African Kingdoms Ruled by Women: A Kingdom-by-Kingdom Guide

Most guides to African queens are lists of women. This one is a list of states.

The difference matters because individuals do not explain the pattern. A woman does not become a sovereign because she is exceptional; she becomes a sovereign because a political system has a route by which she can. Some African states had that route built in as a constitutional rule. Some had a second throne that was always female. Some acquired the route by accident and then kept it. And some never had it at all — which is why the same handful of names circulate endlessly while dozens of large African kingdoms produced no reigning woman in five centuries.

This guide covers the polities, organised by region, with each tagged by the mechanism that made female rule possible in it.

1. Five routes to a woman on the throne

Route A — The office is female by rule. The polity’s supreme office may only be held by a woman. Extraordinarily rare worldwide. One clear African case.

Route B — Two thrones, one of them female. A dual monarchy in which a male and a female ruler hold distinct offices simultaneously, sometimes with separate capitals, courts and revenues. Several African cases — more than anywhere else in the world.

Route C — Conversion. A polity that did not permit female rule, permitted it once under pressure, and then normalised it. The rarest and most interesting route, because it shows a constitution changing in real time.

Route D — Matrilineal descent with male incumbency. Descent and eligibility run through women, but the throne is filled by a man whom a woman selects. Women hold the decisive power without holding the office.

Route E — Exceptional accession. A patrilineal system in which a woman takes the throne when the male line fails or a succession crisis creates an opening. This is the European pattern, and it is also what happened in Egypt, Ethiopia and Madagascar. The women are individually remarkable; the system is not.

Tags below refer to these routes.

2. The Nile Valley and Northeast Africa

Kingdom of Kush — Napata and Meroë

c. 1070 BCE – c. 350 CE · present-day Sudan · Route C, then B

The longest-running producer of women sovereigns in African history. Kush emerged from the Egyptian withdrawal from Nubia, ruled Egypt itself as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, then withdrew southward and shifted its centre from Napata to Meroë. Its economy rested on iron production, gold, and control of the trade corridor between the Mediterranean and inner Africa.

The kandake began as a formal office for the king’s mother. From roughly the second century BCE it was also used for a woman reigning in her own right, usually styled qore and kandake — reigning monarch and kandake together. At least eight women held sovereign or co-sovereign power across the following five centuries, among them Amanirenas, Amanishakheto, Shanakdakhete, Nawidemak, Amanitore, Amanikhatashan, Amanikhalika and Amanipilade.

Note the chronology. Shanakdakhete was long presented as the first, around 170 BCE. Current scholarship re-dates her to the first half of the first century CE, after Amanishakheto. Most published sources have not caught up.

Because Meroitic remains undeciphered, Kush is documented through titulary, iconography, tomb architecture and hostile Roman accounts. At Naqa, Amanitore and her son Natakamani appear at equal scale flanking a temple entrance — in Kushite convention a constitutional statement rather than an artistic choice.

Fate: Meroë declined through the fourth century CE. The traditional account of an Aksumite conquest is now questioned, and internal and economic explanations are gaining ground.

More: Kingdom of Kush

Ancient Egypt

c. 3100 – 30 BCE · Route E

Egypt produced female pharaohs, but the pattern is diagnostic: they cluster at the ends of dynasties. Sobekneferu closed the Twelfth. Twosret closed the Nineteenth. Merneith, in the First Dynasty around 2950 BCE, holds royal burial honours and appears on a king list, with her status as regent or ruler unresolved. Hatshepsut is the exception that proves the rule — she took the throne mid-dynasty, held it two decades, and was systematically erased from monuments decades after her death, in what current scholarship reads as a dynastic manoeuvre to remove a precedent rather than a personal vendetta.

Egypt had no female office and no female route. Women reached the throne when the succession broke.

Ptolemaic Egypt

305 – 30 BCE · Route B, of a kind

The Ptolemies imported a Macedonian practice of sibling co-rule, which gave royal women formal regnal status. Arsinoe II, the Berenices and the Cleopatras appear in the record as co-rulers with titles, cults and coinage, and Cleopatra VII ruled substantively for two decades. This is structural female status, but it arrived from outside and belonged to a Greek dynasty governing Egypt rather than to an Egyptian institution.

The Ethiopian Empire

13th century – 1974 · Route E, with a strong regency tradition

Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty was patrilineal, and its one reigning empress, Zewditu (1916–1930), came to the throne through a succession crisis and shared power uneasily with a regent who eventually replaced her. But Ethiopia’s more consistent pattern is the powerful empress-regent. Eleni dominated Ethiopian government across several reigns into the 1520s and despatched the first Ethiopian embassy to Europe in 1509. Mentewab governed from Gondar for some three decades in the eighteenth century. Taytu Betul shaped policy decisively and was present in command at Adwa in 1896.

Ethiopia is the clearest case of a state where women repeatedly held effective supreme power without the constitution ever providing for it.

Aksum

c. 100 – 940 CE · legendary only

The tradition of Gudit, a tenth-century queen who destroyed the remnants of Aksum, comes entirely from later, hostile church sources. Something disruptive happened. That it was a woman named Gudit is legend.

3. North Africa

The Amazigh confederations

7th–8th centuries CE · not a fixed polity

Dihya, called al-Kahina, led resistance to the Umayyad conquest in the 690s and died around 703. She led a confederation rather than a state with an office, which is why nothing institutional survived her. The core claim is credible; every detail comes from Arab accounts written centuries later by the winning side.

Mamluk Egypt

1250 · Route E, briefly

Shajar al-Durr ruled Egypt in her own name in 1250 — a former slave who concealed her husband’s death during the Seventh Crusade, held the state together through the capture of Louis IX, and was then proclaimed sultana. Roughly eighty days later, pressure from the Abbasid caliph forced her to marry and share power. She was murdered in 1257. The Mamluk system had no route for a woman and never opened one again.

Tétouan

c. 1515–1542 · Route E, as an autonomous city-state

Sayyida al-Hurra — the title means the free or sovereign lady — governed Tétouan as an autonomous power, allied with the Ottoman corsair Barbarossa, and conducted naval operations in the western Mediterranean. When she married the Sultan of Morocco he came to Tétouan for the ceremony rather than requiring her to come to Fez.

4. West Africa

Zazzau (Zaria) and the Hausa states

c. 11th century – 19th century · Route contested

Amina is the most famous woman ruler in West African history and the least securely documented. Her dates are unsettled between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; her campaigns and the fortified earthworks credited to her come through tradition. The founding tradition of Daura, one of the original Hausa Bakwai, also centres on a ruling queen.

What the Hausa states demonstrably had were institutional offices for royal women — Magajiya, Iya, Sarauniya — with authority over women’s affairs. Those offices were substantially restructured by the Sokoto jihad in the early nineteenth century, before European rule arrived. Not every diminution of women’s authority in Africa was colonial.

Kingdom of Benin

c. 1180 – 1897 · a female office, never the throne

Benin never had a reigning woman. What it had, from the early sixteenth century, was the Iyoba — an office created by Oba Esigie for his mother Idia, with a palace at Uselu, its own domain and retinue, and a place among the senior chiefs. The Iyoba was a power centre parallel to the throne rather than a route to it, and a traditional restriction kept her and the Oba from meeting after her installation — the clearest possible signal that the office was designed to be independent.

The British punitive expedition of 1897 removed the political substance and left the title.

More: Kingdom of Benin · queen mother offices

The Asante Confederacy

c. 1701 – 1902 · Route D, the definitive case

Asante never had a female Asantehene, and Asante is nevertheless the most important polity on this page for understanding women’s political power in Africa.

Akan society is matrilineal. Eligibility for the Golden Stool runs through the royal abusua, and the authority on that lineage is the Asantehemaa, who nominates the candidate and can reject nominations put to her. Male elders confirm; they do not choose. Every division and town within the confederacy replicated the arrangement at its own level.

The 1900 War of the Golden Stool showed what the office could do in extremis: Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of the constituent state of Ejisu, took leadership of the resistance when the Asantehene was in exile and the remaining male leadership hesitated.

Asante shows that “did a woman ever sit on the throne” is the wrong question. Women controlled who sat on it, continuously, for two centuries.

