4: Vengeance of the Vagina Head

Summary

Fela Kuti: Fear No Man

Episode 4: Vengeance of the Vagina Head

Release Date: October 22, 2025
Host: Jad Abumrad
Notable Guests: Wole Soyinka, Cheryl Johnson Odom, Judith Byfield, Akila Bishokumbi, Mrs. Ode Dieron

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Overview

This episode delves into the roots of Fela Kuti’s political awakening by probing the life and activism of his mother, Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti. Rather than centering on Fela himself, the narrative focuses on a pivotal but underappreciated chapter in Nigerian—and indeed African—political history: how a movement of market women, led by Fumilayo, confronted British colonial power, toppled a king, and inspired a new template for collective action. Through archival discoveries, family recollections, and rich storytelling, this episode explores the multi-generational transmission of resistance and the immense symbolic power women wielded in Nigeria’s colonial past.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Mystery of Fela’s Political Roots

• The challenge: Fela Kuti left little personal explanation for his fearless belief in music’s power as political tool, posing a challenge for biographers and historians.
• The Insight: Understanding Fela’s motivations requires understanding his mother—her philosophy, activism, and worldview.
  • Jad Abumrad [00:39]: “Where did Fela get his belief from that insane, beautiful idea that music of all things could topple a regime?... Well, perhaps it turned on for him when he was 9, standing in a crowd, holding his mother's hand as she was about to do the impossible.”

Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti: The Archival Discovery

• Cheryl Johnson Odom’s Journey: In 1975, researcher Cheryl Johnson Odom visits Nigeria to study women in the anti-colonial struggle and discovers troves of Fumilayo’s letters, documents, and protest songs in the family’s home—which become the documentary spine of this episode.
  • Cheryl Johnson Odom [05:45]: “…Oh my God, there were letters from Nkrumah… protest, women as far as the eye can see… I have struck the gold mine here.”

The Early Days: Elites, Education, and Social Clubs

• The Ransome-Kuti family’s role as educators and community leaders in colonial Abeokuta.
• British colonialism’s creation of a Nigerian elite, and Fumilayo’s early involvement in “proper society”—culminating in the Abeokuta Ladies Club, which started as a social group for Christian women and metamorphosed into a revolutionary body.
  • Judith Byfield [13:21]: “The first organization that she creates is… an organization to teach Christian girls how to be good wives.”
  • Early activities included cookery classes, dances, and recruitment of club members.

The Spark: Literacy, Market Women, and Political Awakening

• The transformation of the Ladies Club arising from Fumilayo’s realization that market women were illiterate and unable to advocate for themselves.
• Creation of literacy classes—market women coming for lessons, then sharing harrowing stories of tax brutality.
  • Cheryl Johnson Odom [14:35]: “She said she was in church one time… there was a market woman friend of hers who was singing, but holding the hymnal upside down… she realized she couldn't read.”

The Tax Revolt: Colonial Oppression and Female Resistance

• British colonial officers, via a local king known as the Alake, begin imposing and enforcing punishing taxes on market women during World War II to fund the war effort.
• Women are fined, jailed, and publicly humiliated; colonial rule uses local intermediaries to conceal British responsibility.
  • Judith Byfield [17:47]: “The Alake, which is the king of this town.”
  • Cheryl Johnson Odom [18:14]: “Basically, the Alake is being told what to do by the British… The decision making is the British, even if it comes out of the Alake's mouth.”
• Fumilayo pivots from teaching to activism, writing letters of protest for the women.

The Formation of the Abeokuta Women’s Union

• The pivotal moment: The Ladies Club is reborn as the Abeokuta Women’s Union, open to all women regardless of class. Fumilayo abandons Victorian dress for traditional wraps.
  • Judith Byfield [27:50]: “The Abeokuta Women's Union.”
  • Cheryl Johnson Odom [28:09]: “She started only wearing Nigerian clothing. She never wore Western clothing again.”
• A mass movement of up to 20,000 women emerges, united across social lines.

Direct Action: Protest, Symbolism, and Psychological Tactics

• Tactics escalate from letter-writing to mass gatherings, strategic “picnics,” and the use of powerful symbolism:
  • The act of removing head ties (“wrappers”) and tying them around waists as a signal of defiance.
    • Wole Soyinka [31:09]: “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.”
  • The ancient practice of “sitting on a man”—singing derisive, openly sexual songs as acts of protest and shaming.
    • Cheryl Johnson Odom [38:45]: “There is an African tradition called sitting on a man… men were scared to death of it… if a man beat a woman… they would descend in the hundreds on her house, telling her husband if he ever beat her again, they were going to deal with them.”
  • Use of protest songs with biting sexual insults directed at authorities, especially the Alake:
    • Mrs. Ode Dieron [37:58]: “[The song says] the Alake has a penis as big as a horse. However… we will emit fire from our vaginas that will wound his penis… You can't translate them literally like exactly how it is.”
  • Some women strip naked—an act of spiritual and social defiance believed to curse the target with death.
    • Judith Byfield [44:10]: “The idea is that if you see an older woman naked, that that's an abomination. And the person who is the target of this will die.”

The British Dilemma and The Fall of the Alake

• Protests escalate, the city is paralyzed, and the British are caught in a political bind: they fear creating martyrs if they crush the protest.
  • John Blair [47:17]: “We lived in a constant strain, for we never knew when the pot would boil over.”
• Eventually, the British secretly spirit the Alake and his family out of town—he abdicates “to avoid bloodshed.”
  • Alake’s Letter [48:41]: “I cannot bear any longer the sight of turmoil, strife and discontent. I have therefore decided… to leave… in the hope that… an atmosphere of calm will prevail.”
• This unprecedented victory is celebrated as a liberation and a template for future activism across Africa and the world.

