876: Bigger Than Me

25:47She was so old that she had to be assisted up. The meeting was her first, and she had dragged her feeble body to the assembly as a last hope for the menace now hanging over her head. She tells her story. Her son died and left 13 children behind, so she took over the farm to provide for them. Then tax officers came to her and said, because she has a large farm, she gets a special assessment, asking for far more money than she has ever had. You know, one of the things that the colonial enterprise did was it made assumptions about the way society was organized and structured. It made assumptions about women.

26:28For instance, it went into the marketplace and it started telling women where they could locate their markets. Well, nobody told women where they could locate their markets, not even African men, because there was a really different status between the public status of women and the private status of women. And private women were, I'd say, generally oppressed by indigenous patriarchy. In public, there was like a whole different thing. I mean, I saw a woman, I don't tell this story often, who was telling everybody what to do in the market. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, men too. But I went to her house one time and she was serving her husband on her niece.

27:07And I'm like, this can't be you. This cannot be you. And so the colonial enterprise began interfering with what had been the traditional rights of women, where to decide where a market went, how much to charge for something. And so the women began to get very agitated. All of which is to say that as the meetings went on, the nature of the relationship between Fumalaya Ransom Kuti and these market women began to shift. At first, it was just reading lessons. But then the market woman began to approach her and ask her if she would write letters for them. Letters to the alake, to the British colonial officials.

27:44Wow. So where we are right now used to be her study, familiar study. We took a tour of her house, a small two-story house with a balcony overlooking a busy street. And our tour guide. My name is Akin Labi. I'm the manager at the Kuti Heritage Museum. She showed us her home office, a spare room, tiny rug, chair. These are original furnitures that we had to refublish. Is that an original turntable? Oh yeah, it is. Wow. What would she, she probably listened to hymns, would you guess? Yeah. There was an old wooden desk facing out the window, and it was very easy to imagine her sitting there, typing, just rifling off the hundreds of letters found in her archives.

28:22The Egba women's suffering is becoming unbearable. Egba women have been summoned, worried, harangued, and ill-treated by tax collectors. They said the suit they were given would not be eaten by dogs. They had to spread their blankets out to sleep on. Young girls are sometimes stripped naked in the streets by the men, officially designated collectors, in order to ascertain whether they are mature enough to pay tax or not. A woman was jailed with a nine-day-old baby after she had paid her tax to the tax collector. Back with Judith. So this is a letter to Fumalaya Ransom Kuti from, I guess, an officer.

29:03In one exchange about that jailed woman, an officer replied, My dear Mrs. Kuti, what does it matter if a woman is jailed with a day-old baby? What we want to know is that she pays her tax. Wow. So they were taking these stories to Ransom Kuti. And then Ransom Kuti would try to talk to the alake on their behalf. He would basically say, there's nothing I can do. He'd say, you have to talk to the British. This is their policy. And she was like, we have exhausted all these channels. We go to the colonial officials. They tell us it's the alake. They go to him and he says, it's not me. It's the colonial officials who you have to talk to.

29:47They have had it. They're like, this runaround has to stop. Wole Shanka remembers the moment when the vibe irrevocably shifted. It happened at the grammar school. A tumult overspilled the courtyard. Market women had come from all over. There was no question of my going home that night. I sensed the beginning of an unusual event and was gripped by the excitement. The women's group met till late. I had long fallen asleep on the bench in the dining room and woke up the following morning in the bed in the dormitory of Mrs. Kuti's class. On the following morning at breakfast, I heard for the first time the expression, Abe Okuta Women's Union.

30:27The Abe Okuta Women's Union. Wow, this is a... At this point in the archives, you see a switch flip. No more ladies club, this is a union, and no more Western clothes. From this point forward, she would dress in the same wraps and headscarves as the market women. She started only wearing Nigerian clothing. She never wore Western clothing again. Okay, this is Constitution, Rules and Regulations, Aims and Objectives of the Unions. To establish and maintain unity and cooperation among all women in Egba Land. Egba Land, by the way, is a reference to one of the dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria. To cooperate with all organizations seeking and fighting genuinely and selflessly for the economic and political freedom and independence of the people.