More: Asante Confederacy · matrilineal succession

Kingdom of Dahomey

c. 1600 – 1904 · Route B, in an unusual form

Dahomey paired every king with a kpojito, a female reign-mate who was not his mother, was typically drawn from the previous king’s wives, and was frequently of commoner or captive origin. The office appears under Agaja in the early eighteenth century and reached its height with Kpojito Hwanjile and King Tegbesu (1740–1774), who governed in tandem and restructured state religion around a paired male-female supreme deity that mirrored the arrangement at the top of the state.

The pairing extended downward. Dahomey doubled male and female officials throughout the palace, the administration and the army, with a woman attached to each male officer serving outside — simultaneously an administrative parallel and a surveillance structure. The Agojie, the women’s regiments, were part of the same institutional logic and reached an estimated 3,000–6,000 under Ghezo.

Dahomey was also a major slave-raiding and slave-trading state throughout this period, and the female institutions were instruments of it. Both facts belong in any account.

The kpojito declined through the nineteenth century. France established a protectorate in 1894.

More: Kingdom of Dahomey · warrior queens

Waalo

c. 1287 – 1855 · Route B, and actual female rule

A Wolof kingdom in the lower Senegal valley, and a genuinely under-covered case. Waalo maintained the office of Lingeer — a senior female position with its own authority and revenues, distinct from the male Brak. In the nineteenth century the office became the throne: Njembot Mbodj and then her sister Ndate Yalla Mbodj (1846–1855) ruled Waalo directly, and Ndate Yalla resisted French expansion militarily before defeat by forces under Faidherbe in the mid-1850s.

Two sisters ruling a West African kingdom in succession, resisting French conquest, in the same decade the Agojie were fighting in Dahomey. Waalo is the single most neglected polity in this subject.

More: Waalo

The Mossi states

c. 15th century – present · legendary founding, institutional office

The Mossi states of present-day Burkina Faso trace their foundation to Yennenga, a warrior princess whose son founded the dynasty — a charter narrative, not a biography. Institutionally the states maintained the Napoko, a female position associated with the interregnum between rulers. The office needs specialist verification before this site treats it in detail.

5. Central Africa

The Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba

Ndongo c. 1500s – 1671; Matamba c. 1600s – 19th century · Route C, the outstanding case

The most important entry on this page, and the one almost every popular account gets only half right.

Njinga Mbande took power in Ndongo around 1624, was driven out by the Portuguese, seized Matamba, and held it until her death in 1663. Her forty-year record — field campaigning, alliance with the Dutch after they took Luanda in 1641, adoption of Imbangala military organisation, a negotiated Catholic settlement in the 1650s — is the best-documented career of any pre-colonial African woman ruler, because Portugal wrote about her constantly.

That much is well known. What follows is not.

Njinga was not a one-off. She founded a dynasty of women. She designated her sister Mukambu, baptised Barbara, as heir and forced the Portuguese to acknowledge the designation during negotiations in 1655. Barbara reigned from 1663 until her death in 1666. A disputed period followed, with the throne passing between Njinga’s Imbangala general and the Guterres line.

Then Verónica I Guterres came to the throne in 1681, after her brother was killed by Portuguese forces at the Battle of Katole, and reigned until 1721 — the longest reign of the Guterres dynasty. The historically decisive point is that her accession was not challenged on grounds of her sex, as her predecessors’ had been. Within two generations, Njinga’s success had converted a contested innovation into an accepted rule.

Female rule then continued: Ana II Guterres (1742–1756), Verónica II (1756–1758) and Ana III (1758–1767). The politics were vicious — Verónica II was deposed and executed by her sister, who was herself deposed and executed nine years later — which is worth saying because it is the ordinary texture of dynastic politics and the sanitised version helps nobody. Five queens ruled Ndongo-Matamba in the century after Njinga’s death, and the kingdom persisted into the nineteenth century.

This is the only well-documented African case of a polity converting to routine female succession, and it happened because one ruler was successful enough for long enough to make the precedent stick.

More: Ndongo and Matamba

Kingdom of Kongo

c. 1390 – 1914 · Route D, contested

Kongo’s political system rested on matrilineal descent groups — kanda — competing for the throne, which made senior women central to succession politics and gave royal women independent standing and provincial authority. Kongo’s throne was normally held by men, and the extent to which women held sovereign or quasi-sovereign power at various points is genuinely disputed in the literature. It needs specialist treatment rather than a confident summary here.