The Aftermath and Legacy

• Letters flood in from women’s unions across Africa and beyond, hailing the movement as inspiration.
  • Cheryl Johnson Odom [50:03]: “She had letters in her paper from women all over the continent saying, mother, you have so inspired us.”
• The revolt’s success, by toppling a king, exposes cracks in the colonial system and helps lay the groundwork for later independence movements.
• Fumilayo’s activism is largely forgotten, overshadowed by her son Fela’s fame—but her legacy endures in new, global movements for women’s rights and political change.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Wole Soyinka [00:11/31:09]: “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.”
• Jad Abumrad [05:58]: “There were dozens of boxes in that basement. And inside those boxes was a story that was way bigger than she imagined.”
• Cheryl Johnson Odom [28:09]: “She started only wearing Nigerian clothing. She never wore Western clothing again.”
• Judith Byfield [27:50]: “The Abeokuta Women's Union.”
• Cheryl Johnson Odom [38:45]: “There is an African tradition called sitting on a man… men were scared to death of it.”
• Judith Byfield [44:10]: “The idea is that if you see an older woman naked, that that's an abomination. And the person who is the target of this will die.”
• Alake’s Resignation [48:41]: “I cannot bear any longer the sight of turmoil, strife and discontent. I have therefore decided… to leave… in the hope that… an atmosphere of calm will prevail.”
• Cheryl Johnson Odom [50:03]: “She had letters in her paper from women all over the continent saying, mother, you have so inspired us.”
• Judith Byfield [51:46]: “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.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:39] — Introduction to Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti, Fela’s mother, and her political roots
• [05:45] — Cheryl’s archival discovery: “I have struck the gold mine here”
• [13:21] — Shift from social club to activism
• [17:47] — Colonial indirect rule explained
• [22:04] — Taxation crisis and market women’s grievances
• [27:50] — Birth of the Abeokuta Women’s Union
• [30:36-31:09] — Protest: removing wrappers/head-ties as signal for action
• [38:45] — “Sitting on a man”: protest songs and shaming
• [43:50-44:10] — Women strip naked as spiritual act of resistance
• [47:17] — Colonial officer on “constant strain”
• [48:41] — Alake abdicates the throne after women’s victory
• [50:03] — Letters of inspiration flood in from around the globe
• [51:02] — Legacy of the movement and impact on broader political change

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Flow & Tone

The episode blends oral history, personal recollection, archival research, and music to draw a vivid picture of female collective action against colonial and patriarchal systems. The mood moves effortlessly from reverent admiration to lively humor (especially in describing protest songs and tactics) to a sense of awe at the scale and audacity of the movement. The speakers’ voices—whether incredulous, inspired, or simply matter-of-fact—underscore the radical power and urgency of the events recounted.

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Conclusion

“Vengeance of the Vagina Head” frames Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti as a foundational influence on Fela Kuti and as a monumental figure in African political history in her own right. By centering the women's tax revolt in Abeokuta, the episode powerfully illustrates how creative forms of protest, solidarity, and symbolic resistance can reshape power structures—and how vital women’s leadership has been, and continues to be, in struggles for freedom and justice.

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End of summary.

Transcript

[Wole Soyinka]

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. Brothers and sisters, the secret of life.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is to have no fear.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

We all have to understand that.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Fela Kuti. Fear no man. I'm jad Abumrad. Chapter 4 Vengeance of the Vagina Head One of the principal challenges in trying to do a series about Fela is that he didn't leave a lot of tape behind where he explains himself. So it can be difficult to get into in his head and figure out what he was thinking at any given moment. But you know how often a person doesn't make a lot of sense until you meet their mother. And then you're like, oh, okay, okay. All the things that seemed random and inexplicable suddenly have a context. This story clarified for me. Where did Fela get his belief from that insane, beautiful idea that music of all things could topple a regime? Well, perhaps it turned on for him when he was 9, standing in a crowd, holding his mother's hand as she was about to do the impossible. So that origin story that we told you in chapter two is incomplete, maybe very incomplete. Or at the very least, it's like focusing on the crest of a wave as it's peaking and ignoring the movement of the ocean underneath. This story. Honestly, I love this story. And we would not know anything about it were it not for a woman named Cheryl Johnson Odom.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Well, I had gone to Nigeria to do the research for my dissertation.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is 1975 and I was doing.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

It on women in the anti colonial struggle. I had been warned before I went that, oh, you're probably not going to find anything. And so I was even worried about getting support to go because I'd been so warned by all my male professors that there was so little.

[Jad Abumrad]

But she had heard stories about revolts, towns rising up, and she'd been told, you definitely need to talk to a woman named Fumalaya Ransome Kuti. This is of course Fela's mother. Now this was 1975 when she was there. Fela was already a big star. Sheryl was like, okay, let me go talk to his mother. Sheryl was based in Lagos at that point. It turns out his mother lived 60 miles north.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

So I had to try to figure a way to get there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Luckily, she met a woman who was driving in that direction.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

She said, I'll drop you off at Mrs. Kuti's Abia Kuta home. Everybody knew where she lived by the way.

[Jad Abumrad]

No appointment. Just like, I'll, I'll take you there.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Appointment. How would I do that with no.

