Busua and Butre
About 30 km west of Takoradi, with Fort Batenstein above Butre.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Women of Ghana · Busua & Tarkwa · 1918–1986
When the British locked up the Big Six in 1948, it was a dressmaker from Tarkwa who toured the colony collecting signatures and money to get them out. When Nkrumah founded his own party a year later, she was the only woman in the room. For a decade she drove around the Gold Coast organising branches, rallies and women for the Convention People's Party, and people called her "Convention Hannah". The Big Six got statues, streets and schools. She got almost nothing, and within a few years of independence her name had nearly vanished from the story she had helped to write.
Hannah Esi Badu Dadson was born in December 1918 at Busua, the fishing town on the Ahanta coast of the Western Region, the youngest of ten children of John Peter Dadson. She became a dressmaker and moved inland to Tarkwa, the gold-mining town, where she married J. C. Kudjoe, a manager at one of the mines.
Her brother, Dadson, was a UGCC activist in Tarkwa. In June 1947, when the UGCC's new general secretary, Kwame Nkrumah, came to Tarkwa on one of his first organising tours, Hannah Kudjoe met him. She became one of his earliest and most effective supporters.
After the Christiansborg crossroads shooting of February 1948 and the riots that followed, the colonial government arrested the six leaders of the UGCC, the Big Six, and banished them to the north. Hannah Kudjoe organised a petition campaign for their release, travelling from town to town to hold meetings, collect signatures and raise money, at a time when such meetings were themselves close to illegal.
What it achieved: the six were released after a few weeks. The campaign also made her known across the colony as a political organiser in her own right, and showed Nkrumah what a mass movement could do.
When Nkrumah broke with the UGCC leaders and founded the Convention People's Party on 12 June 1949, Hannah Kudjoe was with him. She was the only woman among the founding members, and she was part of the Committee on Youth Organisation from which the party grew.
She became the CPP's organiser and National Propaganda Secretary. Through Positive Action in 1950, while Nkrumah sat in Ussher Fort, and through the elections of 1951, 1954 and 1956, she toured the country setting up branches and bringing women into the party: market women, traders, seamstresses, the people who fed and financed the CPP. Party members called her "Convention Hannah".
After independence she founded the All-African Women's League in 1957, later the Ghana Women's League, with a pan-African outlook matching Nkrumah's. It organised women across the country for welfare, education and the party.
Pushed aside: in 1960 the government merged the women's organisations into a single National Council of Ghana Women, under new leadership closer to the state. Kudjoe was not given a leading role in it. From then on her political career faded.
Kudjoe's best-known cause after independence was what the 1950s called the anti-nudity campaign in the north. She travelled through the Northern Territories distributing donated clothing, teaching hygiene such as boiling water to wash children, helping with food during famines and encouraging women to farm.
How to read it today: the campaign was driven by real concern for poverty in the north, and many northerners remember her help. It was also built on southern and colonial ideas that the north was "backward" and needed civilising, and on shame about traditional dress that was not shameful to the people who wore it. Both are part of her story. See Tamale and the north.
Kudjoe carried on her welfare work in the north through the 1970s and 1980s, largely forgotten in Accra. On 8 March 1986, International Women's Day, she was invited to speak at a symposium at the Accra Community Centre. It was her last public appearance. She died the next day, 9 March 1986, aged 67.
Why she was forgotten: the historian Jean Allman traced how Kudjoe was written out of the independence story in an essay titled "The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe". The histories of independence centred on the Big Six and on Nkrumah; women organisers were remembered as a crowd, not as individuals; and after 1966 anyone closely tied to the CPP fell from official favour. Her name appears in early accounts and then fades out. In recent years Ghanaian writers and her home town of Busua have begun to bring it back.
About 30 km west of Takoradi, with Fort Batenstein above Butre.
The gold town where her political life began in 1947.
The base for visiting Busua and Tarkwa.
Where the CPP was launched in 1949 and independence declared in 1957.
The CPP won independence because it reached ordinary people, and a great deal of that reaching was done by women like Hannah Kudjoe. She organised the campaign that freed the Big Six, stood with Nkrumah when he founded his party, and built its branches across the country. Her later northern campaign carried the prejudices of its time as well as real care. But the way she was dropped from the story of independence, while the men she worked for were cast in bronze, says more about how history is written than about what she did. She deserves to be named every March, alongside them.
Verified: 29 September 2026. Her birth at Busua in December 1918, her marriage and life in Tarkwa, her meeting with Nkrumah in June 1947, the petition campaign of 1948, her role as a founding member and National Propaganda Secretary of the CPP, the All-African Women's League of 1957, her northern campaign, and her last speech and death on 8 and 9 March 1986 follow Jean Allman's research ("The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe"), GhanaWeb and published biographies. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.