Inside The Making Of The Ègbá Women’s Revolt Documentary, 'Record Found Here'

In this interview, filmmaker, Lanaire Aderemi she talks about the experience of making Record Found Here, the source of her love for the arts and balancing academics with creativity.

Lanaire Aderemi first heard about the Ègbá Women’s Revolt from her grandmother as a teenager. At fifteen years old, the enormity of that one historic event and the women behind it, including the story of Fumilayo Ransome Kuti, the leader of the movement, started to build.

This would reveal itself in a further thirst for the facts and nitty gritty of what truly went down at the revolt. 

Record Found Here (see trailer) is the result of this thirst and search. 

The short documentary travels back in time, and through the eyes of witnesses and witnesses of witnesses. Viewers are taken on a stimulating journey of the Ègbá women and their fight against oppression.

This documentary comes just in time after the release of Bolanle Austen Peters’ biopic of Funmilayo Ransome Kuti. Lanaire’s Record Found Here would serve as the fact house of archival unveiling, the round peg to Peters’ Funmilayo Ransome Kuti’s round hole.

In this interview, she talks about the experience of making Record Found Here, the source of her love for the arts, balancing academics with creativity and what coming back to Nigeria after seven years felt like. 

Congratulations on the premiere of your documentary. How do you feel?

Thank you so much. It’s been really good. I feel like I'm processing everything each day as it comes, but I know it's been wonderful. I feel relieved that it's finally out in the world and people saw it. The responses have been fantastic.

We got some news coverage as well, which was really nice. Recently, it struck me that the journey was fast and everything just happened sequentially. We did not have a very long time frame. 

I would like to know the picture that formed in your mind as a 15 year old when your grandmother first told you about the Ègbá women’s revolt ? 

I felt so inspired and was so in awe of the achievements. That was the time when [Chimamanda] Adiche’s We Shouldn't All Be Feminist was everywhere and I remember feeling a sense of pride and confidence.

There is evidence of women's activism prior to our present day. For so long I was also told about Funmilayo Ransome Kuti being the first woman to drive a car, I was very excited to dive deep. They had reduced her entire history to just being a driver and discovering that she was a leader of a movement was so groundbreaking for me. I was excited to just do research more. 

I imagine it is also different now compared to then. You are still the same person, but obviously much grown or older and what is that like for you like a more mature version when you look back ?

I am less concerned about leaders or even emphasizing figures in movements. What I'm more concerned about is the ways in which the people organized the movement. So even with Record Found Here, I was very intentional in not centering Funmilayo Ransome Kuti. This doesn't take away from her amazing achievement because what she did was incredible. However, I think over the years, I really became very intrigued by the erasure of the over 9,000 other women that history unfortunately won’t give credit to. 

These women were market women, I mean some of them were wealthy, but most of them were poor. And I think for me that's also a symptom of who history decides to record as important. So it's often very elite people or higher class people. Mature me is understanding that this movement was a grassroots led movement which happened to be championed by a higher class woman, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti.

Class is something I became even more aware of whilst researching this revolt, how instrumental it was for, first of all, the Abeokuta Ladies Club to become the AWU (The Abeokuta Women's Union) because if they had stuck to their tea drinking and Victorian codes of femininity and etiquette classes, there's no way they could have overthrow that taxation.

One of the things I had to learn was that every single dream has a cost, but also victory needs sacrifice to be achieved. Fumilayo obviously sacrificed her own privileges as well in that I imagine she was out of her comfort zone. I also wrote a play called Protest Hymns and Cascades, which is actually also about the Abeokuta Women’s Revolt. And I staged it in Coventry in the United Kingdom.

There's this scene that explores the conflicts between the women and how they may have felt that FRK was not prioritizing their own agendas. I had to be okay with accepting the limits of the archive. I think a lot of people get frustrated when they can't find information. They either give up or just sort of swim in that frustration. 

