AS we commemorate Africa Day, we are invited not just to reflect on the journey of our continent, but to look deeper beyond the narratives inherited from colonial archives into the values, systems, and cultures that defined the soul of Africa before its conquest.

One critical truth demands our attention: Africa was never inherently violent towards her women. In fact, before the distortion brought by colonisation, Africa cherished her women and revered the girl-child. The scourge of gender-based violence (GBV) that we fight today is not a homegrown plague, but an alien imposition wrapped in conquest, patriarchy, and foreign values.

This Africa Day, let us set the record straight. Let us raise our voices not in lamentation but in power, honouring the fact that African societies, before colonisation, were steeped in respect, balance, and spiritual recognition of women as life-givers, leaders, warriors, prophets, and co-creators of civilisation.

From the highlands of Ethiopia to the savannahs of the Sahel, from the rainforests of the Congo to the southern plains of Zimbabwe, African women were never merely passive participants in society. They were queens and custodians of the land, religion, and governance. In Ethiopia, Queen of Sheba ruled over one of the wealthiest and most advanced empires of her time. In ancient Nubia, the Kandakes (or Candaces) were powerful queens who led armies and engaged diplomatically with the likes of Alexander the Great.

In Southern Africa, we speak of Mbuya Nehanda not as a historical anecdote but as an enduring symbol of resistance and nationhood. She was not a bystander; she was a spirit medium, a political authority, and a strategic mind behind the first Chimurenga War. In West Africa, Queen Amina of Zazzau expanded her kingdom through military might and economic prowess. These were not exceptions. These were common embodiments of a cultural pattern that esteemed feminine wisdom and courage.

Women were central in decision-making. In the Akan system of Ghana, the Queen Mother was the kingmaker she nominated and could depose kings. In the Igbo communities of Nigeria, the ‘omu’ (female leaders) governed marketplaces and had autonomous authority. Among the Bakongo, women held the title of ‘nganga’ —respected spiritual leaders and healers.

Our spiritual systems recognised the duality and balance between masculine and feminine energies. This was evident in deities like Mawu-Lisa (Dahomey), a twin-gendered god embodying both male and female attributes. In Yoruba cosmology, Orisha like Oshun, Yemoja, and Oya were not mere goddesses of domestic roles they symbolised fertility, justice, transformation, and riverine power.

African cosmologies were intrinsically feminist not in opposition to men, but in reverence to the co-creative and sustaining power of women. The idea of ‘Mother Earth’ is not abstract to Africa. We called her ‘Mama Africa’, ‘Nya Learth’, ‘Modjadji’, the Rain Queen. Our ancestors spoke to the land as one speaks to a mother, not as a resource to exploit but as a life-giver to honour.

Pre-colonial African economies were not capitalist nor exploitative. They were communal, interdependent, and largely sustainable. Women were at the heart of these systems. In agriculture, women were not labourers they were innovators. They preserved seed banks, managed irrigation, and mastered the seasons.

In trade, African markets were dominated and regulated by women. Think of the powerful market women in Yoruba. These women controlled the flow of goods, from food to textiles to gold. In West Africa, the ‘Nana Benz’ of Togo were wealthy female entrepreneurs who controlled the textile trade.

Colonisation and the introduction of exploitative labour systems sidelined women from land ownership and formal economic roles. The new order reduced them to dependents, denying them access to credit, education, and decision-making. Yet the strength of the African woman refused to be extinguished. She remained the backbone of the family and society, often single-handedly sustaining communities through war, displacement, and economic turmoil.

Africa has always been a continent of knowledge. Before the Western notion of classroom education, we had our systems of pedagogy rooted in oral tradition, apprenticeship and initiation. Women were not denied knowledge. They were custodians of it.

The griots of West Africa, many of them women, were historians, poets, and moral compasses. In every village, the elderly women were walking encyclopaedias of culture, herbs, genealogy, proverbs, and protocol. Girls were taught the sacred rites of womanhood, family life, diplomacy, and community responsibility through initiation ceremonies like the Basotho ‘Lebollo’ or the Bemba ‘Chisungu’.

Colonial education, imported to create clerks for the empire, disrupted these systems and devalued indigenous knowledge. It created a hierarchy where Western knowledge reigned supreme and African women’s knowledge was relegated to the informal and the superstitious.

Pre-colonial African societies were not perfect utopias. But they operated under the principles of ubuntu, a philosophy of mutual respect, balance, and collective humanity. Colonial rule brought with it patriarchal legal systems, missionary doctrines, and racist anthropologies that painted Africans as primitive and their customs barbaric.

Colonisers rewrote African history, removed women from leadership, criminalised spiritual practices, and introduced monogamous, male-headed households as the civilised norm. They created a social architecture that prized control over community, and domination over dialogue. This is how gender-based violence crept in not from within our heritage, but as a by-product of a system that saw our women as less, and taught our men to do the same.

Today, we spend millions on combating GBV, yet the root cause is rarely addressed: the internalisation of a colonial value system that disrespects women. GBV persists because patriarchy is still policy. We do not interrogate the legal systems, educational curriculums, religious doctrines, and media narratives that continue to sideline women and misrepresent African culture as patriarchal by nature.

The tragedy is that even well-meaning interventions often speak about women without women, as if they are beneficiaries and not architects of change. Women’s rights are not Western imports, they are a reclamation of what was stolen.

As we celebrate Africa Day, we must commit not to mimic other societies but to remember who we truly are. Africa’s salvation lies in memory in the deep remembering of our ways, values, and voices. To empower women today is not to Westernise Africa. It is to Africanise Africa once again.

We must teach our children that Queen Nzinga led armies, that Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti fought colonialists with her intellect, that Winnie Mandela was a warrior of principle. We must teach them that our grandmothers held entire communities together with nothing but wisdom, strength, and faith.

Our constitutions must reflect our cosmologies. Our education must tell our stories. Our men must be taught that to be African is to honour women, not to harm them.

We need laws that protect women but more importantly, we need cultural systems that value them. Our legal reforms must be inspired not only by international conventions but by ancestral truths. We must integrate customary law and women’s rights in ways that uplift both.

Gender equality is not just a Sustainable Development Goal. For Africa, it is a return to origin. To restore balance. To honour Ubuntu.

Let us invest in African women not only because they deserve it, but because when women rise, nations rise. Africa cannot afford to develop on one leg. Our development, our peace, our progress, these rest on the shoulders of our daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives.

This Africa Day, let us not merely celebrate. Let us re-imagine. Let us restore. Let us resist the lie that Africa has always been a continent that oppresses its women. Let us recover our memory, and in doing so, recover our power.

Let African women speak again, not in the margins, not as afterthoughts, but at the centre, where they have always belonged.

Africa was never broken. She was interrupted.

Let us continue the story from where we left off.

Ubuntu. Amandla. Africa rising.