By the end of World War II, the Nigerian economy was on its knees. The economic burdens that had plagued the lives of average Nigerians during the interwar period had only worsened with the war’s economic restrictions, high inflation and acute shortages. In Abeokuta, a town established in 1830 by the Yoruba ethnic group and now the capital city of Ogun state in southwest Nigeria, women who were involved in the local markets and in the selling of foodstuffs were particularly hard hit — and not for the first time. But this time the women would have a champion to fight their cause: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Her approach not only fueled the fight against colonialism and the patriarchy, it also inspired many other social justice movements in Nigeria, throughout Africa and around the world.
When British colonial officials first imposed taxes in Abeokuta in 1918, women were targeted unfairly. Not only were they taxed separately from men and at an earlier age (girls paid taxes from the age of 15 while boys didn’t till they were 16), the methods through which the tax was collected by the local law enforcement were violent and excessive. Their homes were invaded and they were physically assaulted, sometimes even stripped naked in order to determine their ages for taxation. Market women were subjected to police seizures of their produce without compensation or at rates lower than those set up by the colonial administration.
Despite receiving sympathy from some of the men and other male-led institutions, the women of Abeokuta continued to suffer. Yet the local administration would not budge. The market women of Abeokuta had time and time again brought their grievances to the local traditional ruler, the alake of Egbaland, Ademola II, and the Egba Council, with no result. There had to be another way for their complaints to be heard and understood.
This is where the story of Ransome-Kuti’s rise as a champion of women’s rights truly begins. For those familiar with Nigerian history, her story is often boiled down to two facts: for being the first woman in the country to drive a car and for being the mother of legendary Afrobeat artist Fela Kuti. But Ransome-Kuti’s influence in Nigeria has always been and continues to be greater than either of these two features of her life. As the founder of the Abeokuta Ladies Club, which later reestablished itself as the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU), Ransome-Kuti led an all-women resistance movement against the unfair taxes imposed on market women by the British colonial government. In her newest biopic about the political activist, “Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti,” Nigerian film director and writer Bolanle Austen-Peters shows us another side of Ransome-Kuti’s life, one where her legacy and work heavily influenced the beginnings of Nigeria’s independence movement and the inclusion of women in that struggle.
The film is a series of flashbacks told by an older Ransome-Kuti (played by veteran actor Joke Silva) to a French journalist as she lies in a hospital bed after being thrown from a second-floor window by armed soldiers who stormed her son Fela’s compound, an incident that occurred in 1977 and eventually led to her death the following year at the age of 77. The episodes chronicle Ransome-Kuti’s life from her days as one of the first girls to attend the Abeokuta Grammar School to leading the Abeokuta Women’s Revolt in 1946.
The older Ransome-Kuti, born in 1900, begins her story by taking us to the days of her childhood, where her father, Chief Daniel Olumeyuwa Thomas, tells her that he has dreams for her beyond what is expected of a young woman then living in Abeokuta. He somehow persuades the administration at the school to admit a young Ransome-Kuti in 1914, where she shows great intellectual promise. It’s during her secondary school years that she meets her future husband, Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, the son of a clergyman. The journey of their relationship is mostly relegated to the background, a move by Austen-Peters that allows Ransome-Kuti’s life to unfold in a way where the focus remains on her activism, though her husband’s support remains ever-present.
According to Cheryl Johnson-Odim, a historian and coauthor of “For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria,” the fact that Ransome-Kuti and her husband had very similar politics was extremely rare for that time.
“He was an activist himself,” Johnson-Odim told New Lines. “He was the founder of the Nigerian Union of Teachers and also very leftist. He supported her, and there are not many men who would have allowed her to be at the forefront to do what she needed to do.” In a way, not only did his support give Ransome-Kuti the freedom to be so active, but it also bolstered her efforts, knowing that she had a partner whose work and ethics mirrored her own. Between her father and her husband, Ransome-Kuti had two crucial male allies in her life when it came to fighting against the patriarchy and advancing women’s equality in Nigeria.
After secondary school, Ransome-Kuti set out to study in England, where it has been documented that she did not particularly enjoy her time because of racism and discrimination. However, it is also the place where she discovered socialism and anti-colonialism. In addition, the activism she would undertake in her hometown began to materialize. By the time she returned to Abeokuta in 1922 to work as a schoolteacher, Ransome-Kuti’s ideologies and ethics had become increasingly apparent. This is most notably shown in a scene in which the young Ransome-Kuti is at dinner with Israel’s family and has a tense conversation with his father about education and religion. Whereas Israel’s father believes that school isn’t necessarily for everyone and that the British bringing Christianity to Nigeria was a good thing, Ransome-Kuti challenges him by saying that parents should allow their children to explore their educational potential as much as possible and asks, “Why must we think that the only road to salvation is through the white man’s Christianity?” Despite their differences, Ransome-Kuti later described that they ultimately had a great relationship.