I read this amazing paper by this academic, historian and creative writer called Saidiya Hartman, where she spoke about how you should accept the limits of an archive, which essentially means that a lot of the stories that are perhaps maybe pre-colonialism or pre-documentation are often what she calls impossible stories because how you access that is literally by asking people to give you contact.

I used to be very frustrated because I just thought how on earth am I supposed to tell this story with no witnesses? I had to become more mature at just being patient and also being free to ask for help. Fortunately, through the amazing help of Judith Byfield, a credible academic, she co-authored a paper that I actually read about six or seven years ago about taxation and revolt. I emailed her and I asked her if she knew anyone who I could interview.

She directed me to Joseph Ayodokun, who was at the panel after the screening. His input really changed things for us because I went from having zero witnesses, because my grandmother was very young and can't really remember it. What she just shared with me was her own recollection of other people's stories and her own reflection on the event but she herself did not participate in the revolt. So in accepting the limits of the archive, I had to acknowledge that I may not have the witnesses of the revolt but I did  have my grandmother whose oral histories are also valid in this context because sometimes you don't have a witness but you have witness of the witness or you have a storyteller and that itself is credible information. It's credible because it's still the story and is very valuable.

Looking back and compared to the 15 year old you, now you've matured. How do you see it now? 

I really think that this particular historical event is essential to Nigeria's history and our collective imagination as Nigerian people. Because I was 15, I just saw it as wow this is just so amazing but now it's not just amazing, it's that we have to put actions to our words and that's why I've created Record Found Here. I was trying to awaken our audience's imaginations. I also think that my present self is now aware of the legacies even more. 

When we had the EndSARS movement and with FEMCO, for instance, I remember I tweeted something about how the ways they were working was very similar to the Abeokuta Women's Union.

In a way, you see how history just always repeats itself, especially in Nigeria. For me, how I've grown as well with this is knowing that and history repeats itself. I have a duty as a storyteller to educate the public about it so that we don't repeat mistakes and we don't end up in this continuous loop, which I feel like we've been in for so many years, where we say that we're going to change but we never change.

That's often because we didn't fully grasp the lessons of our past. I see this as life's work and work that could be very instrumental, or rather is very instrumental in shaping Nigeria's collective present and our future as well. 

Beyond the responsibility and sense of duty, I can see a fundamental love and passion for storytelling. Where do you think that comes from?

Definitely my mom. Growing up, my mom would tell my sister and I stories to bed every single day. I suppose when you're able to build that kind of routine with your children, it becomes a part of their psyche. She encouraged us to read. We weren't allowed to watch TV during the weekdays, which at the time I really didn't like, but now I'm very glad. We weren't allowed to watch TV after we came to school. We had to read or do our homework, unless we were eating. I think when we were eating dinner, then we could watch TV. 

I was  an inquisitive child, so I was always asking why. Although I'm an extroverted person by my career, really I'm more of an introvert in that I love to be in my own head. I love talking to myself. I remember in primary school, I always had a journal in my blazer or my school bag. I would often sit down in a corner and just write. There's always been this desire to express myself and just release anything in my head. I remember having a WordPress and I would rush to the ICT room and just write poetry before the bell rang and we had to leave for the hostel. It became this thing that I could not let go of in that I just had to write and read.

My parents would take us to see plays at Muson, Terra Kulture and  watch films. I grew up in a family where  arts were very encouraged and my school itself really emphasized the arts. Being immersed in that culture of storytelling, whether it was in my home or in my school, it really made me develop my own love for storytelling and I was thankfully never penalized for being curious or imaginative. I was actually encouraged to continue asking why, which is a fundamental aspect  of crafting narratives.

You excel in the creative and the academic spaces. Do you find yourself showing up differently in these two areas or do you think it’s a symbiotic situation? 

That's a really good question. You know, I remember when I was in university, there was a particular module that I did and I struggled with that module because I constantly felt like I could not be creative in the way I expressed myself. I had to mold my essays to sound very academic using Harvard referencing and form the language the way academics write.

