Who is Mabel dove-danquah Ghana?

Mabel Dove-Danquah (26 October 1905–September 1984), known as the Mother of Ghana, was a Ghanaian suffragist, women's rights activist and politician. A teacher by profession, she was one of the first high-profile female members of the Gold Coast nationalist movement and went on to become the country's first woman political party leader, when she founded the Ghana Congress Party in 1953.

Life and career

Dove-Danquah was born in Sekondi in 1905. Her mother, Rebecca Nee Otoo, originally came from Osu in Accra, and her father, John William Dove, was a Kru man from Liberia who lived and worked in the Gold Coast. Her parents worked as teachers in Sekondi, where Mabel would spend her childhood with an older sister.

Dove-Danquah and her sister benefited from being brought up by a relatively affluent and educated family. She was also inspired to seek an advanced education by her extended family, including her grandmothers and an uncle, J. B. Danquah, the prominent Gold Coast lawyer and later politician who would become an important mentor to her.

As a young woman, she travelled back to England in 1930 to study for a teaching diploma at the Lucy Harrison teacher-training college in Cambridge, England. On her return to the Gold Coast, Dove took a teaching post at Accra’s prestigious Anglican Girls’ Seminary, where she would be an important influence on later generations of women. While there, she began campaigning for women’s rights, including equal access to education and the right to vote. As early as 1935, she was a speaker at a protest against the colonial Poll Tax Ordinance.

In 1945, she went with a delegation to London to press the British government to establish self-government for the Gold Coast. During the Second World War, she and her husband, Dr. Danquah, founded a school known as the Ghana National College, at Cape Coast; after the war, she became the headmistress of Ewurama Badu Girls’ Secondary School in Takoradi. Dove remained politically active throughout this time, and was a firm believer in the importance of women's emancipation and economic independence as fundamental to the development of Ghana.

As Ghana moved closer to independence from Britain, she made her most high-profile contribution as a politician. She was one of four or five women who took part in the drafting of the Gold Coast’s 1951 Constitution, and in 1953 she became the first female leader of a major Ghanaian political party, when she founded the Ghana Congress Party. In this role, she became the only woman to stand as a candidate for election to the Legislative Assembly from the Gold Coast colony in the 1954 elections, the only female member of the 1954 Legislative Assembly and the first female minister in Ghana, when she was appointed Minister of Social Welfare in 1956.