31:14Dang. Number five, to raise and maintain necessary and adequate funds. It's like I read this stuff and I'm like, we got to get our shit together. These people were organized. And, you know, she had a car. So she used to drive to different communities and hold meetings with them. And we know, because Fela told it to his biographer, Carlos Moore, that when she got in a car to go to a meeting, she would often take him with her. So she and her husband owned this school. And so the school had huge grounds. And that's where the rapper wearers would meet. While we were at the school, I kept looking into the field behind where the kids were doing the Bible study.

31:54I mean, it wasn't the same field, but I kept trying to imagine what it would have looked like filled with thousands of women. You know, there were, the estimates are between 10 ,000 and 20 ,000 members. According to Woleshanka, the first protest happened almost spontaneously. They poured out of the grammar school compound, filled the streets, and marched towards the palace of the alake. It was a bust. The authorities quickly shut it down and jailed Fumalayo, saying she didn't have a permit to march. When she was released, she thought, OK, fine, if you're not going to let us have a protest. They said they were going to have a picnic.

32:33So they got 10 ,000 women to go have a picnic, you know, when they were carrying little packets of food. A week before, Fumalaya had held a massive meeting in her courtyard.

33:09around. Everybody I see better be on board. And so she turned her back. And according to everybody, nobody left. Oh, my God. And then as Woloshenka describes it all at once, all 10 ,000 women took off their head wraps. It is always a dramatic moment. Normally, there's a head tie nestling peacefully on the head. The moment there's going to be conflict, off would come the head tie to the waist. They would tie it around their waist like a belt. It's like throwing down the gauntlet. When a woman takes off her head tie, ties it like a sash around her waist, men scatter. Oh my god, you can see her addressing the crowd.

33:51What? Wow, you can see the crowd. After three and a half hours of digging through the archives that Judith Byfield had laid out for me, I found these black and white pictures. There's literally like 10 ,000 people. 10 ,000 heads. In one picture shot from above, you see thousands of heads covered in white scarves, white circles filling every millimeter of the picture. And to the side, on a platform, one woman addresses them. And next to her, maybe a young boy? Probably, I'm just imagining it. I'm getting a little too excited. Oh my God, these pictures. This rally is perhaps the moment right before they march to the Alake's palace, which is when things really go down.

34:38My sense of it is you would see this sea of women approaching the palace. What you would see is you would see men getting out of the way. And they would often tell the British, the British would come to them and say, get these women to stop it. And they would say, we don't tell the Margaret women what to do. We cannot stop it. And there's a wonderful passage in Ake where Shoyinka talks about one of the chiefs running into his mother's shop and hiding there because the women had stripped him off his clothes and just reduced him to his underwear. Speaking of Wole Shoyinka, he snuck ahead of the women to the palace, which we visited.

35:18Picture a gated mansion painted canary yellow. He snaked through the gate under the stone archway and into the spacious square. This must have been the courtyard where they were. It's a big open space with peacocks milling about. As you walk into the courtyard, you see a building in front of you, a yellow building. There's an image of him talking to the alake. The alake is coming down from a balcony. That might have been the balcony. That's probably the balcony. Up high, there was a single balcony with glass doors, the alake's bedroom. He initially stayed inside as the women flooded the courtyard.

35:54So they were probably right here. You just see a sea of white head scars. At first, some of the alake's junior chiefs come outside, try and hold the women back to keep them from entering. They comply, but only in exchange for a conversation with the alake. So the juniors go inside. Then the glass doors on that balcony opened, and the alake stepped out, dressed in his gold robes. When the alake appeared, they cut seed, going down on their knees, but no more. The alake had obviously resolved to receive the emissaries courteously. A protester, one of Mrs. Kuti's lieutenants, stepped forward and called up to the alake.

