Hajiya Gambo Sawaba: ‘The most jailed Nigerian female politician’

The political activist was publicly flogged, had her hair shaved off with a broken bottle and was imprisoned 16 times.

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 came frequently, and her clothes would inevitably get torn. So, the story goes, in order to minimise the frequency with which she would have to replace her daughter’s damaged dresses, Sawaba’s mother, Malama Fatima, resorted to making them out of tarpaulin.