Women in battle dress: how clothes have been used as a form of protest

When Tshegofatso Pule was found stabbed to death and hanged from a tree in June, South Africans were overcome with grief. This act of indescribable cruelty traumatised a nation overwhelmed with despair at the endless pandemic of violence against women. Tshegofatso’s body, bloody and battered, was discovered hanging from a blue-gum tree in a patch of veld in Durban Deep, Roodepoort. She was eight months pregnant.

In August last year 19-year-old Uyinene Mrwetyana was raped and bludgeoned to death at the Clareinch Post Office in Claremont, Cape Town. An unassuming government building in the suburbs was the scene for this grotesque assault on a young woman who had yet to fulfil her dreams. Thousands took to the streets across the country with the social media hashtag #AmINext to demonstrate their rage at the fatal attack on the University of Cape Town student.

Now the simple act of wearing a black headscarf to mourn the deaths of South African women like Pule and Mrwetyana has sparked the national Black Doek Movement.

At the heart of the initiative are Kelleigh James, a 19-year-old from Eldorado Park, Johannesburg, and her activist mother Dereleen James. The two have gathered support as far away as Texas, New York, Potchefstroom and George. Women have been posting pictures of themselves wearing black doeks.

‘We want to see change’

“After Uyinene was killed last year, it was all over social media and the news and then it just went quiet. Then there was another murder and then it went quiet again. Now we want to see change,” says Kelleigh.

Billboards with slogans such as Rise Up South Africa and Join the Movement are encouraging women to join the Black Doek Movement.

For the James women, the doek is not only a symbol of mourning and solidarity with the families whose loved ones were murdered; it is also a symbol of strength, determination and defiance. These crimes resonate deeply with Kelleigh.

When three-year-old Ansia Khena went missing in Orange Farm just weeks after Pule’s murder she joined community members who went searching for the toddler in the veld. Her body was found stuffed in a yellow plastic bin.

“We are not trash; we don’t belong in black bags, suitcases or in a veld. We mean something,” she says.

Dress has been used as a weapon of protest for women almost since we started wearing clothes.

Today is the anniversary of the Women’s March to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in 1956 when tens of thousands of women gathered to oppose the tightening of the draconian pass laws against women.

“Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, you have struck a rock,” the women sang, directing their anger at prime minister JG Strijdom.

Women travelled in trains from all over SA for the protest. (Contemporary accounts report some of them travelled on the same trains as policemen from about the country, ordered to report for duty in Pretoria to bolster security force numbers.)

The photographs of the event are in black and white, but witnesses described the breathtaking sight of the many participants in traditional dress to demonstrate their pride in their roots. Some years later Winnie Madikizela Mandela would wear Xhosa regalia when she attended the Rivonia Trial that culminated in her husband being sentenced to life imprisonment.

Black is associated with many things — strength, death, sophistication and rebellion. In January 2018 the colour ruled the red carpet at the Golden Globe Awards when A-listers dressed all in black to show their support for the #MeToo movement.

Outrage at the sexual harassment rife in the industry had escalated after more women spoke out against Hollywood mogul and serial predator Harvey Weinstein. This year the 67-year-old was sentenced to 23 years in prison for his crimes, the first powerful Hollywood personality to be jailed.

Ordinary women criticised A-listers and celebrity wannabes for only bringing attention to the scourge of criminal sexual predation when they were affected.

With a growing revolt in 2020 against racism and serious social issues, there’s less tolerance for celebrities who exploit serious causes as a fashion backdrop. Los Angeles social influencer and YouTuber Kris Schatzel was called out for posing in a sheer black gown and full hair and make-up among protesters holding up a Black Lives Matter poster. The Russian model had brought her professional photographer along and was caught on video focusing on getting the perfect Instagram snap as protesters marched by. The clip instantly went viral on social media, causing mass outrage.

Unveiled to pass unnoticed

US President Donald Trump has been the target of several marches for his dismal attitude towards women. Trump has a history of derogatory slurs. His comments in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape about grabbing women “by the pussy” made headlines during the presidential campaign in 2016.

On January 21 2017, the day after his inauguration, a worldwide Women’s March took place. In Washington DC alone an estimated 500,000 people gathered to bring attention to women’s rights, the largest single-day protest in US history. Many wore pink knitted beanies with cat ears known as “pussy hats”, to reclaim the word.

“The way people clothe themselves, together with the traditions of dress and finery that custom implies, constitutes the most distinctive form of a society’s uniqueness,” the revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote in 1959. Fanon was born in Martinique. After being stationed in Algeria during World War 2, he got a job there as a psychiatrist in 1953. He wrote about the haik, the black veil typically worn by Algerian women, as a weapon against French colonial power.

The French administration had embarked on a campaign to get rid of the veil, which it considered vampirish and barbaric.

Poor women were the first to be targeted. Every bag of semolina handed out by the administration was accompanied by an admonition against the veil, writes Fanon, who said that the decision to abandon the haik was one to be made by Algerians, not their colonial masters.

