Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti

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. The granddaughter of a returned formerly-enslaved Sierra Leonean, she was the first girl admitted to Abeokuta Grammar School, the first Nigerian woman to drive a motor car, and the founder, in 1942, of the Abeokuta Ladies' Club — which became, within four years, the Abeokuta Women's Union: a movement of twenty thousand market women who taxed themselves to build schools and clinics and refused to be taxed by a colonial state that gave them nothing.

Her organizational genius transformed Nigerian politics. In 1949 her movement forced the abdication of the Alake of Abeokuta — the traditional ruler who had collected punitive taxes from market women on behalf of the British — and brought the colonial authorities to a standstill. She founded the Nigerian Women's Union, served as one of only four Nigerian delegates to the Pan-African Congress in 1947, and travelled across the world from London to Vienna to Beijing as the political voice of African women.

Her son Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, whose Afrobeat music shaped a generation of African political consciousness, drew his radical politics from her. On the eighteenth of February 1977, soldiers of the Nigerian military regime stormed Fela's compound, beat his mother, and threw her from a second-floor window. She died of her injuries on the thirteenth of April 1978, age seventy-seven, having outlived three husbands, fought four colonial governors, and laid the foundation of African feminism.

She is honored here as the founding mother of the African women's movement, the chief at whose word men of state would rise.