Most Nigerians Know Anthony Enahoro For His Independence Motion but Almost nobody talks About What He Did For Nigerian Women.
In March 1953, Anthony Enahoro stood before the Federal House of Representatives and moved the famous motion calling for Nigeria’s independence.
History remembered that moment forever.
But two months earlier, on January 20, 1953, Enahoro had done something equally powerful and almost nobody talks about it.
He stood in the Western House of Assembly and said something that shocked the room.
“There are no women in this House, And that is a problem.”
Think about what Nigeria looked like in 1953.
Women could not sit in regional or central legislative houses. They had no voice in the laws that governed their own lives. When the “Widows and Orphans Pension Bill” was debated in the Western House of Assembly, it was rejected with male legislators arguing that if a woman’s children were provided for, the woman herself was also provided for.
Women were invisible in the eyes of the law.
Enahoro changed that.
He moved a motion urging the Lieutenant Governor to appoint at least one woman to the House of Assembly. He argued that due to discriminatory electoral laws, not a single woman had secured a seat and that this could no longer be acceptable.
Not everyone agreed.
One legislator argued that husbands, uncles, and nephews already represented women’s interests in the House.
That argument. In 1953. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But Enahoro’s motion survived. It was put to a vote.
And it passed unanimously.
Shortly after, Governor Marshall appointed Mrs Remilekun Iseoluwa Aiyedun, an Egba teacher from Abeokuta making her the first woman in Nigeria and indeed in all of West Africa to hold a seat in a regional legislature.
One motion. One man willing to speak up. One historic moment that changed everything for Nigerian women in politics.
Yet we barely teach this in schools.
We barely talk about it in our history books.
Did you know about this side of Anthony Enahoro?
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