[Jad Abumrad]

Cell phone, no landline, you know, 1975.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

You know, the first computer I used was bigger than this room I'm sitting in. Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

And anyhow, Cheryl ends up in front of Fumalaya's home at 7:30 in the morning.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

I went and knocked on the door. Her daughter Dalupo answered it.

[Jad Abumrad]

This would be Fela's sister. Fela had one older brother, one younger brother and one older sister.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

And I said, you know, hello, my name is blah blah. I really hope I could interview your mom. You know, I'm doing this book. And she said, well, okay, come in.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

This building precisely houses the first generation of the Ransom Coutis.

[Jad Abumrad]

During our month in Lagos, we ended up taking a day trip to Abeokuta to visit the same house that Cheryl visited. And we took a tour.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Okay. It was built in the 1930s.

[Jad Abumrad]

First tell us who you are, just so we can have your name.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Okay. My name is Akila Bishokumbi. I'm the manager at the Kuti Heritage Museum.

[Jad Abumrad]

The house is small, two stories with a balcony overlooking a busy street.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

But basically the ground floor was used to receive guests.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

And so she let me in. She gave me a cup of tea. And then within a few minutes, her mom came into the room.

[Jad Abumrad]

Describe her. What was she like?

[Wole Soyinka]

Very wary. Tough lady.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Nobel Prize winning writer Wole Schoenka. He's actually Fala's cousin. They grew up together. He spent a lot of time around Fumalaya Ransome Kuti and has written about her extensively.

[Wole Soyinka]

Fela on stage sometimes reminded me of her.

[Jad Abumrad]

In what way?

[Wole Soyinka]

Very agile.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Very agile, Very strong personality. I mean, you know how some people have vibes. She had a vibe that when you walk in the room, you didn't. She didn't mess around. She was already in her 70s when I met her, but she didn't seem like it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Cheryl says that first meeting was a little tentative. They sipped some tea. She made her pitch. Can I interview you? Yeah, maybe come back tomorrow, but.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

So I went back the next day and she took me down the basement. Now, it was a scary place because it was dark. There were those little. I don't know what you call those little bugs that eat papers. Now they're all over the place. And you'd move with paper, one of these things would jump out. But oh my God, there were letters from Nkrumah.

[Narrator/Reader]

From now on, there is a new.

[Wole Soyinka]

African in the world.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

I mean, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president, Ghana. You know, there was stuff from colonial.

[Jad Abumrad]

Troops, from every part of the empire.

[Judith Byfield]

World War II, pictures, pictures of violence.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Protest, women as far as the eye can see.

[Judith Byfield]

Letters, letters, letters, songs.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Derisive songs, a power struggle. I mean, I was blown away. And I thought, this, this is the gold mine. I mean, I have struck the gold mine here.

[Jad Abumrad]

There were dozens of boxes in that basement. And inside those boxes was a story that was way bigger than she imagined.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

And that's where said, we have to do something about these papers. They just cannot, you know, they were deteriorating.

[Jad Abumrad]

Cheryl convinced Fumalaya, Vela's mother, to put the papers in an archive, which she did, which then led to a cascade of events that brings us to this story right here that we're telling, because I was able to read those papers 50 years later.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Hello.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi, how are you? On the other side of the world. All right, here we are. We are in Ithaca, New York, in a guest room of Judith Byfield's.

[Judith Byfield]

I spent so much time with those files.

[Jad Abumrad]

Judith Byfield, like Cheryl, is a historian who has spent her life looking at these papers. She has hundreds of photocopies which she spread out on a bed for me. Difficult to. In her guest room. Oh, interesting. This is the grammar school.

[Judith Byfield]

She's one of the few women who left us such a volume of stuff. And she's actively speaking for the other women who don't leave these resources for us.

[Jad Abumrad]

Let me back up or at least provide some context. First thing is, for historical reasons, Fella is not going to be terribly present in this story. He was 8, 9 at the time. So imagine him in the mix, tugging on his mother's skirt there at meetings. The setting, the whole story is going to take place in a town in Nigeria called Abeokuta, which we visited maybe two hours north in Lagos. Very different vibe. Abeokuta was seen by the British as one of their crown jewels, proof that the British colonial project was working. And the word Abeokuta roughly translates in the Yoruba to refuge among the rocks. Because what you see when you go there is a massive granite boulder at the center of town. It's very beautiful. This is a newspaper article about Abeokuta. The sun still pours down.

[Judith Byfield]

The sun pours down on Abeokuta. It pours down on the Alake's palace, on its well built administrative center, on its crowded marketplaces, and on the huddle of pan roofs.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Just like to introduce you to the family tree.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our tour guide Ake explained to us that Christian Missionaries arrived in the town in the 1840s.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

The first church in Nigeria happens to be in Abeokuta.

[Jad Abumrad]

The first Christian church in Nigeria was here.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

It's in Abeokuta here.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he says the Kuti family was right there at the beginning. We were downstairs in what used to be the parlor. And he pointed to a picture on.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

The wall, upper left. We'll be starting with Josiah JC Ransom.

[Jad Abumrad]

Kuti to CP A photo of a guy, mustache, suit, holding a Bible.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

That would be Fela's grandfather. He was instrumental in writing a lot of Anglican hymns.

[Jad Abumrad]

This part I found so interesting.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Yeah, and they translated them into Yoruba language as well.

