Wuraola Esan occupies a distinctive place in Nigerian history. In 1960, she became the first woman to serve in Nigeria’s federal Senate, entering a national legislature overwhelmingly dominated by men. Yet her political breakthrough was only one part of a much longer public career.
Before she entered national politics, Esan had worked as a teacher and created schools at a time when formal education remained far less accessible to girls than to boys. Her educational project, which began with elementary schooling in the 1940s, eventually developed into People’s Girls Grammar School in Molete, Ibadan.
Her Senate career showed that she was not content merely to occupy a historic seat. She raised questions about women’s representation, the political rights of Northern Nigerian women and the economic position of petty traders. In 1975, another dimension was added to her public life when she became the tenth Iyalode of Ibadan.
Her career therefore connected three major spheres of twentieth-century Nigerian life: Western education, modern parliamentary politics and Yoruba traditional authority.
Wuraola Esan and the Education of Girls in Colonial Nigeria
Wuraola Adepeju Esan was born in March 1909 in Calabar, into the Ojo-badan family of Ibadan.
Her father, Thomas Ojo-Ade, served in the colonial army and was a veteran of the First World War. He spent more than two decades in the Royal West African Frontier Force and attained the rank of Regimental Sergeant. After leaving the military, he remained active in Ibadan public life and rose within the city’s chieftaincy structure.
Esan’s mother, Madam Ajike Ojo Aina, popularly known as Iya Gbogbo, was a successful trader. Her commercial activities took her over considerable distances, including journeys to Onitsha and Calabar.
Although neither parent had received extensive Western schooling, they supported the education of their children. That decision gave Wuraola opportunities still denied to many Nigerian girls of her generation.
Her schooling took her through several institutions. Between 1921 and 1923, she attended Sacred Heart Convent in Ibadan. She subsequently studied at Sacred Heart Convent School in Calabar between 1923 and 1925, then attended Idi-Aba Baptist Girls School in Abeokuta from 1926 to 1927.
From 1927 to 1929, she trained at the United Missionary College in Molete, Ibadan. Her studies included English, arithmetic, elementary science and domestic science.
Teaching became her profession after completing her training.
Esan began working at the Akure Women’s Centre, associated with the Akure Women’s Training Institution. Its curriculum reflected prevailing assumptions surrounding female education during the colonial period. Women were taught literacy alongside subjects such as sewing, laundering, hygiene, cookery and domestic science.
She remained there until 1935, when she moved to Methodist Girls’ School in Lagos.
Her years as a teacher exposed her directly to the possibilities and limitations of female education. Girls could attend school, but educational policy and social expectations frequently prepared them primarily for domestic roles. Esan would eventually build an institution that widened the educational opportunities available to them.
From 18 Pupils to People’s Girls Grammar School
One of Wuraola Esan’s most enduring achievements began during the final years of the Second World War.
She sought permission to establish Ibadan People’s Girls School and Dorcas Memorial Nursery School. The colonial authorities approved the two elementary vernacular schools on 8 August 1944, following a recommendation from Gertrude Plummer, Superintendent of Education in the Oyo Provinces.
The schools did not immediately begin as the grammar school for which Esan later became famous.
Ibadan People’s Girls School opened in January 1945 with only 18 pupils. Esan and one female assistant were initially its only teachers. Its first premises were at Amen House in the Agbokojo area of Ibadan.
Even the school’s gender composition reflected the difficulties of promoting girls’ education at the time. There were initially too few girls enrolled to make the venture sustainable, so boys were temporarily admitted as well.
Esan persevered.
The school later moved as it expanded, and in 1950 a larger site was secured along Molete, then on the outskirts of Ibadan. The institution developed gradually through different levels of schooling rather than appearing fully formed as a grammar school in the 1940s.
Its major transformation came on 21 March 1965, when People’s Girls School became a full secondary school and was renamed People’s Girls Grammar School.
Esan’s daughter, Yetunde Omisade, a graduate of University College Ibadan who had worked in the Ministry of Information, became the pioneer principal of the grammar school. The institution subsequently prepared pupils for the West African School Certificate examination.
The journey from 18 pupils in 1945 to a recognised secondary grammar school two decades later demonstrates the scale of Esan’s educational commitment. Her contribution was not simply the founding of a school. It was the sustained development of an institution through years of financial, administrative and social difficulty.
From Ibadan Public Life to National Politics
Education gradually led Esan into a broader world of civic activity and politics.
By the 1950s, she was active in public affairs in Ibadan and became associated with the Action Group, one of the major political parties of late colonial Nigeria. She also participated in women’s organisations and was among the prominent figures associated with the emergence of the National Council of Women’s Societies, which developed as an umbrella organisation for Nigerian women’s groups.
Esan’s political activity was not confined to party mobilisation.
In 1958, she was elected to the Ibadan Urban District Council, giving her experience in formal local government before Nigeria attained independence.
Women played important roles in Nigerian political campaigns during this era, particularly through party women’s organisations, market associations and civic groups. Yet leadership positions within the formal structures of government remained overwhelmingly male.
Esan would soon cross that barrier at the federal level.
Wuraola Esan Becomes Nigeria’s First Female Senator
In 1960, Wuraola Esan entered the federal Senate as a representative of the Western Region and became Nigeria’s first female senator.
Her entry must be understood within the constitutional arrangements of the period.
The Senate created under Nigeria’s 1960 Independence Constitution was not composed of senators directly elected from modern geographical constituencies. Section 37 of the Constitution provided that twelve senators from each region were to be selected at a joint sitting of the region’s legislative houses from among persons nominated by the regional governor.
