Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (born Frances Abigail Olufunmilayo Thomas) was a teacher, political campaigner, women's rights activist, traditional aristocrat and founder of the Nigerian Women’s Union. She was one of the most prominent leaders of her generation and was the mother of Afrobeat musician and political activist Fela Kuti.

Early Life and Family
Ransome-Kuti was born on October 25, 1900 in Abeokuta, Ogun State. Her father, Daniel Olumeyuwa Thomas, was the son of a returned slave from Sierra Leone who traced his ancestral history back to Abeokuta. He became a member of the Anglican Faith and soon returned to the homeland of his fellow Egbas.
Ransome-Kuti attended St John’s Primary School, Igbe in Abeokuta from 1906 to 1913. In 1914, she became a student at the Abeokuta Girls' Grammar School, a Christian missionary school founded in 1908. She took her Preceptor’s Examination at the Grammar School and taught there until May 1919 when she was sponsored by the Church Missionary Society and her father’s cousin, a UAC agent, to study in England. 
Ransome-Kuti enrolled at Wincham Hall College where she studied domestic sciences, education, French and music. She decided to drop the names Frances and Abigail and to be known only by her shortened third name, Funmilayo. Upon receiving her teaching credentials, she returned to Nigeria in 1922 and taught at the Abeokuta Girls' Grammar School from 1923 to 1924. There, she met Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, an Anglican minister who was the school’s principal at the time. The two married on January 20, 1925 and had four children: three sons - Fela, Beko and Olikoye - and one daughter, Dolu. Reverend Ransome-Kuti became the first president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) from 1931 to 1954; the NUT was the first multi-ethnic and nationalist association in the country. He was also a human rights activist and both husband and wife worked to end colonialism in Nigeria.
In the 1970s, decades after the death of her husband, she (along with her youngest son Fela) changed her last name to Anikulapo-Kuti; Anikulapo is a Yoruba word that roughly translates to “warrior who carries powerful protection” or “he who carries death in his pouch.”

Activism
Ransome-Kuti was known throughout her career as an educator and activist. She organised literacy classes for women in the 1920s and founded a nursery school in the 1930s. In 1942, she founded the Abeokuta Ladies' Club (ALC) for educated women involved in charitable work. She also started the Social Welfare for Market Women club to help educate working-class women (the first adult education program for women in Nigeria). Along with Eniola Soyinka (her sister-in-law and the mother of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka), she merged the ALC and the market women’s club to form the Egba or Abeokuta Women's Union, which had a membership of over 20,000 individuals. The core objective of the organisation was fighting against the arbitrary exercise of colonial power by the British-supported puppet king of Egbaland, the imposition of taxes on women without granting them the right to vote and the attempt by the British to control markets run by women (trading was one of the major occupations of women in Western Nigeria of the time). Through this project, she also supported Nigeria’s independence movement.
In 1949, she led a protest against the native authorities, in particular the Alake of Egbaland, Oba Ademola II. She presented documents alleging abuse of authority by the Alake who had been granted the right to collect the taxes by the British colonial government. Through a series of marches involving tens of thousands of women, a refusal to pay taxes, strikes and a wide spectrum of measures of civilian disobedience, the Abeokuta Women's Union forced the Alake to abdicate his throne and won women representation in the Sole Native Authority (a committee that was granted some say in the colonial administration). This eventually drove the administration of the Egba kingdom, which was under the authority of Great Britain, to the brink of collapse. These protests (which caused a sensation across the nation and internationally) are often referred to historically as the 'Egba Women's War' or the 'Nigerian Women's Struggle'.
Ransome-Kuti’s political activism led to her being called the doyen of female rights in Nigeria as well as 'The Mother of Africa'. She also oversaw the successful abolition of separate tax rates for women.
In 1953, the Egba Women’s Union became the Federation of Nigerian Women Societies, which subsequently formed an alliance with the Women's International Democratic Federation (of which Ransome-Kuti was made World Vice-President in the same year).