Ghana’s First Female General Remembered Through her Memoir, ‘Lady in Boots’

ADF Staff

It was a life filled with firsts. Maj. Gen. Constance Edjeani-Afenu of the Ghanaian Armed Forces (GAF) was a trailblazer as a military officer, peacekeeper and diplomat. 

She died in 2022, but her memoir, “Lady in Boots,” was published and released during an event at Burma Camp in September 2023. 

The late general’s sister, Akofa Edjeani, said she hopes the book can be distributed to secondary schools across Ghana to inspire the next generation of female leaders. 

“To the youth out there, especially females … do not be afraid,” Edjeani told the Ghana News Agency. “Know what you want, what you are capable of doing, and just start. Once you start, you will finish.” 

During 41 years of military service, Edjeani-Afenu served as the first female commanding officer and the first female brigadier general in the history of the GAF. She served in peacekeeping missions in Lebanon, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she was the first female team leader in that mission’s history. 

In her last post, with the U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, she served as deputy force commander, the first woman to hold that title in that mission. 

Upon her death after a brief illness, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres praised “her tireless work to promote inclusiveness and increase the number of women in the peacekeeping operations where she served.”

She was posthumously promoted from brigadier general to major general in a move approved by the president. 

In an interview the year before her death, she pointed to an attribute that helped her overcome hardships. 

“I think discipline will send you places because in discipline you have hard work, respect, timeliness,” Edjeani-Afenu told the Ghana Peace Journal in 2021. “In life I’ve realized that it’s easier to be disciplined than to be indisciplined … so I choose discipline.”