Studying history at degree level brings a newfound contextual knowledge of current events and the skills to always find the inner logic in unfamiliar stories. Studying African history comes with challenges of representation, both in knowledge and ways of thinking, with most professional historians of Africa being either white, male or both. Reading the work of an African female historian always becomes a watershed moment, illuminating the world with greater nuance. African women in the field deserve to be widely read and celebrated. Here are some of these women illuminating Africa’s past in new and exciting ways.

library of african diaspora interview

Madina Thiam — Mali

Madina Thiam’s work explores the global circulations of West African people and ideas, pan-African decolonisation, race in the Sahel and Malian women’s histories. She is an Assistant Professor of History at New York University, having received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, earlier this year.  For her PhD thesis, she conducted research in Mali, Senegal, France, England, Ireland and Jamaica to question the intersections between freedom, mobility, Islam and political change in the Sahel region. She is also a member of the Projet Archives des Femmes’ digitisation project, creating a public archive of papers of Malian women involved in the 1950s movement for independence and post-colonial feminist activism.

Bolanle Awe — Nigeria

Bolanle Awe is the matriarch of feminist Nigerian history. After getting a doctorate in the history of Yorubaland from the University of Oxford in 1964, Awe returned to Nigeria to lecture at the University of Ibadan. Her research marked a turning point in the male-dominated telling of Nigeria’s colonial and pre-colonial history. In her 1974 journal article, “Praise Poems as Historical Data: The Example of the Yoruba Oríkì”, Awe was one of the foremost scholars to argue for the validity of oral traditions as historical evidence, a fact that is now hardly disputed. Among many accomplishments, she was the founding chairperson of the Women’s Research and Documentation Centre (WORDOC) and is an Officer of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (OFR).

Chisomo Kalinga — Malawi

Chisomo Kalinga explores the intersection between medicine, literature and Malawian history. Since her doctoral enquiry into Malawian and American AIDS fiction, her research interests have covered disease (especially sexually transmitted infections), biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft in African writing and narratives. As a Wellcome Trust fellow, she is exploring African indigenous literature and how it can be used to improve healthcare services.

Sara Salem — Egypt

Sara Salem’s work explores global histories of imperialism and the connections between postcolonial theory and Marxism. Geographically, she focuses on Egypt and the period of decolonisation in the mid-20th century. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she teaches courses on “The Sociology of Race and Empire” and “The Anticolonial Archive''. Her first book, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020; it explores Egypt under the rule of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué — Cameroon 

Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué is an interdisciplinary historian whose work explores how the social constructs of gender inform performances of the body, religious beliefs and political ideologies. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon examines how women navigated the turbulent setting of Cameroon’s post-independence era from 1961 to 1972. The text received the 2020 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize by the Western Association of Women Historians for best history monograph. It was credited for aiding our understanding of women’s roles in separatist and secessionist projects around the world. She is currently writing a book on diasporas in Africa. 

Mawahib Abubakr — Sudan

Mawahib Abubakr’s work explores ethics and gender, nationalism, transnationalism and feminism. Her 2014 dissertation explored the evolution of the women’s movement in Sudan from the period of nationalism to post-nationalism in the 20th century. In it, she argues that Sudanese women negotiated their differences to create alliances across the divides of ethnicity, religion and region in continued resistance to the patriarchy. This history helps us imagine new possibilities for women’s resistance. She is currently a researcher at the Research Centre for Islamic Legislation and Ethics.

Dr Olivette Otele: Historian, Author, Academic and Britain’s First Black Female Professor of History

Olivette Otele — Cameroon

2018 saw the landmark appointment of Olivette Otele as the first Black female history professor in the UK, a country where only 0.5 per cent of university historians are Black. Born in Cameroon, Otele became a professor of history at Bath Spa University before moving on to Bristol University in 2019 to lecture on the history of slavery. She became Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society in that same year. Her work explores cultural and collective memory, with a focus on Afro-European identities, slavery and legacies of European colonisation. In an interview with History Today, Otele said the most important lesson history has taught her is kindness. Her 2020 book, African Europeans: An Untold History, is a good entry point into her body of work.

