Who gets remembered in African history, and who gets erased from it? Who has the power to decide which African lives are recognised, protected, disciplined, or forgotten?
These were some of the difficult and deeply unsettling questions explored by Prof Nwando Achebe during the 2026 Africa Day Memorial Lecture hosted by the University of the Free State’s (UFS’) Qwaqwa Campus through the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies in the Faculty of the Humanities, in collaboration with the Directorate for International Partnerships and Relations. Delivered under the theme ‘Gender as African Archive: Power, Authority, and Reckoning on Africa Day’, the lecture brought together staff, students, university leadership, members of various royal houses, and academics, including Dr Demetrice Jordan, Instructor and Dean’s Faculty Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, for a conversation that moved between history, gender, memory, power, and the unfinished questions that continue to shape African societies today.
A Distinguished Professor and Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History at Michigan State University in the USA, Prof Achebe challenged audiences to reconsider Africa Day not only as a commemoration of political independence, but as a moment to reckon with the histories, voices, and experiences that dominant political narratives have often overlooked or pushed aside. “Africa Day marks courage, aspirations, insistence that Africans would govern themselves, and that should be honoured,” she said. “But memory is never innocent. Every celebration remembers some things and forgets others.”
In his welcoming remarks, Professor Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies at the UFS, said, “Africa Day is both historical and forward-looking, a bridge between liberation movements of the past and the aspirations of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, which aligns well with the UFS’ vision of co-creating responsible societal futures. For universities, Africa Day is an intellectual and political responsibility to deepen scholarship on Africa and challenge inherited narratives of power and identity.”
Reading gender as African political history
Moving chronologically from the early 20th century to the present, Prof Achebe structured the lecture around four interlinked case studies examining how women’s authority has repeatedly been recognised, challenged, disciplined, and erased across different historical moments in African societies.
The lecture revisited the story of Ahebi Ugbabe, the only female king in colonial Nigeria, whose rise to power disrupted both colonial and patriarchal understandings of leadership and authority. Prof Achebe reflected on how the very systems that once recognised Ahebi’s authority later moved to undermine and delegitimise it once her power no longer fit within acceptable colonial structures.
Prof Achebe then turned to women’s collective governance in Igbo marketplaces before the 1929 Women’s War, a major anti-colonial uprising led by Igbo women in Nigeria, showing how marketplaces functioned not merely as economic spaces, but as centres of political organisation, accountability, negotiation, protest, and communal authority led by women. Through these examples, the lecture illustrated that women’s political participation in African societies was neither secondary nor symbolic, but deeply embedded in governance, community life, and systems of power.
The lecture also explored the colonial and postcolonial regulation of marriage, sexuality, and women’s autonomy, examining how systems of governance increasingly narrowed the conditions under which women’s authority, legitimacy, and personhood could be recognised. In one of the lecture’s most contemporary and unsettling examples, Prof Achebe reflected on a recent case at the University of Benin in Nigeria in which the digital circulation of young women dancing and laughing became grounds for public outrage, punishment, and the withdrawal of dignity. Through the example, she examined how women’s visibility, pleasure, and self-expression continue to provoke forms of discipline and moral policing.
Taken together, the four case studies challenged the idea that women existed at the margins of African political life. Instead, Prof Achebe argued that women have always been central to how authority, legitimacy, wealth, resistance, and social order have been negotiated across African societies. “Gender in African history was never merely identity, it was power,” she said. “Through gender, authority was organised, wealth was contested, marriage was negotiated, personhood could be recognised or denied.”
Throughout the lecture, Prof Achebe repeatedly returned to the relationship between liberation and memory, questioning whether political independence alone could ever be enough if inherited systems of exclusion, domination, and silence continue to shape African societies. “What does liberation mean if the flag is free, but the people remain bound by colonial habits of power?” she asked.
Prof Achebe argued that while colonialism did not invent struggles over gender and authority in African societies, it profoundly intervened in them by narrowing the conditions under which certain lives, identities, and forms of power could be recognised as legitimate. “If we learn to read gender as archive,” she said, “Africa Day begins to look very different.”
The lecture further challenged audiences to confront what Prof Achebe described as “unfinished freedom”, particularly in relation to whose histories remain vulnerable to silence, exposure, discipline, and erasure within postcolonial African societies. “Is Africa ready to defeat empire within itself?” she asked. “Because until then, independence remains unfinished.”
In one of the lecture’s most striking reflections, Prof Achebe turned attention to the women whose labour, leadership, resistance, and imagination have often remained absent from dominant narratives of liberation and political history. “They waited while empire ruled. They waited while flags were raised,” she said. “They have waited long enough. Now Africa must answer them.”
Echoing these sentiments, Prof Reddy added that, “By centring gender as an African archive, we are reminded that African women have always been central actors in governance, resistance, and knowledge-making. Africa’s political and intellectual life has always been shaped by complex negotiations of power and legitimacy. We are privileged to have in our midst Prof Achebe, whose scholarship powerfully reconstructs silenced histories. Her work reminds us that gender is not peripheral but foundational. Let us recommit to an Africa Day that is anchored in justice, inclusion, and critical reflection.”
The full Africa Day Memorial Lecture can be viewed here.