876: Bigger Than Me

A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, so I want to tell you a story, and I'm going to start with the part you probably already know about. In November, six Democrats, all veterans of the U.S. military or intelligence communities, came out with a video saying to people in uniform, you took an oath like we did. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. Those are Senators Mark Kelly and Alissa Schradkon and Congressman Chris DeLuzio. They did not specify what illegal orders they might be referring to. At the time, just like now, the Trump administration was shooting boats of supposed drug-renders out of the water off the coast of Venezuela. And lots of military experts and veterans were saying this did not seem to be illegal. When passed, we found boats of drug-renders. We arrested them. We didn't just kill them on the spot in cold blood with no due process. The video also didn't mention the president trying to order the National Guard into American cities, Portland and Chicago, where judges stopped the orders, saying they were illegal. Like I say, the video mentioned no specific orders at all. And really, the video meant it vanished into the daily noise of a million news stories and online videos like almost everything else does these days. It really could have come and gone and been forgotten. Except that the president went on Truth Social and called the video seditious behavior punishable by death. Say he wanted the lawmakers to be tried as traitors. Stephen Miller, who seems to run so many things in the White House these days, went on TV to declare. It is insurrection, plainly, directly, without question. It's a general call for rebellion, saying that those who carry weapons in America's name should defy their chain of command and engage in open acts of insurrection. So in other words, we ended up in one of those completely exhausting and very familiar standoffs between Republicans and Democrats, with the Democrats saying, we're just telling people to obey the law. And Republicans saying that Democrats, as always, are trying to overthrow Trump, this time with a military insurrection. And in the middle of all that are the two million people serving in the active military or national guard or reserves right now. What are they thinking? Aren't many of them worried about getting illegal orders or getting legal orders that they're not comfortable with? We reached out to the handful of organizations that service people can call if they want confidential legal advice on that kind of thing. None of them could put us in touch quickly with any of the service people they talked to, but they all did confirm that they've seen an uptick in calls since the Trump administration came in. Most did not see more calls after the Democrats' video. And I want to emphasize the numbers of calls that they get are low compared to the immense size of the armed forces. GI Wright's hotline has been getting a little over 200 calls a month on average since June. An organization called About Face only gets a few calls a week. Whitney Ramos-DeBarros answers all those calls. She's an army vet served in Afghanistan. Lately, I think we've seen a lot of people who are in the national guard saying orders are being circulated to support ICE or to occupy an American city. I'm really concerned that I'm going to be forced to participate in one of these operations. And I don't believe that that's right. And I want to know what my options are if I don't want to participate in that. Right? People signed up thinking I'm going to help rescue people from floods and help with the aftermath and clean up of hurricanes. I didn't sign up to go police American citizens. That's not what the military is for. The Pentagon wants to create these quick response forces, 500 national guard in each state to control civil unrest and riots. Have you heard about that? Yes. I spoke to someone last week who said that their unit has had voluntary orders where they're asking people to volunteer to be part of these QRFs and that they so far had been able to decline them. But they were calling because they were worried that it was going to not be optional soon because they weren't seeing a lot of people volunteer. And that the sentiment within the units that they were in and connected to seemed to be that people thought this is bullshit. Like I'm not going to be part of an anti-protest force in my own state. That's not what I signed up for the National Guard for. Earlier in the year, most of her calls were from the National Guard. Then that changed in June. Then we saw the Marines be mobilized to LA and suddenly I think a much larger swath of people in the active military were like, wait a minute, this is wild. I might be implicated in this and I need to know what my red lines are and what are my choices and what are the consequences I'm willing to take on. We have more and more people with the escalations that we're seeing in the Caribbean that are saying I am connected in some way to units that are carrying out these boat strikes or these preparations for attacks on Venezuela and things like that that are really gravely concerned. Have you heard from people who have refused orders already? I have heard from people who said I got orders and I decided not to show up for them. What do I do now? And what were the orders? What kind of orders? This person I'm thinking of was active duty and so he just stopped showing up. He was supposed to be supporting the establishment of immigrant detention facilities and he went, what's called