BACK IN THE DAY-FUNMILAYO RANSOME-KUTI: THE LIONESS OF LISABI

  

Funmilayo Ransome Kuti (25 October 1900 Abeokuta, Nigeria - 13 April 1978 Lagos, Nigeria) popularly known as FRK was a celebrated women`s right activist of her time. This hard core lady, prolific woman nationalist and representative of the feminist cause in her country and internationally started her powerful fight for suffrage and equal rights for her countrywomen long before the second wave of the women's movement in the United States. She was also a teacher, political campaigner, and traditional aristocrat. She served with distinction as one of the most prominent leaders of her generation. Mrs Ransome-Kuti was the first woman in Nigeria to drive car !

 

Ransome-Kuti was born on October 25, 1900 in Abeokuta, Ogun State.  to Yoruba parents, Daniel Olumeyuwa Thomas and Lucretia Phyllis Omoyeni Adeosolu. She was named Francis Abigail . Her father, was the son of a repatriated slave from Sierra Leone, who traced his ancestral history back to Abeokuta in what is today Ogun State, Nigeria. He became a member of the Anglican Faith, and soon returned to the homeland of his fellow Egbas.. She attended St John’s Primary School, Igbe in Abeokuta from 1906 to 1913. In 1914, she became a student at the Abeokuta Girls' Grammar School, a Christian missionary school founded in 1908. She took her Preceptor’s Examination at the Grammar School and taught there until May 1919 when she was sponsored by the Church Missionary Society and her father’s cousin, a UAC agent, to study in England.
Ransome-Kuti enrolled at Wincham Hall College where she studied domestic sciences, education, French and music. She decided to drop the names Frances and Abigail and to be known only by her shortened third name, Funmilayo. Upon receiving her teaching credentials, she returned to Nigeria in 1922 and taught at the Abeokuta Girls' Grammar School from 1923 to 1924. Reverend Ransome-Kuti became the first president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) from 1931 to 1954; the NUT was the first multi-ethnic and nationalist association in the country. He was also a human rights activist

On 20 January 1925, she married the Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome Kuti. He also defended the commoners of his country, and was one of the founders of both the Nigeria Union of Teachers and of the Nigerian Union of Students..

Kuti was the mother of the world`s celebrated musician, King of Afrobeats and political activists Fela Anikulapo Kuti,  Beko Ransome-Kuti, a renowned medical practitioner, and Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, a doctor and a former health minister of Nigeria. She was also grandmother to ace musicians Seun Kuti and Femi Kuti.

In the 1970s, decades after the death of her husband, she (along with her youngest son Fela) changed her last name to Anikulapo-Kuti; Anikulapo is a Yoruba word that roughly translates to “warrior who carries powerful protection” or “he who carries death in his pouch.”.

Madam Ransome-Kuti`s’s  was known throughout her career as an educator and activist. Well educated with a colonial education and a Christian background. Her  international career began when together with her husband and their close friend Ladipo Solanke created the infamous West African Student’s Union (WASU). They provided support for West African students studying in London in 1925, WASU promoted nationalist and anti-colonial movements in British West Africa.  A list of life long members of WASU reads like a WHO’s WHO of West African leaders and activists:  Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief H O Davies, Aliyi Ekineh, H A Korsah of Gold Coast, Dr Taylor-Cummings of Sierra Leone, the Alake of Abeokuta, Emir of Kano and Asantehene of Ghana.  Kwame Nkrumah and Joe Appiah were vice presidents in 1946.  WASU was a huge influence on many West African students of the day and played a major part in the independence movements of West African countries.  FRK and her husband acted as agents in Nigeria raising funds and distributing pamphlets for the union.

 Mrs Anikulapo-Kuti embraced her Yoruba heritage and worked to give pride back to the colonized, insisting that children at her school were registered using their African, rather than European names. She abandoned her Western style of dress, favoured by middle class women in the late 40s, adopting the traditional wrapped cloth of the lower classed market traders, and gave speeches exclusively in Yoruba, necessitating the British to find translators to interpret her words.

She also received the national honor of membership in the Order of Nigeria in 1965. The University of Ibadan bestowed upon her the honorary doctorate of laws in 1968. 

In 1947, the Nigerian Union of Students (led by Ransome-Kuti’s husband) became the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), the party of the first Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe. She became a key member of the NCNC as a result of her close association with its roots and led the women’s wing of the party. Azikiwe selected her as the representative of the women of Nigeria as well as of the Western Region for the NCNC delegation that travelled to London in 1947. She was elected treasurer of the Egba division of the party in 1956.
However, Ransome-Kuti was often in conflict with Azikiwe and the rest of the party leadership because she felt women were not as well-represented as men. She was eventually expelled from the party when she failed to win a federal parliamentary seat in the 1959 elections. After her expulsion, her political voice was diminished due to the direction of national politics, as both of the more powerful members of the opposition, Awolowo and Adegbenro, had support close by.

However, she never truly ended her activism.  Prior to independence, She and Elizabeth Adekogbe provided dynamic leadership for women's rights in the '50s. she founded the Commoners Peoples Party (CPP) in an attempt to challenge the ruling NCNC, ultimately denying them victory in her area: her party earned 4,665 votes to NCNC's 9,755, thus allowing the opposition Action Group (which had 10,443 votes) to win. She was one of the delegates that negotiated Nigeria's independence with the British government.

 

Funmi-Kuti  was radicalized through the actions of the British occupation of Nigeria: its racism, sexism and economic violence. She organized literacy classes for women in the 1920s and founded a nursery school in the 1930s. In 1942, she founded the Abeokuta Ladies' Club (ALC) for educated women involved in charitable work. She also started the Social Welfare for Market Women club to help educate working-class women (the first adult education program for women in Nigeria). Along with Eniola Soyinka (her sister-in-law and the mother of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka), she merged the ALC and the market women’s club to form the Egba or Abeokuta Women's Union, which had a membership of over 20,000 individuals.. The core objective of the organisation was fighting against the arbitrary exercise of colonial power by the British-supported puppet king of Egbaland, the imposition of taxes on women without granting them the right to vote and the attempt by the British to control markets run by women (trading was one of the major occupations of women in Western Nigeria of the time).

She also held a seat in the Western House of Chiefs of Nigeria as an oloye of the Yoruba people.
 Traditionally, Yoruba society was divided into male and female administrative sections. Although men in Nigeria held the position of clan chiefs, women had traditionally held political authority which was shared with men, particularly concentrated in areas of trade. With the coming of formal colonial rule through the Berlin Conference of 1884, the British authorities occupying Nigeria restructured the governance of the society: establishing the position of “Warrant Chiefs” as middle men to act between the traditional authorities and those of the colonizers, elevating the traditional and largely symbolic position of clan chief to a political power broker and created the Sole Native Authority, to which only the men holding local political power were admitted.

In 1918, a colonial tax on palm oil to be paid by all men in Nigeria had caused major uprisings; in 1929 the British extended taxation to women and also goats which were usually the personal possessions of women. As soon as the rumours of such a taxation were confirmed, the women of Nigeria rose up. After an initial incident where a Warrant Chief had attacked a female householder and thousands of local women had encircled his home, singing songs, attacking the house before insisting on his resignation and dragging him to the courthouse to be tried for assault, huge gatherings of women appeared across Nigeria protesting at Warrant Chief’s offices, burning courts and European owned shops demanding an end to the tax.

By the late 1940s, the burden of taxation was becoming unbearable as the colonial authorities squeezed more and more from its protectorates in the aftermath of the Second European War.

In 1949, she led a protest against the native authorities, in particular the Alake of Egbaland, Oba Ademola II. She presented documents alleging abuse of authority by the Alake who had been granted the right to collect the taxes by the British colonial government. Through a series of marches involving tens of thousands of women, a refusal to pay taxes, strikes and a wide spectrum of measures of civilian disobedience. The British colonizers teamed up with their local lackeys to subdue the women. At one protest, the “ORO” stick was brought out – a symbolic artifact of the secretive male cult of the Ogboni – supposedly imbibed with great powers, and the women were instructed to go home before evil spirits overcame them . When the women shrank back in fear, Ransome-Kuti grabbed the stick, waved it around declaring that the women now had the power before taking it with her displaying it prominently in her home. This action gave her a reputation of fearlessness and courage that led 50, 000 women to follow her to the home of Alake of Egbaland (Alake Ademola), the “pseudo-king” of  Western Nigeria and a colonial stooge. As the women protested outside the king’s house, they sang in Yoruba:
“Alake, for a long time you have used your manhood as a mark of authority that you are our husband. Today we shall reverse the order and use our vagina to play the role of husband.”
With this unified action and song they chased him out of the house, condemning him to exile on threat of castration This actions resulted in the king’s abdication. These protests (which caused a sensation across the nation and internationally) are often referred to historically as the 'Egba Women's War' or the 'Nigerian Women's Struggle'.

Ransome-Kuti’s political activism led to her being called the doyen of female rights in Nigeria as well as 'The Mother of Africa'. She also oversaw the successful abolition of separate tax rates for women.
In 1953, the Egba Women’s Union became the Federation of Nigerian Women Societies, which subsequently formed an alliance with the Women's International Democratic Federation (of which Ransome-Kuti was made World Vice-President in the same year).

 

In 1955 the Rev Ransome-Kuti died of cancer.  The next 30 years saw Funmilayo Kuti struggle to build and run a series of schools with and without support from local and national government.  She also became involved with a series of land litigations which cost her and her children dearly and none of which she was able to win.   One of the family properties that became the center of controversy and probably the most infamous sites in Lagos was that which was located at 14 Agege Motor Road.  The property had been occupied by FRK’s musician son, FELA.  FELA’s music and lyrics were highly critical of Nigerian governments.  Fela was a champion of traditional African culture and like his mother a Pan-Africanist.  14 Agege Motor Road had become a commune which Fela called Kalakuta Republic .

During the Cold War and before the independence of her country, Funmilayo Kuti travelled widely owing to her status as the world vice-president of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, angering the Nigerian as well as British and American governments by establishing contacts within the Eastern Bloc during visits to the USSR, Hungary and China (where she met Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People's Republic of China). In 1956, her passport was not renewed as it was feared that she could influence other women with her allegedly communist ideas and policies. She was also refused a US visa by the American government on the same grounds

Ransome-Kuti was the first Nigerian women to drive a car and ride a motorcycle. She was Nigeria's first ever representative at a women's international conference (in the USSR in 1963). She was one of the founders of the Nigeria Union of Teachers and the Nigerian Students Union. The University of Ibadan awarded her an honorary doctorate in law in 1968 and in 1970 she was declared the winner of the Lenin Peace Prize.

•            One of the women elected to the native House of Chiefs, serving as an Oloye of the Yoruba people

•            Ranking member of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons

•            Treasurer and President Western Women Association of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons

•            Leader of Abeokuta Women's Union

•            Leader of Commoners Peoples Party

•            Leader of Nigeria Women's Union

In old age, her activism was overshadowed by that of her three sons who provided effective opposition to various military regimes. In 1978, she was assassinated by the Nigerian Authorities at the Kalakuta Republic – a commune established by her son Fela, after it was raided by over a thousand Nigerian soldiers acting under orders from General Obasanjo. Kalakuta was often raided by the police and armed forces as was his club “the Shrine”. Obasanjo was angered by Fela’s criticism of the military as “zombies” who intimidated ordinary Nigerians while allowing the corruption and exploitation of communities to go unchecked. On February 18th 1977 Kalakuta Republic was surrounded by a thousand armed soldiers (The present president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo was then Supreme Commander of the military dictatorship of the day).  That day, FRK together with Fela’s brother Bekolari, Fela’s many wives and Fela himself.   This raid was a particularly brutal one.  The soldiers armed with bayonets and clubs stormed the compound without any warning and began to beat people, destroy property and strip women naked.

In 1978 she was assassinated by the Nigerian Authorities at the Kalakuta Republic – a commune established by her son Fela, after it was raided by over a thousand Nigerian soldiers acting under orders from General Obasanjo. Kalakuta was often raided by the police and armed forces as was his club “the Shrine”. Obasanjo was angered by Fela’s criticism of the military as “zombies” who intimidated ordinary Nigerians while allowing the corruption and exploitation of communities to go unchecked. On February 18th 1977 Kalakuta Republic was surrounded by a thousand armed soldiers (The present president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo was then Supreme Commander of the military dictatorship of the day).  That day, FRK together with Fela’s brother Bekolari, Fela’s many wives and Fela himself.   This raid was a particularly brutal one.  The soldiers armed with bayonets and clubs stormed the compound without any warning and began to beat people, destroy property and strip women naked.

Her coffin was sent to the Dodan Barracks in Lagos, General Olusegun Obasanjo’s residence together with a newly written song “Coffin for a Head of State”.

She lapsed into a coma in February of that year and died on April 13 in Lagos as a result of injuries sustained during the assault. She was buried in Abeokuta on May 5, 1978.