Anna Adima — Uganda 

Anna Adima is investigating women's creative writing after independence in Uganda and Kenya. Her research interests cover women’s history, heritage preservation, race and feminism, and her essays have explored issues from female circumcision to the experience of female African students in European universities since the early 20th century. In her own words, “In a field that at the time was dominated by men, East African women’s voices were comparatively marginalised, and my research aims to retrieve these from the sources available.” She is currently a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar at the University of York.

Sandrine Collard — Democratic Republic of Congo

Sandrine Colard is a historian of modern and contemporary African arts and photography, with a focus on Central Africa. She is currently the Assistant Professor of African Art History at Rutgers University and holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University. She has dedicated the past decade to evaluating the Congolese people’s history of their own images and how the violence of colonialism manifests in representations of Africans. Using research conducted in Belgium and the DRC, she is currently writing a book that examines the history of photography in colonial Congo from 1885 to 1960.

Hanan Hammad — Egypt

Hanan Hammad teaches and researches the modern Middle East, global histories of gender and sexuality, and women's studies. Her 2016 book, Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanisation and Social Transformation in Egypt, offers a fascinating insight into the lives of working-class men and women in an Egyptian factory town, showing how 20th-century industrialisation transformed gender identities, sexualities and public morality. In 2017, the book won the Middle East Political Economy Book Prize, the Arab American Book Awards and the National Women's Studies Association's Sara A. Whaley Book Prize. She is currently an associate professor of history and the director of the Middle East Studies Program at Texas Christian University. 

Ruramisai Charumbira — Zimbabwe

Ruramisai Charumbira is a poet whose work on African and global history is rooted in an exploration of memory and forgetting at the individual, social and collective levels. A good introduction to her work is through her book Imagining a Nation: History and Memory in Making Zimbabwe — adapted from her doctoral thesis at Yale. Charumbira’s text invites us to question how relevant the “nation-state” is in understanding African postcolonial history today. It asks: “What does it mean to be a citizen, patriot, or member of a nation in an ever-globalising world?” She is the founder of Taking the Humanities on the Road (THoR), an Ideas and Actions Lab.

Athambile Masola — South Africa

Athambile Masola researches Black women’s life writing, especially in southern Africa. Her doctoral dissertation at Rhodes University explored the memoirs of renowned writers Noni Jabavu and Sisonke Msimang. In her work, she also uses the archive of early 20th-century newspapers in South Africa (particularly those written in isiXhosa) to explore the multiple ways colloquial texts can inform the intellectual history of a society. She lectures at the University of Cape Town and is a member of the Bua-Lit Collective, a group of researchers advocating for the use of African languages as a social justice issue.

Nwando Achebe — Nigeria

Nwando Achebe studies and teaches about women’s experiences, gender, sexuality and religion in Africa. She is currently the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History at Michigan State University and the founding editor-in-chief at the Journal of West African History. Her short history book Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa explores the breadth of roles African female-gendered entities have played in their respective societies in the past three centuries, be they people, diviners or deities. In her book, she writes, “I see myself as a missionary in reverse: one whose job it is to teach African worlds on their own terms; a person whose job it is to teach Africa in ways that Africans themselves conceptualise their histories and their worlds.”

Safia Aidid — Somalia

Based on her doctoral thesis at Harvard, Safia Aidid is working on a book manuscript entitled Pan-Somali Dreams: Ethiopia, Greater Somalia, and the Somali Nationalist Imagination. This project offers the first comprehensive timeline of Pan-Somali nationalism and its interaction with the Ethiopian state. Her research probes into anti-colonial nationalism, territorial imaginations, borders and state formation in the Horn of Africa. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow and incoming assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto.

Penda Mbow — Senegal

Penda Mbow’s work explores intellectual history in the Muslim world, Sufism, women and law under Islam. In 1986 she obtained a doctorate in Medieval History at the University of Aix-Marseilles. A true public intellectual, her research has informed activism and projects such as the Citizen Movement, which she leads. This advocacy work centres on the intellectual and political leadership of young people. She received the Jean-Paul II Peace Prize from Boston University to honour her peace-building and conflict resolution work. Mbow served as the Minister of Culture for Senegal in 2001 and is currently a professor at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar.