Naked protest by African women has repeatedly forced official decisions

Evidence

In contemporary Kenya, the decision of Wangari Maathai and a group of Kenyan women to resort to a naked protest before a brutalizing police force in support of the Green Belt Movement in the late 1980s is evidence of the fact that women’s naked bodies influenced the government’s decision to reverse a deal that gave multinational corporations authority to occupy the Uhuru forest, which proves the role of the female body in influencing important decisions in society. In Liberian protests against the rule of Charles Taylor, women literally compelled the delegates to reach an agreement at the peace negotiations. The threat of seeing their mothers strip naked in public was enough to instill fear in the (largely male) delegation. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 959

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to anyone interested in gender politics or nonviolent resistance: the Wangari Maathai Uhuru forest and Charles Taylor peace talks cases in one place.
• FICTION: The ‘threat of mothers stripping naked’ as an ultimate deterrent is ripe for speculative fiction about political power founded on shame and kinship.