The first female Army Major General in Nigeria is dead.

Major General Aderonke Kale, who joined the Army in 1972 and retired in 1997, died in London on Wednesday, November 8.

She was 84.

She was also the first to command the Nigerian Army Medical Corps.

Kale was born on July 31, 1939.

Her father was a pharmacist while her mother was a teacher.

She trained as a medical doctor at University College, which later became the University of Ibadan (UI).

Kale then specialised in psychiatry at the University of London.

She was inspired to pursue psychiatry by Thomas Lambo, Africa’s first professor of Psychiatry.

She worked briefly in Britain and returned to Nigeria in 1971.

A year later in 1972, she joined the Nigerian Army.

She was a colonel and deputy commander of the Nigerian Army Medical Corps by 1990.

She was later promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General, becoming the first female general in West Africa.

Kale was then promoted to Major-General in 1994 and became the first Nigerian woman to achieve that rank.

She was also the first female Major-General in West Africa.

Kale retired from the Army in 1997.

She was married to Professor Oladele Kale, a distinguished Professor of Preventive and Social Medicine, and was a mother of five sons.

One of her sons, Yemi Kale, became the Statistician-General of Nigeria.

In 2011, shortly after the introduction of females into the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) programme, the female hall of residence was named after Kale. (Source: Freedom Online)

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