The 18-minute film starts with an aerial view of Abeokuta’s hilly landscape that makes the viewer hopeful for what’s to come. aderemi’s soft-spoken poetic narration, alongside an animated Juju number that slowly creeps up on one’s ear, enters to tell us why we are here: 

This film, record found here, documents my journey, twelve years after I first heard of that wonderful story of resistance, into a vast archive that neither sleeps nor slumbers, that’s always living and breathing. It explores records contained in oral testimonies, historical sites, newspapers and official documents and excavates the archives to open up possibilities to present and future generations, so that we may see the unseen, know the unknown and learn our resistant history anew. 

The film’s first chapter, titled ‘record’, opens with a closeup view of an elderly woman who turns out to be aderemi’s grandmother, Mrs Adenike Sangosanya. Then we are introduced to an eighty-six-year-old man, Pa ESV Ayodele Gbadegbo Sangosanya, who tells us how the single portrait of his mother, who died when he was only four years old, spurred his interest in recording and preserving memories through photography. It soon becomes clear that the purpose of this chapter is to introduce us to the genesis of aderemi’s love affair with history: the grandmother who traded fairytale stories for true stories of resistance and the grandfather who, through numerous portraits and stacks of photo albums, taught her the importance of documentation.  

From the Sangosanyas’ home in Lagos, we are then taken on a journey to Abeokuta for the next chapter of the film, ‘found’. The Juju music erupts again, prepping us for a homecoming into Egbaland. We are introduced to the witnesses, or testifiers as aderemi likes to call them, octogenarian and nonagenarian men and women who are all in their element, garbed in elaborate traditional Yoruba attire against the backdrop of aging houses with the characteristic architecture of old Abeokuta. Their accounts are mostly given in Yoruba, not because their English is not impeccable, but because the indigenous language in all its grandeur carries the weight of the story. They passionately narrate how Ransome-Kuti mobilized both the proletarian and upper-class women to challenge the colonial tax system which began in the aftermath of the First World War.  

According to the testifiers, the Egba market women were impoverished by the cut-throat taxes and some of them even resorted to selling their wares at night to avoid being caught by the authorities. Ransome-Kuti initially cultivated a relationship with the market women by meeting them at Isabo and Lafenwa (major markets in Abeokuta) and teaching them how to read and calculate their profits. Then, she would gradually slip in conversations about the unfairness of taxation and in so doing, galvanize their resistance. The markets became the starting point of the protests, where Egba women, clad in white clothes, would gather in large numbers and march to the palace of Alake, the ruler of Egbaland who instituted the taxes on the behalf of the colonial government. There, they would play the drums and sing songs that mocked the Alake and demanded that he step down.  

In one particularly enchanting scene, three of the female testifiers cheerily sing one of the protest songs while swaying from side to side on their seats. The song (translated to English) goes, ‘you are doing too much…Idowu with sores. The thread of the lantern will expose the secrets of Alake, an unfaithful man.’  Their rendition made me wonder if these songs became a part of pop culture after the revolt, since these women only watched the protests from afar, as they were merely adolescents when they happened. It also made me yearn for more protest songs, which I feel the crew could have done better at highlighting by asking the women to sing more songs, that is, if it was a possibility—and, perhaps, closing out the film with the extracted audio of their singing. 

The third and final chapter of the film, ‘here’, is an entry into the Abeokuta Archives Department in a building that’s aging as much as the history it is trying to preserve—a telltale sign of Nigeria’s poor maintenance culture. aderemi celebrates how thorough the Egba women were about documenting their acts as the camera slowly pans over letters (written in Yoruba) by Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU), newspaper clippings with headlines of Ransome-Kuti’s and the Egba women’s feats, and AWU meeting notes. In one of the records, according to aderemi, it is said that three thousand women were present when a resolution was passed during an AWU’s meeting on 13 April 1947.