerian Women: Emerging from the Margins
This book is a curation of insightful and engaging narrations aimed at freeing women from the margins of Nigeria’s history. It chronicles their protest movements against colonial administrations, including “monster” petitions on taxation and food price controls.
It details a string of remarkable political landmarks which highlight women’s historical credentials as nationalists, as well as their voice in early male-dominated legislative institutions. It also narrates more contemporary episodes in women’s resistance against oil exploitation, environmental pollution and anger over the mass abduction of school girls.
This timely preservation of the voice and agency of Nigerian women from a wide variety of colonial and contemporary documents will benefit readers interested in African history and gender and women's studies.
Tayo Agunbiade is a journalist and social historian. She studied history at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and women development studies at the University of East London. She has published articles on women’s history and is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Tayo is Newsletter Editor for the Women’s History Network. Her research interests are women in history, parliament, politics and governance.
"Tayo Agunbiade has used extraordinary reserves of tenacity and determination to bring to light the neglected stories of the Nigerian women who have shaped their country’s history. But her book is also full of empathy and love for these women, who battled discrimination in the colonial period and bravely continue to do so today. She has done them proud with this pioneering study, and thereby filled a glaring hole in Nigerian historiography."
Barnaby Phillips Former BBC correspondent and author of Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes
"An encyclopaedic volume and a truly remarkable work by Tayo Agunbiade, who has managed to write a book which reinstalls Nigeria’s women into their country’s history over the past century, from 1922-2022. Expertly researched, concisely written and lavishly illustrated, it will surely become the standard work on the subject. Untold Histories of Nigerian Women is exactly what it claims to be, a fascinating record of the lives and experiences of those hitherto largely marginalised from history. Essential reading."
Professor Hakim Adi Historian of Africa and the African Diaspora, University of Chichester (UK)
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