French efforts to refashion local customs from above ultimately backfired. When Algeria’s fight for independence became militant, French soldiers interrogated and intimidated veiled women, but tended to overlook unveiled Algerian women “who moved like fish in Western waters”.

“These fish inconspicuously swam by, never indicating that their suitcases contained weapons meant to remove the occupying power.” They carried revolvers, grenades, bombs and fake identity documents.

If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together

In the end, all Algerian women became suspects.

“In the streets one witnessed what became a commonplace spectacle of Algerian women glued to the wall, on whose bodies the famous magnetic detectors would be passed ... Every veiled woman, every Algerian woman, became suspect. There was no discrimination.”

In 2016 Lebanese feminists staged a powerful protest in front of the legislature in Beirut, wearing bridal dresses with blood splattered over them. They were protesting a rape law passed in the 1940s that decreed that rapists could escape jail if they married their victims. Lebanon was just one of several countries where this law was enforced. The law was repealed in Lebanon the next year.

In 2018 Saudi women mounted a protest by stealth against the abaya, the obligatory all-black robe that covers the entire body. They posted anonymous pictures of themselves on social media wearing it inside out.

Bridal gowns

Fans of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale are familiar with the cruelty women endure in her dystopian world. The handmaids are fertile females who are ceremonially raped to produce offspring for the “commanders”, the ruling class of men.

The handmaid’s red-and-white outfit has become a powerful protest symbol from Argentina to Ireland, and California to Croatia. Wired magazine named it the protest uniform of 2019.

More than 100 girls dressed in bridal gowns took part in a protest against child brides in Dublin in 2017. According to Unicef, across Africa alone 125-million girls and women alive today were married before their 18th birthday. More than one in three young women on the continent are married during their childhood, and one in 10 before reaching their 15th birthday. The good news is that there has been progress. In Ethiopia — once among the worst five countries in Africa for child marriage — child marriage has dropped by a third in the past 10 years.

In Africa, undressing has been used as a form of protest since pre-colonial times. One of the most dramatic threats to strip naked helped end the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that had been dragging on for 14 years.

Convicted war criminal Charles Taylor and rebel warlords were meeting to negotiate yet another peace deal in 2003. Activist Leymah Gbowee and 200 other women formed a human chain about the peace venue to prevent any delegate from leaving until an agreement was signed. When security officers tried to arrest Gbowee she threatened to strip naked. Two weeks later Taylor resigned, and a treaty was signed.

Afrobeat king Fela Kuti’s mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was a titanic force in her own right and one of Nigeria’s most prominent activists when Nigeria was still a British colony. FRK, as she was affectionately known, was honoured with a Google Doodle in October last year on what would have been her 119th birthday.

She was the first woman to drive in Abeokuta in southwestern Nigeria, and once met Chinese leader Mao Zedong. This grandchild of a slave became one of the first girls to receive a decent education. FRK dropped her Western name, Frances, for her Yoruba name and preferred to speak Yoruba. Fela recalled his mother putting on “shorts ... a man’s shirt, a beret and sandals ... as her way of saying it takes a man to fight another man.”

Protest picnics

In the 1940s, when Nigeria was still a British colony, she was instrumental in forming the Abeokuta Women’s Union to protest against unjust taxes and the lack of women’s political representation in the colonial administration. The union had evolved from a genteel ladies club for charity work and sewing and its early members were mostly Christian, Western-educated women from the middle class. By the 1940s FRK realised “the true position of Nigerian women had to be judged from the women who carried babies on their backs and farmed from sunrise to sunset ... not women who used tea, sugar, and flour for breakfast”. Members of the Abeokuta Women’s Union all spoke in Yoruba and wore Yoruba dress to eliminate class differences. When British colonial officers refused to give permits for demonstrations, FRK would organise “picnics” and festivals.

Wole Soyinka’s mother was FRK’s sister-in-law and also involved in the Abeokuta Women’s Union. The women staged marches and mass demonstrations outside the palace of the Alake of Abeokuta, a traditional ruler, against a tax imposed on women, who at the time did not have political representation. Many women refused to pay and either ended up in jail or were fined.

‘Go home and mind your kitchens’

In his autobiography the Nobel prize-winning Nigerian author describes a scene where women had once again gathered outside the Alake’s palace and once again were getting nowhere. Sometimes the crowds outside the palace would be as many as 10,000 women. After repeating their demands the balogun, representing the king, retorted: “The world is spoilt. The world is coming to an end when these women can lay siege to the place and disturb the peace ... go home and mind your kitchens and feed your children. What do you know about the running of state affairs? Not pay taxes indeed. What you need is a good kick on your idle rumps.”

Provoked by these insults the women stripped the balogun and his entourage down to their shorts and hit them with their own chiefly regalia.

An African proverb says, If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.

On that day the men struck a rock.