The premise is doubtful
The title assumes that a women’s major championship has been played in Africa and that someone won it first. To the best of available knowledge, that is not the case. The recognised women’s majors have been held in the United States, Britain and, more recently, France, and none has been staged on the African continent. So there is no “first woman to win a major in Africa” to name, and this article does not name one.
What can be described is the documented history of golf on the continent, and of the African-born women who have competed at the top level, usually on tours based elsewhere.
Golf arrives with colonial clubs
Golf reached Africa through the British colonial world in the nineteenth century. In South Africa, clubs were founded in the Cape and in the towns of the interior in the late 1800s, and the Royal Cape Golf Club is generally described as one of the oldest on the continent. In Kenya and other parts of eastern Africa, clubs grew up around colonial settlements and military and administrative posts, and in Egypt and parts of North Africa, similar clubs were created for expatriate communities.
These clubs were often restricted, in practice or by rule, by race and sometimes by sex, and for much of the colonial era the game was played mainly by Europeans. That limited the early development of the sport across the continent. A broad point worth keeping in mind is that the history of golf in Africa is also a history of who was allowed through the clubhouse door. The decolonisation of the 1950s and 1960s, which included events as varied as the Aden withdrawal on the Arabian side of the Red Sea and independence movements across Africa, changed the membership and the ownership of many of these clubs only slowly.
Women’s amateur golf
Women played at many of these clubs from early on, usually in separate ladies’ sections with their own competitions and handicaps. National amateur championships for women developed in South Africa and elsewhere, and the better amateurs sometimes travelled to Britain to compete. Detailed records of the early champions exist at the national level, but this article does not try to say who was first at any of them, because the accuracy of a summary like this would be hard to guarantee.
African women on the world stage
The most visible African women golfers have mostly been South African, and the pattern has typically been for talented players to move to the United States or Europe to find competition and prize money. Sally Little, born in South Africa, was a successful LPGA player in the late 1970s and 1980s and won major titles there. More recently, South African players have won on the Ladies European Tour and the LPGA tour, and Ashleigh Buhai won the Women’s British Open in 2022 at Muirfield in Scotland. Those wins happened outside Africa, in events whose home is in Britain and the United States.
South Africa also has a domestic women’s professional circuit, the Sunshine Ladies Tour, which has served as a development route for local players. Elsewhere on the continent, women’s professional golf has remained small, with national amateur programmes and a few events drawing the main players from a handful of countries.
What 1967 looked like
In 1967, women’s professional golf was centred in the United States, with the LPGA tour, and in Britain and the rest of Europe, with amateur championships. Africa was not part of that circuit. The continent in that year was dominated by other news, such as the Biafra secession from Nigeria, which led to the start of a civil war that summer. Golf was played in clubs in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere, but no major women’s championship was played there and no African woman is recorded as winning one.
For context on the sporting year more generally, other sporting moments of 1967 that are still remembered came mostly from Europe and North America. That reflects the geography of the sport at the time and tells us little about local talent or interest.
The wider picture
Women’s golf in Africa has been shaped by a few forces: the colonial origins of the clubs, the gradual opening of the game to a wider range of players, the cost of equipment and land, and the pull of better-funded tours abroad. The growth that does exist is often supported by national federations, school and junior programmes and small sponsored events. Those details vary widely by country, and anyone looking for specifics should check the national golf unions rather than rely on a broad summary.
The honest answer to the title is therefore that the milestone has not occurred in the form described. What African women golfers have achieved, they have mostly achieved in the established majors elsewhere, and their story is better told through those results than through an invented first.