Esan therefore did not win a direct popular senatorial election. Her historic distinction was becoming the first woman selected to serve in Nigeria’s upper federal legislative chamber.
That distinction is separate from the achievement of Franca Afegbua, who in 1983 became the first Nigerian woman popularly elected to the Senate.
Esan’s position in 1960 was extraordinary. She entered a political institution in which women were almost entirely absent, but she did more than occupy a symbolic seat.
On 30 March 1961, during a Senate discussion touching on parliamentary procedure, Esan drew attention to the fact that no woman had been included on the committee involved in preparing the chamber’s Standing Orders. Her intervention raised a basic question about representation: institutional rules affecting everyone were being shaped entirely by men.
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Just days later, on 4 April 1961, she turned to economic affairs. During debate on the Governor-General’s address, Esan spoke about Nigeria’s petty traders, drawing particular attention to the women operating in major Lagos markets such as Eko, Balogun and Jankara.
Her argument placed market women within the national discussion about economic development. These traders, she insisted, were participants in the country’s economy and should not be ignored in programmes designed to improve commerce and living standards.
Speaking for Women’s Political Rights
Esan’s interventions became especially significant when the Senate discussed electoral rights.
Northern Nigerian women did not enjoy the same practical political franchise available to women in much of southern Nigeria during the First Republic. Esan repeatedly challenged this exclusion.
During debate on the Electoral Bill on 23 August 1962, she pressed the case for Northern women to participate fully in political life. Her argument was not merely that women should be educated, but that they should be able to take their places alongside men in public affairs.
The issue remained important to her in subsequent debates.
In April 1963, while discussing electoral matters, she again challenged the political exclusion of Northern women. Her interventions brought a subject affecting millions of women directly into the federal legislature.
Her concern extended to the composition of Parliament itself.
On 10 January 1964, Esan argued that the political environment made it difficult for women to compete on equal terms with men. She insisted that Nigeria possessed capable women worthy of becoming parliamentarians and argued that a larger female presence would make it harder for women’s interests to be ignored.
Esan’s parliamentary career therefore extended beyond the significance of being Nigeria’s first female senator. She repeatedly addressed questions of women’s representation, political participation and economic opportunity.
She was initially the sole woman in the Senate, although she did not remain the chamber’s only female member for the entire First Republic. Following the creation of the Mid-Western Region, Bernice Uwanugo Kerry later joined the Senate. By 1966, Esan was serving among the senators representing Western Nigeria, while Kerry represented Mid-Western Nigeria.
From Senator to Iyalode of Ibadan
Esan’s public life eventually moved from modern parliamentary institutions into one of Ibadan’s most important traditional female offices.
In 1975, she became the Iyalode of Ibadan.
The Iyalode institution has long provided a recognised place for prominent women within Yoruba political and social organisation. In Ibadan, its holders have included some of the city’s most influential women.
Wuraola Esan became the tenth Iyalode of Ibadan, succeeding Iyalode Adebisi Abeo.
Her accession represented an important convergence in her life. Esan had built her reputation through Western education, school administration, women’s organisation, local government and federal parliamentary service. As Iyalode, she also became part of an older structure of female authority within Ibadan society.
She held the title from 1975 until 1985.
Chief Wuraola Adepeju Esan died on 1 January 1985, aged 75. Her decade as Iyalode closed a public career that had begun in colonial classrooms more than half a century earlier.
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Conclusion
Wuraola Esan’s significance in Nigerian history reaches beyond the simple statement that she was the country’s first female senator.
Her story began with education. She became a teacher at a time when opportunities for girls remained restricted, then moved from teaching other people’s pupils to creating an educational institution of her own.
The school she began with 18 pupils in 1945 developed over the next two decades into People’s Girls Grammar School. Her political life likewise expanded gradually, from civic and women’s organisations to the Ibadan Urban District Council and eventually Nigeria’s federal Senate.
When she entered the Senate in 1960, she entered an overwhelmingly male institution. During her parliamentary career, she questioned the absence of women from Senate committees, drew attention to the economic importance of petty traders, challenged restrictions on Northern women’s political rights and called for more capable women to enter Parliament.
Her later emergence as Iyalode of Ibadan completed an unusual journey. Few Nigerian women of her generation moved so visibly across the worlds of colonial education, party politics, federal parliament and traditional authority.
Wuraola Esan was a pioneer because she was first, but her more enduring achievement lay in what she built and what she did with the opportunities she obtained.
Author’s Note
Wuraola Esan’s life demonstrates that historic political breakthroughs are often rooted in years of less celebrated work. Before she entered the Senate, she had spent decades teaching, building schools and organising within her community. Her career shows how education could become a route into wider public leadership for Nigerian women, while her Senate interventions illustrate that representation mattered most when it was used to raise the concerns of people who were otherwise excluded. Her legacy survives not simply in the title of Nigeria’s first female senator, but in the institutions she created and the barriers she challenged.
References
Ezekiel Oladele Adeoti, “Wuraola Esan as Educationist,” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, Vol. 19, Issue 2, Version II, 2014, pp. 82–94.
Federation of Nigeria, Parliamentary Debates, Senate Debates, 1961–1964, National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies.
The Constitution of the Federation of Nigeria, 1960, particularly Section 37 on the composition and selection of the Senate.
Nigeria Year Book 1966, Federal Ministry of Information, National Library of Nigeria.
Inter-Parliamentary Union, Historical Data on Women in Nigeria’s Parliament.
Central Council of Ibadan Indigenes, Past and Present Iyalodes of Ibadanland.
Kathleen E. Sheldon, Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2nd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., Dictionary of African Biography, Oxford University Press, 2012.