In 1932, Ransome-Kuti established Abeokuta Ladies Club, an organization made up of middle-class women that primarily focused on charity work and providing adult education classes. By the 1940s, after an illiterate friend asked her to teach her how to read, the organization took a more political stance. It was through providing literacy classes for a group of market women that Ransome-Kuti learned more about the injustices to which the colonial government subjected these women. In the film, Ransome-Kuti’s first encounter with the women’s plight takes place on a visit to the market to speak with the mother of a student who didn’t show up to school that day. There, she witnessed the way the women were unfairly and roughly treated by the guards of the alake, who showed up unannounced to take and destroy their goods.
But here the film took some artistic license. In reality, it was the market women who went to Ransome-Kuti seeking her help and who told her about their situation. This tweak of the narrative could be interpreted as creating a savior image of Ransome-Kuti, if it weren’t for the fact that it is continually shown in the film — as was the case in real life — that Ransome-Kuti had always been adamant that this was a collective liberation struggle against a colonial government that hid behind the alake to enact its oppressive policies. But when needed, Ransome-Kuti’s willingness to confront the alake and his all-male council on behalf of the women, especially in an environment where women’s political leadership was almost nonexistent, was welcomed and supported by the marketplace women.
By the late 1940s, the colonial government had adopted several harsh policies that went against any and all interests of the market women. According to Johnson-Odim, in her article “‘For Their Freedoms’: The anti-imperialist and international feminist activity of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria,” the government set price controls for all goods sold in the market, demanded that the women turn over quotas of goods to the government to offset shortages induced by World War II and levied extra taxes on women. The actions were taken without any female representation in any colonial government bodies. These unpopular policies and restrictions were imposed and enforced on these women through the alake and his council, which functioned as an extension of colonial rule.
These policies not only continued to disenfranchise women in an environment where women’s rights were already limited, they also illuminated the stark contrast between the lives of the market women and those of middle- and upper-class women. The original priority of the Ladies Club was to function as a charity, and membership was exclusive to women of a certain demographic. But things changed when Ransome-Kuti understood that it wasn’t enough simply to provide classes for women of other socioeconomic backgrounds, specifically market women: They needed to work together.
The formal renaming of the club to the Abeokuta Women’s Union in 1946 reflected that change in ideology. It is not documented whether there was pushback within the Ladies Club about the change. But the film suggests this in a scene where Ransome-Kuti says that the club should be dissolved and reconstituted to include all women, but a few members resist. One woman even asks, “You want me … me … to mix with the masses? To breathe the same air?” This scene is a creative choice by Austen-Peters to show that not everyone accepted the solidarity Ransome-Kuti saw as necessary to the struggle.
That same year, Ransome-Kuti led the AWU in its first protest against the unfair taxes on women, setting the stage for the Abeokuta Women’s Revolt (also known as the Egba Women’s Tax Riot), which lasted approximately three years. Thousands of women attended the mass protests. According to Johnson-Odim, Ransome-Kuti also held training sessions where she taught women how to protect themselves from tear gas and even encouraged them to pick up the tear gas canisters and throw them back at the police. The AWU and the women who joined in the protests would surround a man’s home or office and sing protest songs. On several occasions they did the same at Ademola’s palace, where they were subjected to tear gas, beatings from the guards and, for some, arrested. The reenactment on film brings new life to this significant moment in African women’s history.
What Austen-Peters misses, however, is the way that the revolt went beyond the fight against taxation. Ransome-Kuti was a staunch anti-colonialist who publicly questioned the nature of Britain’s colonial rule and how it affected women’s economic and social relations with the state. The AWU also protested that there were no women in the local political structure and that there shouldn’t be any taxation without representation. The AWU and Ransome-Kuti fought for the state to protect their interests and well-being, whether it was about taxes, health care or education. A more holistic take on Ransome-Kuti’s work with the AWU would have provided audiences with a greater understanding of the ways the women’s personal lives influenced their work and that of others.
Although Ransome-Kuti’s famous son, Fela, is known for the way his music influenced sociopolitical discourse and criticized the effect of colonialism in Nigeria, not much is written about the way his mother and her work with the market women were a great source of inspiration for his work. Ethnomusicologist Stephanie Shonekan writes in a journal article titled “Fela’s Foundation: Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Market Women’s Movement in 1940s Western Nigeria” that to understand Fela, it is vital to center the struggles of Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta market women.
According to Judith A. Byfield, a professor of African and Caribbean history at Cornell University, the market women weren’t motivated to join the AWU and the fight against unfair taxation because they were aiming to be at the same level as the elite women in the organization; rather, they were fighting for improvements in their lives as they were.
“They wanted to gain the skills that would help them navigate within their chosen professions,” Byfield told New Lines. “They wanted education for themselves and they wanted it for their children so that they could be better businesspeople.”
The Women’s Revolt ended in 1949, with Ademola abdicating, the suspension of the flat tax on women and the admittance of women to the local council. Despite the fact that some of these successes were eventually overturned — the alake returned to power two years later and the tax was reimposed — the revolt was important in showing what women of all socioeconomic backgrounds could do when it came to fighting against oppression. It also solidified Ransome-Kuti’s legacy as the “Lioness” of women’s rights in Nigeria.
Up until her death in 1978, Ransome-Kuti continued her work as an educator, a politician and a women’s rights activist. “I think one of the things that people don’t talk about enough is the influence that she had on women’s struggles around the world,” Johnson-Odim said. From South Africa to Ghana and even to England, Ransome-Kuti’s work with the AWU influenced several women’s rights movements, particularly on the continent and especially in Nigeria. “She took the Abeokuta Women’s Union from just being something that was locally based to creating the Nigerian Women’s Union,” Johnson-Odim explained. “She was getting letters from women in the north talking about their struggle for the right to vote, because women in the south got the right to vote before women in the north did.”
Her dedication to challenging and resisting ingrained colonial values and her participation in the Nigerian independence movement also emphasized the significant ways that women were active in political organizing. By telling Ransome-Kuti’s story in the film, Austen-Peters offers audiences the chance to understand that African women have always had agency when it comes to telling their own narratives.
Ololade Faniyi, a doctoral student in the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies department at Emory University and coauthor of the journal article, “The End SARS Women’s Coalition: Exploring the Persistence of Women’s Movements through Feminist Generations” with researcher and philosopher Sharon Adetutu Omotoso, says that there is a generational link and parallel between the work that Ransome-Kuti did with the Abeokuta Women’s Union and the work that contemporary feminist organizations are currently doing in Nigeria today. In the same way that the change in objectives led to the Abeokuta Ladies Club turning into the AWU, organizations like the Feminist Coalition (also known as FemCo), a collective of young Nigerian feminists whose aim is to promote gender equality in all facets of Nigerian society, also adapted their initial goals based on the needs of their community during End SARS 2020. End SARS was a social movement and series of mass protests against police brutality, specifically the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, which primarily occurred in October 2020.
Similarly, Ransome-Kuti’s understanding of intersectionality in terms of class, especially when protesting against the state or government, is crucial to the success of a social movement. In their article, Omotoso and Faniyi write that although the promise of food and entertainment might have factored into the decisions of lower-income individuals to participate in the organization’s protests, “their sustained engagement reflected a growing awareness and solidarity with other protesters,” as they began to recognize the systemic problems in Nigeria that were plaguing all people.
“Her notion of class struggle and that women have the right to make choices about themselves is still informing the most progressive forms of feminism,” Johnson-Odim said. Despite Ransome-Kuti being so ahead of her time, specifically in her roles in the political sphere, Nigeria has yet to see a woman be a serious contender for heading the government. In 2022, women took to the streets in Abuja to protest the rejection of proposed constitutional amendments that would have fostered women’s equality and political participation in the country. As recently as August 2024, Nigerians were back on the streets protesting against economic hardships under the hashtag #EndBadGovernance. The systemic struggles that Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Women’s Union fought against continue to reverberate in different ways.
“I think there are so many ways that [Ransome-Kuti’s] progressive positions are fortunately relevant and, in some ways, unfortunately relevant,” Johnson-Odim explained.
What the film “Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti” did was provide a satisfying take on the life and work of an icon whose influence is still important in the ways Nigerians confront inequality in a contemporary context. Although there was room to push the story further, it showed what could be done when telling the powerful stories of African women.
“It is extremely important for us to recognize that the notion of women fighting for women and women’s rights is not something that has roots only in the West,” Johnson-Odim said. “There are things that ‘historical’ African women could teach women’s movements in Nigeria today.”
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