Queen Mothers of Africa: The Offices That Made Women Co-Rulers

In the Akan states of Ghana, no man could be installed as chief without a woman’s nomination. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, every king reigned alongside a female counterpart who was not his mother, and every male official in the bureaucracy had a female opposite number whose job was partly to watch him. In Buganda, the king’s mother held her own palace, her own chiefs, and her own prime minister.

These were not honorary positions. They were offices, in the constitutional sense: defined, inherited or appointed, resourced, and carrying powers that the male ruler could not override.

English has no good word for them, and the word it settled on — “queen mother” — is misleading in almost every particular. This guide covers eleven of these offices, explains the structures that produced them, and traces what happened when colonial administration encountered political systems it had no category for.

1. Why “queen mother” is the wrong translation

Three problems with the term, each of which causes a specific misunderstanding.

She was often not the ruler’s mother. The Akan Ohemaa may be the chief’s sister, aunt, cousin or grandmother — any senior woman of the royal matrilineage. The Dahomean kpojito was typically drawn from the previous king’s wives and was frequently of commoner or captive origin, with no blood relation to the man she reigned beside. The Balobedu khadi-kholo is a great-aunt. Reading “mother” into these offices imports a biological relationship the institutions did not require.

She was often not a queen. In European usage, a queen mother is a former queen consort — a woman whose status derives entirely from a marriage that has ended. Almost none of these women held their positions that way. They held office in their own right, and in several systems the office existed independently of whether the current holder had any connection to the reigning man at all.

“Mother” implies advisory warmth rather than power. The English term suggests a dignified figure offering counsel. The reality includes appointing and deposing rulers, commanding troops, holding separate revenues, running independent courts, and in at least one documented case exercising full royal authority whenever the king was away.

The translation was not accidental. Colonial administrators needed to file these women somewhere, and “queen mother” placed them in a familiar, decorative, powerless slot. The filing decision had consequences — see Section 7.

Where a precise term exists, this site uses it. Ohemaa, Iyoba, Kpojito, Ndlovukazi.

2. What these offices actually did

Across very different societies, the same four functions recur.

Kingmaker. The single most consequential power. In the Akan system the Ohemaa nominates the candidate for the male stool from the royal matrilineage and can reject nominations put to her; the male elders confirm rather than choose. Where succession runs through the female line, the woman who knows and certifies the lineage holds the decisive vote.

Counterweight. These offices sat outside the male ruler’s chain of command, with independent resources, so that the office-holder could oppose him without depending on him. A dual monarchy is a structure for making one ruler’s power contestable, not for making it decorative.

Separate jurisdiction. Many of these women held courts hearing matters concerning women — marriage, market disputes, agricultural and trading regulation — where their rulings were final and did not go up to the male ruler on appeal.

Ritual complement. In several systems the male ruler’s authority was theologically incomplete without a female counterpart. In Dahomey the kingship rested on a paired male-female cosmology; in Eswatini the Ngwenyama and Ndlovukazi hold ritual functions neither can perform alone. Where power is understood as requiring both halves, removing one half does not leave a functioning whole.

3. The offices

Kandake — Kingdom of Kush

Region: Nubia, present-day Sudan · Period: c. 4th c. BCE – 4th c. CE

Rendered Candace in Greek and Latin sources, kdke in Meroitic. The office originally designated the king’s mother as a formal position within the Kushite state. From around the second century BCE the title was also used for a woman reigning in her own right, frequently paired with qore, the term for the reigning monarch — a woman styled qore and kandake was a sovereign.

The Kandake is the earliest of these offices in the documentary record and the one that most clearly demonstrates the transition from institutional queen mother to independent monarch. Because Meroitic remains undeciphered, what survives is titulary and iconography rather than narrative: reliefs at Naqa show Amanitore and her son Natakamani at equal scale on either side of a temple entrance, which in Kushite convention is a constitutional statement rather than a compositional choice.

Full entry: Kandake

Iyoba — Kingdom of Benin

Region: present-day Edo State, Nigeria · Period: early 16th c. – present

Created in the early sixteenth century by Oba Esigie for his mother Idia, in recognition of her role in securing his contested accession and supporting his campaigns. The office came with a palace at Uselu outside the capital, its own domain, its own retinue, and a place among the senior chiefs of the kingdom.

The Iyoba’s position carried a structural restriction that reveals the logic of the whole arrangement: after her installation she and the Oba were not to meet again in person. An office designed as an independent power centre cannot function if its holder is inside the palace. Distance was the point.

The ivory pendant masks carved in Idia’s likeness are among the most reproduced objects in African art. They were removed from the Oba’s palace during the British punitive expedition of 1897 and are held in London and New York. One was adopted as the emblem of FESTAC ’77 in Lagos; Nigeria’s request to borrow the original was refused. The restitution question is unresolved.

