Women of Legacy
Madam Mabel Segun
First Female Table Tennis Player
Mabel Segun was born in 1930 in Ondo town. Her parents, Reverend Isaiah and Eunice Aig-Imoukhuede were from Sabongidda Ora in Edo State. From 1938 to 1941 Mabel Segun received her primary education in St Peter's School, Edunabon, Akoko Jubilee Central School, Ikare, St Paul's School, Ikole and St David's School, Akure. From 1942 to 1947 she attended the oldest girls' school in Nigeria - C.M.S. Girls' School, Lagos, founded in 1869. She left with a Grade 1 Cambridge School Certificate with exemption from London Matriculation.
Mabel Segun was admitted into the second set of the newly founded University College, Ibadan in 1949 and graduated in 1953 with a second class London Bachelor of Arts Degree in English, Latin and History.
Mabel Segun has had a varied professional career. She has taught in various secondary and post secondary institutions, including Edo College, Benin-City and National Technical Teacher's College, Akoka, Yaba. A trained editor and public relations officer trained in the United Kingdom and the U.S.A., she has also been:
- Hansard Editor to the Western Nigeria Legislature;
- Overseas Publicity and Features Officer, Western Region Information Service;
- Head of Information, Publications and Broadcating, Federal Ministry of Education;
- Pioneer secretary to the Nigerian Book Development Council;
- Deputy Permanent Delegate and Acting Permanent Delegate of Nigeria to UNESCO, Paris;
- Chief Federal Inspector of Education;
- Senior Research Fellow, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan and editor African Notes and other Institute publications.
On retiring from both the public service (June 1982) and university service (November 1989), she set up the Children's Literature Documentation and Research Centre (CLIDORC) in Ibadan and became its director.
Mabel Segun has three children, Femi, Gbenga and Omowunmi.
ACCOMPLISHMENT
Mabel Dorothy Segun is a versatile woman whose outstanding achievements in the fields of literature, broadcasting and sports have earned her Nigeria's national honours which she was awarded in December 2004. In October 2007, she was proclaimed joint winner of Nigeria's most prestigious prize for Literature - the LNG Nigeria Prize for Literature which was awarded for her children's book, Readers' Theatre: Twelve Plays for Young People. In 2009, her long literary and academic career was rewarded when she received the Nigerian National Order of Merit for academic excellence in the humanities.
Mabel Segun Mabel Segun has written, co-authored and edited several children's books including the classic autobiography My Father's Daughter and its sequel, My Mother's Daughter both of which have formed the subject of University theses and literary articles in Nigeria and overseas. She has published five books for adults including a poetry collection, Conflict and Other Poems, a collection of short stories published by Longman in UK titled The Surrender and Other Stories, and a selection of her radio talks under the title Friends, Nigerians, Countrymen , later retitled Sorry No Vacancy. Mabel Segun's stories and poems have been published in over 30 anthologies in Nigeria and abroad. They have been translated into German, Danish, Norwegian, Greek and Serbo Croat. Two of her children's books have been translated into Swahili and Arabic.
Mabel Segun showed early promise both as a writer and as a sportswoman at the newly founded University College, Ibadan where she was admitted in 1949 into the second set of students. She graduated in 1953 with a second class London Bachelor of Arts Degree in English, Latin and History. She was deputy editor and advertisement manager of the University Herald with Chinua Achebe, her classmate as editor, and contributed poems, short stories and articles to that pioneer students' magazine. A short story, The Surrender, which she wrote in the year of her graduation won the maiden edition of the Nigerian Festival of the Arts Literature Prize the following year, 1954. The first Nigerian woman to play table tennis, she became an honorary male by entering for Men's Singles tournaments and was awarded the University's Table Tennis Half Colour.