Kimpa Vita, often listed among African queens, was not a ruler. She was a prophet whose Antonian movement sought to restore the ruined capital and reunify a Kongo destroyed by civil war, and she was burned as a heretic in 1706 at about twenty-two.

6. Southern Africa

The Balobedu Queenship

c. 1800 – present · Route A, the only clear case

The one polity on this page where the supreme office is female by rule. Seven Modjadji Rain Queens since about 1800, in a small state on a wet escarpment in what is now Limpopo, maintaining independence through a rainmaking-based tribute and intercession system rather than through military strength.

Recognised by the South African government in March 2016 under the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act, and reported as the only legally recognised queenship in the country. The current succession is disputed and before the courts.

Important qualification. Balobedu society was not organised on matrilineal descent in the way Akan or Bemba society was. The queenship’s female succession is a rule attaching to a specific office, not an expression of a general descent principle. That distinction bears directly on the present dispute.

More: the Balobedu

Barotseland (the Lozi kingdom)

c. 17th century – present · Route B, formally constituted

The most explicit dual-throne arrangement in Africa, and almost unknown outside Zambia.

The Lozi kingdom on the Zambezi floodplain is formally divided in two. The north, Namuso, is ruled by the male Litunga from Lealui and Limulunga. The south, Lwambi, is ruled by a woman — the Litunga la Mboela, “of the earth of the south,” also styled Mulena Mukwae — from Nalolo. She holds her own court, her own Kuta of indunas with titles paralleling those of the northern council, her own prime minister, and her own barge in the annual Kuomboka migration when the floodplain inundates.

Tradition places the origin of the southern seat with the sixth Litunga, Ngombala, who established a second centre of power in the south with his daughter Notulu as its first ruler. Lozi origin tradition also holds that the Luyi people were led by women before settling the floodplain, with Mbuyamwambwa abdicating in favour of her son, the first Litunga.

The honest qualification: Lwambi is subordinate to Namuso. This is a second throne, not an equal one.

The office produced real political actors. Mukwae Matauka, sister of Litunga Lewanika, held Nalolo from 1878 and made representations to European powers over Portuguese encroachment on the kingdom’s western boundary — the dispute that went to international arbitration and shaped the present Angola–Zambia border.

More: Barotseland

Eswatini (Swaziland)

c. 18th century – present · Route B

A functioning dual monarchy: the Ngwenyama and the Ndlovukazi, the lion and the she-elephant, holding distinct offices with distinct ritual responsibilities, the Ndlovukazi maintaining the royal residence at Lobamba. She has repeatedly served as regent — Labotsibeni Mdluli governed from 1899 to 1921 through the South African War, the imposition of protectorate administration and the land partition, organising a national levy to buy land back and directing funds into education.

The office remains constitutionally recognised: the only such arrangement formally embedded in a national constitution anywhere in Africa.

The Kingdom of Rwanda

c. 15th century – 1961 · Route B

The mwami ruled with the umugabekazi, his mother, who by constitutional rule came from a designated clan other than his own — power distributed between lineages by design. She took a regnal name distinct from her birth name, marking the office as separate from the person. Kanjogera held it from 1889 to 1931 as regent and then co-ruler; her role in the violent succession crisis of 1896 is documented and contested. The office did not survive the end of the monarchy.

The Batlokwa

c. 1813–1824 · Route E, as regency

Mmanthatisi led the Batlokwa as regent for her son through the Difaqane. Her reputation was inflated by settler writing with an interest in depicting the interior as consumed by self-generated violence. What she actually achieved — holding a displaced people together through a catastrophic decade — is more impressive than the legend.

7. Madagascar and the Indian Ocean

The Merina Kingdom

c. 1540 – 1897 · Route E, sustained

Four consecutive queens ruled Madagascar from 1828 to 1897, and the sequence traces the arc of nineteenth-century African sovereignty exactly.