[Jad Abumrad]

This, what you're hearing is Fela's grandfather. And this song that he's singing is the first recorded album released in all of Nigeria. And if you can imagine, this must have driven Fellah crazy years later because what his grandfather is singing here are Christian hymns taught to him by British missionaries. He's translating those hymns into his native Yoruba so he can spread the gospel to other colonial subjects.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

He was clergy and a musician.

[Jad Abumrad]

These are amazing pictures. Aki showed us picture after picture of Fela's parents surrounded by well dressed white people. Everybody's in really impeccable white suits.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Yes, they were very well respected.

[Jad Abumrad]

The reason which will become important to our story is that they helped run a school.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Yomayomayo Lo Rio Lumo. This is Abeokuta Grammar School.

[Jad Abumrad]

This was a British established school.

[Wole Soyinka]

Exactly what is it like to be in that school?

[Jad Abumrad]

Playwright, novelist Wolo Schoenka remembers it this way.

[Wole Soyinka]

Very heavy handed discipline. He remembers the buildings, stone, I mean real heavy stone. Mortar rock.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is this it, you think? And the school is still around. It was just down the street from her house, past the market. So we dropped in. You see hundreds of small kids in Christian prep uniforms. Little boys in yellow shirts and ties. Little girls in checked skirts. The same uniforms they would have worn in the 1930s.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

Yes, if I may say, this is Abeokuta Grammar School.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's the vice principal.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

My name is Mrs. Ode Dieron.

[Jad Abumrad]

She was nice enough to show us around.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

We have the King chemistry lab, the biology lab, the physics lab to one side. This is the school stadium.

[Jad Abumrad]

There's a big sports field, sort of a dirt field where maybe 50 older boys were sitting in bleachers. They are having their school fellowship, listening to Bible lessons.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

Yes, Christianity.

[Jad Abumrad]

And everywhere we went, about 20 young people in ages 8 to 15 stared at us, very confused why we were there.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Hello.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can I talk to you for a Minute. Do you know Fumalaya Ransom Kuti?

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you know about her?

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

She's the first woman to drive a car.

[Jad Abumrad]

She's the first woman to drive a car?

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is something you hear a lot. And in fact, her car is on display at a museum in town. What do they teach you about her at the school?

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

She's a teacher and a woman leader.

[Jad Abumrad]

She's a teacher and a woman leader, sir. Yes.

[Judith Byfield]

She was the first woman to stop.

[Jad Abumrad]

The pain of tax of women. To stop the pain of tax of women.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Boom. That's the story we're going to tell on the radio. Yes. I need that. Okay, last question. Last question. Do you have an anthem for Abeokuta Grammar School? Yeah. Can you sing it for us? I love the I.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

Feel.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. Scene set done. It's 1945. Fumalaya ransom kuti and her husband are running the grammar school. If you see pictures of her from this era, she dresses in Victorian dress, puffy sleeves, buttons going down the front. She reminds you of the person you knew at school who was president of all the clubs. Colonialism had basically created this whole new class of Nigerian elite who worked with the British. And she was basically that, at least at first.

[Judith Byfield]

The first organization that she creates is actually an organization to teach Christian girls how to be good wives.

[Jad Abumrad]

Minutes of the Abeokuta Ladies Club.

[Judith Byfield]

It's called the Abeokuta Ladies Club.

[Jad Abumrad]

Are these the actual minutes of from 1945?

[Judith Byfield]

Yeah, and actually I have a couple more for envelopes. Make yourself comfortable. They were planning picnics.

[Jad Abumrad]

Picnic at 10am to 4pm on the 31st. We have a whole, like, dance program here.

[Judith Byfield]

They were planning dances.

[Jad Abumrad]

Foxtrot, Hokey Cokey. Wow.

[Judith Byfield]

They were planning cookery classes. They were talking about how to recruit.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was again suggested that more ladies should be asked to join the club.

[Judith Byfield]

For the next set of girls.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's her handwriting right there. Wow. Very loopy, precise, cursive. F. RANSOME Cootie PRESIDENT It's a weird thing when you see someone's handwriting.

[Judith Byfield]

Oh, yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

They're there suddenly. And it turns out reading and writing would become one of the things, one of the catalytic agents that would take Fumalaya from cooking classes to coup plotting. So Cheryl says it started one day in church.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

She said she was in church one time and there was a market woman friend of hers who was singing, but holding the hymnal upside down. And she said that was when she realized she couldn't read that. You know, she just learned the words. So she said the market Women because of the little group she had started coming to her.

[Jad Abumrad]

We can imagine. After the service, Fumalaya told the woman, hey, I have this club. Why don't you come? We'll teach you how to read. This woman was not the kind of person who would have typically gone to the Ladies Club.

[Judith Byfield]

So the ladies club were all these elite Christian women.

[Jad Abumrad]

She worked in the markets, very different class. We might guess that she sold dyed.

[Judith Byfield]

Cloth, a tie dyer.

[Jad Abumrad]

Judith says that was a major industry in Abeokuta. The market woman would use indigo dye to create these very particular undulating patterns that look like water. Pretty soon, all of the cloth dyers and the rice sellers and the red pepper sellers and the potato sellers were all coming to Fumalaya's Ladies Club for reading lessons.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Fat Wali Shuinka. He's written about how he would sometimes be in her compound.

[Narrator/Reader]

Women of every occupation, the cloth dyers, weavers, basket makers, they arrived in ones, twos, groups. They came from near and distant compounds. They smelt of the sweat of the journey of dyers. Dried fish, yam flour, in addition to the head tie. Their shoulder shawls, neatly folded, were placed lightly on their heads.

