Eight Nigerian women who currently hold, or have held, world records. Some are well known; Hilda Baci’s cook-a-thon made international news. Others, like a Paralympic powerlifter who trains between clients at her hair salon, are barely known outside their own sport.
Here’s who they are and how they got there.
1. Hilda Baci — Longest cooking marathon by an individual: 93 hours, 11 minutes
Hilda Effiong Bassey started cooking at five years old, standing beside her mother in the family kitchen in Nsit Ubium, Akwa Ibom State.
By 2023, she was the owner of a small Lagos food brand called My Food by Hilda, and largely unknown outside her own client base. That changed on May 11, 2023, when she walked into Amore Gardens in Lekki, Lagos, to attempt the Guinness World Record for longest cooking marathon by an individual, then held by Indian chef Lata Tondon at 87 hours and 45 minutes.
Baci was allowed only a five-minute break every hour, was barred from coffee or energy drinks, and had to remain standing throughout. She cooked more than 100 pots of food, drawing crowds that included Tiwa Savage, Burna Boy and the governor of Lagos State, while her cook-a-thon’s Instagram account amassed over 255,000 followers in real time. The crowds and online audience continued to grow as she approached the record. Guinness confirmed the record weeks later, after her livestream traffic reportedly crashed the organisation’s own website.
Although Baci no longer holds the Guinness World Records title for the longest cooking marathon (individual), which she set in 2023 before it was broken first by Irish chef Alan Fisher and later by Australian chef Evette Quoibia, she returned to the record books in September 2025. On September 12, 2025, Baci also achieved two Guinness World Records in the same attempt: the largest serving of Nigerian-style jollof rice and the largest serving of rice at 8,780 kilogrammes, cooked in Victoria Island, Lagos, in partnership with Gino.
2. Kafayat Oluwatoyin Shafau (Kaffy) — Longest dance party: 55 hours, 40 minutes
Long before she was known as Nigeria’s “Dance Queen,” Kaffy was an 11-year-old whose parents had just separated and was helping her mother get by during a genuinely difficult stretch of her childhood.
She found dance almost by accident, training people for free at the National Stadium in the late 1990s simply because she loved it, not because she saw a career in it.
In 2006, she led her dance group to the Nokia Silverbird Danceathon, where they danced continuously for 55 hours and 40 minutes to break the Guinness World Record for longest dance party.
Kaffy has since said the record mattered to her less for the title than for what it proved about her own leadership, since a team record depends entirely on how far the weakest link can go.
Two decades later, she runs the Imagneto Dance Company and still trains the next generation of Nigerian dancers.
3. Blessing Okagbare-Ighoteguonor — Most appearances in IAAF Diamond League meetings: 67
Okagbare made her 67 Diamond League appearances between July 3, 2010, and August 31, 2018, a record for sheer competitive longevity in one of track and field’s most demanding annual circuits. Across a career that began at 17, she won an Olympic silver medal in the long jump at Beijing 2008, a World Championships silver and bronze at Moscow 2013, and a sprint double at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, at one point holding the African record in both the 100m and 200m.
4. Oyinka Asu-Johnson (DJ Yin) — Longest DJ marathon: 243 hours, 30 minutes
DJ Yin grew up watching her father and uncle work as DJs before training under Jimmy Jatt, widely credited as one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing in Nigeria.
In October 2021, at The Grill by Yanna in Ikoyi, Lagos, she set out to break the standing longest DJ set record, then held by fellow Nigerian DJ Obi at 240 hours. She played for 243 hours and 30 minutes, becoming, by most reporting at the time, the first Black woman to hold the record.
Alongside DJing, she has also released her own tracks and worked with artists including Tay Iwar and BankyOnDBeatz, with an ambition to build a recording career of her own eventually.
5. Helen Williams — Longest handmade wig: 351.28 metres
A professional wig maker working out of Abule Egba, Lagos, Williams now holds four separate Guinness World Records tied to her craft. She set the first, for longest handmade wig, on July 7, 2023, with a piece measuring 351.28 metres, longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall.
The wig took 11 days to make and cost more than ₦6 million, including over 1,000 bundles of hair.
Williams made it entirely by hand, without using a machine, and said her husband, son, friends, manager and family supported her through the process.
In February 2024, she added the record for widest wig, at 3.65 metres, and by July 2024 had set a third, for most hair clips placed in a wig in 30 seconds, with 94. A month later, she claimed a fourth title for most hair clips placed on the head in 30 seconds, with 97.
6. Bose Omolayo — Heaviest Para powerlift by a female, -79kg category: 144kg
Before she was a powerlifter, Omolayo was a hairdresser in Seme, running her own salon and supporting her family on what she earned braiding hair.
In 2012, a client’s husband, Feyisetan Are, who would go on to become her coach, told her she was strong enough to try the sport. It took her time to commit, since the salon was what fed her family, but once she did, the results came quickly: a silver medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, gold at the 2016 Rio Paralympics, and a second consecutive gold at the Tokyo 2020 Games.
At the 2021 World Para Powerlifting Championships in Tbilisi, Georgia, on December 2, she lifted 144kg to set a new world record in the -79kg category.
She added a silver medal at the Paris 2024 Paralympics, lifting through an arm injury to finish behind China’s Han Miaoyu. She still does hair on the side, by her own account, whenever she gets the chance.
7. Lauritta Onye — Farthest shot put by a female F40 athlete: 8.40 metres
Onye was born in Owerri with a form of achondroplasia and never planned on a sporting career at all. She wanted to act and later did, appearing in the 2015 Nollywood film Lords of Money under the screen name Laury White.
She took up athletics in 2007 more or less by circumstance, and by 2015 was setting world records in the F40 shot put, first at 7.59m in Tunisia, then 7.72m at the Doha World Championships.
At the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games, on September 11, she broke her own world record twice in the same final, first with a throw of 7.83m, then, on her fourth attempt, with a throw of 8.40m, becoming the first F40 athlete to clear eight metres and securing Nigeria’s first athletics gold of the Games.
She marked the win by cartwheeling across the field. Ahead of the competition, Onye had publicly said that promised government funding for her training never arrived, and that she believed her status as a disabled athlete was part of the reason.
8. Lucy Ejike — Heaviest powerlift by a female, -61kg category: 127.5kg
Ejike contracted polio at one year old and did not walk again, growing up in Enugu in a country with little public infrastructure for disabled people. She began powerlifting in 2000 and went on to compete at six consecutive Paralympic Games, from Sydney 2000 through Tokyo 2020, winning three golds, two silvers and a bronze along the way, a run that made her the first Nigerian athlete in any sport, male or female, to win medals at five separate Paralympic Games.
Her lift of 127.5kg on September 20, 2004, at the Athens Paralympics, won her gold in the -44kg category. She went on to serve as Nigeria’s flagbearer at the Rio 2016 opening ceremony and as national team captain for over a decade, crediting her rivalry with Egypt’s Fatma Omar, a competitor across five separate Games, as one of the things that kept pushing her further.
