Kofo was born to the family of the Lagos lawyer Omoba Eric Olawolu Moore, a member of an Egba royal family[6], and his wife Aida Arabella (née Vaughan), who descended from Scipio Vaughan (through whom she also had Cherokee ancestry).[7][8] She was a first cousin of Oyinkan, Lady Abayomi and a niece of Oloori Charlotte Obasa.[9] She spent half of her young life in Lagos and the other half in U.K.[10] Ademola was educated at C.M.S. Girls School, Lagos; Vassar College, New York;[11] Portway College, Reading and, from 1931 to 1935, St Hugh's College, Oxford. She earned a degree in education and English from Oxford, while at Oxford she wrote a 21-page autobiography at the insistence of Margery Perham to challenge British stereotypes about Africans, she wrote of her childhood as a mixture of western cultural orientation and African orientation.[10]