People · 1933-2001
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Married at thirteen, a party leader before twenty, jailed sixteen times for going door to door to talk to women. Zaria's Gambo Sawaba fought for northern women's vote for decades and paid for it with her body.
People in northern Nigeria still tell stories about Gambo Sawaba as a child. In one of them, whenever she saw two children fighting, she would step in on the side of the one who was losing. "I have bought this fight from you," she would say, and then carry on the fight herself. Her dresses kept getting torn. So, the story goes, her mother, Malama Fatima, gave up and began making her dresses out of tarpaulin. Nobody can say for sure that this happened. But it fits the woman she became.
She was born on 15 February 1933. Her father died when she was ten, and her mother three years later. Soon after that, at thirteen, she was married to a man named Abubakar Dan Sarkin, who had fought in the Second World War. At sixteen she had her only child, a daughter called Bilikisu. By the next year, she was already in politics.
The North at that time was run by the British through emirs, district heads and village heads, and the ruling party was the conservative Northern Peoples' Congress, the NPC. In 1950 a schoolteacher in Kano, Malam Aminu Kano, started a new party, the Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU. It said girls should be educated, in religion and in Western schooling, and that women should have room in politics and in business. The NPC's leaders, by contrast, were quoted saying northern women were happy as they were and that men knew what was right for them.
The young mother joined NEPU's women's wing early. She rose to become its president-general, and that, by one account, is when Aminu Kano gave her the name Sawaba, which means freedom or redemption. There is a second story. It says she climbed onto the stage at a rally at Jakara Market in Zaria while the crowd waited for a male council member, Alhaji Gambo Sawaba, and spoke to them about votes and schooling for women. When he arrived, he declared that the first woman to speak at a political rally in the North should be called Gambo Sawabiya. She kept the man's form instead, and Zaria learned to tell the two of them apart.
She spoke against child marriage, forced and unpaid labour, and unfair taxes. She asked for jobs for women, schools for girls and the full right to vote. Her husband's family did not like a wife and mother doing all this, and the couple parted on friendly terms. As was the custom then, her baby daughter went to live with the in-laws.
The authorities liked her even less. Many northern women lived in purdah, kept at home away from public life, so Sawaba went to them, house by house. In 1952 the Native Authority in Kano took her to the Alkali court on a charge of "drawing out women who were in purdah". She was given three months in prison.
That was the first of sixteen prison sentences. She was arrested so often that she kept a blanket near her with the words "Prison Yard" written on it, ready to grab whenever the police came to the door. Later in 1952 Kano ordered her out of the city, and officers took her back to Zaria to make sure she went. She simply carried on at home. Over the years she was jailed in Zaria, Kano, Kaduna and Jos. When she stood trial, her supporters packed the courtroom.
Prison was not the worst of it. The Daily Trust later reported that twice in Zaria Central Prison she was stripped and given eighty lashes, and that her hair was shaved off with a broken bottle. A fellow NEPU woman, Malama Ladi Shehu, said many of the party's women had their heads shaved and were beaten, and some members were even killed. Sawaba herself once said there was no opening in her body from which blood had not flowed because of torture. Her front teeth were false; the real ones had been broken and pulled out. After torture in prison in 1957, she said, she needed an operation to remove her womb to save her life. Once, on the way to a meeting, six men beat her and left her for dead in the bush. No one was ever charged.
In 1956 Sawaba and the NEPU women marched to the office of the Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, in Kaduna, to ask that northern women be allowed to vote. He said he would think about it. Nothing came of it. Women in the South had a limited vote from 1951, the East from 1954, the West from 1959. In 1954 the NPC said northern women would get the vote "only in God's time". Years later, in the Senate, a Western senator, Wuraola Esan, said she feared that God's time might never come for women in the North.
Bello wrote in his autobiography that votes for women went so much against the feelings of most northern men that he would be very unwilling to bring them in himself, and that far more women first had to be educated. Sawaba never forgot it. She once said that if women had been allowed to vote and stand, she would have run against him in his own constituency. Northern women finally got the vote in 1976.
She never won an election herself, with NEPU or with the two parties she joined later. In 1998 she retired, saying politics had stopped being about ideas and become a game of grabbing for oneself.
At home she was someone else. Her daughter Bilikisu remembers a house in Benin Street full of political meetings, with pictures of Karl Marx, Thomas Sankara and Samora Machel on the walls, and a door that was always open. Sawaba cooked her own food and would let no one do it for her, favouring the Nupe dish dukuno, tuwon shinkafa and sakwara. She married three more times, to a railway worker, to a boxer from Cameroon whom her opponents kept threatening to deport, and to a businessman.
In her last years she raised other people's children. When she died in October 2001, the Daily Trust counted more than thirty adopted children in her house, among them a baby less than a month old she had brought home from hospital days before. Two former heads of state came to her funeral in Zaria.
