As a child growing up in Nigeria, you mostly know Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti as the first Nigerian woman to drive a car. As you grow into your teenage years and become familiar with Afrobeats, the music movement and sound her son inspired, she’s mostly spoken about as Fela’s mum. Even Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a new biopic by the award-winning theater veteran and filmmaker Bolanle Austen-Peters, opens with a reenactment of the infamous ransacking of Kalakuta that eventually led to soldiers throwing her off a two-story building.

However, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was always more. She was an educator passionate about democratizing access to education in her native town, Abeokuta, in southwest Nigeria. She was a feminist in a period when it wasn’t cool or universally accepted. In the film, there’s a delightful scene that gives us a peek into the mischievous side of her feminism, a playful defiance away from her serious work as an activist. When she visits her husband-to-be’s family for the first time, his autocratic clergyman dad asks a few probing questions about her views on religion and a woman’s place in society. Her lover, Israel Ransome-Kuti, played by the delightful Ibrahim Suleiman, signals to her to play along, but she characteristically answers like a feminist, vexing the father, who then loses his appetite. However, he still ends up blessing their marriage—a fact Funmilayo speaks about fondly and proudly.

Ms. Ransome-Kuti was also a humanitarian and brave political activist who fought for Nigerian women’s right to vote, to be included in government, and to be educated. One of her famous fights was a protest against the unfair taxation of the women of Egbaland in the 1940s by the Alake (or traditional ruler), which resulted in women being part of the formerly all-male chief union of Egbaland.

These are among the aspects of the late Ms. Ransome-Kuti that Austen-Peters wants to show us with this biopic—to say that Fela’s mum was way more than that. The film is a classic Nigerian case of art filling the gaps of school history lessons.

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti opens with an older Funmilayo, played by the venerable Joke Silva, but quickly takes us to her younger days as a smart child whose dad wants more for her beyond being a seamstress. He takes her to the then-all-boys Abeokuta Grammar School and somehow convinces the administration to admit his daughter—a first for the school. There she meets Israel, her future ever-supporting husband, then the school’s head boy, whom the film wisely and deftly relegates to the background, even though he was quite influential in her life.

After secondary school, she goes to the UK to study and returns to Egba to be an educator. On one occasion, she visits the market after one of her pupils doesn’t come to school, and there she witnesses the rough treatment meted out to the market women. This treatment, ordered by the Alake of Egbaland, worsens with the indiscriminate taxation of the market women.

This aggrieves Funmilayo, who encourages women in her circle, the elite Egbaland Ladies Club, to join hands with the market women and fight their cause. After some agitation and eventual rebellion from some of her friends whose husbands are associated with the throne and who don’t want to oppose it, the club morphs into the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU), accepting women of all classes, including market women, and together they launch a protest against the Alake and his tyranny, initially demanding he withdraw the heavy taxation. When he fights back by beating them and using traditional systems like the Oros against them, they take it further by demanding his removal from the throne.

Austen-Peters’s film provides a good summary of who Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was. It captures her stubbornness, bravery, and empathy as she relentlessly fought for women’s rights. It is a fine portrait of an important figure in Nigeria’s lore who has been reduced to basic trivia like being the first woman to drive a car or the parent of a music genius.

She was a woman who faced a king, his chiefs, and their colonial masters and won at great personal cost—a woman so fearless that she deserves to be known for her deeds.

However, the film often feels too simple and safe. It is content with plugging the holes in history lessons while dodging Funmilayo’s personal life and how her fights affected her and her family. There’s a tension that similar biopics have that is sorely missing here. The personal losses their subjects experience, along with their internal and external conflicts as activists fighting for bigger issues while their family lives suffer, are felt more deeply. These conflicts are touched on only fleetingly in Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. 

There’s a scene in which Funmilayo, while in prison after being beaten by the Alake’s guards, wonders whether she should continue her fight against the chiefs. It is brief, and such moments, which would have humanized her character and shown her in another light, never come again. Instead, we have a one-dimensional story of an all-powerful, all-conquering woman, which ends up making the character predictable and boring. She wins and wins and suffers only a little. In reality, she won and suffered and suffered and won and then suffered again.