The Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903) reshaped Hausaland’s political landscape, transforming pre-jihad female offices such as Magajiya and Iya into new forms of Islamic scholarship and educational leadership. This article examines the evidence, structures, and legacies of women’s sovereignty before, during, and after the caliphate, centring figures like Nana Asma’u and the Yan Taru movement.
Mkabayi kaJama (c. 1750–c. 1843) was a Zulu inkosazana, regent, and royal councillor whose strategic interventions shaped the succession of the early Zulu kingdom. As daughter of King Jama kaNdaba and sister of Senzangakhona, she installed her brother and later her nephew Shaka, and ultimately sanctioned the conspiracy that ended Shaka’s reign. Her life exemplifies the often-unwritten constitutional powers of senior royal women in precolonial southern Africa.
The Dahomey Amazons, or Mino, were an elite corps of female soldiers in the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) from the seventeenth century until 1894. They served as a standing army, royal guard, and ritual force, wielding real military and political power within a centralised African state. This article examines their origins, organisation, combat record, gender dynamics, and complex legacy, drawing on Fon oral traditions and critical scholarship.
The Incwala is the most sacred national ceremony of Eswatini, a first-fruits and kingship renewal ritual held at the summer solstice. Its performance depends on the joint ritual authority of the Ngwenyama (king) and the Ndlovukazi (Queen Mother), whose rainmaking powers and custodianship of sacred medicines are constitutive of the ceremony. This article examines the Incwala and the Ndlovukazi’s ritual authority through indigenous concepts of dual sovereignty, oral tradition, and documented ceremonial practice.
Ndieumbeutt Mbodj was the Lingeer of Waalo in the early nineteenth century, the senior woman of the Tedyek matriclan who preceded her more famous sister Ndate Yalla. Her reign was defined by the defence of matrilineal sovereignty, the management of succession crises, and diplomatic navigation of growing French pressure along the Senegal River. This article reconstructs her life and office from Wolof oral traditions, colonial records, and Africanist scholarship.
The Modjadji Nature Reserve in Limpopo, South Africa, is both a sanctuary for the endemic Modjadji cycad and a living landscape of Balobedu Rain Queen sovereignty. Colonial conservation did not create the sacred forest but reframed it through state forestry, land alienation, and protected-area legislation, transforming the Rain Queen’s custodial authority into a legally circumscribed environmental trusteeship. This article examines how successive colonial and apartheid conservation regimes reshaped the reserve and the Rain Queen’s land authority, while oral traditions and ritual practice continued to assert an older, spiritually grounded jurisdiction.
Sobekneferu and Twosret were the last rulers of Egypt’s Twelfth and Nineteenth Dynasties respectively, each assuming the full pharaonic titulary in her own right. Their reigns illuminate how ancient Egyptian kingship could accommodate female sovereignty at moments of dynastic crisis. This article examines their evidence, genealogies, succession mechanisms, regalia, and contested legacies.
The Lingeer was the queen mother, royal sister, or co-sovereign of the Wolof kingdoms of Senegambia, holding institutionalised political, ritual, and economic authority. Rooted in matriclan legitimacy, she served as dynastic gatekeeper, regent, rainmaker, and military leader. This article examines her origins, governance role, succession mechanisms, ritual power, and anti-colonial resistance, centring Wolof oral traditions and African scholarship.
This article examines how matrilineal succession shaped royal authority in the Central African kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba. It explores the avuncular principle, the role of the royal kanda, and the extraordinary reign of Queen Njinga Mbandi, whose rise to power was both enabled and constrained by these indigenous succession norms.
This article examines how European colonial administrations systematically excluded queen mothers and other female sovereigns from the codified customary law they constructed in Africa. Drawing on oral traditions, archival records, and comparative cases from Asante, Buganda, Swaziland, and Igboland, it shows how indirect rule recognised only male chiefs, reclassified female officeholders as wives or ceremonial figures, and erased their real political, judicial, and ritual authority. The article also traces postcolonial revival movements that are restoring these offices to public memory and legal recognition.