Margaret Ekpo

Margaret Ekpo (27 July 1914 – 21 September 2006) was a Nigerian women's rights activist and a pioneering woman politician of the First Republic (Wikipedia). Born in Creek Town, in present-day Cross River State, she grew up in Aba, where after training in domestic science she set up a Domestic Science and Sewing Institute.

She organised a Market Women Association to unionise the market women of Aba, and in 1954 founded the Aba Township Women's Association. She joined the NCNC, which in 1959 nominated her to the regional House of Chiefs, and in 1961 she won a seat in the Eastern Regional House of Assembly, where she continued to fight for women's interests. Wikipedia describes her as one of a class of women activists who rallied women beyond ethnic loyalties in a male-dominated independence movement.

Through her mother she belonged to the royal family of King Eyo Honesty II of Creek Town; her father came from Aguluzigbo in present-day Anambra State. She completed standard six in 1934, but her hopes of training as a teacher ended when her father died that year, and she worked as a pupil-teacher. In 1938 she married a doctor, John Udo Ekpo, an Ibibio, and the couple moved to Aba. In 1946 she studied domestic science in Dublin, Ireland (Wikipedia).

Her first political involvement came in 1945, when she attended meetings in place of her husband, a civil servant, to protest the colonial administration's discrimination against Nigerian doctors; at a rally she was the only woman present to hear Mbonu Ojike, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Herbert Macaulay speak. In the 1950s she joined Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti in protesting the killing of leaders who had been protesting colonial practices at the Enugu coal mine. By 1955 women outnumbered men among Aba's voters. Her political career ended with the civil war, when she was detained by the Biafran authorities for three years (Wikipedia).

After the First Republic she took a less prominent role in politics. In 2001 the airport at Calabar was renamed Margaret Ekpo International Airport (Wikipedia).