We were taught history with holes in it. Heavy silences, absences too obvious to be honest. Behind these voids: Black women—strategists, warriors, thinkers, activists—whom dominant history deliberately ignored. Here are 7 of them, among many others, whom it is long past time to restore to their rightful place; at the heart of the narrative.
When Black women were writing history… and their names were erased
History as we are taught it is not a neutral account. It is often a political choice, a calibrated version meant to comfort certain narratives at the expense of others. And in this staging of the past, Black women are the great absentees. Not because they lacked courage, impact, or voice; quite the opposite. But because their very existence disrupted ready-made categories: too Black, too free, too powerful to be relegated to the margins of textbooks.
Whether they fought slavery, defied empires, founded movements, wrote manifestos, or planted trees to save a nation, these women shaped the world. But their names, their faces, their struggles are rarely passed down. Forgetting is not an accident. It is a strategy.
It is time to repair this silence. Not out of memorial charity, but because these stories are essential to understanding the world in all its complexity; and to inspiring those who inhabit it today.
Here are 7 Black women whom History tried to erase, but whom collective memory refuses to bury.
1. Nzinga Mbande – The queen who defied the Portuguese colonizers
Imagine a time when being a woman, Black, and free was enough to make you a threat. Nzinga Mbande, born around 1583 in the Kingdom of Ndongo (present-day Angola), was not only a queen: she was the architect of a war of survival, the terror of Portuguese colonizers, and a strategic genius in a world that neither wanted to listen to her nor let her live.
From childhood, she was trained in the use of weapons and in political negotiation. She accompanied her father, the king, to war councils and diplomatic audiences, while learning Portuguese from missionaries. At a time when women were relegated to the shadows, she was already standing in the light of power.
During a diplomatic mission to Luanda, she commanded respect with a single gesture: refusing to sit on the ground, she turned a servant into a human throne, seating herself face to face with the Portuguese governor, eye to eye. A powerful symbol in a world where sitting low meant bowing one’s head.
But it was after her brother’s death in 1624 that Nzinga truly entered history. She seized the throne, eliminated rivals, and became Ngola, a masculine title that even the Imbangala war chiefs had to respect. She married a rival war leader to seal an alliance, then took control of the neighboring kingdom of Matamba; creating a new, powerful, mixed, resistant state.
Her genius was not only military. She manipulated alliances, negotiated with the Dutch against the Portuguese, traded enslaved people to finance her wars, and imposed an androgynous style of power: men’s clothing, concubines dressed as women, an entirely female royal guard. She subverted norms, blurred codes, and ruled with an authority that even her enemies came to respect.
Until her death in 1663, she fought relentlessly, signed a peace treaty on her own terms, and left a stable kingdom to her sister—rare in an era of constant conflict.
Nzinga Mbande is the story of a woman they wanted to strike from the books. A queen too independent, too brilliant, too unforgettable. If she unsettles, it is precisely because she embodies what History never wanted to see: a Black woman kneeling before no one.
2. Claudia Jones – The intellectual who invented the Notting Hill Carnival
When the world shuts every door in your face, some choose to force them open. Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915 and exiled to Harlem in childhood, quickly understood that the world made no room for Black women. So she created one—with pens, pamphlets, raised fists; and Caribbean drums.
A Communist activist from the 1930s, an engaged journalist, she rose through the ranks of the American Communist Party, becoming one of the few Black women with a real voice within it. She wrote, spoke, organized. But in McCarthyite, racist America, that did not go unnoticed. She was arrested, surveilled, imprisoned. Finally, in 1955, she was deported—not to her homeland, but to a Britain she had never known.
What did she find there? A Black community broken by racism, marginalized, impoverished, constantly humiliated by the press and police violence. Claudia did not remain silent. In 1958, she founded The West Indian Gazette, the first newspaper for the British Black diaspora. A medium to inform, denounce, and unite.
That same year, the Notting Hill race riots erupted. Claudia’s response: she organized a Caribbean carnival inside a hall in East London, to remind everyone that culture is also a form of struggle. The idea took root. A few years later, the carnival moved into the streets and became what we know today: the Notting Hill Carnival, one of the largest cultural festivals in the world.
But Claudia was never honored in her lifetime. Too Black for white feminists. Too much of a woman for male Marxists. Too free for the British state. She died in 1964, at just 49, worn down by exile, surveillance, and poverty. Today she rests in Highgate, buried not far from Karl Marx; an irony history left behind.
Claudia Jones is the memory of a woman who understood before anyone else that racism cannot be fought alone, that feminism without anti-racism is empty, and that joy can be a weapon. She did not just invent a carnival: she gave a people back the right to walk in their colors, loud and proud.
3. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti – The mother of Nigerian feminism
Long before her son Fela Kuti became the voice of a continent, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was already a political hurricane. In a Nigeria still under British rule, this woman born in 1900 dared something radical: to speak loudly, to walk at the front, and to organize women so they would do the same.
