Stella Thomas

Stella Jane Thomas was born in Lagos in 1906, the daughter of a Sierra Leonean Creole businessman who was the first African to head the Lagos Chamber of Commerce. She was educated at the Annie Walsh Memorial School in Freetown, Sierra Leone, before travelling to England in 1929 to study law at Oxford University, joining Middle Temple as a student barrister.

While in London, Thomas was an energetic member of the West African Students' Union, publicly arguing for African self-determination and criticising the paternalism of colonial policy. On 10 May 1933 she was called to the Bar, becoming the first African woman ever to qualify as a barrister in England and Wales — an announcement the Students' Union proudly described her as "the first lady barrister in the whole of West Africa."

After a short period practising in Britain, Thomas returned to West Africa, registering at the Supreme Courts of both Sierra Leone and Nigeria in 1935 and opening her own law firm on Lagos Island, where she handled criminal and family cases. In 1943 she was appointed a magistrate — the first woman in West Africa to hold judicial office — a post she held for nearly three decades, sitting at courts across Lagos before retiring in Sierra Leone in 1971.

Married in 1943 to fellow barrister Richard Marke, she continued to practise and preside as "Mrs Marke" for the rest of her career. Stella Thomas died in 1974, remembered as the woman who broke open the legal profession for African women on both sides of the Atlantic decades before the wave of independence that followed.