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A pamphlet published by the Egba Women’s Union after the Fall of the Alake. This digitised copy was accessed through Professor Judith Byfield.

Click the link to read the pamphlet here.

In my paternal family, there was a rule that my grandfather often reiterated to my mother, “obinrin o ki n soro ni ile wa,” which means “women do not speak in our household.” My mother would scoff in annoyance as she was a polytechnic lecturer whom one might presume had overcome the limits of patriarchal silencing. However, the utterance underlines the significance of women’s experiences, particularly the realities of marrying into the the Ogboni Lugiriso Compound in the ancient town of Esa-Oke in Osun State, Nigeria, where women were expected to be seen but not heard.  The title “Ogboni” signaled the founding patriarch of my family as a high chief second in command to Owamiran, the King of Esa-Oke town. This proximity to power and privilege had several connotations, one of which was polygamy.

Through generations, the Ogboni Lugiriso Compound had a harem of wives, a practice that has remained till date with my grandfather and uncle, who have two wives each (my father is an exception). The wives were historically referred to as eru, meaning servants, lending further insights into traditions of rigid patriarchal dominance. However, within the tensions and limits of wifehood, oral traditions passed through generations of wives reveal that a kitchen performance began that gradually refuted the subject-object relations of the men and their wives over a hundred years ago. As a routine form of evening relaxation in the family courtyard, the men typically played the bembe drum, a cylindrical Yoruba drum. In reaction to this, the wives began a fortnightly performance in the courtyard using kitchenware as an outlet for improvisational creativity, a sonic noise that established their presence and confronted stereotypes about men’s artistic dominance. Using water pots and drinking and serving calabashes as proxy instruments, the performance of songs was usually led by the eldest wife, who was also typically the lead vocalist. They would sing about their husbands, their beauty and farming successes.

My reflection draws from stories told by my mother and experiences watching my aunts and grandaunts (term used loosely here) follow a script of performance as gendered and economic liberation that has lasted through generations in its over 100 years of practice. Moving beyond the confines of the courtyard and gracing public social events, their performance, called ere obinrin ile, the performance of the housewives has remained the same even as external developments begin to emerge over the years. However, a marked difference from earlier performances is the replacement of the kitchenware with the shekere (beaded gourd rattles), added to an ensemble of agogo (metal gongs). Performing at ceremonies in which their performance prompts the hosts and audience to reward them, from weddings to baby-naming and funerals, they began earning money to support themselves, forming a strong community by creating soft loan schemes to support their businesses and help out with emergency needs, as well as support neglected wives.

Although this performance is less practiced by later wives, including my mother, due to family dispersal, it is still alive. During typical ceremonies in Esa-Oke, such as my grandmother’s funeral in 2016, the wives would perform in honor of their lost loved ones. My mother would join them dancing, singing and rattling the shekere; a conscious movement and faculty of memory that invite her to join them every time we travel to my hometown, despite her long disconnects disconnection from the performance. The performance would usually attract money from the spectators as the rattles and echoes of the shekere and agogo invite the audience to dance and give their money. Although this performance originated in the Lugiriso compound, it expanded to other households in various parts of Esa-Oke town, and over time became closely associated with the women of Esa-Oke, so that it is now synonymous with their collective identity.

After every performance my mother was involved in, the leader of the ere obinrin-ile women would typically come to her and squeeze some money into her hands. “That’s your share,” she would say in Yoruba. My mother would laugh and return the money to her, telling her to use her share to do something for the group, and the older woman would smile widely in response and walk back to join her group. In this repeated interaction, announcing my mother as one of them, persuading her to accept her due, and propelling their hands as the money earned moves from one wife’s hand to the other, we see a project of memory in these exchanges. In the hands of the housewives, the performance of ere obinrin ile makes the shekere and agogo things that possess agency as they appropriate these instruments in the quiet disavowal of objecthood. Their subversively embodied performance of ere obinrin-ile enabled wives through generations to connect to creativity and knowledge transmitted through generations, as the shekere and agogo choreograph a disruption of dominant patriarchal orders. 