[Wole Soyinka]

Well, you saw the swirling collars and the women's sashes. He saw the movement of the clothing, which meant, get out of my way.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

He talked about them being the wrapper wearers. He said, when the wrapper wearers showed up, boy, something was going down.

[Judith Byfield]

And so the Ladies Club then sets up this literacy program and Fela is involved.

[Jad Abumrad]

Fela apparently would sit with the cloth makers and the peanut sellers and he would teach them how to write their letters.

[Judith Byfield]

Wole Shoyinka is involved. They're all helping to teach the market women to write.

[Wole Soyinka]

But as I confessed, I was a great eavesdropper as a child.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wolishenka said that inevitably, after their reading and writing lessons, the talk would turn to politics and the kids would have to leave the room. But he, and we might imagine Fela next to him, they would crouch down and listen just out of sight. And when they did, he says they would hear the same words coming up over and over.

[Judith Byfield]

Taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes.

[Jad Abumrad]

And also the alake.

[Judith Byfield]

The Alake.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

The Alake.

[Wole Soyinka]

The Alake of Abeokuta was a formidable personality in his own right.

[Jad Abumrad]

This person, the Alake, is going to come up a lot. So let me explain the situation and who he was. Nigeria was a British colony, which we know. But colonialism took many forms. Unlike, say, South Africa, the Brits in Nigeria didn't have many White people on the ground. Instead, what they did was they ruled Nigeria through surrogates like the Alake.

[Judith Byfield]

The Alake, which is the king of this town.

[Jad Abumrad]

Technically, the Alake was a king and he definitely looks like it. In one photo of him, he's decked out in flowing robes with gold detailing, big crowns studded with jewels, and someone is always holding a tasseled umbrella over his head. But if you look to the side of the picture, you see a white guy with a mustache and a shiny top hat. In most photos of the Alake, there is a guy like that standing right at the edge of the picture.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Basically, the Alake is being told what to do by the British. He's being held in power by the British. And the decision making is the British, even if it comes out of the Alake's mouth.

[Judith Byfield]

This was the basis of indirect rule. And that was what the British said was so important about their system that they left those indigenous political leaders or titles at least in place.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is why the British loved Abyakuta so much, because it was the perfect case study for their classic move. British government did this all over Asia, in what is now Singapore, India, Bangladesh, and of course Africa. They would go in, take control of the leaders, and then use a local man dressed ostentatiously to execute their plans.

[John Blair]

Okay, so full confession. I'm not really supposed to be recording in here. This is his diary from 1920.

[Jad Abumrad]

A producer, Ruby Walsh, found a diary of one colonial officer who put it.

[John Blair]

Pretty plainly, the titular ruler is the Alake, who knows no English and started life as a canoe boy. However, The British Commissioner, Mr. Young, is of course the dominating factor. The little state is somewhat in the position of a would be independent but really very dependent child.

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Wole Soyinka]

You saw the soldiers being moved across Abeokuta in lorries, and they were going to fight some nasty man called Adolf Hitler, the vague ogre, overseas who in some way or the other was involved in our own local politics on the wrong side.

[Jad Abumrad]

This was happening all over Africa. You had the Nigeria regiment. You had stations on the shore of Sierra Leone. You had the Gold coast regiment. And so the British government now had this problem.

[Judith Byfield]

They're trying just to make sure they get enough rice to feed the soldiers. And so there are all these conversations about how can we, in a sense, put more of a squeeze on the population. It's a really combustible situation for these market women.

[Jad Abumrad]

What the British decided to do was create a contingent of tax collectors. These were native tax collectors, so non white. But like the Alake, they were directed by the British colonial officers.

[Wole Soyinka]

Oh, they were hated. They were hated. They were considered the slaves of white district officers.

[Jad Abumrad]

The tax collectors would march in to the markets, demand that the market sellers unload all their potatoes and their rice for a third of what they were asking.

[Judith Byfield]

And if you don't sell to me, I'll actually just confiscate it and you get nothing. So during the war, they had no control over the prices.

[Jad Abumrad]

On top of that, the tax collectors would levy all these new fines on the women.

[Judith Byfield]

Not only tax them, but make sure they pay.

[Jad Abumrad]

So at those literacy meetings, the market women would tell Fumalaya these stories about how they were being harassed, how they would try to sell at night to avoid the tax collectors, but often get.

[Judith Byfield]

Caught, taken to court and tried to, and sometimes get hard labor. They were putting them in Jail. At one point, they started jailing them outside of Abeokuta so that their families couldn't see them.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wole Schoenko writes about one literacy meeting where an old woman got up to speak.

[Narrator/Reader]

She 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. And 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.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

You know, one of the things that the colonial enterprise did was it made assumptions about the way society was organized and structured. Made assumptions about women. For 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, it 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, blah. Men, too. But I went to her house one time, and she was serving her husband on her knees. And 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

All of which is to say that as the meetings went on, the nature of the relationship between Vumalaya, 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.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Wow. So where we are right now used to be hasta study, formalaya study.

[Jad Abumrad]

Aki showed us her home office, a spare room, tiny rug, chair.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

These are our original furnitures that we had to refurbish.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is that an original turntable?

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Oh, yeah, it is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. What would she. She probably listened to hymns, would you guess?

