By Lillian Okenwa
At 94, Nigeria’s first female SAN is now the oldest surviving member of the Inner Bar, carrying the memory of a generation that transformed Nigerian advocacy through a career spanning more than six decades and marked by historic firsts and an extraordinary legal drama.
The death of Professor Alfred Bandele Kasunmu, SAN, has left Chief Folake Solanke, SAN, as the oldest surviving member of Nigeria’s Inner Bar, closing another chapter in the story of a generation that helped shape the country’s legal profession.
Solanke, born on March 29, 1932, is about two years older than Kasunmu, who was born on May 23, 1934. Kasunmu, however, entered the Inner Bar before her, while Solanke became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 1981.
By then, she had already spent years breaking barriers in a profession dominated by men.
She was Nigeria’s first woman to attain the rank of SAN and the first female lawyer to wear the silk gown. She later became the first female Commissioner in the old Western State and, in 1992, the first African and first non-Caucasian to become International President of Zonta International.
Her legal career began in Britain, where she was called to the English Bar in 1962. On returning to Nigeria, she worked in the chambers of Justice Michael Adeyinka Odesanya before joining the chambers of Chief F.R.A. Williams, one of the giants of Nigerian advocacy. She established her own practice, Alabukun Chambers, in 1966.
Daughter of the Alabukun pioneer
Solanke was born Olufolake Odulate, daughter of Chief Jacob Sogboyega Odulate, the Abeokuta pharmacist and entrepreneur whose name became inseparable from Alabukun, the indigenous medicinal brand that became a household name in Nigeria.
Odulate was an unusual figure in his own right. Largely self-taught, he built his pharmaceutical business in Abeokuta and sent his children abroad for education. His daughter would eventually become one of the most accomplished women in Nigeria’s legal history.
But before the silk gown, the courtroom battles and the succession of professional firsts, Solanke found herself at the centre of a very different kind of legal drama.
The Benson affair
In the 1950s, her family and that of prominent lawyer and politician T.O.S. Benson explored the possibility of a marriage between the two families. Solanke rejected the proposal and later married Toriola Solanke in London in 1956.
The matter did not end there.
In 1957, Benson confronted Solanke in London. She alleged that during the encounter he forcibly took her engagement ring and wristwatch. The dispute eventually reached the Old Bailey, where Benson was tried and acquitted.
The case attracted considerable attention among Nigerians in Britain and became one of the most talked-about episodes in Solanke’s early life.
It was a remarkable prelude to the career that followed.
In 1981, Solanke became the first female SAN, breaking into a professional rank that had until then been exclusively male. Her appointment was followed by other firsts, including her elevation to Commissioner in the old Western State and her international leadership of Zonta.
She also remained active in the legal profession long after many of her contemporaries had retired. In 2021, she marked 40 years as a SAN, six decades after her call to the English Bar.
A profession changes around her
Kasunmu’s death has now placed Solanke in a singular position.
She belongs to a generation of Nigerian advocates whose careers began when the Bar was much smaller and courtroom advocacy was shaped by figures such as F.R.A. Williams, Gani Fawehinmi and other formidable practitioners of the early post-colonial era.
She has watched the profession expand from a relatively small Bar into one with thousands of practitioners and a much larger Inner Bar, while women have moved from being rare at the highest levels of advocacy to occupying prominent positions across the profession.
Her own career helped make that change possible.
At 94, Solanke remains not simply the oldest surviving SAN but one of the few living practitioners able to speak directly to several generations of Nigerian legal history.
Kasunmu’s passing has therefore left the profession with fewer links to its formative years.
For now, one of those links remains firmly in place.
Chief Folake Solanke, SAN — Nigeria’s first woman in silk and now the oldest surviving member of the Inner Bar.