On 9th March 2018, three weeks after I had started Sistah Sistah Foundation, I stood in front of a police officer with a black eye, bruised face and cut lip while he made jokes about how “my boyfriend” and I had argued and that I was claiming to have been raped by a thief. I stood there, my voice cracking, defending my story and yet nothing happened. No arrest, no investigation and not even a “sorry”

On 9th March 2023, I woke up to a call asking me to leave the safe house I was In because my security had been breached and Zambians were on radio demanding that I and my team be killed because we had been released after being arrested for holding a women’s rights march  against Sexual Gender Based Violence. 

Five years ago I started a feminist social movement aimed at helping young women, especially victims of sexual violence. I had been advocating using social media for years and I wanted to do so much more. So with no money, no connections and no idea what to do, I reached out to a friend and told her I wanted to create an organization that operated like a big sister program. By the end of that year, I was running programs out of my pocket, working with volunteers and dragging my sisters and family to help build this movement. By 2020 I was fully immersed in my work, extremely audacious and determined to create spaces for women and girls to advocate for their safety. I had volunteered and helped mobilize the Global Women’s March in Lusaka and by 2020 I had taken over and became the Lusaka organizer for it. By 2021 it had fully turned into an SGBV march called #WomensMarchZambia. The marches became this space where victims were heard and where people felt liberated and powerful. And yet everywhere there was always a flock of misogynists ready to shit on the marches. At first it was mocking what’s kids understood about patriarchy, then next it was our dress code, then mockery of the marches and then when they ran out of things, we were called Lesbians who were organizing gay marches. 

On 4th March 2023 we went to bed happy with the success of another march and woke up to a homophobic violent social media campaign demanding our arrests for our arrests and deaths for “promoting homosexuality” in the country. We were accused of being paid money to push homosexuality by funders, I had to check my bank account and walk outside my house to check for the missing Jeep Wrangler I must have bought from this so-called payment I had received. It was a whole joke to me because how could any sensible person see a women’s march, with slogans like “my body my choice” and perceive that as a gay rights march? A march that had been happening for years? How do you hear women scream “stop raping us” and choose to turn it into a violent homophobic campaign? 

I was naive to think the justice system in my country was smart enough to 1. Understand the law on advocacy and protesting, 2. Be able to conduct fair investigations. But with no respect of the constitution and human rights, I was arrested, locked up in a holding cell then brought up to be asked three questions that focused on the slogan “my body my choice- my pussy my choice” according to the very capable and trained officers of this country this slogan meant “we have a right to use our vaginas to sleep with women” if a basic google search about a SRHR slogan can not be conducted by a police department, then I weep for the security intelligence of this country. These three questions were enough to charge my cousin and I and have us locked up and denied the right to police bond. We were forced to spend the night in a tiny police cell while officers came in and threatened to assault us for being “lesbians”. We were not allowed food, a change of clothes or a phone call to lawyers and family. 

The ironic part for me was that the rapist who had attacked me just 5years to that day had never seen a police cell and I who had created an organization for victims of sexual assault had been arrested and mug shots taken. What was even more disappointing is that I had stood for hours to vote out a repressive regime, cast my vote for a political party who stood in Parliament debating about the homosexuality of “my body my body” and encouraged the police to have us arrested and detained. I had been so hopeful that this government would respect human rights, that the police were less authoritative and that Zambians cared about the voices of women.

Angel Nduka-Nwosu

The first time I vividly recall feeling a sense of solidarity over the experiences of Black women at the hands of the police came from YouTube. It was a video of African American feminist Kimberle Crenshaw offering a TED Talk on the ways in which Black women in America often had their stories of brutality with the police ignored, especially during the use of hashtags to raise awareness on social media.
It was not the first time I was hearing about #SayHerName, intersectionality, and BlackLivesMatter. America’s cultural power makes it almost impossible to ignore trends used in its social justice movements, even as a Nigerian woman living in Nigeria. I was moved deeply by a slideshow of murdered Black women, which Ms. Crenshaw gave at the end of the talk. In a strange way, her words hit a nerve for me and reminded me of how women world over are unsafe from the very structures sworn to protect us.

