100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  Well then. What do you think happened next? Soyinka describes the scene that followed: ‘The women stripped his fellow council members down to their shorts and used the men’s chiefly regalia to beat them.’

  Let’s throw in a few more of these bad boys:

  What happened then, however, was the most moment of all. The older women of the group started to strip off, and hang out in front of the palace, nearly or completely naked, just chilling. At this point, the Alake lost the support of his council. He gave the fuck up, friends. He couldn’t take it any more. He couldn’t deal with the songs and the bad press and all the naked old ladies trapping him inside.

  He left the compound on 29 July 1948 and went into exile. Not only that, but the protest forced the colonial government to abolish taxes on the women, at least temporarily. It just goes to show, girls, that with enough good pals, a bit of organisation, and a naked grandmother or two, you can do anything.

  By the end of the protest, Funmilayo was pretty famous throughout the land. And what a fabulous thing to be famous for. We should all want to be famous for something exactly like this. Her role as a leading activist was cemented, and the success of the AWU led to the foundation of the Nigerian Women’s Union, because if one town’s women can get together and cause that much mayhem, what can a whole country’s women do?

  Ransome-Kuti ended up being one of the few women at the top of Nigerian nationalist politics, and agitated for independence from Britain. She advocated for women’s right to vote, and was the first woman in Nigeria to drive a car. She wrote that ‘no country can rise against its womenfolk,’ and that women ‘should be conscious of their womanhood and set a value on it, for only in this way will they be able to free themselves from intimidation and terrorism.’

  When she saw that nationalist parties in Nigeria did not support women (yet wanted their votes), she started her own party, the Commoner People’s Party. She and her hubby founded multiple students’ and teachers’ unions, and worked their whole lives in the name of trade unionism, nationalism, and anti-colonialism.

  She also raised a family of activist and musician sons – including Fela Kuti – and had more famous musicians among her grandsons, Femi Kuti and Seun Kuti. In his 1981 song ‘Coffin for Head of State’ Fela commemorated his mother’s death following a brutal raid on their compound in 1977. She died the next year from injuries after being thrown from a high window by soldiers. After her tragic death, Funmilayo’s family carried on her legacy of activism and political agitation.

  68

  Queen Liliuokalani

  1838–1917

  I am sorry to have to be the one to inform you that this is another tale of terrible white men being terribly terrible. We can’t seem to escape them on this journey around the world. Even worse, it’s businessmen. How dearly I would have liked to ban them from these pages, but alas, here we are again. Men have a way of making everything about themselves.

  White people came to Hawaii in the late 18th century, beginning with the fabled Captain James Cook, who was promptly killed for attempting to kidnap the head Hawaiian chief in retaliation for a stolen boat (RIP). I don’t know why he thought this would work out just fine, but anyway, there’s a famous painting of the whole sorry incident for you to admire entitled Death of Captain Cook. The first missionaries arrived in the 1820s, led by one Hiram Bingham I. Remember Hiram Bingham III, who raced Annie Smith Peck to the tops of mountains? This guy was his grandfather.

  Fast-forward 70 years, and a continued stream of European missionaries and sugar growers had made their way to the islands and decided that they were very clever and good and therefore should be in charge. They created the Hawaiian League and forced the Hawaiian King Kalakaua to sign a new constitution which would limit his powers, and disenfranchise the Asian and native Hawaiian residents of the islands by way of land ownership and literacy requirements. Only 3% of the population ended up with the ability to vote and stand for office – all of them fancy white educated clever men who were good and noble and therefore allowed to be bastards, because, I dunno, they think they look the most like God. The constitution came to be known as the Bayonet Constitution, and it perfectly paired the colonial penchant for violence with its interest in rules and the illusion of legitimacy. ‘Well it says right here, in the thing that we wrote to give ourselves power, that we have all the power. You can’t argue with that logic!’

  Kalakaua died in 1891 and was succeeded by his sister, Liliuokalani. She was a gifted composer and musician, and would be the last Queen of Hawaii, ending a monarchy begun with the unification of the islands in 1795. Hoping to undo the shittiness of the Bayonet Constitution, Liliuokalani proposed restoring her powers and extending the franchise to native Hawaiians. Horrified at the thought, a group of 13 white businessmen created the Committee of Safety, and by ‘safety’ they meant ‘organise a coup to remove the queen by military force.’ Another example of old white men clinging to their safe spaces like the special snowflakes they are.

  The aim of the men was to achieve annexation to the United States. However the president at the time, Grover Cleveland, known for serving two non-consecutive presidential terms and also for having a pudding instead of a face, ordered the men to restore the Queen to power and chill the fuck out.

  In 1895, Hawaiians attempted a counter-coup to restore the Queen, but it failed and 100 men and the Queen herself were all arrested. The government of the newly declared Republic of Hawaii implemented martial law and accused the plotters of treason. You know, treason against the state they just invented by overthrowing the former one. Yes, it is all perfectly logical in the timeless manner of logical white colonisers. The government, under one Sanford Dole, who had a long, forked beard that you have to see to believe and was related to the Doles of banana fame, found everyone guilty and sentenced some to death.