Because I'm someone who hates boredom, I was always trying to think of ways I could translate the knowledge I gained or research into something interesting because the average person would not read an academic paper.

However, the average person would go to a cinema or a gallery. I once described myself as a translator because I struggled between academia and the arts. I also started to realize that I could practice my theory, and I could also theorize my practice, which means that when I create a piece of work, I reflect on the work afterwards, and reference academics or other researchers and I write essays on this. 

So the relationship between academia and arts for me is symbiotic, they feed into each other. I'm grateful for the academic training I received because it was extremely rigorous. It means that I'm very attentive to detail. I'm always very sensitive about things like ethics when it comes to researching because these are things that creative people neglect. For example, you forget to give consent forms and then you get into legal trouble, you know, or you don't reference people and so you are at risk of reproducing the same erasure that you're contesting against so passionately. 

What are your general thoughts about biopics in the context of the points you just made about researching facts and the ethics guiding them?

I'm so passionate about historical accuracy. Maybe that's also my academic background, but I remember when I was writing my first stage play on the revolt, my supervisors said to me that a play is a story, not a journalistic piece. You're a storyteller, not a journalist.

That was a wake up call for me because in that moment I realized I could actually have artistic license and it was very liberating. But it was also challenging because there was still a part of me that wanted to stick to the story and stick to the facts because I was constantly thinking about generations ahead. 

I learned the  importance of  knowing your boundaries and part of being a storyteller is making good decisions at the end of the day. But I think that with regards to Nollywood and biopics, I think that if it's well researched, then I think it's good. I think that it's important for Nollywood to capture stories that are of different genres. So within historical films, you have biopics, you can have films about groups of people or collectives. I mean, you can also have a documentary. You can express the story in different ways. 

What was the highlight of making the film for you?

Definitely meeting the women that witnessed the revolt, the men as well. I just felt so blessed to be able to be at their feet and just listen to their stories. They were very enchanting stories and just meeting them, knowing that I think a lot of times when we study history, we think that the past is so far back, but 80 to 90 years is not that far away. It’s amazing when you meet someone that is over 80 or 90, and they're telling you about their childhood as though it was yesterday.

It makes you appreciate that history even more because you remember Funmilayo Ransome Kuti’s life, for instance, is closer to now than it is to maybe the 18th century or the 19th century, which feels far away. So I felt grateful to be able to listen. That was probably my highlight. They just spoke with so much passion and admiration for Mrs. Ransome Kuti.

What are your plans for the documentary and what impact do you want it to have? How do you intend to get in the faces of more people? 

I definitely want this documentary to show at festivals. My second goal is that it gets to people in schools. Whether it's university, secondary schools, primary schools, because I think that a lot of times students use textbooks, which is very important because reading is good. But if you give a child what you film, they may find that more enjoyable and they learn more things from them. My big dream is really that it gets on a streaming platform. So like a Netflix show, HBO, BBC or Prime, because I really want the short film to be widely distributed and it helps when it's on a streaming platform. 

Do you think you would be exploring more stories like this in the future? 

I'm really into memory, whether it's childhood memories or it's cultural or collective, one of my sort of interests is really exploring memory in different ways. So I guess in terms of what next or what stories I might tell are stories that deal with  childhood memories. I find them nostalgic and playful.

I'm also a Christian and I like to think the Bible has really great stories. I actually wrote a play called Abel and Cain, which is a retelling of Cain and Abel, but it's about sisters. I wrote the play this year and I had it staged at the Hampstead Theatre. It went well and the reception was great. So I'd love to stage my plays. I would love to also write about the Aba Women’s Revolt .

My play, ‘Protests, Hymns and Caskets’ hasn't been staged in Nigeria. So I want to bring that to Lagos and even beyond. Everything about this trip has come full circle because I haven't been to Nigeria in seven years. So I'm really glad I was able to. It was a really good experience for you. It was fantastic. I'm really glad that I got to come and I thank God for the opportunity because it was a real dream come true.