Born into a progressive Yoruba family, Funmilayo was one of the first girls to attend a school reserved for boys, before continuing her studies in England. But she did not return from London obsessed with shining in salons; she returned with political rage, class consciousness, and a mission.
In the 1940s, she founded the Abeokuta Women’s Union, an organization that would bring together up to 20,000 members—market women, mothers, intellectuals. Together, they waged a relentless struggle against colonial taxation imposed on women by British authorities through local chieftaincies. Leading marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, she even forced the Alake of Egba, a chief backed by the colonizers, to temporarily abdicate.
Her rallying cry? “No taxation without representation.” No tax without the right to vote. A phrase that still resonates, because it said everything: if you want to exploit women, you will first have to listen to them.
But she did not stop there. Funmilayo campaigned for literacy, political equality, economic emancipation; traveled to the USSR and China, met Mao, and irritated empires—to the point that her passport was confiscated. The colonial administration labeled her “dangerous”; America refused her entry. A Black woman, anti-colonialist, feminist, and independent? Too subversive to be tolerated.
She was one of the few women of her time to sit in political bodies, to be elected to the House of Chiefs, to run electoral campaigns… and also one of the first Nigerian women to drive a car. That alone says enough.
But official history often prefers to present her as “Fela’s mother.” Yet it was she who planted the seed of rebellion in the Kuti dynasty. And it was also she whom they tried to silence in blood: in 1977, after a military raid on the Kalakuta Republic (the autonomous community founded by Fela), Funmilayo was thrown from the second floor. She died shortly after from her injuries.
But she never truly disappeared.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti is proof that feminist and anti-colonial struggles in Africa did not wait for the West. And that some women wrote History; even if History tried to erase them.
4. Solitude – The Guadeloupean fighter for freedom
Her name alone is an enigma: Solitude. No first name. No family name. Just this word—immense, tragic, resistant. A woman born enslaved around 1772, freed young, and who became one of the most poignant symbols of the fight against the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe. And yet she remains unknown in textbooks, as if her courage still unsettles.
Daughter of an African enslaved woman raped by a white sailor, Solitude was born into violence, into a world where skin color determined rank, the right to life, the right to freedom. A mixed-race child (then called a “mulatto woman”), she was freed, which did not mean free. For in 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte, in a cynical decision, annulled the abolition of slavery instituted a few years earlier by the French Revolution.
At the head of the resistance stood Louis Delgrès, a Black republican officer who refused to become enslaved again. Solitude joined his ranks. She had no military rank, no noble title—just a belly rounded by pregnancy, and a will of iron. She fought. She stood firm. She refused the idea of retreat. Until the final assault of May 28, 1802, when Delgrès and his companions chose to blow themselves up rather than surrender to French troops.
Solitude was captured. But the army could not execute her: she was pregnant. So they kept her alive. They waited. And the day after she gave birth, she was hanged. A cruel, calculated death that targeted not only a woman, but a symbol of revolt they wanted to smother at the root.
What did she leave behind? No writings. No letters. No tangible trace. But a memory, passed down in hushed voices, from generation to generation. A memory official history never wanted to sanctify. And yet today, her name is carved into statues, walls, books; but it deserves to be carved into our consciences.
Solitude is the woman reduced to a shadow, whose light still breaks through. A woman who chose revolt, even while pregnant. A woman no empire ever managed to silence.
5. Marsha P. Johnson – The forgotten LGBTQ+ revolutionary
In the tumult of 1960s New York, there was Marsha. Tall, exuberant, a flower in her hair, a colorful dress on her back, a radiant smile and tired eyes. Her name was Marsha P. Johnson, and the “P.” stood for “Pay It No Mind”; an ironic reply to those who questioned her identity. A way of saying: mind your business, I live my truth.
Black, transgender, poor, a sex worker, HIV-positive, intermittently homeless, Marsha checked every box of those society renders invisible. And yet she was on the front line of the Stonewall riots, those nights of June 1969 when New York’s LGBTQ+ community, harassed by police, decided it was over. She threw a brick. She shouted. She fought. Not for media recognition, but for the survival of her people.
After Stonewall, she co-founded with Sylvia Rivera the organization STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), one of the very first collectives to support homeless trans youth. When the state abandoned them, Marsha fed them, housed them, protected them. She became a mother to the rejected, an activist for the forgotten.
But official history had other priorities. It preferred white, male, gay figures from affluent neighborhoods. Marsha unsettled, like all Black women who take up too much space in a narrative not written for them.
In 1992, her body was found floating in the Hudson River. Police quickly ruled it a suicide. But her loved ones, her comrades, everyone knew this death tasted of imposed silence. Of erasure. It would take nearly 30 years for New York City to officially recognize her contribution and dedicate a public monument to her—a first for a Black trans woman.
Marsha P. Johnson is an insurgent memory. That of a woman who had nothing, but gave everything. One who understood that struggles are never separate: racism, sexism, transphobia, poverty… everything is connected. And that sometimes, throwing a brick is opening a breach in history.
