Dove, Mabel (1905–1984)

Ghanaian politician and journalist, the first woman to be elected to a national assembly in West Africa. She joined the Convention People's Party (CPP) in 1950 and wrote for the party newspaper, the Accra Evening News; Kwame Nkrumah appointed her editor for a brief period in 1951. She was nominated as the only CPP woman candidate in the 1954 election and won a resounding victory. However, she lost her nomination in the 1957 election.

Born in Accra, Dove came from a family of Sierra Leonean origin. She was educated in Freetown and in the UK, returning to Ghana in 1926 to pursue a career in journalism. In 1933 she married J B Danquah, editor of the Times of West Africa and later a nationalist politician; they divorced in the early 1940s.