MEET
The women
Aiyegbusi or “Lady Kemitte”, as they call her in the Ayo (oware) world was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1981. She has been a professional athlete for many years in Nigeria, although not always in mancala games.
She started her career as a weight lifter for the Lagos State, and then qualifying for the Nigerian Olympic team which was going to compete in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Unfortunately, in 2015 she suffered a serious accident when cycling in training, which caused her a fracture that put her into hospital for a year. When she recovered, she was medically forbidden from lifting weights again.
But Lady K did not let the situation be the end of her. Far from it. While she was still recovering in her home in Lagos she started to go see Oware (Ayo) games that elder men were playing in the street. She started to develop an interest in the game and she learned with them how to play.
Today, she is Nigeria National Female Champion and she works as a coach and athlete for the Lagos State Sport Commission and has been Lagos State Champion since 2018.
Aiyegbusi is not only the best female playerv of Nigeria, she is also a coach of both men and women, and has trained very good players both at national level and internationally. She has trained one of the best oware players of France, who currently owns Club Awelé; and currently she is also the official coach of the Spanish oware female team.
For her interview, I asked her to explain the way they play oware in Nigeria, but as she said “we don’t call it oware here. We call it ayo, it comes from Yoruba language”. Not only the name is different but also the way the game is played in competition in Nigeria. As she explained:
“In Ayo competition we have different categories. Only if you win in all of them you can be champion. The categories are:
Aiyegbusi is very proud of having overcome the hardship of an injury that left her out of physical professional sports, but opened the door of intellectual sports and board games in general, which she now loves. She does not only play Ayo but also loves to play other abstract games like chess, togyzqumalaq and draughts.
I asked her what is the thing she loves most about Ayo, and she told me “I am passionate of Ayo because it allows me to travel a lot, to meet other people, although only in Nigeria. Last year in Abuja i became National Champion. Now we are preparing for next year competition in Enugu State”.
We also spoke of the first medal she ever won, which was the Ayo female gold medal in 2018 in the National Sport Festival, the first time she played in a competition. “People discovered my talent there” she told me.
Regarding women playing Ayo in Nigeria, she told me that since last year World Nomad Games, more and more women are having a greater interest in learning and playing: “In Nigeria, Ayo has been a traditional men game, but now it is changing. More women are eager to learn and play, and as women like myself win medals, we are more respected”.
But the path for women is still challenging, as she says, especially for married women, as a married woman playing Ayo outside in the evening with other men is not particularly widely accepted, “but things are changing”.
She also admires other women from her country that have helped open the path for women in Ayo, like the greatest Aderonke Gbemisola Lawal, the former Yoruba Ayo champion that learned the game when she was little and participated in the 5th World Nomad Games in 2024 in Kazakhstan, obtaining an incredible 10th place.
Finally, I asked her what advice they would give girls and women interested in learning oware/ayo and other mancala games, to what she responded:
