Remembering Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti: The fearless activist who forced a king into exile

From primary school texts, Funmilayo’s story is narrated as the first Nigerian woman to drive a car. Whoever wrote that narrative is not fair to the activist and vociferous advocate.

What happened to her political activism, feminism advocacy and women empowerment?

Born October 25 1900, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was a leading political leader, feminist and advocate of women’s right whose fearlessness earned her the ‘Lioness of Lisabi’.

She was the first female student at the popular Abeokuta Grammar School before travelling to England where she learned elocution, music, dressmaking, French, and various domestic skills at a finishing school for girls in Cheshire from 1919 to 1922.

On her return to Nigeria, probably after being served a full dose of racism in England, she dropped her birth names – Frances Abigail Olufunmilayo Thomas, and preferred to speak Yoruba.

In 1925 she married Rev Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, her senior at Abeokuta Grammar School who later became a school principal and Anglican priest. Like his wife, he was also instrumental in the formation of rights groups, co-founding both the Nigeria Union of Teachers and the Nigerian Union of Students. Their union lasted for 30 years until Oludotun’s death in 1955.

Between 1935 and 1936, Funmilayo and her husband acquired a secondhand car shipped to Nigeria from England, making her the first woman in Abeokuta and Nigeria to drive a car. This is the part of her life that became more celebrated.

Her active participation in activism started when she, alongside Eniola Soyinka (her sister-in-law and mother of Prof Wole Soyinka), founded the Abeokuta Ladies Club (ALC) in 1932 focused on women empowerment, charity work and adult education classes.

The ALC later became the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU) and went national in 1949 becoming Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU). The group promoted gender equality, raised awareness against the injustice that women were receiving, protested against taxation on women and organised several lectures across the country.

Some of the goals of the AWU, with an estimated membership of 20,000 women, included greater educational opportunities for women and girls, enforcement of sanitary regulations, and the provision of health care and other social services for women.

One of the popular protests of the AWU led by Ransome-Kuti was its continuous demonstration against the Alake of Egbaland, Oba Ladapo Ademola II at his palace over the imposition of tax on women, corruption in the administration of local authority. The protest forced Oba Ademola into temporary exile in 1949.

She was the only woman on the delegation of the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC) which went to London to protest against a proposed Nigerian constitution in 1947.

She played a prominent role in the fight for universal adult suffrage and Nigeria’s battle for independence.

At a time when education of the girl child was seen as a waste, she was one of the very few women of her time who received post-primary education

It would not be out of place to describe her as the mother of feminism in Nigeria, as most of her advocacy and charity works were based on making life better for the women and girls and also raising their living standards.

She ran for a seat in the regional assembly as the NCNC candidate in 1951 but lost.

It would also not be out of place to say aluta spirit flows in the Ransome-Kuti’s lineage, their children, asides the eldest and only daughter Dolupo who has little public information, the males – Dr Olikoye Ransome-Kuti a former health minister, Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti and afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti became prominent activists and social crusaders.

Fela was famous for his vocal criticisms of the military government through his songs and on February 18, 1977 when 1,000 soldiers stormed his Kalakuta Republic to destroy the property and brutalise occupants, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was one of those brutalised while his kinsman General Olusegun Obasanjo was military head of state at that time..

Fela claimed his 77-year-old mum was thrown from the window of the one-storeyed building. She died in April, having never fully recovered from injuries sustained in the Kalakuta attack.

Fela narrated the incident in his song ‘Unknown Soldier’.”Dem throw my mama out from window. Dem kill my mama. Dem kill my mama. Dem kill my mama. Dem kill my mama. Dem kill my mama…” he cried in the song.

In his book, “For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria”, biographer Cheryl Johnson-Odim has this to say about her: “no other Nigerian woman of her time ranked as such a national figure or had [such] international exposure and connections.”

She was conferred with a national honour of the Order of Niger, in 1968, the University of Ibadan bestowed her with an honorary doctorate of law. In 1970 she received the International Lenin Peace Prize and remained the only African woman to have received the prize.

To celebrate her 119th posthumous birthday, Google honoured her with a doodle on October 25th 2019.