ENCORE
We had earlier taken a break late last year on the above topic, to discuss other salient urgent national issues. On this note, we shall continue and conclude our discourse on Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Thereafter, we shall reflect on another great icon, Chief (Mrs.) Margaret Ekpo.
Funmlayo Ransome-Kuti
Activism and Women Rights (Continues)
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. The Aba Women’s Rebellion eventually ended in bloodshed after two months on December 17, 1929, as 32 women were killed when the British military fired into a crowd of protesting women.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the lioness of Lisabi in spectacles
Although some compromises were made to the governance structure and methods of collection, the tax on women remained in place. 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. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, then the headteacher of a local school, who had previously set up several organisations bringing together middle-class women, had heard of the struggles of marketwomen and the fightback that they had started and established the Abeokuta Women’s Union – an explicitly political organisation uniting the working class marketwomen with middle-class women. This was designed to challenge both colonial rule and the patriarchal structure. Two hundred thousand women joined.
From the initial demands of an end to the taxation regime, the confidence and demands of the AWU grew with proposals to replace the flat rate tax on women with taxation on expatriate companies, investment in local initiatives and infrastructure including transportation, sanitation and education and the abolition of the Sole Native Authority and its replacement with a representative form of government, including women.
Mrs. Ransome-Kuti addressing a gathering
The Abeokuta Women’s Union was a well organised and disciplined organisation. Mass refusal to pay the tax combined with enormous protests, were organised under the guise of “picnics” or “festivals.” The response from the authorities was brutal as tear gas was deployed and beatings were administered. Ransome-Kuti ran training sessions on how to deal with this threat, teaching women how to protect themselves from the effects of tear gas and how long they had to throw the canisters back at the authorities.
Madam Ransome-Kuti’s 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 lifelong 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. Ransome-Kuti pulls crowds
Ransome-Kuti embraced her Yoruba heritage and worked to give pride back to the colonised, 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 1940s, 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 oversaw the successful abolishing of separate tax rates for women. In 1953, she founded the Federation of Nigerian Women Societies, which subsequently formed an alliance with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, an organisation and movements through which Kuti campaigned for women’s rights to education, employment and political participation.
FRK campaigned vigoriously for women’s votes. She was for many years a member of the ruling National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons party (NCNC), but was later expelled when she was not elected to a federal parliamentary seat. At the NCNC, she was the treasurer and, subsequent, president of the Western NCNC women’s association. After her suspension, her political voice was diminished due to the direction of national politics. However, she never truly ended her activism. Elizabeth Adekogbe and FRK, provided dynamic leadership for women’s rights in the 1950s.
1955 to 1985, saw FRK 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 centre 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.
Frk’s giant strides and achievements
During the Cold War and before the independence of her country, FRK travelled widely and angered the Nigerian as well as British and American governments by her contacts with the Eastern Bloc. This included her travel to the former USSR, Hungary and China, where she met Mao Zedong. In 1956, her passport was not renewed by the government because it was said that “it can be assumed that it is her intention to influence … women with communist ideas and policies.” She was also refused a U.S. visa because the American government alleged that she was a communist.
Prior to independence, she founded the Commoners Peoples Party (CPP), in an attempt to challenge the ruling NCNC, ultimately denying them victory in her area. She got 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.
FRK was the first Nigerian woman 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. In fact, she was one of the few women elected to the House of Chiefs. She founded the Egba or Abeokuta Women’s Union along with Eniola Soyinka (her sister-in-law and the mother of the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka). This organisation is said to have once had a membership of 20,000 women. Among other things, FRK organised workshops for illiterate marketwomen. She continued to campaign against taxes and price controls. She was the leader of the Commoners Peoples Party.
She had four sons, one dying shortly after birth, all three who survived carried on her legacy of political activism. Olikoye, became an AIDS activist speaking out for Africans abandoned to the ravages of the disease; Fela, became a musician writing songs inspiring a generation; and Beko helped to form one of the first Nigerian human rights organisations, the Campaign for Democracy.
The demise of an icon
In old age, her activism was overshadowed by that of her three sons who provided effective opposition to various military regimes. In 1978, it was reported that 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. She was an anti-colonialist, womanist and revolutionary to the end.
Chief (Mrs.) Margaret Ekpo
Margaret Ekpo (1914-2006) was a Nigerian women’s rights activist and social mobilizer, who was a pioneering female politician in the country’s First Republic and a leading member of a class of traditional Nigerian women activists. She played major roles as a grassroot and nationalist politician in the eastern Nigerian city of Aba, in the era of an hierarchical and male-dominated movement towards independence, with her rise not the least helped by the socialisation of women’s role into that of helpmates or appendages to the careers of males.
Early life and education
Margaret Ekpo was born in Creek Town, Cross River State, to the family of Okoroafor Obiasulor and Inyang Eyo Aniemewue. She reached standard six of the school leaving certificate in 1934. However, tragedy struck at home with the death of her father in 1934, her goals of further education in teacher training was as a result put on hold following her father’s death. She subsequently settled for a ‘pupil-teaching job,’ teaching at various elementary schools until she got married, in 1938, to a Yaba High School-trained medical practitioner, Dr. John Udo Ekpo. He was from the Ibibio ethnic group who are predominant in Akwa Ibom State, while she was of Igbo and Efik heritage. She later moved with her husband to Aba.
Ekpo’s determination to advance her education motivated her to obtain a diploma in Domestic Economics in 1948 at the Rathmine School of Domestic Economics in Dublin, Ireland, during the period her husband was taken there for medical attention. When the couple returned to the country, Ekpo established a Domestic Science Institute, where she trained young girls in dress-making and home economics.
Margaret Ekpo’s arrival on the national scene
Margaret Ekpo’s first direct participation in political ideas and association was in 1945. Her husband was indignant with the colonial administrator’s treatment of indigenous Nigerian doctors but, as a civil servant, he could not attend meetings to discuss the matter. Margaret Ekpo then attended meetings in place of her husband, the meetings were organised to discuss the discriminatory practices of the colonial administration in the city and to fight cultural and racial imbalance in administrative promotions. She later attended a political rally and was the only woman at the rally, which saw fiery speeches from Mbonu Ojike, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Herbert Macaulay. (To be continued).
Thought for the week
“We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to non-violence and racial and economic justice, who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.” (Marian Wright Edelman).