Women in Social Movements in Nigeria: Case Study of the ENDSARS Movement

• In Event: Women, Gender, and Politics in Africa

Abstract

While mass movements are conceptualized as leaderless, among other identifying characteristics, women's leadership role in the ENDSARS movement in Nigeria, among similar recent protests across Africa, seem to disturb that received notion and call for its re-think(ing). The ENDSARS movement was one of the most significant, most widely discussed protest movements in Africa since the Arab Spring. It attracted global attention for four main reasons. First, women assumed the leadership role of the movement and deployed their technology and communication savvy skills to draw the international community's attention to the protest. Secondly, ss the Nigerian State shocked the world in its brutal suppression of the protest by shooting into the crowd and killing its protesting youth, these women trained the cameras on the massacre for all to see. Thirdly, the young women leaders resisted the Nigerian government's attempt to co-opt them into the State's denialism narratives and were subsequently subjected to continuing terroristic attacks from state agents. And finally, as the State deploys its multi-pronged campaign of burying the facts and rewriting the history of the protest, women have held fast to their demand for state accountability by methodically and painstakingly documenting the role of the State and other actors in what is one of the darkest events in the political history of the independent Nigerian State. This study employs qualitative methods and uses primary in-depth interviews, media reports, and secondary grey resources to question the accepted understanding that mass movements are leaderless to expand our knowledge and the literature on mass movements.

Authors

• Joseph Olayinka Fashagba, Federal University Lokoja

• Chiedo Nwankwor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Innterntional Studies