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

The EGBA women's suffering is becoming unbearable. Egba women have been summoned, worried, harangued and ill treated by tax collectors. They said the soup 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Back in Ithaca. All right, so this is a letter to Fumalaya Ransom Kuti from a, I guess an officer. In one exchange about that jailed woman, an officer replied, my dear Mrs. Cootie, 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.

[Judith Byfield]

So they were taking these stories to ransom cootie. And then Ransome Kuti would try to talk to the Alake on their behalf. He would basically say, there's nothing I can do.

[Jad Abumrad]

He'd say, you have to talk to the British. This is their policy.

[Judith Byfield]

And she was like, we have exhausted all these channels. We go to the colonial officials, they tell us it's their latke. They go to him and he says, it's not me, it's the colonial officials who you have to talk to. They had had it. They were like, this runaround has to stop.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wole Shayenko remembers the moment when the vibe irrevocably shifted. It happened at the grammar school.

[Narrator/Reader]

A tumult overspilled the courtyard.

[Jad Abumrad]

Market women had come from all over.

[Narrator/Reader]

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 Abeokuta Women's Union.

[Judith Byfield]

The Abeokuta Women's Union.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 Victorian clothes. From this point forward, she would dress in the same wraps and headscarves as the market women.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

She started only wearing Nigerian clothing. She never wore Western clothing again.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, this is constitution, rules and regulations, aims and objectives of the unions to establish and maintain unity and cooperation among all women in Egbaland. Egboland, 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. Dang. Number five. To raise and maintain necessary and adequate land. It's like, I read this stuff and I'm like, we gotta get our shit together. These people were organized.

[Judith Byfield]

And, you know, she had a car, so she used to drive to. To different communities and hold meetings with them.

[Jad Abumrad]

And we know because Fellah 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.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

So she and her husband owned this school. And so the school had huge grounds, and that's where the repar wearers would meet.

[Jad Abumrad]

While we were at the school, I kept looking into the field behind where the kids were doing the Bible. I mean, it wasn't the same field, but I kept trying to imagine what it would have looked like filled with thousands of women.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

You know, there were. The estimates are between 10 and 20,000 members.

[Jad Abumrad]

According to Wolishenka, the first protest happened almost spontaneously.

[Narrator/Reader]

They poured out of the grammar school compound, filled the streets, and marched towards the palace of the alaki.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, okay, fine, if you're not going to let us have a protest.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

They said they were going to have a picnic. So they gathered 10,000 women to go have a picnic, and they were carrying little packets of food. And she said. And at her compound, she came out and she said to them, and she said she was screaming because there were so many of them because she started talking, they were like, at the back and hear you. So she was screaming through her hands, and she was saying, look, this is the time I'm going to turn my back to you. And anybody who wants to can scurry away. I won't know who you are. I won't see you. But when I turn back around, everybody I see better be on board. And so she turned her back, and according to everybody, nobody left.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my God. And then, as Wolishenka describes it, all at once, all 10,000 women took off their head wraps.

[Wole Soyinka]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

They would tie it around their waist like a belt.

[Wole Soyinka]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my God. You can see her addressing the crowd.

[Judith Byfield]

What? Wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

You can see the crowd. After three and a half hours of digging through the archives with Judith and Ithaca, which are mostly just tons of documents and memos, well, then 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.

[Judith Byfield]

My sense of it is, you would see this sea of women approaching the palace.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

What you would see is you would see men getting out of the way. And they would often tell the bridge. The bridge would come to them and say, get these women to stop it. And they would say, we don't tell the market women what to do. We cannot stop it.

[Judith Byfield]

And there's a wonderful passage in Ake where Soyinka 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Speaking of W. Shanka, he snuck ahead of the women to the palace, which we visited. Picture a gated mansion painted canary yellow. He snakes through the gate, under the stone archway, and into the spacious square. Okay, we're in the. This must have been the courtyard where they were.

[Wole Soyinka]

Were.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's a big open space with peacocks milling about. As you walk into the courtyard, you see a building in front of you. Yellow building.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

There's an image of him talking, them.

[Jad Abumrad]

Talking to the alake.

[John Blair]

And the alake coming down from a balcony. That might have been the balcony.

[Jad Abumrad]

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. So they were probably right here. 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.

[Narrator/Reader]

When the alake appeared, they cut seed going down on their Knees. But no more. The Alake had obviously resolved to receive the emissaries.

[Jad Abumrad]

Courteously, a protester, one of Mrs. Kuti's lieutenants, stepped forward and called up to the alake.

[Narrator/Reader]

Kabiesi, the message which I bring you today.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

The 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, Kabiesi. They are all the womanhood of Egba. The voice with which I speak is the Voice of Aberre. 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.

[Wole Soyinka]

In hindsight, it was rather like protagonists and the chorus.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wolashenka describes the scene almost as like it had a kind of mythic choreography.

[Wole Soyinka]

You had the masked women. You had the moment when the white district officer came in through the gates and was booed round lane.

[Jad Abumrad]

A policeman ordered a district officer to clear his way through the crowd towards Mrs. Cootie. As he moved through, the women threw insults at him from all directions, getting in his face. Mrs. Cootie stayed rooted.

[Narrator/Reader]

Officer. Look here, Mrs. Kuti, we are trying to hold a serious meeting here. Would you kindly keep your women in order, Ms. Kuti?

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

So are we holding a serious meeting, or do you think we're here to play?

[Narrator/Reader]

Officer. Well, tell them to shut up. Shut up. Your women.

