logo
    • Magazine
    • Membership
    • Donate
  • Racial Justice
  • Economic Justice
    • Collections
  • Climate Justice
  • Health Justice
  • Leadership
  • CONTENT TYPES
  • Subscribe
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Complimentary Webinars
    • Premium On-Demand Webinars
  • Membership
  • Submissions

Laying It Bare: Reflections on Africa’s Nude Feminist Protest Movement

Titilope Ajayi
May 12, 2016
Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print

May 5, 2016; The Guardian

Stella Nyanzi may have unwittingly started a revolution—a naked one. When the Ugandan academic was locked out of her university office in April over a departmental dispute, she stripped in protest, risking ridicule in the conservative country where a controversial anti-pornography law led to mob attacks against women in miniskirts in 2014. At the time, Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister, Simon Lokodo, reportedly said, “Put on a miniskirt but please don’t expose your thighs, your buttocks and your genitalia.” In April, he ordered that Nyanzi be arrested for her demonstration and charged for indecency under the same law, though it’s unclear from media reports whether this took place. Ugandan mainstream media mocked Nyanzi, labeling her “controversial” and “diehard” and deriding her body parts. Yet, she succeeded in getting her office reopened. Days later, students held successive anti-rape protests at Rhodes and Witswatersrand universities in South Africa. Like Nyanzi, many of the protesters were topless as they made their demands. As various media exploded with their censored images, their stories and public reactions to them prompted me to look deeper at the issue.

Naked protests are an ancient form of resistance by women across Africa. In the past, strong and deeply rooted beliefs about the spiritual power of a woman’s nudity made them a dreaded last-resort tool. The older the woman, the stronger the sense of fear and reverence. Those beliefs hold true today, arguably to a lesser degree, but the more frequent use of naked protests by younger women is sparking debate about their relevance and impact.

The significances of women’s nude protests are multiple. The very act of disrobing in public, even partially, is a metaphor for vulnerability, the anguished cry for help of people who have nothing left to lose. Nude protests are also acts of defiance of the patriarchal cultural norms surrounding women’s bodies. By being naked in public on their own terms—not in sanctioned public cultural displays, sexualized art, or situations of sex or sexual violence—women reclaim ownership and power over their bodies, many of which have been ravaged by abuse.

The high shock value attached to nude protests stems from a tacit understanding that they are an extreme reaction to extreme threats or abuse. They command the attentions of perverts and policymakers alike. Nude protests make people talk, for good or bad, forcing them to confront their personal attitudes and ingrained cultural contradictions toward nudity.

Sign up for our free newsletters

Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Each of these significances is amplified today by the use of technology to spread news across the world in mere seconds. Like Nyanzi, partakers in South Africa’s nude protests shared photos of their bodies on social media in ways that would not have been possible twenty years ago.

It is difficult to determine the impact of this type of protest. Nudity does not necessarily guarantee success, only attention. Nyanzi got her office back. The students of Rhodes and Witwatersrand are still negotiating with their schools’ authorities while a clothed solidarity protest holds at Cape Town University. Impact is relative anyway, and the success of social movements “cannot simply be measured by immediate political effects,” argue Zachariah Mampilly and Adam Branch in their 2015 book on African protests and political change. Maybe the protests are an achievement in themselves? Their greatest significance lies less in the change they cause than what they symbolize: a resurgence of female radical activism parallel to the rise of social movements across Africa. This is particularly telling in South Africa, where there has been a wave of socio-political protests in recent months.

Responses to these protests vary. Hundreds of comments have been posted under the hashtag #nakedprotest on Twitter and Facebook: Some mocked the women, calling them prey for rapists; others praised and encouraged them. A few thought the protests were pointless in the face of an uncaring government; the rest were indifferent.

The police were unequivocal: They arrested some of the protesters while using teargas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets to disperse them. This assault on women at their most vulnerable shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the aims, motives, and tools of the naked protests. One observer pointed out that the police were more aggressive toward the nude protesters than they have ever been toward sexual violence and its perpetrators.

Gender violence against women is not subsiding. In a context of rising dissatisfaction with poor governance and falling thresholds of political tolerance, women are seeking and creating new spaces alongside global uprisings and speaking out about the challenges they face as women that tend to be subsumed within or trivialized by non-feminist movements. But nude protests could lose their potency if they become too trendy.—Titilope Ajayi

Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Titilope Ajayi

Titilope is an independent editor, writer, and civil society and gender and security scholar. She is currently a PhD student of international affairs at the University of Ghana, Legon, and also a 2017/8 Social Science Research Council Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Doctoral Fellow. For more, follow her on Twitter: @MataLope

More about: ActivismFeminismNonprofit NewsWomen’s Rights

Become a member

Support independent journalism and knowledge creation for civil society. Become a member of Nonprofit Quarterly.

Members receive unlimited access to our archived and upcoming digital content. NPQ is the leading journal in the nonprofit sector written by social change experts. Gain access to our exclusive library of online courses led by thought leaders and educators providing contextualized information to help nonprofit practitioners make sense of changing conditions and improve infra-structure in their organizations.

Join Today
logo logo logo logo logo
See comments

NPQ_Winter_2022Subscribe Today
You might also like
Eliminating Biphobia Through Breath, Brotherhood, and the Arts
H. “Herukhuti” Sharif Williams
Fair Wages Come to Washington DC
Rithika Ramamurthy
How Can We Make Public Commissions More Democratic?
Iris Crawford
Redefining Black Farming
Iris Crawford
Widening the Lens: Reimagining Leadership Among Young Women of Color
Sara Guillermo
Five Years after Hurricane Maria, Energy Justice in Puerto Rico Gains Ground
Jonathan Castillo Palanco and Ruth Santiago

Popular Webinars

Remaking the Economy

Black Food Sovereignty, Community Stories

Register Now

Combating Disinformation and Misinformation in 21st-Century Social Movements

Register Now

Remaking the Economy

Closing the Racial Wealth Gap

Register Now
You might also like
Eliminating Biphobia Through Breath, Brotherhood, and the...
H. “Herukhuti” Sharif Williams
Fair Wages Come to Washington DC
Rithika Ramamurthy
How Can We Make Public Commissions More Democratic?
Iris Crawford

Like what you see?

Subscribe to the NPQ newsletter to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

See our newsletters

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Independent & in your mailbox.

Subscribe today and get a full year of NPQ for just $59.

subscribe
  • About
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Copyright
  • Careers

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

 

Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.