Chief Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (née Frances Abigail Olufunmilayo Thomas, 1900–1978) of Abeokuta was the first Nigerian woman to drive a car, the first woman to attend Abeokuta Grammar School, and the founder of the Abeokuta Women's Union (1946) — which through demonstrations, petitions and tax boycotts forced the abdication of the Alake of Egbaland, Oba Ladipo Ademola II, in January 1949. One of the very few documented instances in Nigerian history of a powerful traditional ruler stepping down primarily because of organised popular pressure.
She is included in this register because the political role of women in late-colonial Nigeria was carried not by Governors' wives but by figures such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Margaret Ekpo and Hajia Gambo Sawaba — the proto-First-Ladies of the Republic to come. She was a founding member of the NCNC delegations to London in 1947, 1949 and 1957, and a delegate of the Federation of Nigerian Women's Societies.
On 18 February 1977 her son Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's Kalakuta Republic compound was attacked by approximately a thousand soldiers of the Obasanjo military government in retaliation for the song 'Zombie'. Funmilayo, then 77, was thrown from a first-floor window. She died of her injuries on 13 April 1978. The woman who had peacefully forced a king to abdicate was killed by an unaccountable state of the kind her activism had once successfully challenged.