Before her portrait appeared on the ₦20 note, Ladi Kwali had already taken something much older than paper money into places her childhood could hardly have imagined.
It was clay.
In the hands of the woman from Kwali, a water pot was no longer merely a household object. It became a work of art, a record of Nigerian craftsmanship and eventually an object sought by museums and collectors abroad.
But Kwali’s rise was not simply the story of a gifted woman who became famous.
It was the story of two pottery traditions meeting in colonial Nigeria.
One came from the Gwari communities around Kwali, where women had learned to build vessels by hand for generations. The other came through Michael Cardew, a British studio potter working in Nigeria who introduced the potter’s wheel, glazing and high temperature firing at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre.
Kwali learned the new techniques.
She also refused to abandon the old ones.
That decision became the foundation of her legacy.
The girl who learned pottery from her aunt
Ladi Dosei Kwali was born around 1925 in the village of Kwali, in the Gwari region of what was then Northern Nigeria.
Pottery was already an established part of life in the area, particularly among women. Kwali learned the craft as a child from her aunt, using a traditional technique based on coiling.
Instead of throwing a lump of clay onto a rotating wheel, the potter built the vessel gradually.
Long coils of clay were placed one above another. The walls were joined, shaped and thinned by hand as the potter moved around the vessel.
The technique required considerable control.
A vessel had to remain balanced while its walls were gradually raised. Its shape had to be maintained without the assistance of modern machinery. Its surface could then be decorated with patterns cut directly into the clay.
Kwali became exceptionally skilled.
Her pots included large water jars and other functional vessels, often decorated with animals and geometric forms. Lizards, snakes, birds, fish, crocodiles and insects appeared among the imagery associated with her work.
These were not initially made for foreign galleries.
They belonged to a practical world in which pottery stored water and other materials and formed part of everyday domestic life.
That distinction is important because Kwali’s fame later came partly from the transformation of such familiar objects into internationally collected works of art.
The Emir’s palace brought her work to the attention of Michael Cardew
Around 1950, a British potter named Michael Cardew visited the Emir of Abuja.
Cardew was already an experienced studio potter. He had worked in Britain and the Gold Coast, now Ghana, before moving to Nigeria as part of a colonial government effort to develop pottery.
At the Emir’s palace, he encountered pottery from the local tradition.
Among the objects was work associated with Ladi Kwali.
Cardew recognised a level of skill that would become important to his plans for pottery production in Nigeria.
This encounter is often presented as the moment when Cardew discovered an unknown village woman and introduced her to modern pottery.
The reality was more interesting.
Kwali was already an accomplished potter.
She did not meet Cardew as a beginner waiting to be taught how to make pottery. She brought with her a specialised tradition of hand building that had been passed down through generations.
What Cardew offered was a different technological system.
What Kwali already possessed was the knowledge to make the clay respond.
The Abuja Pottery Training Centre
In 1951, Cardew established the Pottery Training Centre at Abuja, now Suleja in Niger State.
The name can be confusing today.
The Abuja of the 1950s was not the modern Federal Capital Territory capital that Nigerians know today. The present city of Abuja was designated Nigeria’s capital in 1991. The pottery centre was in the settlement historically known as Abuja, which is now Suleja.
The centre was established partly to introduce modern ceramic technology into Nigerian pottery.
Potters were exposed to the wheel, glazing, slips and high temperature kiln firing. The programme also had an economic purpose. Traditional pottery was being adapted for new urban and commercial markets, producing objects that could be used as tableware or sold as decorative pieces.
It was into this environment that Kwali entered.
In 1954, Ladi Kwali stepped onto the wheel
In 1954, Kwali joined Cardew at the Pottery Training Centre.
She learned to throw on the wheel and began working with glazed stoneware.
For someone who had grown up building pots by hand, the wheel represented a major technological change.
But Kwali did not simply replace her traditional method with the new one.
She continued to make her characteristic hand built vessels.
This was where her work became distinctive.
She could construct a large vessel using the coiling method she had learned from her aunt, decorate it with imagery rooted in her local tradition, and then use the new materials and firing techniques available at the training centre.
The result was a meeting of two systems.
Traditional Gwari pottery gave the vessels their forms and decoration.
Modern studio ceramics provided new possibilities through stoneware, glazes and kiln technology.