[Jad Abumrad]

Mrs. Kuti apparently squinted her eyes.

[Wole Soyinka]

I think her exact words were, you may have been born, but you were not bred.

[Jad Abumrad]

Those words would fly around Abeokutu for weeks.

[Wole Soyinka]

I think that's the one which then became translated that you like bread in your house and all kinds of other versions. Anyway, she gave it to him back.

[Judith Byfield]

With interest, and it was at that.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Point that the women began to sing.

[Jad Abumrad]

This 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 for. Oh, hello. This is what in the archives that Judah showed me. Fumalaya has documented all of the songs, the protest songs that the women sang when they occupied the palace. First of all, a lot of these songs, there's 200 different songs that you were singing. Every protest movement is defined by its music to some degree. And there are pages and pages, pages of these songs in the archives. All 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.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Would sing insulting songs. They would say, sing things like.

[Jad Abumrad]

You.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

Know, white man is not going to get back to his country alive, going to cut off the latke's head. Elake's genitals are small. I mean, all kinds of just mean, you know, things to just insult.

[Jad Abumrad]

My favorite, by far, the chorus that we got to sing these songs were gasping when they read the lyrics.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

English translation.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

Translation that has the penis. His penises has been as a horse.

[Jad Abumrad]

The Elake has a penis as big as a horse.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

However, it's vagina. Yeah, it's what will cost the.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

You can't translate them literally like exactly how it is.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

There 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 deal with them.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

So they would start seeing. Singing those songs to the alake.

[Judith Byfield]

Yeah, they weren't mincing their words.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

And then they would say, and we're not leaving either.

[Narrator/Reader]

You scaled the sheer cliff face, battling.

[Jad Abumrad]

Frostbite, running low on oxygen. The wind pierced your skin and every inch was agony. You reached heights no other human had before.

[Narrator/Reader]

While getting nowhere at airport security.

[Jad Abumrad]

There's more to imagine when you listen.

[Narrator/Reader]

Discover best selling action titles on audible.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is fellow Fear no Man. Back to the story. November 1947. The Market Women camped out in in the courtyard of the Alakis Palace. And then they began round the clock shifts. Wolashenko remembers that those encampments became like a city.

[Wole Soyinka]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

At some point you described yourself as a courier.

[Wole Soyinka]

Yes. It's true. I was a courier since I was so small, and there were police, lots of police around, and the alaake's own guards, since I was so tiny, people didn't take much notice of me. And so Mrs. Kuti in particular, he.

[Jad Abumrad]

Says she would entrust him with these.

[Wole Soyinka]

Notes, little notes to her forces who were scattered in front of the palace.

[Jad Abumrad]

As the year went on, the protest happened daily.

[Judith Byfield]

I mean, they literally made the town ungovernable.

[Jad Abumrad]

They shut down the market, and they stayed camped out just outside the alake's window.

[Judith Byfield]

The sea of women is in the palace, and he can't get out.

[Jad Abumrad]

After several months of this, he starts to crack.

[Judith Byfield]

Yes, yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

And is he amassing soldiers to try and drive a wedge through the protesters?

[Judith Byfield]

So that's a really interesting story. I learned from the memoir of the main colonial officials that they did have soldiers on the edge of town, and they were contemplating bringing the soldiers into town. In fact, the alake was trying to beg him to bring the soldiers in.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is not theoretical. Twenty years earlier, in a different part of Nigeria, there had been a different revolt, also led by women.

[Judith Byfield]

Also a struggle around taxation. And in the 29 protests, they did call out the army and women were killed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Army 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. Fala would actually sing a song about this. He would adapt a folk song that was used in the protest and set it to. But 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.

[Judith Byfield]

They were very conscious of that earlier era. And so in 47, now, they have the army closed, basically on the edge of town.

[Jad Abumrad]

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. A few of them step forward and.

[Judith Byfield]

They take their clothes off.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Judith Byfield]

And the idea is that if you see an older woman naked, that that's an abomination. And the person who is the target of this will die.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Judith Byfield]

And it's a long established practice.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what's. What's behind that? Like, why.

[Judith Byfield]

So I think in both Igbo culture.

[Jad Abumrad]

And Yoruba culture, two major ethnic groups in West Africa, women are, partly because.

[Judith Byfield]

Of their ability to procreate, are thought to be in touch with the spiritual powers around them. In fact, in Yoruba culture, when you had women on political councils, they were very specific that you don't have women who are still menstruating because those women don't know how to control their power. So you would only have postmenopausal women in political offices.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really? That's interesting.

[Judith Byfield]

It's that association of the sort of power of the spiritual realm and women being thought to be able to really sort of weaponize that.

[Jad Abumrad]

I 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.

[Judith Byfield]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Judith Byfield]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

And they're lined up against each other.

[Judith Byfield]

Exactly. And so they have the army closed basically on the edge of town.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, what do we do with this? We could march in, kill them all, as we've done before.

[Judith Byfield]

But they're saying, do we want to create martyrs?

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Judith Byfield]

Go in and attack these women, that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Might unleash an energy that they can't.

[Judith Byfield]

Contain, that could then bring young men and the ones you usually fear out into the streets as well.

[Jad Abumrad]

Don't forget, the British were outnumbered. They didn't actually have a lot of soldiers on the ground.

[Judith Byfield]

And so, on one hand, the state is a little hamstrung about how you deal with women.

[Jad Abumrad]

I 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.

[John Blair]

We lived in a constant strain, for we never knew when the pot would boil over.