36:31The message which I bring you today is the message of all women who have left their stalls, their homes and children, their farms and petty affairs to come and visit you today. They are the suffering crowd who are gathered on your front lawn. You can see them yourself, Kabiyeci. They are all the womanhood of Egba. The voice with which I speak is the voice of our bare-rare Mrs. Kuti. The words which you hear from me are the words of Mrs. Kuti. She asked me to tell you on behalf of those women you see outside that the women of Egba have had enough. In hindsight, it was rather like protagonists and the chorus.

37:09Wole Shanka describes the scene almost like it had a kind of mythic choreography. You had the masked women. You had the moment when the white district officer He came in through the gates and was booed roundly. A policeman ordered a district officer to clear his way through the crowd towards Mrs. Kuti. As he moved through, the women threw insults at him from all directions, getting in his face. Mrs. Kuti stayed rooted. Officer, look here, Mrs. Kuti. We are trying to hold a serious meeting here. Would you kindly keep your women in order? Mrs. Kuti, so are we holding a serious meeting, or do you think we're here to play?

37:47Officer, well, tell them to shut up. Shut up your women. Mrs. Kuti apparently squinted her eyes. I think her exact words were, you may have been born, but you were not bred. Those words would fly around Abiyakuti for weeks. That's the one which then became translated that you lack bread in your house. And all kinds of other versions. Anyway, she gave it to him back with interest. and it was at that point that the women began to sing.

38:37This is one of the most interesting parts of the story to me. Oh, look at this. Yeah. All songs sung during the women's union demonstrations from... Oh, hello. This is... What? In the archives that Judith showed me, Fumalaya has documented all of the songs, the protest songs, that the women sang when they occupied the palace.

39:11First of all, there's a lot of these songs. There's 200 different songs they were singing. Every protest movement is defined by its music to some degree, and there are pages and pages of these songs in the archives.

39:35All the songs are in Yoruba, so we hired a language expert to help us translate them, and then a choir in Lagos to sing them. And these songs are wild. Because they would sing insulting songs. And a quick warning, they get kind of graphic. They would say things like...

39:58You know, a white man is not going to get back to his country alive. You've got to cut off de laque's head. De laque's genitals are small. I mean, all kinds of just mean, mean, you know, things to just insult. My favorite, by far. The chorus that we got to sing these songs were gasping when they read the lyrics.

40:36English translation. Translation. But alake has a penis as big as a horse. The alake has a penis as big as a horse. However... His vagina is what will cause the... We will cut it off, basically. The literal translation is, as best as we can tell, we will emit fire from our vaginas that will wound his penis.

41:07This is one of the reasons why the protest movement became known as Vengeance of the Vagina Head.

41:23There is an African tradition called sitting on a man. Sitting on a man means gathering outside of a man's house. and singing insulting, derisive songs and daring him to come out. And men were scared to death of it. Now, no one woman could talk to her husband like that. So, like, if a man beat a woman, she might run to her market women's group, and then they would descend in the hundreds on her house, telling her husband, if he ever beat her again, they were going to have to deal with them. Wow. So they would start singing those songs to the alake. Yeah, they weren't mincing their words. And then they would say, and we're not leaving either.

42:10Coming up after the break, the women make the British experience something they have absolutely no answer for. That's in a minute, Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. Support for This American Life and the following message come from AT &T. AT &T believes that hearing a voice can change everything. Sometimes a familiar voice can bring back a memory, a moment, a feeling of connection. This holiday season, AT &T celebrates the voices that stay with you and the ones that continue to connect, even when they're miles apart. AT &T, connecting changes everything. Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace.

42:50Their AI-enhanced website builder, Blueprint AI, can create a fully custom website in just a few steps, using basic information about your industry, goals, and personality to generate premium quality content and personalized design recommendations. And get paid on time with branded invoices and online payments. Plus, streamline your workflow with built-in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools. Head to squarespace.com slash American for 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums.

43:27What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. It's just American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Bigger Than Me. Stories of people trying to rise to the historic moment that they find themselves in. If you're just tuning in, we're in the middle of an excerpt from Jad Abelmob's new podcast about Fela Kuti. This particular story is about Fela's mother, Funmalaya Ransom Kuti. Jad picks up where he left off. The women are trying to convince the alake to stop taxing them unfairly. The market women camped out in the courtyard of the alake's palace, and then they began round-the-clock shifts.

44:07Woleyshenka remembers that those encampments became like a city. There were moments of absolute stillness. For instance, when they started cooking. Because they laid siege. They were there all night. And they took turns, sometimes go home, look after the children, come back to their position. So there was cooking also. And the activity, especially at night, when they lit their lamps, oil lamps, to stay on the siege.

44:41At some point, you described yourself as a courier. Yes, it's true, I was a courier. Since I was so small, and there were police, lots of police around, and the Alakezon guards. Since I was so tiny, people didn't take much notice of me. And so Mrs. Kuti, in particular. He says she would entrust him with these notes. Little notes to her forces who were scattered in front of the palace. These protests happened on and off as the year went on. I mean, they literally made the town ungovernable. They shut down the market and they stayed camped out just outside the alake's window. The sea of women is in the palace and he can't get out.

45:20After several months of this, he starts to crack. Yes, yes. And is he amassing soldiers to try and drive a wedge through the protesters? So that's a really interesting story. I learned from the memoir of the main colonial official that they did have soldiers on the edge of town. And they were contemplating bringing the soldiers into town. In fact, Elake was trying to beg him to bring the soldiers in. This is not theoretical. Almost 20 years earlier, in a different part of Nigeria, there had been a different revolt, also led by women. Also a struggle around taxation. And in the 29 protests, they did call out the army and women were killed.

46:14Army opened fire on a crowd and killed over 50 women. A few years before that, in 1918, a similar rebellion ended up with 600 people dead. Fela would actually sing a song about this He would adapt a folk song that was used in the protest and set it to music

46:42But that's many years later, let's not get ahead of ourselves At that moment, if anything, Fela is in the encampment with his mom As the tension mounted Because it looked like this protest with the market women was going to end the same way as the others. Because what the alake was saying, essentially, to his British masters was, what you did last time, do it again, please. They were very conscious of that earlier era. And so in 1947 now, they have the army closed, basically on the edge of town. The market women are camped out, well aware of the violence that might be about to go down. But both Judas and Cheryl say that somewhere around this point in the standoff, the women begin to protest in an entirely new way.

47:33A few of them step forward. And they take their clothes off. They actually stripped naked. Apparently, right there in the plaza, some number of women, we don't have accurate details on how many, maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred. They got together and while facing the alake's window all at once, they disrobed. And the idea is that if you see an older woman naked, that that's an abomination. Judith explained that in many West African cultures, and in fact in many other cultures around the world, women disrobing, particularly older women, was thought of as a kind of weapon, a summoning of a spiritual power.

48:18Partly because of their ability to procreate, women are thought to be in touch with the spiritual powers around them and thought to be able to really sort of weaponize that. That when they disrobed, any man who looked on them was now a target.

48:44I find this moment so interesting. You have these women, shoulder to shoulder, putting out a kind of spiritual power, almost like a force field. And then just outside of town, you have an army. It's like two different epistemologies in a way of power. Yes, yes. You have military power, and then you have this no less potent symbolic power. Yeah. And they're lined up against each other. Exactly. And so they have the army closed, basically on the edge of town. And Judah says, if you read the correspondence that was flying back and forth between the Alake and the generals and between the various British officers, they were like, fuck.

49:26What do we do with this? We could march in, kill them all as we've done before. But they're saying, do we want to create martyrs? The British understood on some level that women hold the culture of a place. They are traditionally the child-rearers, the relationship tenders. So if you attack them, if they go in and attack these women, that might unleash an energy that they can't contain. That could then bring young men and the ones you usually fear out into the streets as well. Don't forget the British were outnumbered. They didn't actually have a lot of soldiers on the ground. And so on one hand, the state is a little hamstrung about how you deal with women.

50:17I think in general, it's fair to say that a lot of politics is driven by the fact that men are afraid of women. In this case, the British definitely were. We lived in a constant strain, for we never knew when the pot would boil over. That is how John Blair, the main colonial officer stationed in Abiyokuta, put it in his diary. When the tension was at its worst, I got quite ill, and the doctor sent me to hospital in Lagos. I was sure I was suffering from nervous exhaustion. On July 29, 1948, in the dead of night, as protesters were camped all around the palace, The British sent a car to the palace to take the alake, his wives and his family, away.

50:58They snuck him out of town. He didn't want to leave. They snuck him past all the people? Yeah. They put him in a car. So one of the colonial officials I interviewed had been involved with getting him out of town. And he said they put him in the car and had him lie down on the back seat. so they were sneaking him out without the women being aware that he was leaving town. Wow. He went into exile.

51:34Okay, so this is a speech that the alake made a few months after they took him away. After more than a half century of service to my country, 28 of which I have given in the capacity of native authority. I cannot bear any longer the sight of turmoil, strife, and discontent. I have therefore decided, after mature consideration, and in order to avoid bloodshed, to leave the environment of my territory in the hope that, after a time, frayed tempers will subside and an atmosphere of calm will prevail. Wow. Quite a speech. In other words, he abdicated the throne. That was huge.

52:21No other woman is ever credited with unseating a sitting king. Drumming began in the Olubumi houses at 5 p.m. on August 21st, 1948, followed by firing of guns by hunters and dance by all at Alake Square. 50 different forms of African dances were in attendance. They were dancing at the dawn of a new day. They talked about Abiyakuta being liberated, and they have this Thanksgiving ceremony. There's this minister who speaks on behalf of the women. He said it took the women to do what the men couldn't do for 28 years.

53:05And in the archives, what you see from this point forward are hundreds of letters from other women. She had letters in her paper from women all over the continent. Saying, Mother, you have so inspired us. 1948. Dear Ms. Kuti, I am penning you this day under the respect I owe to women. Women from unions all over start to reach out. We, the Alawa Oribe Women's Union, send this letter to ask for your assistance. Copycat women's unions start to appear everywhere. South Africa, the anti-apartheid movement, Ghana. Arab Women's Society, Union of Albanian Women, Union of Australian Women, Union of Korean Women.

53:42So you can look everywhere. Democratic League of Finnish Women, Democrat Union of German Women, Federation of Cuban Women, League for Lebanese Women Rights, whoo! Union of Luxembourg Women. And I'm only at the M's. And you see women everywhere.

53:58We in the West tend to emphasize the legacies of Africa's male leaders, the Kwame Nkrumahs, the Nelson Mandelas. But if you look across the continent from this point forward, you see women leading revolts in Senegal, Cameroon, South Africa, Gold Coast, Algeria, Kenya, Mozambique, Ivory Coast, Togo, Mali, Somalia, Egypt. It's a story we've largely missed. And the erasure of it all kind of landed on us when we went off in search of Fumalaya Ransom Kuti's grave. Aki, our tour guide from earlier, pointed us toward the Anglican church that was 300 feet from the house. Yes, hi. We were told that Fumalaya Ransom Kuti is buried in this church, or we're not sure which church.

54:43We went there, asked around. A guy walked us to the back side of the church.

54:55This is? Yeah, this one. Father's mother is there. Father's mother is there. Here we are. There was a grave set in concrete. Mrs. Kuti is buried with her husband There's a headstone and then above the headstone is a bust of Reverend Kuti And there on the tombstone is his bust and on the epitaph Reverend Israel Odon Ransom Kuti All the details of his life President Nigerian Union of Teachers Association 1930 to 1954 He was a very impressive man Did a lot to revolutionize the educational system in Nigeria But his wife, who is buried with him and who led a revolt to depose the king. She's hardly mentioned.

55:38That's crazy they didn't say anything about her. Barely a word. All there is is this one line that says, R.I.P., my love, Fumalaya. Are you surprised? A little bit. I was expecting her to have a thing. Me too. Yeah, that says a lot. Even people who do remember her, says Judith, tend to think of her as a footnote in Fela's story rather than the hero of her own. So I appreciate that you're doing this, though, because that's the thing that drove me crazy. She became reduced to Fela's mother. And so even when I would give talks in Nigeria, people would be surprised at all the stuff that I bring out because her activism has just really been forgotten.

56:31Felakuti himself would eventually take up positions about the role of women in society that were very controversial and in many ways flew in the face of what his mother was fighting for. And yet he did honor her. He referred to her as the mother of Nigeria. And in 1978, when she died, after the government raided his compound and literally threw her out of a window, he records a song called Unknown Soldier where he sings about the incident and you can hear his voice break.

57:27Thank you.

57:34So he never forgot what she'd accomplished. And neither did those market women who marched with her. So, let me tell you. My grandmother. This is Yeni Kuti, Fela's oldest daughter, Fumalai Ransom Kuti's granddaughter. My grandmother, when we were burying her, we went in a convoy to Abekuta. Abekuta is her town. when we got to the border of Abekwita, there was this mammoth crowd of women. Mammoth crowd of women. We had to stop. They took her body from us and they walked with her and they honored her as the voice of the women. It was a people's funeral.

58:27It was a people's funeral.

58:55That my mama will you give She's the only mother of this country That my mama will you give She's the only mother of Nigeria Well, today's program was produced by Valerie Kutness and Emmanuel Jochi. The people who helped put the show together today include Michael Comete, Susan Gabber, Sophie Gill, Cassie Halley, Seth Lindstone, Nelson, Catherine Raimondo, Nadia Raymond, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Sotala, and Marisa Robertson-Texter. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Jad's collaborators in making his famous series were Ian Wheeler, Ango fan Mutu Puele, Ruby Heron Walsh, Fefeo Dudu, and Oluwakimi Ula Dosowi.

59:43The series was edited by Ben Adair. Special thanks as well to VTech, Hunmi Arewa, Debbie Ohiri, who put together the choir singing protest songs throughout this episode. Adiran K helped translate those songs. The episode was fact-checked by Robin Reed and Jamila Wilkinson. Just a quick reminder that if you like our show and you want us to, you know, keep making it, please become a This American Life partner. You'll get bonus episodes, you'll get ad-free listening, you'll get other perks, but most important, you will join the people who now collectively contribute a fourth of our total budget for our show with their subscriptions, which is amazing.

1:00:16And when you sign up, you get all kinds of stuff. Bonus episodes, ad-free listening, an archive of greatest hits right in your podcast feed. To join thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia. All his exes live in. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

1:01:06This message comes from Total Wine and More. The holidays are here, filled with gatherings, toasts, and cheer. Make every moment shine with Total Wine & More, where you can find rich whiskeys, smooth tequilas, and festive liqueurs, perfect for sipping or gifting. And for wine lovers, explore everything from velvety pinots to elegant champagnes, ready to pour or share at Total Wine & More. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21. This message comes from Sony Pictures Classic. From Sony Pictures Classics and Fathom Entertainment, Merrily We Roll Along. Three best friends through two decades of time.

1:01:47Directed by Maria Friedman, starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez. By legendary composer Stephen Sondheim and winner of four Tony Awards. Merrily We Roll Along, playing only in theaters starting December 5th.