Efunsetan Aniwura, The Iyalode of Ibadan was is a very wealthy and powerful woman in Ibadan at the end of the 18th century. The community is afraid to question her about her bad manners, but is forced to confront her after she has killed a pregnant slave in public.
The Movie, which is an adaptation of Akinwunmi Isola's play "Efunsetan Aniwura", a historical drama covering the life of the eponymous Yoruba heroine who was the second Iyalode (Queen of Women) of Ibadan and who was killed on 30 June 1874.
The story of Efunsetan Aniwura is intriguing. Her date of birth remains uncertain, but she must have been born around 1790s or around that period. Yoruba epic films and folklores portray Efunsetan as a very vicious woman, filled with prejudice, a woman who died in tragic circumstances. But there are hidden thrills and heroic feat that those who wrote his history continue to undermine.
There is nothing as perplexing as having the story of a great woman being relayed by men, in a society credited for not giving women any chance in socio-political affairs, especially in the primordial times, where women were seen as objects consigned to the kitchen and on the mat top. It is to the glory of Moremi, that her story definitely ignited passion in subsequent Yoruba women, one of which was Efunsetan Aniwura.
This woman of substance has been consistently portrayed as a villain who ran a Gestapo of sorrow and blood, a bloodsucker who beheaded people’s head at will. No. We must deconstruct the narrative that veiled real stories under the cover of the superiority of men over the distinction of some brave women in our troubled history. Efunsetan was the son of an Egba farmer, Ogunrin, a native of Egba Oke-Ona. She rose to become the Iyalode of Ibadan. She was the first woman to set up a flourishing agrarian economy that employed no fewer than 2000 men and women.
Around 1850, worried by the spread of war and combat in the Yoruba country, she introduced infantry military training into the midst of her workers. She was said to have had her own military training in urban and guerrilla warfare after which she requested that the same training be impacted on her slaves, about 2000 of them.
The workers mainly worked in the vast farmland. They produced cash crops, cotton, groundnuts, maize and beef. She was said to be in possession of a vast dairy farm that could feed the entire Yoruba country and beyond.
She traded up to Ghana and the Hausa country and even exported her produce to Europe. In his book, A History of the Yoruba, Prof Banji Akintoye wrote about Efunsetan who she described as a rich “woman trader” that ‘had more than 2000 workers employed on her farms.”
This was at a time the industrial revolution was gaining strength in Europe and agriculture had become the most industrious enterprise in Yorubaland, being one of the service points for European products.
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