J. B. Danquah
And on MyGhana2027: the intellectual force.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Women of Ghana · Accra · 1905–1984
In the 1930s she wrote a newspaper column under a false name, telling Gold Coast women to take their lead from the suffragettes and to stand up to the empire. She married the paper's owner, J. B. Danquah, the man who would give Ghana its name, and later left him. Then she joined his great rival, Kwame Nkrumah, edited Nkrumah's newspaper, and in 1954 won a seat in the Legislative Assembly: the first woman elected to a legislature anywhere in Africa. Mabel Dove Danquah broke more barriers than almost anyone of her generation, and did it with a typewriter.
Mabel Ellen Dove was born in Accra in 1905 (a few sources say 1910). Her mother, Eva Buckman, was a businesswoman of Osu. Her father, Francis "Frans" Dove, was a lawyer from Sierra Leone who became the first President of the Gold Coast Bar, one of the West African professionals who moved between Freetown, Lagos and Accra.
She was educated in Sierra Leone and in England, a rare education for a girl from the Gold Coast at the time. Her sister Evelyn went on to a singing career in Britain. When Mabel came home she worked for years as a secretary for the shipping firm Elder Dempster, while she began to write.
In 1931 J. B. Danquah founded The Times of West Africa, the Gold Coast's first daily newspaper. It carried a column called "Women's Corner", signed "Marjorie Mensah". Behind the name was Mabel Dove.
The column was sharp, funny and political. It told Gold Coast women to take inspiration from the British suffragettes, to question the customs and the men who held them back, to insist on their rights, and to oppose foreign rule. It was one of the first regular feminist voices in West African print, and many readers did not know it was written by a woman at all.
Many names: over her career she wrote as Marjorie Mensah, Dama Dumas, Ebun Alakija and Akosua Dzatsui, in The Times of West Africa, the African Morning Post, the Nigerian Daily Times, the Daily Graphic and the Accra Evening News.
In September 1933 Mabel Dove married the owner of the paper, J. B. Danquah: lawyer, scholar, playwright, and brother of the powerful king of Akyem Abuakwa, Nana Sir Ofori Atta I. She travelled with him in Europe and the United States, and they had a son.
The marriage did not last. They divorced in the early 1940s. She kept his name, as Mabel Dove Danquah, and then made her own political choice, in the opposite direction to his.
When Kwame Nkrumah broke with the UGCC and founded the Convention People's Party in 1949, her former husband stayed with the UGCC and became Nkrumah's great rival. Mabel Dove Danquah went with Nkrumah.
She wrote for the CPP's paper, the Accra Evening News, through the years of Positive Action, and in 1951 she became its editor, only the second woman ever to edit a newspaper in the Gold Coast, after Akua Asabea Ayisi. She also organised women for the party.
In the general election of 15 June 1954, the first in which the whole Legislative Assembly was directly elected, the CPP put her up for the Ga Rural constituency around Accra. She won, defeating Nii Amaa Ollennu, a prominent lawyer who years later briefly served as acting head of state (see Afrifa and the Presidential Commission).
Her victory made her the first woman elected to the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly, and the first woman elected to any legislative assembly in Africa. She sat in the chamber now known as the Old Parliament House in Accra until the Assembly was dissolved in July 1956, before the last election before independence.
1951 or 1954? Several popular accounts say she was elected in 1951. The election records show 1954: in 1951 she was the editor of the Evening News, and the Ga Rural seat she won was contested in the 1954 election. We give 1954.
After politics she went back to writing. Her short stories, many with women at their centre, were collected with work by the Nigerian writer Phebean Itayemi in The Torn Veil and Other Stories. Critics of Ghanaian literature now describe her as the trailblazing feminist writer who came before Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo.
Mabel Dove Danquah died in 1984, aged about 79, two years before Hannah Kudjoe, the other great woman of the early CPP, and like her largely forgotten by then.
Mabel Dove Danquah was one woman in an Assembly of 104. Seventy years later, women still hold only a small share of the seats in the Parliament of Ghana, around fifteen per cent. The country elected its first woman vice-president only in 2024; see the Fourth Republic. She opened a door in 1954 that Ghana has walked through very slowly.
And on MyGhana2027: the intellectual force.
The organiser. And on MyGhana2027: Convention Hannah.
The Makola flour queen who financed the CPP.
Where she sat as the first elected woman legislator in Africa.
More women of Ghana: Theodosia Okoh, Susanna Al-Hassan, Esther Ocloo and Justice Annie Jiagge. Also: Accra, People of Ghana and the 1,000-year timeline.
Mabel Dove Danquah did three things no Gold Coast woman had done before: she wrote a feminist newspaper column in the 1930s, she edited a nationalist daily, and she won a seat in a legislature by the votes of the people. She was privileged by birth and education, and she used that privilege to argue for women who had neither. She also made one of the boldest personal choices in Ghanaian political history, backing Nkrumah against the man she had married. Ghana remembers the Big Six by name. It should remember the first woman it elected just as clearly.
Verified: 29 September 2026. Her birth in Accra in 1905 (1910 in some sources), her parents, the "Women's Corner" column as Marjorie Mensah in The Times of West Africa (1931–34), her marriage to J. B. Danquah in September 1933 and later divorce, her editorship of the Accra Evening News from 1951, her election for Ga Rural in the general election of 15 June 1954 (term to July 1956) against Nii Amaa Ollennu, her short stories and her death in 1984 follow GhanaWeb, the 1954 election records and published biographies. The date of the divorce varies between sources and is given as the early 1940s. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.