6. Wangari Maathai – Green and rebellious Nobel laureate
Before people spoke of “political ecology” or “climate justice,” Wangari Maathai was already planting seeds of rebellion. The first woman in East Africa to earn a doctorate, the first female university professor in her country, and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Wangari was a pioneer. But what makes her unforgettable is not the accumulation of “firsts”; it is her ability to link land to freedom.
It began in the 1970s in Kenya. Forests were disappearing, land was being seized, and women—the first victims of this degradation—were walking miles to find firewood. Wangari understood that behind every uprooted tree, a household was collapsing. So she founded the Green Belt Movement, a women’s movement that planted trees—thousands, then millions. This was not just an ecological gesture. It was an act of popular sovereignty.
But she did not only plant trees: she uprooted injustices. When President Daniel arap Moi attempted to privatize a public park in the heart of Nairobi, she organized sit-ins, mobilized the mothers of political prisoners, was beaten, imprisoned, but never silenced. “I was accused of being too educated, too stubborn, too independent for an African woman,” she would say. She turned it into strength.
Her struggle disturbed the powerful, but inspired peoples. For Wangari, planting a tree was refusing fatalism, offering shade to someone you would never meet. It was a legacy.
At her death in 2011, she left a living inheritance: more than 50 million trees planted, thousands of women trained in sustainable agriculture, and an ecological consciousness rooted in social struggle. She proved one could confront an authoritarian regime with a shovel and a handful of seeds.
Wangari Maathai was the voice of an Africa standing tall, proud, and deeply connected to its land. A woman whose activism was both gentle and sharp. And above all, proof that deep roots can crack concrete.
7. Amy Jacques Garvey – The discreet architect of Pan-Africanism
History loves flamboyant male figures. It is less fond of those who write in the shadows, organize in silence, and support ideological empires without ever claiming the throne. Amy Jacques Garvey was one of those. Too often reduced to “Marcus Garvey’s wife,” she was in reality the intellectual, editorial, and strategic backbone of the largest Pan-African movement of the 20th century.
Born in 1895 in Kingston, Jamaica, into an educated family, Amy received a solid education and early developed a passion for reading, music, and law. She moved to the United States in 1917, where she quickly joined Black activist circles. Her meeting with Marcus Garvey changed everything: she became his secretary, editor, political partner, and later, his wife.
But when Marcus was imprisoned for mail fraud in 1922, it was Amy who took the reins of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association). She raised funds, published his speeches, oversaw The Negro World, the movement’s newspaper, and traveled across the United States to galvanize crowds. Quietly, she held together an organization the authorities were trying to extinguish.
And when Marcus was deported to Jamaica, Amy did not let go. She wrote, published, campaigned, formulated political proposals to the United Nations, and continued alone to carry the Pan-African dream. She was also one of the first Black women to publish a feminist column in an international Black newspaper: “Our Women and What They Think.” In it, she defended emancipation, culture, education, and the financial independence of African and Afro-descendant women.
Her writings, lectures, and books (Garvey and Garveyism, Women as Leaders) have become references in Pan-African circles, even as dominant history continues to leave her on the margins.
Amy Jacques Garvey is proof that behind every revolutionary, there is sometimes a more discreet revolutionary, just as determined. And that Black women are not merely the muses of history: they are its builders.
Why these erasures?
Because the history we are taught is never neutral. It is constructed, ranked, chosen. And too often, that choice excludes. It erases women. It blurs Black figures. It ignores those who do not fit the dominant narrative; that of a world shaped by white men, enlightened, sole artisans of progress.
These Black women unsettle. Because they exist outside the victimized or folkloric schema assigned to them. They think. They command. They write, lead, strike, resist, contest. They do not wait to be given a place: they take it. And it is precisely this gesture that unsettles archives, school curricula, statues, and official commemorations.
But what is deliberately forgotten always comes back. Through the voices of griots, the steps of descendants, the quiet rage of heirs. These women are not the “forgotten” of history. They are the censored. And their return is not a favor: it is a repair.
Notes and references
Nzinga Mbande – John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Claudia Jones – Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, Duke University Press, 2007.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti – Cheryl Johnson-Odim, For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria, University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Solitude – André Schwarz-Bart, La Mulâtresse Solitude, Seuil, 1972, 144 p.
Marsha P. Johnson – David France, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (Netflix documentary), 2017.
Wangari Maathai – Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir, Anchor Books, 2007.
Amy Jacques Garvey – Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Contents
When Black women were writing history… and their names were erased
- Nzinga Mbande – The queen who defied the Portuguese colonizers
- Claudia Jones – The intellectual who invented the Notting Hill Carnival
- Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti – The mother of Nigerian feminism
- Solitude – The Guadeloupean fighter for freedom
- Marsha P. Johnson – The forgotten LGBTQ+ revolutionary
- Wangari Maathai – Green and rebellious Nobel laureate
- Amy Jacques Garvey – The discreet architect of Pan-Africanism
Why these erasures?
Notes and references
