ARTICLES
Journal of Gender Studies, 2023
In 2020, ignited by rising levels of police brutality towards youth in Nigeria, the #ENDSARS movement erupted in Nigeria. Protestors rallied against the nation’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), calling for its disbandment after people became fed up with the brutality it unleashed on innocent citizens. However, the issues raised by the #ENDSARS movement are not new, and the movement is reminiscent of decades of organizing against Nigerian police forces. Drawing on archival data, this paper investigates the nature of police violence against Black women in Nigeria under colonialism between 1925 and 1930. This article examines two separate instances of Black women’s organizing in southeastern Nigeria against market tolls that particularly affected women. In both instances, their cries were met with brutal force from the police which prompted new rounds of activism from the women. Findings reveal that police violence against Black women was gendered, racialized, and capitalist. In turn, this paper seeks to uncover what the Movement for Black Lives has termed the ‘vestiges of colonialism’ in the system of policing in Nigeria.
Black Women’s Lives Matter: Social Movements and Storytelling against Sexual and Gender-based Violence in the US
Feminist Review, 2021
According to the US Department of Justice, women (33 percent) are more likely than men (19 percent to experience violent victimisation (Morgan and Kena, 2018). Black women students are especially at risk of experiencing rape or sexual assault (Planty et al., 2013). A special report on sexual violence among college-age women found that between 1995 and 2013, the rate of sexual violence victimization for Black females was 2.5 times higher than for white females (Sinozich and Langton, 2014). Furthermore, unlike other groups, Black women students were more likely to experience sexual victimization than Black women non-students (ibid.). While Black women students experience higher rates of sexual violence, they remain on the periphery in discussions about sexual violence in higher education and violence against Black women (Wooten, 2017). Black women's violent victimization in higher education and the marginal attention to the problem reveal the persistence of the US' historical legacy of racist and sexual violence.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2021
This study examines the activism of the Ogoni women of southern Nigeria who have organized with their community since the early 1990s to speak against the state and multinational oil companies’ exploitation of their people and resources between 1993 and 2017. The article intends to shed light on the women’s practices of resistance in their movement for self-determination. Through the example of Ogoni women’s activism I provide an illustration of nonviolent resistance as an appropriate mode of resistance to the coloniality of gender because it works to fight the invisibility of Black women. I reveal the operations of the coloniality of gender in the experiences of Ogoni women and their participation in the Ogoni movement. Then I identify ways the Nigerian colonial and neocolonial state denies the women’s existence, and I discuss how they act to insist upon their humanity. In turn, I respond to María Lugones’s call to shed light on the various modes operating in the “oppressing/resisting process at the fractured locus of the colonial difference.”
CSW Policy Briefs, 2019
Forcible sex offenses represented 29% of all reported campus crime in 2015.1 Current implementations of Title IX policies in higher education emphasize punitive responses to sexual assault rather than restorative methods which require counseling for affected parties. The tendency toward punishment nei- ther attends to the needs of assault- ed students nor of those perpetrating assault, and studies have shown that members of both populations are like- ly to have been assaulted in the past. Further, the use of campus law en- forcement to address sexual assault re- produces racial, gendered, and sexual inequality that results in the dispro- portionate victimization, over-policing, and criminalization of people of col- or and gender non-conforming people. Given that 69.7% of 14- to 17-year- olds in the United States have been assaulted, and of those, 27.4% have been sexually victimized, universities and colleges cannot ignore students’ prior histories of abuse or how inter- sectionality shapes students’ experi- ences of sexual violence.2 This brief presents restorative justice approaches that aim to address these issues.
African Studies Quarterly, 2015
The Story of the Nigerian Civil War from 1967-1970 has been revisited time and again from various perspectives. In The Biafran War, Gould uses archival information coupled with interviews and personal knowledge of key players in the war to clarify the events that led up to and prolonged the war. The first half of the book, Chapters 1-4, chronologically details events before and during the war. The second part of the book from Chapters 5-7 revisits the same narrative of the war topically, addressing the factors that contributed to the longevity of the war like the two leaders Gowon and Ojukwo’s personalities. He also uses the opportunity to dispel popular myths about the war including clarifying the number of casualties and the international influences on the war. The result is a well-crafted historical account of a young Nigeria struggling to define its own future while burdened by colonial legacies.
Author(s): Keys, Domale | Advisor(s): Suárez-Orozco, Carola E. | Abstract: The Ogoni movement has become a key example of civil resistance in postcolonial Africa, yet women’s role in the movement has been largely suppressed. Since the early 1990s, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) has organized against the Nigerian government and multinational corporations’ oil drilling activities in Ogoni. This study explains how and why the Ogoni women of Nigeria (1990-2017) joined their community in calling attention to the exploitation of their people at the hands of the Nigerian government and multinational oil companies, while documenting how and why they became key players in nonviolent campaigns in the Niger Delta in seeking correctives and justice. I not only examine women’s contribution to the movement by looking at the issues that has drawn women into the movement but also seek to understand how those issues are reflected in the campaigns that they waged. Furthermore...