Years ago, when I profiled Yeni Kuti, the matriarch of the Kuti music dynasty, she described her grandmother, the legendary activist Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, as well as her family’s worst moment in 1977, when then head of state General Olusegun Obasanjo’s soldiers stormed their home, angry at her father Fela’s military-mocking song “Zombie,” and threw her grandmother from a two-storey building, which led to her death two years later. The powerful memory Yeni shared — of being a girl playing outside when playmates told her, of the confusion and pain of her family — is not the vantage from which we see that incident in Bolanle Austin-Peters’ biopic Funmilayo Ransome Kuti.
One would be forgiven for presuming that the film’s decision to open with that assassination attempt would be informed by more than simple dramatic value. It isn’t. One of the most powerful moments in Nigerian activism is botched by uninspired direction and a strange choice of music, a tragic event rendered like a second-rate action sequence. Recovering in the hospital, Funmilayo grants an interview to a journalist from Reuters, a sequence that proceeds like a documentary, and not in a good way.
Funmilayo Ransome Kuti is saved by its split in chronology: three timelines showing us the woman as a legend and grandmother in 1977 after the attack, as a leader and mother in 1930-50, and as a girl in a majority-boys’ school in the 1910s. The three strands are uneven. Where the 1977 timeline, led by Joke Silva, is tonally unimaginative, the stakes lesser than what the real story calls for, and the childhood backstory, with Iyimide Ayo-Olumoko, proceeds with neither fault nor skill bar cinematographer Lance Gewer’s beautiful sepia frames, it is the 1940s timeline, led by an inspiring Kehinde Bankole, that wrests excitement for the story.
As she showed in Sista, Bankole is a proven performer who can carry a film regardless of the strength of the writing. She soars in several scenes leading up to the Egba Women’s Protests: in the market fight with the Alake’s guard, during her visit to the Alake when his chiefs make her kneel to address them, and, in one of the best plot beats of the year, when the women break into the Alake’s palace. It is a triumphant scene — a unity of purpose in Austin-Peters’ direction, Tunde Babalola’s screenplay, Gewer’s shots, and Tanja Hagen’s editing that maximizes Leo Omosebi’s production design and the costuming by Folake Akindele, Ituen Basi, and Clement Effanga — and its resonance, alongside the other scenes, is enough to lift the film onto this list.
It does not offset the other problems, though, mostly of poor structuring. And how strange that the film does not connect the Egba Protests to the Aba Women’s Protest of 1929, which will have influenced it, save a throwaway comment; and how laughable it is to absolve the Alake of the responsibility of the parakoyi assaulting the protesters — how ridiculous, in this act of exoneration, it is to make a white man give the direct orders to the Alake’s own guards.
There is a world in which Funmilayo Ransome Kuti touches the greatness of its subject. In this world, those scenes may rise to the occasion but we may have to wait for a fully formed biopic. Hopefully, we would see more stories of the women who helped get us here, activists like Margaret Ekpo, who took part in the Aba Women’s Protests. ♦
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