AWOL, absent without leave and he just stopped showing up. I think he kind of, the way he described it, he panicked because it wasn't this drawn out process. He was just like, this is bad and I don't know what to do and he didn't have anyone to reach out to about it so he just stopped showing up. He panicked. So we connected him with legal support. Since he already made that choice, it's just a matter of helping him to navigate the legal consequences. Because of her hotline's confidentiality rules, I should say we could not confirm this story or the others that she told us by talking to the service people involved but we were able to verify many details. Brittany says she does not advise anybody on what they should do but tells them what their options are. People can stay in their units and speak out publicly about things that they object to within certain limits. Even if they follow the rules, they could face all kinds of consequences. People who want out can file papers to be conscientious objectors, which can lead to wildly various outcomes. They can be reassigned to other duties or they can be discharged. Somebody refusing to obey orders can get you court-martialed. And of course, people can choose to do nothing. I've talked to active military members who were really upset about what's happening but who said, my kids are in school, we're struggling to get by as it is. And unless I'm actively being asked to do something that I believe is wrong, I can't afford to do anything about what I believe right now. Can you think of somebody like that and tell me about that conversation? Well, we've been doing a lot of outreach in D.C. to the National Guard members in D.C. And our members will go out and have conversations with people while they're patrolling, give them flyers that share that if they ever want to reach out for resources, they can. And when we initially started those conversations and that outreach, we had no idea how that was going to be received, kind of what the disposition of people was. And they were really willing to talk to us. And most of them said, yeah, I don't know why we're here. This is pointless. This is dumb. I'm away from my family. I'm losing pay even in my regular job because of this. And what we heard from many of them was this is really good information. I believe my orders are legal currently. But if I ever am given an illegal order, I'll keep this in mind. It'd be hard to figure out what to do sometimes. I was in Mexico and Oaxaca a couple of weeks ago. And in this church in Spanish and one of the walls, it said, here are the remains of people like you and like me, people who knew how to act with faith and charity in the historic moment and the circumstances that God decided to put them in. And I read that and I thought, am I doing the best I should be doing in the historic moment that God decided to put me in? Today on our show, history comes knocking and a bunch of people have to figure out what to do. WB Easy Chicago, this is American life. Am I right glass? Stay with us. This is American life. Not one. Mother knows best. Thela Kuti is at a special level of fame where, yes, lots of people have no idea who he is. But for people who do, there could not be a bigger musical star. He was a worldwide musical phenomenon by the 1980s, iconic from Nigeria. He actually did a great job of making music. He was a great musician. He was a great musician. He was a great musician. He was a great musician. He was a great musician. He was a great musician. He was a great musician. He was a great musician. He actually did an entire new genre of music, which he called Afrobeat. Thela is also a profoundly political figure. Nigeria was still a newly independent country in the 1970s and 80s, still very much trying to answer questions about what kind of nation it was going to be. Thela's songs criticized colonialism in all of its forms, openly challenged Nigeria's ruling military government. He took on apartheid South Africa in the United States. Thela called for the complete rejection of most things European and Western and tried to live that way, once as far as to found his own commune and declared it to be its own republic free of government control. His politics were radical, but also messy. His version of being an Africanist led him to pretty ugly views about gay people and women and make him a complicated person to explain. But recently, Jad Abramrod embarked on a journey to do just that. Jad is the creator and longtime co-host of Radio Lab and he did a big series on Dalai Parton that won all kinds of awards and lots of people heard. Now he's put out a whole series about Thela. Had a big chunk of it is about how Phalas music and his politics spoke to each other. And one of the stories that Jad tells, the story that we're going to excerpt here today, is about where Phalas anti-colonial politics came from. Jad says that some of those beliefs can be traced back to his mother, Funmulayo Ransomkuti. The story of her political accomplishments is not that well known outside of Nigeria and is kind of an amazing story on its own. What she did in her small town helped transform the entire country. Here's Jad with the story. The story starts in the 1940s, Abiyakuta, Nigeria, a town that is about 50 miles north of Lagos. In Yoruba, Abiyakuta means refuge under the rocks because what you see at the center of town is this massive granite boulder. It's a really beautiful place. And the British felt that Abiyakuta was their crown jewel, really proof that the colonial project was working. Everything in Abiyakuta was exactly as they wanted it. And our main character, Funmulayo Ransomkuti, Fela Kuti's mother, she was kind of part of that system. At least initially, she taught at a very Christian, very British prep school. Is this it, you think? That is still there today. Abiyakuta Grammar School. When we visited, we saw hundreds of small kids in Christian prep uniforms, little boys in yellow shirts and ties, little girls in checked skirts. And everywhere we went, about 20 young people, ages 12 to about 15, stared at us, very confused why we were there. Hello. Can I talk to you for a minute? Yes, please. Do you know Funmulayo Ransomkuti? Yes, please. What do you know about her? She's the first woman to be a girl. Is she the first woman to drive a car? Yes. 