[Jad Abumrad]

That is how John Blair, the main colonial officer stationed in Abeokuta, Put it in his diary.

[John Blair]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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. To take the Alake, his wives and his family away.

[Judith Byfield]

They snuck him out of town. He didn't want to leave.

[Jad Abumrad]

They snuck him past all the people.

[Judith Byfield]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Judith Byfield]

He went into exile.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. 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.

[Narrator/Reader]

After more than half a century of service to my country, 28 of which I have given in the capacity of.

[Jad Abumrad]

Native authority, I cannot bear any longer the sight of turmoil, strife and discontent.

[Narrator/Reader]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. Quite a speech. In other words, he abdicated the throne.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

That was huge. No other woman is ever credited with unseating a sitting king.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

Drumming began in the olubumi houses at 5pm on August 21, 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.

[Judith Byfield]

They talked about Abeokuta 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. This just gives you a sense of.

[Jad Abumrad]

And in the archives, what you see from this point forward are hundreds of letters from other women.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

She had letters in her paper from women all over the continent saying, mother, you have so inspired us.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

1948. Dear Mrs. Couti, I am penning you this day under the respect I owe to women.

[Jad Abumrad]

Women from unions all over start to reach out.

[Mrs. Ode Dieron]

We, the Alawa Oribe Women's Union send this letter to ask for your assistance.

[Jad Abumrad]

Copy Copycat. Women's unions start to appear everywhere.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

South Africa, the anti part time movement.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ghana Arab Women's Society, Union of Albanian Women, Union of Australian Women, Union of Korean Women.

[Cheryl Johnson Odom]

So you can look everywhere.

[Jad Abumrad]

Democratic League of Finnish Women, Democratic Union of German Women, Federation of Cuban Women, League for Lebanese Women, Rights Union of Luxembourg Women. And I'm only at dms and you see women everywhere. This goes all the way to Venice, Venezuela. Nationally. Judah says you can also see this tax revolt in Abyakuta as the very beginning of maybe an even bigger dismantling.

[Judith Byfield]

Once the alake is removed, they don't have a structure.

[Jad Abumrad]

She says after the revolt, there is a period of time when no one is in charge. Not the Alaake, not the British.

[Judith Byfield]

This becomes a space to begin thinking broadly about what an electoral political system could look like.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what you see happen is just a few years later, after the war, soldiers from what is now Ghana come back from fighting the Germans on behalf of the British and they haven't been paid and they're complaining of back pay. They go on strike, they riot. And this becomes one of the first official dominoes to fall in the African independence movement. A continent wide revolt. I don't think it would be overstating it to say that they may have been inspired at least a little bit by what happened in Abeokuta.

[Judith Byfield]

I so 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. And you know, so fella stands out as this, you know, this almost like this person without an ideological genealogy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ideological genealogy. I like those words. Together they suggest that the way that you see the world is not just yours. It's not just about the decisions that you make and the people that you bump into. It's an inheritance given to you by your parents and your parents. Parents. Here are some things we know. Fela's grandfather. We know that it would drive Fela crazy that his grandfather would be the first person to release a record in Nigeria and that the song on that record was put in his mouth by white British missionaries. We also know that fellow was there as a nine year old boy at some of those protests, holding his mother's hand as they sang those songs.

[Judith Byfield]

He's around, I mean, literally a sea of women who are powerful and who are almost like, you know, invoking that metaphysical power around them to try to get the colonial state to blink. They don't have the guns.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Judith Byfield]

And they're basically putting their bodies on the line to say you will be the one to step back.

[Jad Abumrad]

Coming up, the story you just heard will come around again in a way, because cycles do repeat, just not always in the way you want them to. This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original Produced by Audible. Higher Ground Audio. Western Sound and Talk House series was created and executive produced by me, Chad Abumrad, Ben Adair and Ian Wheeler. Written and hosted by yours truly. Higher Ground executive producers were Nick White, Mukta Mohan and Dan Fierman. Jen 11 was creative executive and Corinne Billiard Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible were Ann Hepperman, Glenn Pogue and Nick d'. Angelo. Our senior producer was Goan Utwelling. Ruby Heron Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fefe Odudu and Oluakemi Aladdiusui. Ben Adair was our editor with editing help with Carla Murthy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babalola, Dotun, Ayubade, Neet Abdurraqib, Michael Veal, Moses Achunu and Judith Byfield. Huge thanks to Judith and Cheryl Johnson Odom and Stephanie Shonekan for sharing their research with us. Our fact checker was Jamila Wilkinson. Alex McInnis was the mixed engineer. Also special thanks to Knitting Factory Records and BMG to the Kuti Family, Yeni, Femi Shayun and made to Melissa o' Donnell to Inside Projects, Maggie Taylor. And big thanks to Carla Murthy, Leah Friedman and Shoshana Scholar. The head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navin, Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giazza Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC Sound Recording Company Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, L.L.C.

[Akila Bishokumbi]

Hey y'.

[Jad Abumrad]

All.

[Sam Sanders]

Each week on the Sam Sanders show, we ask big questions and offer hot takes about the pop culture we're obsessed with. Like, should we be allowed to talk.

[Jad Abumrad]

At the movie theater?

[Sam Sanders]

Are stadium concerts boring now? Is it time to stop making bingeable tv? Join me and a bunch of comics and journalists and celebrities as we make sense of the zeitgeist. Or at least make fun of it. The Sam Sanders Show Wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube.