Ugandan women protesting in Kampala in A couple of months ago, a firestorm of controversy and debate was ignited in Uganda when Dr Stella Nyanzi stripped naked as a form of protest. Earlier this week, that investigation filed its report, which concluded that Nyanzi should face disciplinary action for gross misconduct and insubordination.
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On July 23, a group of women—dressed in black, solemn, and enraged—accompanied a number of unclad elderly women marching on the town of Samaru Kataf, pleading for an end to the relentless attacks. The recent rebellion by the women of southern Kaduna refocused my attention on this controversial tactic of protest. Nude protests began in pre-colonial Africa. For centuries, mothers and grandmothers—the sentinels of societal rectitude—have used nudity to curse defaulters. Their bodies possessed the power to give as well as take lives whenever they deemed it fit. Nudity is often used as a last resort. Their bodies transmuted into weapons. Suddenly, the customs cascading the repression of the female body no longer mattered. And at this moment, the roles of these women were upended from dispensable members of the community, to overseers. The women were no longer shamed for their nakedness, rather the offenders were shamed for failing in their functions.
'Look at books, not legs'
Yesterday a group of black women protested topless in the streets of San Francisco. In tandem with the sayhername campaign, women throughout the United States organized to rally against the continued dismissal of violence against black women in the U. A last resort. Black women, specifically throughout Africa have been using naked protests and genital cursing for centuries to express intolerance and other forms of resistance- referred to as the curse of nakedness. However, according to Barbara Sutton, the African context of naked protests can only be understood through an examination of African contexts of nudity, nakedness and dress- and it should be noted that even within Nigeria, understandings of the naked body varies between ethnic groups.
In July , hundreds of female protestors in Nigeria occupied properties owned by Chevron Texaco. By threatening to take off their clothes, the women convinced corporate authorities to negotiate with them for better resource management and for environmental justice. Public nakedness catches eyes, makes headlines, and sometimes, as in the Chevron Texaco case, gets things done. Yet Naminata Diabate , assistant professor of comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, seeks a more nuanced analysis of this and other incidents of naked protest, particularly by women in Africa. The act of disrobing, Diabate said, has been used as a form of deviation, protest or resistance in many times and places, including ancient Greece, 18th-century China, the French Revolution and the present day.