Kwali made the combination her own.
The animals carved into her pots
Some of Kwali’s most recognisable works are covered with animals.
Lizards crawl across the surface.
Snakes wind through the decoration.
Birds, fish, scorpions and other creatures appear alongside geometric patterns.
The designs were not simply painted onto the finished vessel. They were incised into the clay itself.
One surviving 1957 water jar in the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge demonstrates the technique particularly well. The vessel was hand coiled and decorated with incised and impressed designs before being covered with slip and transparent glaze.
The pot is also revealing for another reason.
Although described as a water jar, the museum notes that it was made as an exhibition piece for European collectors rather than as an ordinary household vessel.
That tells us something about what was happening to traditional Nigerian pottery during this period.
An object could begin with the form of a domestic vessel but acquire a new purpose when it entered the international art market.
Kwali was still making a pot.
But increasingly, people outside Nigeria were looking at it differently.
She was not the only woman making this history
The fame of Ladi Kwali can sometimes make it seem as though she was the only woman at the Abuja pottery centre.
She was not.
Other Gwari women worked within the pottery tradition and became associated with the centre. Among them was Asibi Ido, whose surviving work demonstrates how traditional hand building, local motifs and modern glazing techniques could coexist.
The National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., holds one of Ido’s vessels. It was hand built using pinching and coiling techniques and decorated with traditional Gbagyi motifs before being glazed and fired at high temperature.
This wider community matters.
Kwali’s achievement did not emerge from a cultural vacuum. It came from a tradition in which women already possessed considerable technical knowledge.
Her international fame helped make that knowledge visible beyond the communities where it had long existed.
The world began to notice
By the late 1950s, Kwali’s work was appearing outside Nigeria.
Her pottery was exhibited at the Berkeley Galleries in London, including exhibitions in 1958 and 1962.
Her work also entered international collections.
The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a stoneware pot made by Kwali in 1957. The British Museum has examples of her pottery. Her work is also held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and other institutions.
For a woman who had learned pottery through a local apprenticeship, this was an extraordinary transformation.
Her work had crossed from the household to the exhibition hall.
And then Kwali herself travelled.
The woman behind the pots travelled abroad
In 1962, Kwali travelled to Britain with Cardew and demonstrated pottery techniques.
She gave a series of demonstrations that attracted considerable attention.
This was important because audiences were not merely looking at finished objects. They were watching the maker.
Kwali could demonstrate the hand building technique herself, showing how a vessel could rise from coils of clay without being thrown on a wheel.
Her presence challenged a common assumption about where sophisticated ceramic knowledge came from.
The technology may have been new, but the skill was not.
She later travelled to the United States in 1972 with Cardew and participated in demonstrations there as well.
The American tour was connected to a broader effort to bring African craftsmen to American audiences and encourage cultural exchange.
By then, Kwali had become more than a successful potter.
She was an international representative of Nigerian ceramic knowledge.
Colonial modernisation and Nigerian knowledge met in her work
There is a deeper story beneath the beautiful pots.
The Abuja Pottery Training Centre operated within the colonial system. Cardew worked with the colonial government, and the centre was part of an effort to develop pottery production using modern technology.
This meant the project was never simply about art.
There were questions of production, markets and economic usefulness.
Traditional pottery was being introduced to new customers, including urban Nigerians and European buyers.
Yet the relationship was not simply one of Europeans bringing knowledge to Nigerians.
Kwali’s career demonstrates a more complicated exchange.
Cardew introduced techniques that Kwali had not previously used.
Kwali, meanwhile, brought an established Nigerian pottery tradition into that environment and showed what could be achieved with it.
The technology changed the possibilities of her work.
Her traditional knowledge changed the character of the pottery produced at the centre.
The result was not purely British and not simply traditional Gwari pottery.
It was a new Nigerian ceramic language.
The honours began to follow
Kwali’s international reputation eventually brought official recognition.
In 1963, she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, MBE.
In 1977, Ahmadu Bello University awarded her an honorary doctorate.
She later received the Nigerian National Merit Award, an honour that recognises outstanding achievement and contribution to national development. The Nigerian National Merit Award organisation specifically identifies Kwali as a distinguished non academic recipient.
In 1981, she was made an Officer of the Order of the Niger.