Full entry: Iyoba

Ohemaa — the Akan states

Region: Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire · Period: pre-colonial – present

The most institutionally developed of these offices and the one with the strongest surviving presence. Ohemaa is usually translated “queen mother”; the accurate rendering is closer to “female ruler.” At national level in Asante the holder is the Asantehemaa; each town and division has its own.

Akan societies are matrilineal — descent, inheritance and eligibility for office pass through the female line. That single fact makes the Ohemaa structurally necessary rather than ceremonial. She is the authority on lineage, and therefore on who is eligible; she nominates the candidate for the male stool and can veto candidates proposed to her; she holds her own stool, her own court, and her own body of elders; she adjudicates matters concerning women; and she can initiate destoolment proceedings against a chief.

Yaa Asantewaa was Ejisuhemaa — Ohemaa of Ejisu, a state within the confederacy — not queen of Asante, a distinction almost universally lost in popular accounts. When she took military leadership of the 1900 War of the Golden Stool, she was exercising an authority her office already carried.

Full entry: Ohemaa · See also matrilineal succession

Kpojito — Kingdom of Dahomey

Region: present-day Benin · Period: early 18th c. – late 19th c.

The most radical of the offices, and the one that most decisively breaks the “queen mother” framing. The kpojito — the term is generally rendered “reign-mate” or “Mother of the Leopard” — was the female co-ruler paired with each king of Dahomey. She was not his biological mother. She was typically selected from among the previous king’s wives, often a woman of commoner or captive origin, elevated at the accession of a prince whose bid for the throne she had backed.

The office appears to have been created under King Agaja in the early eighteenth century and reached its height in the mid-century pairing of Kpojito Hwanjile with King Tegbesu (r. 1740–1774), who governed in tandem. Hwanjile, an Aja woman brought to the palace at Abomey as an adult, restructured the Dahomean religious hierarchy, establishing Mawu and Lisa as a supreme paired deity — a male-female divine pairing that mirrored and legitimised the male-female pairing at the head of the state.

The ideological model this established, as Edna Bay’s institutional history sets out, posited a balance along two axes at once: male and female, royal and commoner. And it extended downward. Dahomey paired male and female officials throughout the bureaucracy, with a woman in the palace attached to each male officer serving outside it — a structure that functioned simultaneously as an administrative parallel and as internal surveillance.

The office declined through the nineteenth century as princes found other routes to the throne and other sources of counsel.

Full entry: Kpojito

Namasole and Lubuga — Buganda

Region: present-day Uganda · Period: pre-colonial – present (much diminished)

Buganda maintained two distinct senior female offices alongside the Kabaka. The Namasole was the king’s mother, holding her own palace separate from his, her own subordinate chiefs, her own estates, and her own Katikkiro — the same title borne by the head of the Kabaka’s government. Testimony from a palace protocol expert with recollection reaching back into the nineteenth-century civil wars held that when the Kabaka was absent, the Namasole was regarded as the Kabaka. Her responsibilities are recorded as having included intelligence and the personal protection of her son, and the office came with an armed following.

The Lubuga was the royal sister — not necessarily a full sibling, but of the same lineage — who took a coronation oath alongside the Kabaka and held her own compound in the palace complex.

The office’s trajectory is one of the clearest illustrations of Section 7. The 1900 Buganda Agreement, which restructured the kingdom’s relationship with Britain, made no provision for either position. Present-day descriptions of the Namasole note that she is among the most honoured figures in the kingdom and that she has no role in its governance. The honour survived; the office did not.

Full entry: Namasole

Umugabekazi — Rwanda and Burundi

Region: Rwanda, Burundi · Period: pre-colonial – 20th c.

The Rwandan monarchy was constitutionally dual. The mwami ruled with the umugabekazi, his mother, who by rule came from a designated clan other than his own — an arrangement that distributed power between lineages by constitutional design rather than by negotiation. She held a regnal name of her own, distinct from her birth name, marking the office as separate from the person.

Kanjogera (c. 1847–1933), who held the office from 1889 to 1931 under the regnal names Nyiramibambwe IV and later Nyirayuhi V, served as regent and then as co-ruler alongside her son Yuhi V Musinga. Her role in the violent succession crisis of 1896 is documented and remains contested in the historiography. Her long tenure spans the German and then Belgian colonial administrations, and the office did not survive the end of the monarchy.

Full entry: Umugabekazi

Ndlovukazi — Eswatini

Region: Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) · Period: pre-colonial – present

The Ndlovukazi, the “she-elephant,” holds one half of a functioning dual monarchy alongside the Ngwenyama, the “lion.” She maintains the royal residence at Lobamba, holds specified ritual responsibilities, and has historically served as regent during minorities and interregna. The Swazi arrangement is the most intact surviving example of an African dual monarchy, and the office is recognised in the country’s constitution.

Labotsibeni Mdluli, Ndlovukazi and regent from 1899 to 1921, governed through the South African War, the imposition of British protectorate administration, and the land partition that stripped Swazi people of most of their territory. She organised a national levy to buy land back and directed funds into education. She is among the most strategically effective African leaders of the colonial period.

The office remains constitutionally live. It has also been at the centre of political conflict within the kingdom, including the removal of a queen regent in 1983.

Full entry: Ndlovukazi

Magajiya — the Hausa states

Region: northern Nigeria, Niger · Period: pre-colonial – present (transformed)

Magajiya is one of several titles for senior royal women in the Hausa states, alongside Iya and Sarauniya. The offices carried authority over women’s affairs, and in the pre-jihad period several Hausa states had women in senior political and ritual positions. The founding tradition of Daura, one of the original Hausa states, centres on a ruling queen.

The Hausa case shows something the others do not: these offices could be diminished from within as well as from without. The Sokoto jihad of the early nineteenth century restructured political and religious authority across the Hausa lands, and the position of women’s offices changed substantially with it — before European administration arrived. The colonial account is not the only account.

Full entry: Magajiya

Iyalode and Iyaloja — Yoruba states

Region: south-western Nigeria · Period: pre-colonial – present

Iyalode is commonly glossed as “mother owns the outside world.” The holder led the women of a town, held a seat on the council of chiefs, and represented women’s interests in political decisions — with authority resting on her command of the market economy, which in Yoruba states meant a substantial share of the economy.

Nineteenth-century holders such as Efunsetan Aniwura of Ibadan and Efunroye Tinubu of Lagos and Abeokuta accumulated commercial and political power sufficient to shape state policy and, in Tinubu’s case, to be exiled for it. Tinubu’s career included substantial involvement in the slave trade prior to its suppression, a fact that celebratory accounts routinely omit and this site includes.

The related office of Iyaloja, leader of the market women, survives as a functioning and politically significant position in Nigeria today, with a national-level holder.

Full entry: Iyalode

Omu — western Igbo

Region: Onitsha, Ossomari and neighbouring communities · Period: pre-colonial – present (much diminished)

Igbo societies were largely decentralised, without kingship in most areas. Where a male Obi existed, as at Onitsha and Ossomari, a female Omu held a parallel position with her own council of titled women, authority over markets and trade regulation, and jurisdiction over disputes among women.

Elsewhere in Igboland, where there was no monarch at all, women’s political authority operated through age-grade assemblies and the umuada — the association of a lineage’s daughters, whose collective sanction was one of the most effective enforcement mechanisms in the society.

The Igbo case is the clearest evidence for the argument in Section 7, and Section 7 returns to it.

Full entry: Omu

Further offices

Also documented, and covered in the silo: the Mafo among the Bamileke of the Cameroon Grassfields; the Nyina Mukama in Bunyoro; the Napoko among the Mossi of Burkina Faso; and the khadi-kholo among the Balobedu, a great-aunt’s office that surfaced during the current Modjadji succession dispute as a proposed alternative position for a claimant.

4. The offices compared

Compare any two side by side with the office comparator.

5. What produced them

Three conditions, which overlap but are not the same thing.

Matrilineal descent. Where descent, inheritance and eligibility for office run through the female line, a senior woman’s certification of lineage is structurally necessary. The Akan case is the clearest. But matriliny is not a sufficient explanation: Dahomey and Buganda were not matrilineal and both had powerful female offices, while some matrilineal societies developed no comparable institution.

Dual-sex political organisation. The pattern the anthropological literature identifies most consistently: societies organising political authority as two parallel systems, one male and one female, each with its own hierarchy, jurisdiction and assemblies. Under this arrangement women were not represented within a male political system — they had their own, and the two negotiated. Dahomey took it furthest by pairing officials all the way down the bureaucracy.

The counterweight logic. Centralising states face the problem of an over-mighty monarch. Several of these systems solved it by building a permanent second power centre and staffing it from a category of person structurally excluded from the throne itself. A woman who cannot become king is a safe holder of the power to constrain one — she has authority without being a rival for the office. The Rwandan requirement that the umugabekazi come from a different clan is this logic made explicit.

None of these is a story about women’s rights. They are stories about how states solved problems of legitimacy, succession and the distribution of power, in which women’s authority was the solution rather than the goal.

6. What they were not

Four corrections, because this subject attracts overclaiming and the overclaiming is what gets these institutions dismissed.

They were not matriarchy. A society with a powerful female office is not a society in which women held power over men. The Kandake, the Iyoba and the Ohemaa were sovereigns and near-sovereigns within societies that were not otherwise egalitarian and in most cases were not egalitarian at all.

