Stella Thomas

The first Black African woman to be called to the Bar, the first female magistrate in West Africa and the First Chief of the mid-western region in Nigeria.

Stella Jane Thomas was born in Lagos in 1906, a Yoruba Nigerian and daughter of a businessman, John Claudius Thomas who was the first African to head the Lagos chamber of commerce. Stella was educated in Free Town, Sierra Leone, where she attended the prestigious Annie Walsh Memorial school for girls. She travelled to England in 1929 to study law at Oxford and there she joined Middle Temple, and in 1933 became the first African woman to be called to the bar.

While a student, she was an energetic and committed activist and was active in part of the West African Students’ Union. She was also a founding member of the League of Coloured Peoples; a multi-racial civil rights organisation with a Christian liberal-humanitarian ethos which aimed to promote the rights and interests of African, Asian and Caribbean minorities in Britain and the Commonwealth.  The organisation also sought collaboration with sympathetic organisations and attracted a large number of white supporters, such as Sylvia Pankhurst. 

In 1934, she famously challenged, historian Dame Margery Perham after one of her lectures at the Royal Society, while also addressing Lord Frederick Lugard the former Governor of Nigeria who was in attendance. She criticised imperial approaches to African problems without consultation or involvement of local people, in her word,