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? She's a teacher and a woman leader. She's a teacher and a woman leader? Yes. She was the first woman to stop the pain of tax of women. To stop the pain of tax of women? Yes. Boom. That's the story we're going to tell on the radio. Yes, I think so. Okay, last question. Last question. Do you have an anthem for Abiyakuta Grammar School? Yes. Can you sing it for us? Yes. Yes. Okay, scene's that done. It's the 1940s. Fumalaya Ransomkuti and her husband are running the Grammar School. If you see pictures of her from this era, she dresses in almost Victorian style clothing. Puffy sleeves, buttons going down the front. She reminds you of the person you knew at school who was president of all the clubs. Queen Elizabeth had basically created this whole new class of Nigerian elite who worked with the British. And she was basically that, at least at first. The first organization that she creates is actually an organization to teach Christian girls how to be good wives. This is historian Judith Beifield. She showed me photocopies of handwritten notes from Fumalaya Ransomkuti's archives. Minutes of the Abiyakuta Ladies Club. It's called the Abiyakuta Ladies Club. Are these the actual minutes from 1945? Yes. Actually, I have a couple more for envelopes. Make yourself comfortable. They were planning picnics. Picnic at 10am to 4pm on the 31st. We have a whole dance program here. They were planning dances. Foxtrot, hokey-cokey. Wow. They were planning cookery classes. They were talking about how to recruit. It was again suggested that more ladies should be asked to join the club. For the next set of girls. That's her handwriting right there. Wow. Very loopy, precise, cursive. F. Ransomkuti president. It's a weird thing when you see someone's handwriting. Oh, yeah. That 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 blotting. Um, so... This is historian Cheryl Johnson Odom. She says it started one day in church. 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, and she realized she couldn't read. That, you know, she is learning the words. So she said the market women, because of the little group she had, started coming to her. 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. So the ladies club were all these elite Christian women. She worked in the markets. Very different class. We might guess that she sold dyed cloth. A tie-dyer. Judith says that was a major industry in Abiakuta. 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. Fact, Woli Shuyinka, he's written about how he would sometimes be at her compound. Women of every occupation, the cloth dyers, weavers, basket makers, they arrived in ones, two groups. They came from near and distant compounds. They smelled of the sweat of the journey. Of dyes, dried fish, yam flour. In addition to the head tie, their shoulder shores neatly folded were placed lightly on their heads. Well, you saw the swirling colors and the women's sashes. That's Nobel Prize winning writer Woli Shuyinka, who is actually fellow Kuti's cousin. He spent a lot of time around Fumalaya Ransom Kuti and has written about her extensively. We saw the movement of the clothing, which meant get out of my way. He talked about them being the rapper weavers. He said when the rapper weavers showed up, boy, something was going down. And so the ladies club then sets up this literacy program and Fela is involved. Fela apparently would sit with the cloth makers and the peanut sellers and he would teach them how to write their letters. Woli Shuyinka is involved. They're all helping to teach the market women to write. But as I confessed, I was a great eavesdropper as a child. Woli Shuyinka 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. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. The Alaque of Abel Kuta was a formidable personality in his own right. This person, the Alaque, 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 Alaque. The Alaque, which is the king of this town. Technically, the Alaque 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 fringed 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 Alaque, there is a guy like that standing right at the edge of the picture. Basically, the Alaque is being told what to do by the British. And he's being held in power by the British. And the decision-making is the British, even if it comes out of the Alaque's mouth. This was the basis of indirect rule. 