This realization became stronger in April 2019 when reports came in that policemen from the Abuja Environmental Police Board had arrested 70 women in a lounge using the excuse that they were “prostitutes”. These men told the women to either pay five thousand naira or accept rape. It was also said that the police went ahead to rape some women using sachet water nylons as makeshift condoms. Now, compared to the stories of men harassed by another branch of the Nigerian police called SARS, I noticed that there wasn’t as much outrage online for the women who had been raped by the AEPB. In thinking of a hashtag that could totally capture this realisation of online double standards, my mind kept going back to Kimberle Crenshaw’s TED Talk.

I decided then that I would name the hashtag #SayHerNameNigeria. It was to draw solidarity on the already existing framework of SayHerName whilst still asserting our place as Nigerian women in the conversation of global gendered police brutality. We ended up protesting in four Nigerian cities and in Ghana, and England. During the October 2020 protests against SARS, one question that kept popping in my mind was: “Why didn’t #SayHerNameNigeria cause a nationwide and global revolution even from women?”. I got immensely attacked for stating my discomfort with feminist participation in a cause whose victories would have done nothing for women structurally. This is because SARS attacks mostly young men due to the prevailing belief that young men are more likely to engage in cyber criminal fraud.
Although SARS does attack women in minute numbers, their rapes and deaths are barely enough to cause the global revolution that was October 2020. Most times, even female victims of SARS brutality face slutshaming from the very men who protest online against SARS.

I have mentioned the #ENDSARS protests in this detail because it is impossible to talk about the gendered dynamics of #SayHerNameNigeria without mentioning #ENDSARS. This especially as it taught women to not ignore gender. In the months following the #ENDSARS protests, feminist groups like Feminist Coalition and other notable women who offered legal aid have been insulted and called thieves and liars even by the men who praised them for spearheading the protests.
I like to think that in the Nigerian context, #ENDSARS is the equivalent of #BlackLives Matter. It is the hashtag that taught Nigerian women never to imagine that fighting side by side with men will guarantee that their own rights will be attended to.

During the #ENDSARS protests, when I was being attacked online for stating my discomfort, I held on to the words of leading feminist writer Mona Eltahawy. She said, and I shall quote to conclude this essay: “Who is the revolution for? Who is your fight as a woman in service of?”. In all things in and out of police brutality, my fight remains in service of the needs of Nigerian women and girls first.

There is a lot of conversation in African feminist spaces about the significance of the Internet for connectivity and organizing. There is an even added significance with the rising platform changes, particularly regarding API access restrictions, as platforms start to prioritize an attention economy with often precarious consequences for activists and organizers. So, I have been thinking: as we begin to talk about creating safer, better, and more sustainable pro-activist internet spaces, how do we do memory work that documents the flows, timelines, networks, and contexts of some of our most transformative movements in a way that is sustainable and can be a resource for people, the ones coming after us, even outside of this platform? 

Twitter, for instance, is an important embodied born-digital archive of African feminist thought. The last decade has witnessed several hashtag movements and transnational networks gaining visibility because of the platform’s affordances and, most importantly, because of the digital labor of African feminists. The question then becomes, if Twitter is no more tomorrow, how can we show the real-time liveness of movements like #SayHerNameNigeria or #WomensMarchZambia? 

I got the inspiration for an archival home for hashtag movements that have emerged from Twitter for African feminists. The African Feminist Archive is a manifestation of that dream, a digital collection documenting feminist hashtag movements across Africa. This is a collaborative project to preserve the voices and digital labor of African feminist organizers who have used social media, particularly African Feminist Twitter, for social organizing.

This living archive seeks to capture both the immediate impact and afterlives of digital feminist organizing. As a core memory work project, it will document movements that may otherwise be lost to platform constraints and API restrictions, preserving not just social media artifacts but the context and lived experiences of organizers and participants.

Each movement profile includes organizer reflections, media coverage, timeline visualization, and network analyses. Highlighted collections will include movements such as #WomensMarchZambia, #SayHerNameNigeria, #TotalShutDownKE, #ArewaMeToo, and more. Beyond preservation, this archive will serve as a resource for activists, researchers, and students interested in African feminist organizing, digital activism, and social movements.  Preserving these stories is a radical care act and labor of love for me amidst the threats of an unpredictable internet, and I am excited to see how it turns out.