The woman who had learned pottery from her aunt had become one of Nigeria’s most highly recognised cultural figures.
Yet her journey remained unusual.
She had not risen through an art school or university.
Her expertise had come through practice.
Her education had been her craft.
The ₦20 note gave millions of Nigerians her face
There is perhaps no more familiar modern symbol of Kwali’s legacy than the Nigerian ₦20 note.
The Central Bank of Nigeria identifies pottery works by Ladi Kwali as one of the cultural features represented on Nigerian currency.
The ₦20 note bearing her portrait was redesigned and issued in polymer form in 2007, retaining Kwali’s image.
This transformed her from an internationally collected artist into a figure recognised by millions of Nigerians in everyday life.
A person buying food could encounter her portrait.
A student paying for transport could hold her image.
Someone who had never entered a museum could still see the face of the woman whose pots had travelled to museums around the world.
But there is an irony.
Many Nigerians know Kwali from the currency before they know her work.
Her portrait became more widely circulated than her pottery.
The pottery centre eventually carried her name
The institution where Kwali developed her new ceramic practice was eventually renamed the Ladi Kwali Pottery Centre.
It was a fitting tribute.
The centre had helped create the environment in which her traditional knowledge and modern ceramic technology came together.
But the name also represented something larger.
It acknowledged that the woman who became its most famous potter had not simply been a student of the centre.
She had helped give the place its historical significance.
Ladi Kwali died in 1984
Ladi Kwali died in Minna on 12 August 1984.
She was about 59 years old.
By the time of her death, her work had already travelled across continents and entered important collections.
Michael Cardew, whose encounter with Nigerian pottery had helped shape the course of her career, had died the previous year.
The two figures had become inseparable from the history of the Abuja pottery experiment, although their roles were very different.
Cardew brought a European studio pottery background.
Kwali brought the knowledge of a Nigerian pottery tradition.
Together, their work produced something that neither tradition would have produced in quite the same form alone.
What Ladi Kwali really left behind
It is easy to tell Kwali’s story as a simple rise from obscurity to fame.
That version misses the most important part.
She did not become significant because she abandoned traditional pottery.
She became significant because she carried that tradition into a new technological environment.
Her pots demonstrated that traditional knowledge could survive contact with modern technology without becoming meaningless.
The old coiling technique could exist alongside the wheel.
Local animal motifs could exist on glazed stoneware.
A vessel rooted in domestic Nigerian life could become an object displayed in an international museum.
That is why her work continues to matter.
Ladi Kwali’s story is ultimately not just about pottery.
It is about knowledge.
It is about what happens when a skill passed from one generation to another enters a rapidly changing world.
It is about women whose technical abilities were often embedded in everyday domestic life and therefore overlooked by outsiders.
And it is about a Nigerian artist who crossed an enormous distance without leaving the tradition that first taught her how to work with clay.
The ₦20 note may have made Ladi Kwali’s face familiar.
Her pots tell us why she deserved to be remembered.
Author’s Note
Ladi Kwali’s legacy lies in the way she brought together two worlds of pottery without allowing either to erase the other. She carried the hand building traditions she learned from her aunt into a modern pottery centre, mastered new ceramic technologies, and transformed Nigerian pottery into work that could command international attention. Her story reminds us that important knowledge does not always begin in classrooms, and that the women who preserved everyday crafts can also become the artists who reshape how the world understands a culture.
References
British Museum, Collections Online, Ladi Kwali biography and pottery records.
Victoria and Albert Museum, Studio Pottery: An Introduction.
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Ladi Kwali water jar collection record.
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, collections records on Abuja pottery and Asibi Ido.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Michael Cardew and Abuja Pottery Training Centre records.
Nigerian National Merit Award, official information on the Nigerian National Merit Award and Ladi Kwali.
Central Bank of Nigeria, official currency history and ₦20 note records.
Michael Cardew, Pioneer Pottery, Longmans, Green and Co., 1969.
Michael Cardew, “Ladi Kwali,” Craft Horizons, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1972.
Liz Moloney, “Michael Cardew and the Abuja Potters,” The Nigerian Field.
Emman Okunna, “Living Through Two Pottery Traditions and the Story of an Icon: Ladi Kwali,” Mgbakoigba: Journal of African Studies, 2012.
