Stories from the life of Hajiya Gambo Sawaba, one of northern Nigeria’s most important female political activists, who was born on this day in 1933, have become the stuff of folklore.
According to one, her fighting spirit was evident when, as a young girl growing up in northern Nigeria in the 1930s and 40s, she would always intervene in other children’s fights on the side of the loser, telling them: “I have bought this fight from you”, before carrying on the scuffle.
The fights got here frequently, and her garments could inevitably get torn. So, the story is going, in order to minimise the frequency with which she might must replace her daughter’s broken dresses, Sawaba’s mom, Malama Fatima, resorted to creating them out of tarpaulin.
Whether or now not this unique tale became actual, there was no denying that during her life, Sawaba in no way shied away from a fight, specially while it become on the aspect of the downtrodden.
A TEENAGE ACTIVIST
Her story commenced on February 15, 1933.
In 1943, when she changed into 10 years old, her father died. Her mom died 3 years later and, quickly after, on the age of 13, Sawaba became married to a 2d international conflict veteran named Abubakar Dan Sarkin. At 16, she gave delivery to her only baby, Bilikisu.
By the subsequent yr, her political activism had all started.
At the time, the British ruled over Nigeria the use of a gadget of Indirect Rule, wherein Native Authorities (NA) administered colonial regulations inside the 12 northern provinces through nearby emirs and district and village leaders.
The Northern Region turned into dominated with the aid of the conservative Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC). But in 1950, a faculty trainer in Kano City referred to as Malam Aminu Kano shaped a new political party, Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU).
NEPU supported “ladies’s training in both spiritual and secular spheres and their being given enough area – politically and economically”.
It become in sharp assessment to the NPC, which managed the Native Authorities and whose leadership became quoted as pronouncing: “We in the north are glad, our girls are happy approximately their circumstance. There isn't a unmarried Northern lady who has advised all of us that she is sad. We recognize what's right for ladies and our men recognise what's right for themselves.”
NEPU’s messages resonated with Sawaba’s experience of justice and she became an early member of the celebration’s ladies’s wing.
By this time, there have been already requires girls’s balloting rights in other elements of Nigeria – with the aid of the likes of the renowned feminists, Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Margaret Ekpo in the western and eastern areas of Nigeria, respectively. Sawaba might soon lend her voice to theirs.
‘FREEDOM AND REDEEMTION’
Sawaba turned into now not her beginning name. Meaning freedom or redemption, it turned into given to her by way of her political mentor, Malam Aminu Kano, after she have been elected president-standard of NEPU’s girls’s wing.
Although folklore gives an opportunity model of the way she came via the name. According to this, she became referred to as Sawaba after attending a political rally at Jakara Market in Zaria. As the gang waited for the reputable speaker, a male Zaria council member known as Alhaji Gambo Sawaba, she took to the level to talk about voting and education rights for ladies.
When Alhaji Gambo Sawaba arrived, he introduced to the audience that as she have been the primary lady to address a political rally within the north, she might henceforth be known as Gambo Sawabiya – the feminine version of Sawaba.
If this model of the story is accurate, Sawaba definitely preferred the male version as this is the only she stuck to. From then on, in Zaria’s political circles, humans differentiated among the two politicians by using announcing: “Gambo Sawaba [male]; Gambo Sawaba [female].”
Whatever the truth in the back of her call, Sawaba have become synonymous with the politics of freedom and emancipation in northern Nigeria, mainly for ladies.
IMPRISONMENT
She brazenly recommended towards baby marriage, pressured and unpaid labour and unfair taxes, and canvassed for jobs for girls, education for girls and complete vote casting rights.
Her husband’s circle of relatives, but, have been unhappy along with her efforts to merge motherhood and political activism and an amicable separation soon accompanied. As was the custom at the time, her child daughter become surpassed over to her in-legal guidelines.
But she had additionally attracted the ire of the authorities. As many ladies in the north accompanied the practice of purdah, a shape of social seclusion, Sawaba went from house-to-house to speak to them. This displeased the Native Authority in Kano and, in 1952, she become hauled before the conservative Alkali (Magistrates) Court, on costs of “drawing out girls who were in purdah”. The court sentenced her to a few months in prison.
It became the primary of sixteen jail sentences she could serve in the course of her lifetime. She became arrested so regularly, in reality, that she usually saved a blanket with the phrases ‘Prison Yard’ inscribed on it nearby in order that she could take it with her every time the police came for her.
Later that 12 months, the authorities in Kano ordered her to leave the city. To make certain she complied with the order, nearby law enforcement retailers escorted her again to Zaria.
But she persevered her political activism – and periods of imprisonment – in her fatherland. As well as Zaira and Kano, she changed into additionally imprisoned in Kaduna and Jos.
According to the Daily Trust newspaper: “Whenever she become on trial, the court changed into full of her supporters.”
But it became now not just prison time she persevered.
The Daily Trust stated, “On two activities she was stripped bare and given 80 lashes in Zaria Central Prison. She also persisted the indignity and ache of having her hair shaved off with a damaged bottle.”
In 1990, Sawaba’s political compatriot, the past due Malama Ladi Shehu, instructed the First Nation Magazine about the abuses girl political activists faced: “Gambo and a few different NEPU ladies, very many of them who had been imprisoned, had their hair shaven and had been crushed up; and a number of our individuals have been even killed. Quite some of them.”