  The Queen was presented with a document of formal abdication and told if she would sign it that the lives of the men on trial would be spared. She signed, hoping to spare their lives, but, surprise! They carried on with the trials and the death sentences – though amid international outcry they would later be commuted. As for the Queen, they had found guns and bombs buried under her flowerbeds, and found her guilty of treason as well. It’s like if I suddenly invented a state, the Republic of Memes, and found the Queen of England guilty of treason for not being into it. Or if I walked into your house and said, ‘I declare this house mine,’ and then called the police to come arrest you for breaking into your own house.

  After a period of house arrest, Liliuokalani went to DC to petition the White House against annexation to the United States – but in 1898, Hawaii became a US territory. She continued to work trying to win back compensation and land from the government, and was eventually given a small pension. She continued to make public appearances until her death in 1917 at the age of 79. In 1959, Hawaii became the 50th and last state of the United States, at least until it claims the moon once and for all. It wouldn’t be until 1993, nearly a hundred years after the fact, that Congress apologised for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.

  69

  Fanny Cochrane Smith

  1834–1905

  We are inhabitants of a time in which we take careful photographs and written records of every above-average lunch we have ever eaten, so that our grandchildren will not be denied these precious memories of their forebears. For the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, Australia, however, nearly every memory of their heritage was wiped out when British colonisers arrived in 1803 and brought along with them their trademark gifts of disease, deportation, displacement, massacres and broken promises. The British have always been so quaint and charming!

  When the Aboriginal woman Fanny Cochrane Smith spoke into the large brass trumpet of an Edison phonograph between 1899 and 1903, she would record and preserve the oral history, traditional songs, language, and artistic legacy of her people. She called herself ‘the last Tasmanian Aboriginal’, which she was not, however she was amo
ng the last to fluently speak a native Tasmanian language, of which there were at least nine, and to remember the songs from before the time of white fuckery.

  Fanny was born in 1834 on Flinders Island, in a settlement where survivors of disease and fighting on the main island of Tasmania had been sent to live in even worse conditions. As a child, she moved to Hobart and was trained in European settler institutions to become a domestic servant for appalling and abusive employers. When Aboriginal survivors were moved once again to Oyster Cove, Fanny went too and there married an Englishman who had been sent to Australia for stealing a donkey, which as far as British crimes go is pretty tame. The family lived off timber and ran a boarding house, and converted to Methodism. Fanny would cook traditional Aboriginal food and sing traditional Aboriginal music at Methodist functions, and became known for her witty hosting.

  Fanny was in her 70s when the phonograph recordings were made on wax cylinders engraved with tracks, like a vinyl record, which are so delicate that every time you play them they break down a little more, much like me. Because of this, they have only been played between six and ten times, but have since been transferred to more modern equipment so that they can be heard now, 120 years later. Their sound quality is poor, but clear enough if you consider the scope of history that has passed between Fanny uttering those words, her own words, and us listening to them today. They are considered the first recorded oral history, in sound, of an Aboriginal person recounting their own stories – and the oldest recording of an Aboriginal language. The original wax cylinders still exist at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, a rare example of an indigenous person getting to speak for herself, and still speaking for herself 120 years later.

  70

  Lillian Ngoyi

  1911–1980

  South African apartheid was one of the most extreme examples of white idiocy and violence ever to grace this good green earth, and Lillian Ngoyi was one of the many incredible women who fought to end it. If you’re not familiar with the word, ‘apartheid’ was the official state segregation policy that governed South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s – yes, that recent – instituted by ever more fucked-up laws passed by the country’s white government. South Africans were divided into four racial groups – you could be ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘coloured’ or ‘Indian’, and your classification determined everything from whom you could marry and where you could live to whether or not you were even a South African citizen – by the 1960s only white South Africans were allowed to vote.

  It’s incredible to think about the sheer effort required to maintain the apartheid system; the time and money and bureaucracy it took to prop up a segregated society when it probably would have been much easier to just not be fucking racist. But, well, some people adore their deep, long, historical, political and economic commitments to being racists and will go to great lengths to preserve their own destructive ignorance. Meanwhile, the US and Britain happily continued to defend, support and sell arms to the apartheid government right until the bitter end, because they are freedom-loving and enlightened western countries who know what’s best for the world.

  Lillian Ngoyi was born in 1911 to an extremely poor family in the capital city of Pretoria. Her father was a mine worker who died when she was young, and her mother worked in the households of white families at various domestic tasks. One of Lillian’s earliest and most affecting memories was of a time when she and her brother went to deliver laundry to the house of one of her mother’s white clients, and were not allowed inside – but a dog was.

  After she left school, Lillian married, and worked as a trainee nurse in Johannesburg until her husband died and apartheid laws forced the uprooting of black South Africans from city suburbs and into crowded segregated ‘townships’ away from the cities. She ended up in Soweto, which would be the site of some of the most important uprisings in the fight against apartheid.

