“The women in this family, we work.”
My mother-in-law said those words to me after the birth of our second daughter.
She was not delivering a lecture about balancing motherhood and career. She simply assumed that marriage and children did not mean a woman’s education, abilities and ambitions should be packed away. I had a family to raise. I also had a life to build.
For thirty years, Professor Kamene Okonjo gave me something I have come to recognise as an extraordinary gift. Room. Room to work, raise my children, build businesses and become myself without fighting my husband’s family for permission.
She died on 23 October, aged ninety-six. As we prepare to celebrate her life, I have been thinking about the power women exercise within families, and how easily we underestimate its economic consequences.
I knew none of that on the day I married her son.
Thirty years ago, our traditional marriage took place in Onicha Ugbo, my parents’ hometown, a week before our Catholic church wedding at St. Paul’s Church, followed by the reception at Saidi Centre in Benin City. My father was adamant. The traditional ceremony was before our families. We still had to be married before God. Until then, I was not going anywhere with my husband’s family.
So we waited for the white wedding.
Imagine me, a young bride with all the romantic, fairytale expectations of her wedding night. Spending it in Ogwashi-Uku, my husband’s ancestral home, was not part of the plan.
But after the church wedding, my mother-in-law and the family insisted that I return with them to the village. I was not particularly amused at the time. Later I understood she meant no harm, and that my father’s insistence on the sequence of ceremonies had probably helped create the situation.
“Mommy, you stole my wedding night!” became one of our running jokes.
My husband would give me that familiar look. Are we still talking about this?
If that is the grievance I can summon after thirty years as her daughter-in-law, it tells you something about the woman she was.
Making Room for More
Not that we lived outside tradition. After one of our babies arrived, Mommy asked after her son before asking after me. “Mommy, who is going to ask for Udo?” I protested. We could laugh because there was no contest for territory beneath the humour.
She never made me feel that belonging to her family required surrendering the person I already was. Her gentleness was not weakness. Nor was it a standard she expected other women to meet.
My father was a judge. My mother was a nurse who went on to study law after I graduated from law school. They raised me to believe my ambitions were natural. Marriage could have undone that foundation. Instead, my parents-in-law strengthened it.
To understand that, you have to know something about her intellectual life.
Mommy was a professor of sociology and an advocate for women’s rights. In 1976, she wrote about the dual-sex political system among Igbo communities west of the Niger, documenting traditions in which women held recognised forms of political authority. In 1989, she published a paper with a title that could have been written for our present conversations: Rural Development in Nigeria: How Do Women Count? It examined women’s economic contributions and the constraints that made those contributions invisible.
Long before we were asking who gets a seat, a stake or recognition for the value they create, she was asking whose work counted and whose authority was acknowledged.
She and my father-in-law, Professor Chukwuka Okonjo, raised two formidable daughters: Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, and Dr Njideka Okonjo-Udochi, an accomplished physician in the United States.
It would be easy to conclude that a progressive mother raised accomplished daughters. That matters, certainly. But it is not the whole test.
A family can celebrate its daughters’ achievements and still make its daughters-in-law smaller. It can proudly educate girls, applaud a woman who reaches the highest office and expect the woman who marries its son to surrender her independence.
Progressiveness is not established by the success of the women who share your bloodline alone.
Sometimes the better test is how you treat the women who arrive from elsewhere, with their own histories, convictions and ambitions.
I know what the other version sounds like, because women tell me. What does your husband think? Is all this work necessary? Who will look after the children? Nobody has to forbid a woman anything. A family can make ambition feel like disobedience without ever saying no. Inside a family, those questions carry the weight of being spoken by people she loves.
Mommy did not do that to me. Her belief in capable women extended to the women who joined her family.
Daddy even addressed letters to me as “Mrs Udo Kachikwu Okonjo,” retaining my maiden surname. After returning to Nigeria in the late 1990s, I interviewed at a leading bank where my use of both surnames was challenged. The reaction was one reason I chose not to pursue the job. My father-in-law, by contrast, saw nothing strange in my keeping my name. He and Mommy celebrated my achievements as proudly as my own parents did.
Perhaps the most tangible expression of her own authority still stands in Ogwashi-Uku.
For years my parents-in-law lived in Ghana, at Legon, while my father-in-law worked internationally. During that period, Mommy travelled back and forth to Nigeria to build the family home on roughly two acres of land. She supervised construction, attended to the gardens and landscaping, worked with the gardener and oversaw details that make a property into a place. She helped shape it, stone by stone.
My father-in-law once told me the story. Whenever I had a question about the house, his answer was wonderfully matter-of-fact.
“Go to Mommy. She’s the owner of the house.”
He did not need to diminish her competence to assert his own. He knew who had built it.
Consider what that means. Land acquisition, construction decisions, coordinating labour, managing budgets, maintaining a substantial property over decades. We recognise these as economic leadership in a developer’s office. When a woman does them for her family, we often file them under care, support or simply being a good wife.
She was caring for her family. She was also creating and stewarding an asset.
Mommy bought plots of land for her sons. My husband built our home in Ogwashi-Uku on the one hectare land she gave us. Those decisions were not just transactions. A household took root, children grew up, and another generation began its life on a foundation she had helped provide.
The family house continues to gather the generations. We celebrated one daughter’s wedding there, and another is planned for next year. Visitors still marvel at its grounds. I see the work of a woman who thought beyond the immediate moment, and a husband who recognised her authority over what she built.
An asset can outlive its builder. So can the atmosphere its builder creates.
Changing the Starting Point
I was reminded of another form of inheritance at my son’s Craft exhibition, where I met a woman whose haulage and logistics business began with her grandmother, was carried forward by her mother and now involves a third generation of women. That grandmother did more than start an enterprise. She changed where the women who followed would begin.
Not every matriarch leaves a business. Some leave land, a home, an education, professional relationships or the time and confidence another woman needs to make her own move. Some build an environment in which a woman’s success does not have to be purchased with domestic conflict.
I know how fortunate I was. But no woman’s freedom to work, build and become herself should depend on having an unusually kind mother-in-law.
Families are economic institutions, whether we call them that or not. They distribute money and land, but also time, opportunity, access, confidence and freedom. Some multiply a woman’s possibilities. Others use up her energy before she gets to exercise them.
I was able to pursue my work and build my life without fighting a parallel war for dignity in the home I had married into. I know how much energy such a war can consume because I have seen what other women endure.
When I told friends I had never known stress from my mother-in-law, several wished they could say the same. That pattern extends into workplaces, boardrooms and political institutions, where those with influence can open the way for other women or close it.
So as we celebrate Mommy, I think of the scholar who insisted women’s contributions counted, the mother who raised extraordinary daughters and sons, the builder who created homes and land for generations, and the mother-in-law who made room for another woman to thrive.
Her gentleness was real. So was her power. She did not need to make herself the centre of everything to leave her mark on it.
Perhaps that is the matriarch effect. Not simply what a woman owns or leaves behind, but what other women are able to build, become and own because of the space she created.
And now I find myself asking a question that is both personal and economic.
What will the women who come after me be able to do because of how I used my influence?
Women. Wealth. Power.
October 28, 2026
Udo Maryanne Okonjo is a board director, wealth strategist, and investor. As Executive Chair of Fine &Country West Africa and Founder of Radiant Collective Capital, she champions women-led wealth, Impact and Legacy across Africa and Beyond.