They were not universal. Many African societies had nothing resembling these offices. The institutions were concentrated in particular regions and particular kinds of political system. Generalising them to “African tradition” as a whole is inaccurate and hands critics an easy refutation.

They were not benign. These were offices in states that conducted wars, took captives, and in the cases of Dahomey and Matamba participated substantially in the Atlantic slave trade. The kpojito’s wealth came from the same palace economy as the king’s. Recovering women’s political history does not require making its holders sympathetic.

They did not always benefit women generally. An Ohemaa’s authority derived from her lineage position. An Iyalode’s derived from her commercial standing. Neither necessarily improved conditions for women outside those structures, and both had strong reasons to defend the hierarchy that produced them.

7. What colonialism did

Colonial administrations governed through indirect rule, which required identifying a chief in each territory and dealing with him. The system had no category for a dual-sex political structure, no form field for a second ruler, and no interest in acquiring either.

The mechanism was bureaucratic rather than dramatic. Where a female office held constitutional powers, those powers were not recorded. Where succession ran through the female line, officials frequently recorded it as running through the male line, because that is what the paperwork accommodated. An office that goes unrecognised by the only state that can enforce anything does not survive long, and it does not need to be abolished — it simply stops being consulted. The Buganda Agreement of 1900 did not outlaw the Namasole. It made no mention of her, which was sufficient.

Christian missions reinforced the pattern with a model of household and public authority in which female political office had no place, and mission education was for a long period the only route to the clerkships and positions the colonial state actually distributed.

The clearest case is Igbo. Igbo societies had no centralised kingship, so the British invented one: the warrant chief system, in which men were appointed as chiefs where no such role had existed. The female half of the political system — the Omu, the women’s assemblies, the umuada — was not incorporated, not consulted, and not compensated. In 1929 tens of thousands of women across south-eastern Nigeria rose against the warrant chiefs and the prospect of taxation on women. Colonial records call it the Aba Women’s Riots. Igbo tradition calls it Ogu Umunwanyi, the Women’s War. Dozens of women were killed by colonial forces.

It is taught almost everywhere as an anti-tax protest. It is better understood as what happens when a political system’s female half is abolished and its members still expect to be consulted.

The implication cuts against a common framing. When the scarcity of women in African political leadership is attributed to traditional attitudes, the institutional record points the other way: across large parts of the continent, the tradition was constitutionally defined female authority, and what removed it was colonial administration. Two qualifications keep this honest — the offices were regionally concentrated rather than universal, and their existence never meant general equality. The argument is about institutions, not a lost golden age.

8. What survives

Ghana has the strongest continuity. Ohemaa and the parallel offices function within the traditional-authority system recognised alongside the state, and queen mothers’ associations have become significant actors in local development, education and public health work — an adaptation of an old office to new functions rather than a museum survival.

Eswatini retains the Ndlovukazi as a constitutional office in a functioning dual monarchy, the only case where the arrangement remains formally part of a national constitution.

Nigeria retains the Iyoba in Benin, largely ceremonial; the Iyalode in Yoruba towns; and the Iyaloja, which remains a nationally significant position with real influence over market economies and, through them, over politics.

Uganda restored the Buganda kingdom in 1993 and the Namasole title with it, honoured and without governing function.

South Africa recognises the Balobedu Queenship, a sovereign queenship rather than a queen-mother office, whose succession is currently disputed. See The Modjadji Rain Queens.

The pattern across all five: where the office survives, it usually survives as honour rather than as power, and where it retains power, that power now runs through economic or civic channels rather than constitutional ones. The offices adapted. They were not restored.

9. Sources and further reading

Institutional histories

• Bay, Edna G., Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (1998).
• Bay, Edna G., “Belief, Legitimacy and the Kpojito: An Institutional History of the ‘Queen Mother’ in Precolonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 36:1 (1995), 1–27.
• Amadiume, Ifi, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (1987).
• Okonjo, Kamene, on the dual-sex political system among the western Igbo.
• Van Allen, Judith, “Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women,” Canadian Journal of African Studies (1972).
• Musisi, Nakanyike, on Buganda’s queen mothers and the writing of Irene Drusilla Namaganda’s life.
• Stoeltje, Beverly, on Asante queen mothers and contemporary adjudication.

Regional

• Krige and Krige (1943), The Realm of a Rain-Queen — Balobedu.
• Kuckertz (2021), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology — Meroitic titulary and chronology.
• Ben-Amos, Paula Girshick, on Benin court art and the Iyoba masks.

Related pages on this site

• African Queens: a complete guide
• Matrilineal succession in Africa
• The Modjadji Rain Queens
• African kingdoms ruled by women