THE VOTE
But imprisonment did not stop Sawaba and other members of the ladies’s wing of the party campaigning for enfranchisement. In 1956, they marched to the workplace of the nearby optimal, Sir Ahmadu Bello, in Kaduna to demand the franchise for ladies inside the north in future parliamentary elections.
The top of the line stated he would don't forget it – but his pledge came to nothing.
Women in southern Nigeria were granted a restricted franchise in 1951. In 1954, the Eastern Region followed in shape and the Western Region in 1959.
But, in keeping with the book Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights by means of Bonny Ibhawoh, in 1954, the ruling NPC within the Northern Region issued a announcement saying: “Women would accept franchise, simplest in God’s time.”
Eight years later, throughout a debate in Nigeria’s Senate on vote casting rights for Northern women, Senator Wuraola Esan, one of the two women inside the Senate and a consultant from the Western Region, declared: “I daresay, God’s time can also in no way come as a long way as franchise for ladies inside the north is worried.”
Again, in 1965, she advised the Senate: “I would really like to remind my Northern brothers that … it's time the girls of the north had the franchise. It is applicable for me to remind our Northern brothers in their promise that the ladies of the Northern Region can be given the franchise in due route. I am simplest attractive to them to make that ‘due direction’ soon.”
In his autobiography, Bello, who became assassinated at some stage in a navy coup in January 1966, defined his stand on enfranchisement for Northern ladies: “I dare say that we shall introduce it in the long run right here, but – and this is crucial – it is so contrary to the customs and feelings of the more a part of the men of this Region that I would be very loth to introduce it myself. The education of ladies must attain a far greater electricity, and the numbers of nicely knowledgeable girls have to be increased to generally the existing, before the vote could be used to complete benefit.”
Sawaba did not overlook his failure to furnish women the right to vote and once declared that have been it now not “for the fact that girls within the North had been not allowed to vote or be voted for” she might have stood in opposition to him in his personal constituency.
Northern girls could in the end get the vote in 1976.
Sawaba, however, never carried out electoral fulfillment – either with NEPU or the 2 different events she joined later on in her profession.
In 1998, she announced her retirement, telling the New Nigerian newspaper: “Politics inside the country has misplaced its flavour and is not a game of ideology, but a recreation of self-aggrandisement.”
A HEAVY PRICE
But she had paid a heavy rate all through her forty eight years in politics.
In an interview with the New Nigerian newspaper in 2000, the then sixty seven-year-vintage Sawaba recalled considered one of her worst moments, describing how she “became beaten up through six guys and left to die in a bush” while on her way to a meeting. No one become ever charged over the assault.
On another event, the New Nigerian had quoted her as announcing: “There isn't any establishing in my frame – mouth, nostrils, eyes or anywhere else – from which blood did not gush out from because of torture.
“My the front tooth are synthetic. The originals had been broken and pulled out.”
She also confirmed that as a result of torture she had persisted in prison in 1957, she had wanted surgical operation to get rid of her womb to save her lifestyles.
Having witnessed the emotional and physical pain her mom persevered, Bilikisu never pondered following in her direction. Now a seventy one-12 months-vintage grandmother and retired civil servant, she lives within the family domestic in Benin Street in which pix of Karl Marx, Thomas Sankara and Samora Machel had once decorated the living room walls.
“My earliest recollections of her when I become growing up changed into she changed into fully engaged and worried in civic politics along her pals,” Bilikisu recalls. “Our home became the centre of political meetings and sports.”
It was no longer best political pals who were welcomed inside the house.
“Throughout her existence, she maintained an open-door coverage that saw buddies, associates and everyday individuals of the public come to the house,” Bilikisu explains.
“[Our] home turned into never freed from followed children, residence guests and site visitors.”
While Sawaba was a political activist to the outside global, at domestic she turned into someone who loved to cook dinner, her daughter recollects.
“[She] might not permit everyone to cook dinner for her. She had specific favourites, the Nupe traditional dish of Dukuno, and additionally Tuwon Shinkafa or Sakwara [popular northern Nigerian dishes].”
Sawaba married – and divorced – three extra instances after her teenage marriage. Her second husband turned into a railway employee, her third a Cameroonian boxer, who became regularly threatened with deportation through her political opponents, and her fourth a businessman.
After her last marriage ended, Sawaba dedicated her energies to worrying for the kids she had taken in.
After her loss of life at the age of seventy one in October 2001, the Daily Trust newspaper wrote: “Gambo Sawaba took on herself the challenge of education other human beings’s kids. She relished the activity of taking care of helpless children. Apart from dozens of her sister’s kids that she added up and educated, she adopted many from the road … proper now there are over 30 of such adopted children in her house. Among them is a child less than a month antique she had simply introduced from the clinic a few days before her dying.”
Bilikisu says that till her death day, her mom “by no means stopped hoping for a better society and remained constructive that Nigerians, specially girls, could be unfastened from tyranny and dictatorial leadership in governance”.
Her political reputation turned into possibly illustrated through the presence of former heads of state at her funeral rites in Zaria.
In its tribute, the New Nigerian described her as: “Blunt, non-conformist and outspoken, the maximum tortured and jailed Nigerian girl politician.”
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