Margaret Ekpo

Margaret Ekpo was born on the 27th of July 1914 in Creek Town, in the Cross River country of what was then southern Nigeria. Her father, Okoroafor Obiasulor, was of Igbo origin, and her mother, Inyang Eyo Aniemewue, descended from the household of King Eyo Honesty II of Creek Town, giving her both Igbo and Efik roots. The sudden death of her father in 1934 interrupted her schooling, but her resolve did not falter.

In 1938 she married Dr. John Udo Ekpo, a physician of Ibibio descent, and settled with him in the Eastern city of Aba. There, in a colonial order that gave women little voice, she turned her home and her convictions toward organizing. She travelled abroad for further study and returned to build institutions of learning and, in 1954, founded the Aba Township Women's Association, forging market women and townswomen into a disciplined political force.

Aligned with the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, she mobilized women as voters and citizens, so effectively that by the mid-1950s women in Aba outnumbered men at the polls. In 1961 she won a seat in the Eastern Regional House of Assembly, among the small number of women to reach that chamber, a first for a woman of Aba and a landmark in Nigeria's First Republic.

She lived to see her city's airport bear her name, the Margaret Ekpo International Airport at Calabar, before her passing on the 21st of September 2006. May the mother of Nigeria's women's political struggle be honored, her courage remembered wherever a woman claims her rightful voice.