876: Bigger Than Me

Ira Glass

OK, 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 US military or intelligence communities, came out with a video, saying to people in uniform, you took an oath like we did.

Ira Glass

Those are Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin 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 runners out of the water off the coast of Venezuela, and lots of military experts and veterans were saying this did not seem to be legal. In the past, if we found boats of drug runners, 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 might have 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. He said 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--

Ira Glass

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 the 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? Are 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 Rights 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. Brittany Ramos DeBarros answers all those calls. She's an Army vet who served in Afghanistan.

Ira Glass

Earlier in the year, most of her calls were from the National Guard. Then, that changed in June.

Ira Glass

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. But 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. Simply refusing to obey orders can get you court martialed. Of course, people can choose to do nothing.

Ira Glass

It can be hard to figure out what to do sometimes. I was in Mexico, in Oaxaca, a couple weeks ago. And in this church, in Spanish on 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. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, Act One, "Mother Knows Best."

Fela 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 ushered in an entire new genre of music, which he called afrobeat.

Fela was 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. Fela's songs criticized colonialism in all of its forms, openly challenged Nigeria's ruling military government. He took on apartheid South Africa and the United States.

Ira Glass

Fela called for the complete rejection of most things European and Western and tried to live that way. He went so 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. They make him a complicated person to explain.

Recently, Jad Abumrad embarked on a journey to do just that. Jad is the creator and longtime co-host of Radiolab, and he did a big series on Dolly Parton that won all kinds of awards and lots of people heard. Now, he's put out a whole series about Fela, and a big chunk of it is about how Fela's music and his politics spoke to each other.

And one of the stories that Jad tells, a story that we're going to excerpt here today, is about where Fela's anti-colonial politics came from. Jad says that some of those beliefs can be traced back to his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The story of her political accomplishments is not that well known outside of Nigeria, and it's 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.

Jad Abumrad

The story starts in the 1940s, Abeokuta, Nigeria, a town that is about 50 miles north of Lagos. In Yoruba, "Abeokuta" 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 Abeokuta was their crown jewel, really proof that the colonial project was working. Everything in Abeokuta was exactly as they wanted it. And our main character, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Fela Kuti's mother, she was kind part of that system, at least initially. She taught at a very Christian, very British prep school--

--that is still there today.

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.

Jad Abumrad

This is something you hear a lot. And, in fact, her car is on display at a museum in town.

Jad Abumrad

OK, scene, set, done. It's the 1940s. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti 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 is 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.

Jad Abumrad

This is historian Judith Byfield. She showed me photocopies of handwritten notes from Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti archives.

And it turns out reading and writing would become one of the things, one of the catalytic agents that would take Funmilayo from cooking classes to coup plotting.

Jad Abumrad

This is historian Cheryl Johnson-Odom. She says it started one day in church.

Jad Abumrad

We can imagine after the service, Fumilayo told the woman, hey, I have this club, why don't you come. We'll teach you--

Jad Abumrad

This woman was not the kind of person who would have typically gone to the ladies club.

Jad Abumrad

She worked in the markets.

Jad Abumrad

We might guess that she sold dyed cloth.

Jad Abumrad

Judith says that was a major industry in Abeokuta. The market women 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 Funmilayo's ladies club for reading lessons.

Jad Abumrad

That's Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, who is actually Fela Kuti's cousin. He spent a lot of time around Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and has written about her extensively.

Jad Abumrad

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

Jad Abumrad

Wole Soyinka said that, inevitably, after the 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.

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.

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 crown 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 Alake, there is a guy like that standing right at the edge of the picture.

Jad Abumrad

This is why the British loved Abeokuta 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.

Jad Abumrad

Our producer, Ruby Walsh, found a diary of one colonial officer who put it pretty plainly.

Jad Abumrad

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 Alake and told him, we need you to tax the women in the market. Because at that time--

[SIREN WAILING]

Jad Abumrad

--World War II was about to happen. Hitler was rampaging his way through Europe.

Jad Abumrad

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jad Abumrad

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

Jad Abumrad

So at those literacy meetings, the market woman would tell Funmilayo 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.

Jad Abumrad

Wole Soyinka writes about one literary meeting where an old woman got up to speak.

Jad Abumrad

All of which is to say that as the meetings went on, the nature of the relationship between Funmilayo Ransome-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 Alake, to the British colonial officials.

Jad Abumrad

We took a tour of her house, a small, two-story house with a balcony overlooking a busy street. And our tour guide--

Jad Abumrad

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

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.

Jad Abumrad

Back with Judith.

In one exchange about that jailed woman, an officer replied.

Jad Abumrad

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

Jad Abumrad

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

Jad Abumrad

Market women had come from all over.

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 headscarves as the market women.

Igboland, by the way, is a reference to one of the dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria.

Jad Abumrad

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.

Jad Abumrad

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.

Jad Abumrad

According to Wole Soyinka, the first protest happened almost spontaneously.

Jad Abumrad

It was a bust. The authorities quickly shut it down and jailed Funmilayo, saying she didn't have a permit to march. When she was released, she thought, OK, fine. If you're not going to let us have a protest--

Jad Abumrad

A week before, Funmilayo had held a massive meeting in her courtyard.