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. This is why the British loved Abiyakuta 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. A producer, Ruby Walsh, found a diary of one colonial officer who put it pretty plainly. The titular ruler is the Alaque, 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. Getting back to the story, the market women coming to those literacy meetings were pissed, because around 1938, the British colonial officers, those men in suits at the margins of the photos, they went to the Alaque and told him, we need you to tax the women in the market. Because at that time, World War II was about to happen, Hitler was rampaging his way through Europe. And this is something that no one teaches you in history class, but a lot of the manpower for the war effort came from European colonies in Africa. The people of Africa are doing excellent work to help the Allied cause, both by the production of raw materials and by finding men for the armed forces. You saw the soldiers being moved across the Beokutah in lorries, and they were going to fight some nasty man called adult Hitler. The vague ogre overseas, who in some way or the other was involved in our local politics on the wrong side. 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. 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. What the British decided to do was create a contingent of tax collectors. These were native tax collectors, so non-white, but like the Alakay, they were directed by the British colonial officers. They were hated. They were hated. They were considered the slaves of white district officers. 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. And if you don't sell to me, I'll actually just confiscate it and you get nothing. So during the war, they have no control over the prices. On top of that, the tax collectors would levy all these new fines on the women. Not only tax them, but make sure they pay. 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 caught. Taken to court and tried and sometimes get hard labor. They were put in them in jail. At one point, they started jailing them outside of Abiyakuta so that their families couldn't see them. Wole Shoenka writes about one literacy meeting where an old woman got up to speak. 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 as a last hope for the menace now hanging over her head. She tells her story. Asun 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. 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. Private women were, I'd say generally oppressed by indigenous patriarchy. In public, it was like a whole different thing. 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 now went to her house one time and she was serving her husband on her niece. 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. We decided 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 the Malayans and Kuti and these market women began to shift. At first it was just reading lessons, but then the market women began to approach her and ask her if she would write letters for them, letters to the Ilaque, to the British colonial officials. Wow. So where we are right now used to be her study, from Malaya's 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. Showed us her home office, a spare room, tiny rug chair. These are original furniture that we had to refurbish. Is that an original turntable? Oh yeah, it is. Wow. What would she, she probably listened to hymns, would you guess? 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. The Eqba women's suffering is becoming unbearable. Eqba 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 have 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. Right, so this is a letter too familiar, I ran some Kuti from, I guess, an officer. In 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 alakay 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 alakay. They go to him and he says, it's not me, it's the colonial officials who you have to talk to. They had heard it. They were like, this runaround has to stop. Waleh Sheyanka remembers the moment when the vibe irrevocably shifted. It happened at the grammar school. A tumult overspewed 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, abeokuta, women's union. The abeokuta 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 head scarves 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 Egbaland. Egbaland, 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. Man, 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-weirors would meet. While we were at the school, I kept looking into the fields behind where the kids were doing the Bible study. 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. You know, there were the estimates are between 10 and 20,000 members. In Nualashanka, 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, okay, fine, if you're not going to let us have a protest. They said they were going to have a picnic. So they had 10,000 women to go have a picnic when they were carrying little packets of food. A week before, Fumalayo had held a massive meeting in her courtyard. And she said 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 and I could 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. Oh my God. And then as Nualashanka 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. What? 