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Paper short abstract

Through the 2024 film Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, this paper uses Oyewumi’s decolonial lens to show how African women’s knowledge systems reclaim agency, resist patriarchy, and model culturally grounded, transformative approaches to development.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the foundations of development by posing a critical question: What might development be if reimagined through the lived experiences and intellectual traditions of African women? Anchored in a close reading of the 2024 biographical film Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, directed by Bolanle Austen-Peters, the study foregrounds Indigenous African epistemologies as sites of agency, resistance, and futurity. The film's portrayal of Funmilayo's leadership within the Abeokuta Women's Union serves as a compelling narrative to examine how African women's knowledge systems, rooted in communal ethics, relational authority, and cultural continuity, mobilize collective action and political resistance against colonial and patriarchal paradigms. The analysis situated within Oyeronke Oyewumi's decolonial gender theory, challenges the imposition of Western gender binaries onto African social formations, and asserts that precolonial Yoruba society organized social relations through seniority and relationality. The paper argues that Funmilayo's activism exemplifies a distinct African feminist praxis. Her use of protest songs, women's assemblies, and moral suassion reflects a development model grounded not in individualism or extractive growth, but in communal well-being and culturally embedded ethics. By centering African feminist epistemology, this study positions Funmilayo's life and activism as both a historical archive and blueprint for alternative development futures. It contends that Indigenous African knowledge systems offer critical insights into agency, justice, and community-led transformation-insights that are urgently needed in an era marked by global epistemic dislocation. Consequently, the paper calls for reorientation of development discourse, that privileges African women's intellectual traditions as generative frameworks for equitable, sustainable, and culturally resonant futures.