Nigerian-born Chinyelu Onwurah won the first seat to be declared for Labour in the December 12 general election in the United Kingdom.

According to The Independent, Onwurah took Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central with 21,568 votes, compared to her Conservatives rival’s 9,290.

Onwurah’s victory was swiftly followed by success for Labour’s Bridget Phillipson in Houghton and Sunderland South.

Onwurah’s 12,278 margin of victory was down from 14,937 two years ago, the medium reported.

Chinyelu Susan Onwurah was born on April 12, 1965. Her mother hails from Newcastle.

Her father, from Nigeria, worked as a dentist while he studied at Newcastle University Medical School. The parents met and married in the 1950s.

Onwurah says on her official website,

“My maternal grandfather was a sheet metal worker in the shipyards of the Tyne during the depression.

“My mother grew up in poverty in Garth Heads on the quayside.

“In the fifties, she married my father, a Nigerian student at Newcastle Medical School.

“In 1965, I was born whilst they were living in Long Benton where my father had a dental practice.

“I was still a baby when my father took us to live in Awka, Nigeria.

“But two years later, the Biafran Civil War broke out, bringing famine with it and, as described vividly in an Evening Chronicle article in 1968, my mother, my brother and sister and I returned as refugees to Newcastle, whilst my father stayed on in the Biafran army.”