Situating Nigerian Women in Global Black Politics Discourse

This post is part of our forum on “Black Women’s Activism in the African Diaspora.” 

In 1929, before the wave of independence movements across Africa, thousands of market women in Aba and neighboring areas in Southeastern Nigeria gathered to organize a series of anticolonial protests. The influential and oft-cited Aba Women’s Revolt, or War of 1929, consisted of two months of a mixture of events, including peaceful protests, public dialogue between leaders and protesters, property destruction, satirizing of warrant chiefs who served as colonial state intermediaries, and physical confrontations between civilians and security officials. Though excluded from formal political leadership in the colonial government, the women involved in these demonstrations leveraged their social and economic power via their market networks to fight for justice and express their political agency.

During the same period in the 1920s-30s, Black women in the United States were actively organizing against lynching, while advocating for voting rights and combating systemic anti-Blackness through churches, schools, workplaces, associations, and other areas of civic life. Despite the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which theoretically granted women the right to vote, Black women and men, particularly in the antebellum South, continued to face disenfranchisement through extra-legal discriminatory practices. Juxtaposing Nigerian women’s political activism with that of Black American women reveals how trans-local activism constituted a significant part of the global fight for Black liberation. Leveraging their embeddedness within socially conscious communities, whether through markets or other spheres of associational life, Nigerian women and Black women in other parts of the world actively sought political redress within exclusionary political systems that disenfranchised and taxed Black people without representation. Much of the discourse on Black politics privileges a US-centered articulation of Blackness. It is important to consider the geopolitical question of transnational difference in terms of articulating Blackness and social justice from varied contextual positionalities. Black women in Africa, Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world, with varied experiences, are a significant part of the history of Black politics.

Nearly a century later, a group of entrepreneurial Nigerian women created the Feminist Coalition, which was pivotal in the historic EndSARS movement of 2020. Originating in response to years of police brutality perpetrated by Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), the EndSARS movement gained national and international momentum as Nigerian youth mobilized to demand justice, police reform, and governmental accountability. The Feminist Coalition leveraged social media networks to galvanize interest and to organize thousands of people in Nigeria and the diaspora to protest police brutality and to demand better governance and a deepening of democracy in Nigeria. Building on their socio-economic networks and professional expertise in diverse areas such as financial technology, media, community organizing, public health, and gender advocacy, the coalition raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in under two weeks.

One of the key features of the Feminist Coalition and the wider EndSARS movement was organizers’ and protesters’ articulation of the movement within a larger concern for Black Lives, citing connections between EndSARS and the Black Lives Matter movement. Explaining the group’s mission, the coalition’s founders named a concern for the advancement of Black women politically, economically, and socially rather than a concern solely for Nigerian women, thereby situating Nigerian women within a broader discourse of global Blackness and Black feminism. Organizers and protesters articulated their Nigerian identity through the lens of global Blackness as a strategic move to gain international awareness and traction for the movement, but also to express a sophisticated understanding of how Nigeria, the world’s largest Black nation, is situated within a global Black community experiencing the legacies of empire. Similarly, the Black Lives Matter network released an official statement in 2020 about their solidarity with the EndSARS movement, illuminating the interrelation between Black international and pan-Africanist fights against imperialism and anti-Blackness. This solidarity underscores the shared experiences of resisting militarized policing, underdevelopment, and inequity faced by Black communities worldwide.

Linking the feminist foundations of contemporary social movements across Africa and the Americas to historical protests like the Aba women’s war reveals enduring themes in Black women’s political engagement across temporal and spatial boundaries. Despite the underrepresentation of women in Nigerian political leadership, women’s organizing remains a significant force in Nigerian society, with activists citing historical inspirations for their present-day activism. Similarly, in the United States, Black women continue to utilize grassroots activism as a pathway to political participation despite historical exclusion from formal leadership roles.

Many of the Black liberation movements of the twenty-first century drew on transnational Black and African feminist ideologies in their articulation of political empowerment for women and historically marginalized populations more broadly. Public rhetoric disseminated through protest chants, signage, demands, and activist interviews demonstrates how key players in recent Black liberation movements conceive of feminism in their organizing and are informed and inspired by the ideological and epistemic threads of Black and African feminism. Transnational Black and African feminisms consist of a set of frameworks that elucidate theoretical, experiential, and empirical knowledge on the intersectional nature of identities and power while centering knowledge produced by indigenous Black, African, and African diasporic women. Black feminist theoretical insights on intersectionality and justice inform the Black Lives Matter movement, which in turn has implications for anti-police brutality movements globally, including the EndSARS movement. These insights are important not only for how we think about the lasting effects of empire in Africa but also for how Black, Afro-descended women in the diaspora are racialized and gendered within a global political system. Articulating Blackness and feminism from varied contextual positions provides the foundations for a better understanding of how Nigerian women’s activism in the twentieth century influences political activism today and situates Nigerian women within a global history of Black politics.