Ranavalona I (1828–1861) reversed her predecessor’s European engagement, expelled missionaries, repudiated treaties, and repelled a Franco-British naval attack in 1845. Madagascar remained independent throughout. Her reign also involved severe internal repression; European accounts of it are unreliable in a specific and predictable direction, and the casualty figures they produced are inflated.

Rasoherina (1863–1868), Ranavalona II (1868–1883) and Ranavalona III (1883–1897) followed, and here the qualification is substantial: the prime minister Rainilaiarivony married each of the three in succession and held effective control of the state for over thirty years. France annexed Madagascar in 1896 and deposed Ranavalona III in 1897; she died in exile in Algiers in 1917.

Four queens in seventy years, and for the last thirty-four of them the real executive was a man who married the throne repeatedly.

More: Merina Kingdom

The Sultanate of Mwali (Mohéli)

1830 – 1909 · Route E

Djoumbé Fatima, known as Jumbe Souli, acceded as an infant in the 1840s and spent her reign navigating French pressure until the island became a protectorate. One of the few documented Muslim women sovereigns in the western Indian Ocean.

The Swahili city-states

c. 10th century – 19th century · Route E, sporadic

Fatuma binti Muhammad ruled Zanzibar in the seventeenth century during Portuguese pressure and Omani expansion. Mwana Mkisi appears in Mombasa’s foundation traditions. The Swahili coast produced occasional women rulers in city-states without producing an institution that made them regular.

8. The kingdoms at a glance

Explore by region and era with the timeline tool.

9. What the pattern shows

Four conclusions the kingdom-level view supports and the biography-level view does not.

Dual monarchy is an African speciality. Route B is rare globally and appears repeatedly across Africa — Dahomey, Rwanda, Eswatini, Barotseland, Buganda in modified form, and Kush in the kandake’s original sense. These are unrelated societies, at different periods, on opposite sides of the continent, arriving independently at the same solution: a second throne, permanently female, with its own court and revenues, as a counterweight to the first.

The scarcity of reigning queens understates women’s power. Asante had no female Asantehene and had women controlling the succession for two centuries. Benin had no reigning queen and had an Iyoba with a palace, a domain and a following. Counting thrones is the wrong metric.

Constitutions changed, and one case shows it happening. Ndongo-Matamba moved from contested female rule under Njinga to unchallenged female accession within two generations. That is a documented constitutional change in a pre-colonial African state, driven by nothing but one ruler’s sustained success — and it is worth setting against the assumption that customary systems are static.

Almost none of it survived. Of the polities above, the Balobedu queenship, Eswatini’s Ndlovukazi and Barotseland’s Litunga la Mboela retain formal standing, and only Eswatini’s is embedded in a national constitution. Kush, Matamba, Dahomey, Waalo, Merina, Rwanda’s monarchy and Mwali are gone entirely — most of them ended not by internal collapse but by conquest between 1855 and 1904.

The great age of African women’s sovereignty did not fade. It was ended, and it was ended within about fifty years.

10. Sources and further reading

Central Africa

• Heywood, Linda, Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (2017).
• Thornton, John K., A History of West Central Africa to 1850 (2020).
• Campos, Fernando, on the chronology of the Guterres dynasty, África: Revista do Centro de Estudos Africanos (2006/07).

Southern Africa

• Krige, E. J. and Krige, J. D., The Realm of a Rain-Queen (1943).
• Gluckman, Max, on Lozi political and legal institutions.
• Jalla, Adolphe, Litaba za Sicaba sa Malozi (c. 1909) — the Lozi regnal tradition.
• Mainga, Mutumba, on Bulozi under the Luyana kings.

West Africa

• Bay, Edna G., Wives of the Leopard (1998) — Dahomey.
• Alpern, Stanley B., Amazons of Black Sparta (1998).
• Boahen, A. Adu, on Yaa Asantewaa and the 1900 war.
• Barry, Boubacar, on Waalo and the Senegambia.

Nile Valley

• Kuckertz, Josefine, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2021) — Meroitic chronology.
• Eide, Hägg, Pierce and Török, Fontes Historiae Nubiorum (1996).

Related pages on this site

• African Queens: a complete guide
• Queen mothers of Africa
• Matrilineal succession in Africa
• Warrior queens of Africa
• The Modjadji Rain Queens