Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti
1900 — 1978 · Nigerian educator and chief of the women's movement; mother of African feminism
Frances Abigail Olufunmilayo Thomas was born in Abeokuta, in what was then the British Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, on the twenty-fifth of October 1900. She was the great-granddaughter of Sarah Taiwo, a woman of the Saro community who had been captured by slave traders in the early nineteenth century before returning home to Abeokuta. Raised in a Christian, mission-educated household, Funmilayo became one of the first girls to enter Abeokuta Grammar School, and from 1919 to 1922 she studied at Wincham Hall School for Girls in Cheshire, England.
On her return she shed her English names and embraced Funmilayo — "God has given me joy" — and turned to teaching, opening some of Nigeria's first preschool classes and literacy programs for market women. In this work she came to understand how deeply ordinary women bore the weight of colonial rule, and she resolved to give their grievances a voice that could not be ignored.
In the 1940s she founded the Abeokuta Women's Union, mobilizing thousands against unjust taxation and demanding representation for women. Known as the Lioness of Lisabi, she led marches of up to ten thousand women that in 1949 forced the Alake to abdicate. She went on to build the Nigerian Women's Union and the Federation of Nigerian Women's Societies, championing women's suffrage and independence, and earned the Lenin Peace Prize and membership in the Order of the Niger.
She was the mother of Fela, Olikoye, and Beko Ransome-Kuti. Gravely injured when soldiers stormed her son Fela's compound, she died in Lagos on the thirteenth of April 1978. May the Lioness of Lisabi be honored forever, and may the joy her name carried outlive every wall they thought could hold her.
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