This chapter discusses the topic of gender, gender relations, and the history/roles of women in Indigenous and colonial Nigeria. It will also explore the regional differences in women’s experience from the Islamic north to the relatively egalitarian status of Igbo women in the southeast. While still mainly occupying subordinate roles, many women in precolonial Nigeria could wield significant official and unofficial power. With the onset of colonialism, women’s lives were relegated to the private sphere, with direct and indirect barriers excluding women from significant public roles. Finally, the chapter chronicles colonial Nigerian women’s widespread response and agency during this period, detailing several noteworthy individuals.

The society is often a fragmented space of ideas and ideals only harmonized by the agency of collective knowledge, tested, disseminated, and established as an episteme through its educational system. Ideally, the nature of a society usually informs the system and structure of its educational institution. Hence, Nigeria, like every other modern state, has moved through different trajectories that have altered the frame of the institution. The purpose of this paper is therefore propelled by the need to assess how those trajectories have affected the nature of the educational system of a West African country and its society. With the power and agency of colonially introduced Western education still reverberating in the modern state, the chapter taps myriad existing literature on Western education in Africa, Nigeria in particular, to reiterate the need for the decolonization of the Nigerian educational system. To this extent, it concludes on the unarguable note of rethinking Western education and its essence in the country for national cohesion and culture.

My life began at the water’s edge near a tiny town in Tasmania. I had eight older brothers and sisters, one of whom had died from diphtheria before I was born. My father was Aboriginal and my mother an Englishwoman who had moved to Tasmania while still a teenager. Her father had been a merchant mariner who sailed to Hobart on his final voyage, where he settled with his family. My dad was also a mariner, and it was probably inevitable that they should meet. The marriage, however, was pretty unusual for the times.