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 Alakaz Palace, which is when things really go down. My 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 bridge, the bridge would come to them and say, get this woman to stop it. And they would say, we don't tell the market women what to do. We cannot stop it. And there's a wonderful passage in Ake, where Shoyanka talks about one of the chiefs running into his mother's shop and hide in there because the women had stripped him off his clothes and just reduced him to his underwear. Speaking of Wally Shoyanka, he snuck ahead of the women to the palace, which we visited. Picture a gated mansion painted canary yellow. He snaked through the gate under the stone archway and into the spacious square. Okay, 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, yellow building. There's an image of him talking to them, talking to the Alakaz. The Alakaz 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 Alakaz bedroom. He initially stayed inside as the women flooded the courtyard. So they were probably right here. You just see a sea of white headscarves. At first, some of the Alakaz'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 Alakaz. So the juniors go inside, then the glass doors on that balcony opened and the Alakaz stepped out, dressed in his gold robes. Then the Alakaz appeared. They cut seed, going down on their knees, but no more. The Alakaz had obviously resolved to receive the emissaries cutiously. A protester, one of Mrs. Kooti's lieutenants, stepped forward and called up to the Alakaz. 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 crowds who are gathered on your front lawn. You can see them yourself, Kabyesi. They are all the womanhood of Egwa. The voice with which I speak is the voice of our bare rare Mrs. Kooti. The words which you hear from me are the words of Mrs. Kooti. She asked me to tell you on behalf of those women you see outside that the women of Egwa have had enough. In hindsight, it was rather like protagonists and the chorus. Wolo Schenke describes the scene almost like it had a kind of mythic choreography. You had a massed women. You had the moment when the white district officer came in through the gates and was booed roundly. A policeman ordered a district officer to clear his way through the crowd towards Mrs. Kooti. As he moved through, the women threw insults at him from all directions, getting in his face. Mrs. Kooti stayed rooted. Officer, look here Mrs. Kooti. We are trying to hold a serious meeting here. Would you kindly keep your women in order? Mrs. Kooti, so are we holding a serious meeting or do you think we're here to play? Officer, we'll tell them to shut up. Shut up your women. Mrs. Kooti 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 Abiyakute for weeks. I think 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. This is one of the most interesting parts of the story to me. Oh, look at this. All songs sung during the women's union demonstrations from Fort ... oh, hello. This is what? In the archives that Judas showed me, Fumalaya has documented all of the songs, protest songs that the women sang when they occupied the palace. First 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. All the songs are in Yoruba so we hired a language expert to help us translate them and then acquire in Legos 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 ... You know, white men is not going to get back to this country alive. They're going to cut off the Ilaque's head. The Ilaque's genitals are small. I mean, all kinds of just mean, mean things to just insult. My favorite by far. The chorus that we got to sing these songs were gasping when they read the lyrics. The Ilaque has a penis as big as a horse. However, 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. You can translate them literally. This is one of the reasons why the protest movement became known as Vengeance of the Vagina Head. Ilaque, Olokoeshi, Oboa Supa Loma Di Jale. There is an African tradition called sitting on a man. Sitting on a man means gathering outside of a man's house and singing and salting derisive songs and daring him to come out. Men were scared to death of it. No one woman could talk to her husband like that. So 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. So they would start singing those songs to the Ilaque. Yeah, they weren't mints in their words. And then they would say, and we're not leaving either. Coming 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. It's just American life on my hourglass. 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 Chad Abramov's new podcast about Fela Kuti. This particular story is about Fela's mother, Funmalaya Ransom Kuti. Chad picks up where he left off. The women are trying to convince the Ilaque to stop taxing them unfairly. The market women camped out in the courtyard of the Ilaque's palace and then they began round the clock shifts. Wule Shankin 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 the opposition. So there was cooking also. And the activity, especially at night, when they lit their lamps, oil lamps, to stay on the siege. At some point you would describe 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 Ilaque's own 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 Ilaque's window. The sea of women is in the palace and he can't get out. After 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, the Ilaque 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. There was also a struggle around taxation and in the 29 protests, they did call out the army and women were killed. 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. Fela would actually sing a song about this. He would adapt a folk song that was using the protests instead of to music. 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 Ilaque 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 the 47 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. A 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. A dozen, maybe a hundred. They got together and while facing the Ilaque's window all at once, they disrobed. And the idea is that if you see an older woman naked, that that's an abomination. Judas 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. Partly 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. 