CHAMPION OF THE PEOPLE, A FAMOUS NIGERIAN WOMAN.

Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome Kuti was a famous Nigerian teacher and political campaigner who fought for equal rights for Nigerian women. This brave woman was born in Abeokuta in Ogun State in 1900. (In those colonial days the area was known as Egbaland).
She attended African Church Primary School and later Abeokuta Grammar School before she left for the United Kingdom in 1920 to study.

When she returned to Abeokuta in 1923 she became a headteacher of the the girls branch of Abeokuta Grammar School,

where her husband, an Anglican priest, was headmaster. This was quite a famous school which educated and trained Nigerian men and women as future leaders.

However, at this time women played little part in politics. The colonial government allowed the traditional ruler, the Alake, to rule the area, and didn't care that women had no voice in local affairs.
One of the first things Funmilayo Ransome Kuti did was to start a ladies club, whose members - all educated women - learned such things as handicrafts and good manners. But then she learned three things that changed her life.

Firstly, a market woman came to her and said, "Please teach me to read". It was then she realised that most of the market women were illiterate.
Secondly, she discovered that these women were suffering under an unfair taxation system run by the Alake. Taxation began at age fifteen, married women were also taxed, and there were taxes on what women sold in the market.
The third thing she realised was the most important: women had no idea how to escape this oppression. This allowed tax collectors to invade their homes, beat them and even imprison them if they could not pay.

"We educated women are living outside the life of the people," Funmilayo Ransome Kuti declared. From that day she never again wore western clothes in public, always appearing in the traditional Yoruba wrapper. She enrolled large number of the market women in her ladies Group - now the Abeokuta women's Union - is and taught them how to read and write.

At the same time she began a long fight to abolish the hated taxes. The method she used with great success was to organise her 20,000 Abeokuta Women Union (AWU) members in mass demonstrations. For month after month the women never gave the authorities a moment of peace, and after a long, hard struggle they won the battle. Funmilayo Ransome Kuti had taught these courageous women to believe in themselves, and this self-confidence was their most powerful weapon.

After independence, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti continued her fight for democracy, and died for her beliefs. In February 1977 she was in a family home in Lagos with her sons Fela and Beko and their children when hundreds of soldiers raided the house. They beat up her sons, threw the 77 year old woman out of the window, and then burned down the house.
Funmilayo Ransome Kuti never fully recovered from a leg injury and died the following year.