And then, as Wole Soyinka describes it, all at once, all 10,000 women took off their head wraps.

Jad Abumrad

They would tie it around their waist like a belt.

After 3.5 hours of diggig through the archives that Judith Byfield had laid out for me, I found these black-and-white pictures.

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.

This rally is perhaps the moment right before they march to the Alake's palace, which is when things really go down.

Jad Abumrad

Speaking of Wole Soyinka, 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 this spacious square.

Up high, there was a single balcony with glass doors, the Alake's bedroom. He initially stayed inside as the women flooded the courtyard.

Jad Abumrad

At first, some of the Alake's junior chiefs come outside and 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.

Jad Abumrad

A protester, one of Mrs. Kuti's lieutenants, stepped forward and called up to the Alake.

Jad Abumrad

Wole Soyinka describes the scene almost like it had a kind of mythic choreography.

Jad Abumrad

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

Jad Abumrad

Mrs. Kuti apparently squinted her eyes.

Jad Abumrad

Those words would fly around Abeokuta for weeks.

Jad Abumrad

This is one of the most interesting parts of the story to me.

In the archives that Judith showed me, Fumilayo has documented all of the songs, the protest songs that the women sang when they occupied the palace.

Jad Abumrad

Every protest movement is defined by its music, to some degree, and there are pages and pages of these songs in the archives.

Jad Abumrad

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.

Jad Abumrad

And a quick warning, they get kind of graphic.

Jad Abumrad

My favorite by far.

Jad Abumrad

The chorus that we got to sing these songs were gasping when they read the lyrics.

Jad Abumrad

The Alake has a penis as big as a horse, however--

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.

Jad Abumrad

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

Ira Glass

Coming up after the break, the women make the British experience something they have absolutely no answer for. That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. 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 Jad Abumrad's new podcast about Fela Kuti. This particular story is about Fela's mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Jad picks up where he left off. The women are trying to convince the Alake to stop taxing them unfairly.

Jad Abumrad

The market women camped out in the courtyard of the Alake's palace, and then they began round-the-clock shifts. Wole Soyinka remembers that those encampments became like a city.

Jad Abumrad

He says she would entrust him with these notes.

Jad Abumrad

These protests happened on and off as the year went on.

Jad Abumrad

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

Jad Abumrad

This is not theoretical. Almost 20 years earlier, in a different part of Nigeria, there had been a different revolt, also led by women.

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. Fela would actually sing a song about this.

[FELA KUTI SINGING]

He would adapt a folk song that was used in the protest and set it to music.

[FELA KUTI SINGING]

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.

Jad Abumrad

The market women are camped out, well aware of the violence that might be about to go down. But both Judith 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 stepped forward.

Jad Abumrad

Apparently, right there in the plaza, some number of women-- we don't have accurate details on, maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred-- they got together and, while facing the Alake window all at once, they disrobed.

Jad Abumrad

Judith 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--

Jad Abumrad

--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.

Jad Abumrad

And Judith 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.

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--

Jad Abumrad

--that might unleash an energy that they can't contain.

Jad Abumrad

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

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.

Jad Abumrad

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

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

In other words, he abdicated the throne.

Jad Abumrad

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

Jad Abumrad

Women from unions all over start to reach out.

Jad Abumrad

Copycat women's unions start to appear everywhere.

Jad Abumrad

We in the West tend to emphasize the legacies of Africa's male leaders, the Kwame Nkrumahs the Nelson Mandelas. 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 Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti's grave. Aki, our tour guide from earlier, pointed us toward the Anglican church that was 300 feet from the house.

Jad Abumrad

We went there and asked around.

Jad Abumrad

The guy walked us to the back side of the church.

There was a grave set in concrete. Mrs. Kuti is buried with her husband.

And there on the tombstone is his bust, and on the epitaph--

--all the details of his life.

He was a very impressive man--

--did a lot to revolutionize the educational system in Nigeria. But his wife, who is buried with him and who led a revolt to depose the king, she's hardly mentioned.

Barely a word. All there is this one line that says, RIP, my love Funmilayo.

Jad Abumrad

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.

Jad Abumrad

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.

Jad Abumrad

So he never forgot what she'd accomplished, and neither did those market women who marched with her.

Jad Abumrad

This is Yeni Kuti, Fela's oldest daughter, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti's granddaughter.

Ira Glass

Jad Abumrad's podcast about Fela is called Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Ira Glass

Well, today's program was produced by Valerie Kipnis and Emmanuel Dzotsi. The people who helped put the show together today include Michael Comite, Suzanne Gaber, Sophie Gil, Cassie Howley, Seth Lind, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, and Marisa Robertson-Textor.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Jad's collaborators in making his Fela series were Ian Wheeler, Ngofeen Mputubwele, Ruby Harron Walsh, Fayfay Odudu, and Olawakemi Aladesuyi. The series was edited by Ben Adair.

Special thanks as well to Vtech, Funmi Arewa, Debbie Ohiri, who put together the choir singing protest songs throughout this episode. Adéróké helped translate those songs. The episode was fact checked by Robin Reid and Jamila Wilkinson.

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. But most important, you will join the people who now collectively contribute a fourth of our total budget for our show with their subscriptions, which is amazing.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.