Lady Oyinkansola Abayomi co-founded the Nigerian Women’s Party and helped establish Queen’s College, Yaba, in 1927.
On 19 March 1990, Nigerian feminist, nationalist, and politician, Iyaloye Oyinkansola Abayomi died in Lagos, aged 93. Abayomi co-founded the Nigerian Women’s Party and was the former head of the Nigerian Girl Guides.
Abayomi was born in Britain’s Lagos colony on 06 March 1897, where she attended the Anglican Girls’ Seminary. She left for England in 1909 to continue her education in Gloucester and, later, at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Abayomi founded an organization called West African Educated Girls’ Club in the 1920s, which she used to raise funds for the establishment of Queen’s College, Lagos—a girls-only secondary school—in Yaba in 1927. She became a founding teacher at the school and was the only Nigerian to work there at the time.
On 10 May 1944, Abayomi and 12 other women founded the Nigerians Women’s Party, Nigeria’s first and only women’s political party. In 1954, she was appointed to represent women in the regional legislature of Nigeria’s Western Region. When her husband, Kofo Abayomi, was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 1954, Oyinkansola Abayomi became known as Lady Abayomi.
Lady Abayomi was honoured with several titles and traditional chieftaincies, becoming the Iya Abiye of Egbaland, Member of the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (OFR), and Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)⎈
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