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. It's like two different epistemologies in a way of power. You have military power and then you have this no less potent symbolic power. And they're lined up against each other. Exactly. And so they have the army closed basically on the edge of town. And Judas says, if you read the correspondence that was flying back and forth between the Aulacche 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. 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 the traditionally the child reweries, 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. And 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. 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. 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 Abiakuta, 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. They 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. He went into exile. 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 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 my chore consideration and in order to avoid bloodshed to leave the environment of my territory in the hope that after a time, freed tempers will subside and an atmosphere of calm will prevail. Wow. Quiet speech. In other words, he abdicated the throne. That was huge. No other woman is ever credited with unseating a city with plume. Jumming began in the Olu Bumi houses at 5pm on August 21, 1948, followed by firing of guns by hunters and danced by all at Alake Square. Fifty different forms of African dances were in attendance. They were dancing at the dawn of a new day. They talked about Apeakuta 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... And in the archives, what you see from this point forward are hundreds of letters from other women. Several letters in her paper from women all over the continent saying, Mother, you have so inspired us. 1948. Dear Miss Coutty, 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-part time movement. Ghana. Arab women's society, union of Albanian women, union of Australian women, union of Korean women. So you can look everywhere. Democratic League of Finnish women, Democratic Union of German women, Federation of Cuban women, League for Lebanese women rights. Woo! Union of Luxembourg women. And I'm only at the EMS. And you see women everywhere. We in the West tend to emphasize the legacies of Africa's male leaders. The Kwame and Krumas, the Nelson Mandela's. 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 Fumalai Aransum Coutty's grave. Aki, our tour guide from earlier, pointed us toward the Anglican church that was 300 feet from the house. Yes, hi. I know that Fumalai Aransum Coutty is buried in this church, or I would not show which church. We went there, asked around. Ma'am, we want to see a burial and raise some coutty. A guy walked us to the back side of the church. This is... Yeah, yeah, this one. This one. What has Mother J's there? What has Mother J's there? There we are. There was a grave set in concrete. Mrs. Coutty is buried with her husband. There's a headstone, and then above the headstone is a bust of Reverend Coutty. And there on the tombstone is his bust, and on the epitaph. Reverend Israel O'Donran Sum Coutty. All the details of his life. President Nigerian Union of Teachers Association 1930-1954. He was a very impressive man. Did a lot to revolutionize the educational system in Nigeria. But his wife, who was buried with him, and who led a revolt to depose the king. She's hardly mentioned. It's crazy to 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? Oh, bet. 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. Fela Kuti 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. So he never forgot what she'd accomplished. And neither did those market women who marched with her. This is Yeni Kuti, Fela's oldest daughter, from Alayransum Kuti's granddaughter. My grandmother, when we were burying her, we went to a convoy to Abekucha. Abekucha is her town. When we got to the border of Abekucha, 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 unload her as the voice of the women. It was a people's funeral. It was a people's funeral. Jedi Brumard's podcast about Fega is called Fega Kuti, if you're no man, you can get it wherever you get your podcast. She fought for universal adult suffrage. That's my mama where you give. She's the only mother of this country. That's my mama where you give. She's the only mother of Nigeria. Well, today's program was produced by Valerie Kittness and Emmanuel Jo Chi. People who helped put the show together include Michael Kamate, Susan Gabber, Sophie Gill, Cassie Halle, Seth Lynne, Stonelson, Catherine Raimondo, Nadia Raymond, Alyssa Ship, Christopher Sotala, and Marisa Robertson-Texter. Our managing editor, Sara Abduraman, our senior editor is David Kastenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Judd's collaborators in making his Fega series were Ian Wheeler, Angofan Mutu Puele, Ruby Heron Walsh, Feifeo Dudu, and Olo Wakimi Ula Dosewi. The series was edited by Benadir. Special thanks as well to VTech, Funmi Aurewa, and Debbie O'Hiery, who put together the choir singing protest songs throughout this episode. Adir and Kay helped translate those songs. The episode was fact-checked by Robin Reed and Jamile Wilk-Kudson. 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. 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