She was thrown off the balcony of Kalakuta. Her frail seventy-seven years old body hit the ground with a force that would ripple through history. The year was 1977, and the Nigerian military had invaded Kalakuta, the communal compound owned by her son, Fela Kuti. They were looking to silence dissent. But in that act of violence, they only amplified the story of a woman who had spent her entire life resisting oppression. Her name was Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti.
Long before that devastating day, Funmilayo had made history. She was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta and was a pioneer in every way. She was Abeokuta Grammar School’s first female student, one of the first Nigerian women to study in the United Kingdom, and later the first woman in Nigeria to drive a car. However, these firsts were not about novelty.
In the 1940s, the colonial authorities imposed taxes that disproportionately harmed women, particularly Egba’s market women. The colonialists, with the support of the local monarchs, sought levies from women who were already economically marginalised. Funmilayo, having watched these women’s everyday struggles, established the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU). Under her leadership, the AWU grew to over 20,000 members, including mothers, traders, farmers, and widows.
Their protests were strategic and symbolic. They boycotted marketplaces, occupied government buildings, and held sit-ins. They chanted resistance songs and used the traditional Yoruba form of protest known as èfè, in which old women bared their breasts. This was a sacred act that culturally undermined male power. The AWU sought the resignation of the Alake of Egbaland, accusing him of conspiring with colonialists.
They achieved a victory that continues to astound historians. The Alake abdicated the throne in 1949.
But Funmilayo’s feminism was more than just local; it was Pan-African. She was speaking with revolutionaries across the continent and beyond. She travelled to China and the USSR. She co-founded the Nigerian Women’s Union, pushed for women’s voting rights, and ran for elected office herself. Her feminism was based on African women’s actual reality, rather than elite circles. She did not feel that women’s rights were different from the struggle for independence, dignity, and social equality. To her, they were the same.
And yet, for years, her name was often mentioned in footnotes—if at all—usually as “Fela’s mother.” That erasure is gradually being undone.
In 2023, Nigerian filmmaker Bolanle Austen-Peters released the biopic Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The film pays a long-overdue cinematic homage to the girl boss who battled colonialism, patriarchy, and economic injustice with equal zeal. It is a portrayal of a woman who was not afraid to speak, march, organise, and, when necessary, confront those in power with her voice and presence.
The film reintroduces her to a generation that might know Fela but not the matriarch who raised him on a foundation of rebellion and justice. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti’s feminism was based on resistance, solidarity, and communal action. Her narrative reminds us that African women have always been at the forefront of societal change, not waiting to be invited to the table, but rather creating it themselves.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was more than just a witness to Nigerian history. She shaped it. And even though she was flung from that balcony, her legacy remains intact.
