Lanaire Aderemi's 'record found here' Contextualizes the History of Nigerian Women as Protest Organizers

One of the Story Story episodes is centered on the Egba Women’s Revolt, an event Aderemi has now explored in multiple forms. Between university, a theater residency and during her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing, she developed three plays that invariably intersected the revolt with the Aba Women’s Movement of 1929, issues of child marriage and female genital mutilation, as well as more contemporary resistance movements led by women’s collective efforts.

“I've always been very passionate about women's histories and stories, and amplifying women's voices,” Aderemi tells OkayAfrica via Zoom.

Late last month, on June 29, Aderemi premiered record found here to an audience of about 100 people at the EbonyLife Cinemas in Lagos. For the film, she and a small production team traveled to Abeokuta to interview witnesses and participants in the movement, and visited historically relevant sites, including the Kuti Heritage Museum, Centenary Hall, and the National Archives in Abeokuta.

record found here is as succinct as it is profound. Testimonies enliven the narratives of an event that deserves more reverence, while Aderemi’s curiosity presents a relatable entry point for viewers who are either totally unfamiliar or vaguely familiar with the revolt.

During the first of three panel discussions that followed the screening of the film, a member of the audience asked Aderemi if the premiere of record found here was planned to coincide with the fairly recent release of the eponymous biopic of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a rights activist and de facto face of the Egba Women’s Revolt. “It’s divine timing,” Aderemi replied.

A week before Aderemi premiered her documentary, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti became available for on-demand streaming on Prime Video, after a commercially successful, month-long cinema run. Directed by Bolanle Austen-Peters, the biopic centers around the revolt, including the formation of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and Ransome-Kuti’s central role in organizing the movement. The film is engaging, if not altogether tight, and according to Aderemi, it’s “historically accurate and corroborated with my own research findings.”

Taken together, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and record found here give nuanced details into one of the most important acts of resistance in Nigerian history. The former also expands on the life of its eponymous figure beyond the customary mention in Nigerian school curriculums that “Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria,” a highlight that grossly reduces her expansive work as an activist.

“I think that if you don't have women’s appearances in the record, then not only is that erasure but it's very harmful, because I think, personally, that silence is violence and it reproduces violence,” Aderemi says. “It’s saying that there was no woman that was contributing to, in this context for instance, change in Nigeria. So I think it's very important we ensure that women’s voices are documented so that future generations know that what they're doing is not new.”

In a broader and pertinent context, both films underline the fact that Nigerian women have organized around common social issues for decades, and continue to do so now. From the Sex for Grades movement to the Nigerian #MeToo and #ArewaMeToo movements to the Feminist Coalition’s integral role in organizing the #EndSARS protests, Nigerian women have always been essential to any organizing efforts demanding a better society.

“I think it's a gift and a curse because we shouldn't have to do this in the first place, but the label is often put on us, or rather maybe it's that women just are restless when they see injustice,” Aderemi, who wrote a dissertation on the relationship between feminist activism and X (formerly Twitter) in Nigeria, says.

Just this week, women called out the need for tighter punishments of sexual assault crimes at the College of Medicine in the University of Lagos, after it was revealed that existing penalties are very lenient. Organizing around a common hashtag, X was their primary demonstration ground and it led to an acknowledgment from the university’s vice chancellor and upper management, which is expected to lead to harsher punishments for students found guilty of sexual assault.

For Aderemi, there are easy parallels between the communal spirit of these contemporary movements and that of the Egba Women’s Revolt and Abeokuta Women’s Union, where Ransome-Kuti emerged as the prominent face of the movement but, “She kept saying that our values are unity, democracy, cooperation, everybody's equal. That was constantly the rhetoric that was repeated within their meetings.”

Aderemi also adds that an in-depth knowledge of a past event like the revolt is an ultra-important point of reference that can help future organizing efforts. “I think that if we're able to look back and study what they did and their strategies, even organizers presently, whether you're an activist or an academic or a historian, it's useful because we know what works and what didn't work, and we can adapt it to our [current] society.”