  Lillian got a job as a seamstress, joined the Garment Workers’ Union, and soon became a labour organiser among the women in her industry. In 1950, she joined the African National Congress, or ANC, now the ruling party of South Africa but which began as a resistance movement in the early 20th century. One of the many fucked-up features of apartheid were the ‘pass laws’ which required black South African men to carry internal passports with them in order to prove their reasons for entering white areas of the country. In the 1950s, as the government intended to extend the pass laws to women as well as men, the ANC organised the Defiance Campaign against these laws. Between June and October 1952, 8,000 people were arrested for protesting the pass laws – and hundreds were killed when police officers opened fire at a protest that came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre.

  Lillian took part in these actions, purposefully using the ‘white facilities’ of a post office in an act of civil disobedience. She was arrested, but quickly rose up through the ranks of the ANC as a gifted leader and public speaker. Within a year of joining, she became the first woman elected to the national executive committee, and went on to lead the Federation of South African Women. In 1956, Lillian and others led a march of over 20,000 women to the offices of the Prime Minister to deliver a petition with over 100,000 signatures against the proposed pass laws for women. It was the largest protest that South Africa had ever seen, and it was Lillian who would rap on the door of prime minister Johannes Geradus Strijdom, who was a real bastard on the scale of great bastards of history, to deliver the petitions.

  In her 1966 memoir Tomorrow’s Sun, the anti-apartheid activist Helen Joseph recalls how, after handing over the petition, Lillian led 30 minutes of solid silence at the head of the 20,000 person-strong crowd, in response to a government law forbidding speeches at rallies:

  As we stepped on that rostrum again and faced them, our hands empty now, those thousands of women rose spontaneously to their feet, lifting their hands in the Congress salute …Thirty minutes, and still the arms were raised. Lillian began to sing.

  At an ANC women’s conference in 1956, Lillian gave an incredible speech issuing a warning to Prime Minister Strijdom directly:

  Strijdom! Your government now preach and practice colour discrimination. It can pass the most cruel and barbaric laws, it can deport leaders and break homes and families, but it will never stop the women of Africa in their forward march to freedom during our lifetime. To you daughters of Africa I say, Praise the name of women; praise them.

  Lillian died in 1980, and so did not live to see the dismantling of apartheid, which was brought about by an international protest movement to boycott the South African regime, in tandem with the daring activism of men and women like her. Among the many lessons to take from this struggle, here are two: never assume that just because something is the law, that it is right, or worth respecting. And secondly, the next time someone asks you with an air of false and cynical knowingness, ‘What have protests ever achieved?’ banish them from your life.

  71

  Miriam Makeba

  1932–2008

  If you’ve heard just one of South African singer Miriam Makeba’s songs, it’s probably her greatest hit, ‘Pata Pata’, which was released in 1967. ‘It’s a song with no meaning at all,’ she once explained to an interviewer, laughing. ‘Because it’s about a dance. A dance called Pata Pata … I would have preferred another song to be popular than “Pata Pata”. But people choose what they want.’

  Miriam’s music was in fact so much more meaningful than the fun hit ‘Pata Pata’ that it was considered dangerous by the apartheid South African regime and banned, and Miriam was forced to spend most of her life in exile from her home country.

  Miriam was born in 1932 in Johannesburg. Her father died when she was young and she had to get a job as a domestic servant, while her mother worked for a white family and was forced to live far from her own children. Miriam’s beginnings were rough, as she dealt with the most depressing trifecta of apartheid, an awful husband, and breast cancer, but her talent as a singer would lead her to a
life of international celebrity.

  Miriam’s big break came in the 1950s when she sang with several bands including the all-woman group The Skylarks. She gained international recognition when she performed two songs in the 1959 anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which had to be filmed in secret and was smuggled out of the country by the filmmaker, Lionel Rogosin. Though black artists were not allowed to travel from South Africa, Lionel bribed some officials to allow him to bring Miriam to the film’s premiere at the 1960 Venice film festival. The film shot Miriam to fame. She embarked on a tour across Europe and America, and moved to New York where she was taken under the wing of the singer Harry Belafonte.

  Her music combined American jazz with South African styles, and was a huge hit. Miriam sang about love and heartbreak, but she also sang about the brutal reality of being a black South African. She had a wide smile and was completely glamorous, and she sang with a clear and heart-stopping voice that trembled with a delicate vibrato to convey the deep emotion of her songs. Things were going well for her career when Miriam heard that her mother had died. She wanted to return to South Africa to attend the funeral but discovered that the apartheid government had revoked her passport and she couldn’t go back. The exile lasted for decades, as she painfully recounted it to the author Hank Bordowitz:

  I always wanted to leave home. I never knew they were going to stop me from coming back. Maybe, if I knew, I never would have left. It is kind of painful to be away from everything that you’ve ever known. Nobody will know the pain of exile until you are in exile. No matter where you go, there are times when people show you kindness and love, and there are times when they make you know that you are with them but not of them. That’s when it hurts.