Abstract
Women in Johannesburg, South Africa, protest against the harassment of women who wear miniskirts
CREDIT: Loanna Hoffmann/Foto24/Gallo
Ugandan and South African women who wear miniskirts are facing attacks from private citizens.
Supposedly, the act was going to make Uganda’s women safer. Instead, as Akumu discovered in Kampala on that day in 2014, it spurred on a section of the population which believed women shouldn’t be allowed to wear what they choose.
Akumu is a human rights activist, writer and feminist. Her experience drove her and a group of human rights advocates to organise a demonstration against the controversial piece of legislation. She also set up a Face-book page, End Miniskirt Harassment, to give women a platform.
Speaking to Index on Censorship from Kampala, Akumu said that “on paper”, Ugandan women’s freedom of expression is protected. It’s enshrined in the country’s constitution, despite its growing reputation as a nation of fundamentalist Christians, Uganda is secular.
The attempt to control women’s dress is a return to the 1970s when the country’s leader, dictator Idi Amin, banned women from wearing trousers, revealing dresses, long skirts with splits as well as miniskirts and hotpants. Many girls and young women were fined by magistrates and a few even given jail sentences. Amin himself though was famously photographed with model, politician and lawyer Princess Elizabeth Bagaya of Toro who wore shorts for the occasion.
Despite Amin’s rules, Ugandan women didn’t come to physical harm if they violated the laws. Even in “up-country” rural areas, which tend to be more traditional and staid, said Akumu, women weren’t attacked for wearing supposedly revealing clothing. The attitude from men and elders “was never outright; it was quite subtle. You wouldn’t be beaten up, but there would be disapproval.”
Then came 2014 and things started to change. In the run up to the national elections in February 2016, politicians tabled a wave of “morality” laws. They included the internationally reviled Anti-Homosexuality Act, which would later be overturned. The Anti-Pornography Act was also tabled at this time. Akumu said its “ambiguous” definitions of “pornography” and “exposure” were problematic. And although it didn’t mention miniskirts or women’s clothing choices, the act gave voice to those who wanted women to cover up.
These voices had a powerful ally in the form of Uganda’s rather grandly named state minister for ethics and integrity, whose department is housed in the office of the presidency. Minister Simon Lokodo is no fan of the miniskirt. He had pushed for some time to have these supposedly offensive garments banned in Uganda, explaining in 2013: ”Any attire which exposes intimate parts of the human body, especially areas that are of erotic function, is outlawed. Anything above the knee is outlawed. If a woman wears a miniskirt we will arrest her.” At another stage, he suggested that women who displayed their legs were dangerous. They distracted male drivers for one thing.
Akumu said that before the act had even been passed by Uganda’s parliament, vigilante groups began roaming the country stripping women they claimed were ”obscenely” dressed.
After her own harrowing encounter with a man who claimed she deserved to be groped since her knees and shoulders were visible, Akumu decided to organise a demonstration opposing the act. She struggled to get police clearance for the gathering, telling the BBC that she’d been turned away from several police stations because officers complained she wasn’t appropriately dressed. In the end, the protest went ahead. It was attended by 200 people and, Akumu said, put pressure on the police to start taking vigilante attacks on “obscenely dressed” women a bit more seriously. Some men were arrested. Others continued to verbally hound women, telling them: “I see how you’re dressed, but I know I can’t do anything. I’ll be arrested.”
Sadly, the attacks persist. Akumu told Index that lobbying around the issue was tough: “When it comes to women and freedom of expression, and them dressing in a way that people consider ‘inappropriate’, there’s little interest or action.” She contrasted this with widespread global condemnation of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which created so much pressure that President Yoweri Museveni decided not to challenge a constitutional court ruling that overturned the legislation.
Akumu said that even many feminist activists in Uganda preferred to focus on what they perceived as more important issues, such as female genital mutilation and the need to improve girls’ schooling. And ordinary Ugandans, she said, sometimes seemed to think that “women should be grateful for the rights they have”.
“There’s almost a sense that while women should have their rights, there’s a limit, a ceiling to these rights,” she said.
For Akumu and her peers in Uganda, the battle continues. But theirs is far from the only African nation that believes it’s acceptable to control women’s clothing choices. Kenyan journalist Samantha Spooner told Index she felt far less comfortable wearing shorts or a skirt in Nairobi than she would elsewhere.
“In general this is a patriarchal society, though more and more women are getting appointed into higher positions. This doesn’t however dilute the elements of discrimination you’ll face or see as a woman, like male-dominated panels in conferences, being consistently spoken over in a conversation, expected not to air your opinions in a meeting or to accept when a man pushes in front of you in a queue,” Spooner said. “Just to show how much men can get away with, in 2013 the Nairobi governor Evans Kidero slapped the women’s representative Rachel Shebesh outside his office. It was caught on film but he kept his job.”
This sense of impunity extends to policing women’s clothing choices - and has done for a long time in Kenya, Uganda and across most of the rest of Africa. South African professor Louise Vincent has researched the history of women being targeted for ”daring” to dress in a way that men think is inappropriate or doesn’t conform to their ideas of femininity. In an article titled Women’s Rights Get A Dressing Down: Miniskirt Attacks in South Africa, Vincent wrote: “Controversy over the clothing choices of African women is not new. In the immediate postcolonial period African leaders across the continent took a personal interest in what women wore and berated them for ‘unsuitable’ choices.”
In some cases, Vincent pointed out, these women’s choices of “modern” clothing that was popular in the West were linked to colonialism, a system the continent was trying to cast off once and for all after centuries of control and invasion.
“Miniskirts in particular became, for many African leaders, emblematic of both the continued intrusion of colonial ideas despite formal liberation and of the moral degeneration, particularly of urban black youth, as a result of this intrusion,” Vincent wrote.
The major shift since then, in South Africa particularly, has been that private citizens rather than the state have “taken it upon themselves to play the role of guardians of the country’s moral order”. Men frequently police women’s behaviour, often violently. South African theatre director Clara Vaughan created the play Noord! because she’d read a story about two women who were attacked, groped and taunted by a mob of men while at one of Johannesburg’s biggest commuter taxi ranks, Noord. It wasn’t the first attack of its kind at the rank, but because it was captured on video this incident became a massive national talking point.
Vaughan said these kinds of attacks on women in public places stemmed from men having “a sense of ownership, both of public space and women’s bodies”.
“It’s particularly striking to me that Johannesburg, even more than other cities, is such a historically masculine space. Men migrating or immigrating here to look for work on the mines, living in hostels, and so on. There is something about the identity of the city that belongs to men. So women are always interlopers, they don’t really belong.
“And so they can be challenged and policed. Women who give the impression of being in control of, or enjoying, their sexuality are particularly threatening to men who think female sexuality should be controlled by men. That’s why I think women in ‘sexy’ clothing are so often the victims of assault. Black women, in particular, are under extraordinary pressure to conform to the ’correct’ model of femininity, the correct combination of tradition and modernity, sexiness and modesty, and so on.”
The freedom to wear what you choose is also an indicator of how free a society is, and its attitudes to the equality of its citizens. In some parts of Africa all the gains made for women risk being set back if countries’ laws and cultural mores continue to dictate what should or shouldn’t be worn. These laws are not just about clothing, but are a sign of something greater.