Epidemic of nude protests and Makerere’s naked gods

Wonders never cease, as Kenya’s late Chief Justice Miller used to say. They only increase.

A few weeks ago, I told you of the young primary schoolteacher who stripped naked before her colleagues and pupils in protest at what she thought was an insult from one of her peers. I did not mention then that a few days earlier, the wife of a prominent politician had also bared all to protest her husband’s loss in the recently concluded polls.

Nor did I tell you of a couple of feminist activists who had invaded the Kampala Central Police Station, topless, sometime last year, chasing around and yelling at hapless policemen that if they wanted breasts, they were going to have more than their fill of them.

This was in protest at a TV newsbyte that allegedly showed a police officer squeezing the breast of a female politician he was trying to arrest. Earlier, an array of naked matrons in northern Uganda had confronted a probe team visiting a shamba that they claimed some rich crooks were scheming to snatch from them.

But the startling naked truth struck home on Monday, April 18, 2016, when my colleague, Dr Stella Nyanzi of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), also decided to stage a nude protest on campus.

“Femme nue, femme noire (naked woman, black woman),” croons Leopold Sedar Senghor, “clothed in your colour which is life, in your form which is beauty.” But what we witnessed on Makerere’s Main Campus that Monday morning was anything but beauty and life. Rather, it was a gorgonian horror enough to turn any mortal into a pillar of rock.

ONE-WOMAN SHOW

Many gathered to watch our sister Stella, whose name means “star”, as she put on her one-woman show at MISR, just inside the Main Gate. But few dared look her straight in the eye, hence the merciful absence of people-turned-into-stones on the terraces of that august institution.

Briefly, Dr Stella Nyanzi had been ordered by the director of MISR, Prof Mahmood Mamdani, to vacate her “office” since she had refused to perform some of the academic duties assigned to her.

When she defied this order, too, the director gave instructions that her office should be locked.

Dr Nyanzi responded by locking Prof Mamdani inside his own study and then returning to her own door and staging her stripping protest, accompanied by the declaration that she would not release Prof Mamdani till her own office was opened.

The commotion quickly attracted a crowd, which included the university’s top administrators, who started pleading with Dr Nyanzi to control herself as they were handling the matter.

But all their pleas were falling on deaf ears and, amidst a lot of howling and shouting, the lady had soon peeled down to her underpants.

It was at that stage that the administration overruled Prof Mamdani and ordered that Dr Nyanzi be allowed to get back into her office. After covering up a bit, she gave an impromptu press conference, recounting the injustices that she and other MISR staff had allegedly suffered under Prof Mamdani.

The decibels had decreased somewhat, but the language was as “strong” as ever, and she maintained the threat that next time she would strip to the skin.

The bone of contention was that the director wanted Dr Nyanzi to teach a few classes on the doctoral programme that the Institute introduced some time back. Dr Nyanzi adamantly refused, pointing out that she was appointed as a research fellow and not as a lecturer, which is, technically, accurate.

The way this affair has unfolded, raises a number of disturbing questions. The most obvious is: when and how MISR became a teaching institution. The reason is fairly clear. Mamdani himself has said that he wanted to make the Institute a viable and effective world class entity.

He has been strikingly successful in this respect, but he has, in the process, had to stretch its research mandate into teaching activities, in order to attract funds.

Ironically, this is one of the dilemmas Mamdani identifies as facing all African universities, in his book, Scholars in the Marketplace.

PATHETIC FAILURE

A Ugandan of Asian descent, Mamdani, who was a victim of Idi Amin’s mass deportations in the 1970s, is probably the most respected scholar at Makerere and possibly in the whole of Uganda. Indeed, his presence at Makerere is a kind of favour to his beloved alma mater and his country.

After all, he is a tenured (permanent and pensionable) professor at New York’s Columbia University, one of the Ivy League schools in the USA. He only took leave of absence to come and help out for a while at Makerere.

But his run-in with Dr Nyanzi exposes a number of things that are wrong with Makerere and possibly the whole of Ugandan society.

We are all increasingly getting used to the assumption that assertive and violent confrontation is the only way of getting decisive action taken on any issue. Strikes, demonstrations by both staff and students, complete with running battles with riot police, have become the order of the day.

Dr Nyanzi might have erred in exposing her body as a way of exposing her grievances. But one wonders whether locking a senior scholar out of her study is a justifiable approach to disciplining her for allegedly failing to perform up to expectation.

The whole thing smacks of a pathetic failure of our best and most educated minds to practise and apply communication and negotiation skills. One also hopes that peeling off our clothes every time we are aggrieved will not become a standard procedure among our mothers, sisters and daughters. At the present rate of undressing, it appears that we are headed for an epidemic.

Dr Stella Nyanzi has, since these events, been suspended from her duties for bringing the university into contempt and disrepute. I hope someone is considering getting her to hospital for psychiatric help.

Incidentally, Prof Mamdani is the life partner of the eminent Indian film director, Mira Nair, who filmed Lupita Nyong’o in Queen of Katwe last year.