LeidenASA Seminar: The Female Nude as a Symbolic Tool for Social and Political Mobilization among the Ekiti Yoruba

Women’s nude curse was a predominant socio-cultural practice and ritual performance in Yoruba land before the advent of colonial contact, imported religions and their conception of nudity as obscenity. Owing to this conception from the late 18th century onward, ex-colonial and imported religions prohibited their faithful from engaging in nude curse which they considered heathen. With the degenerating spate of political misrule in the 20th century colonial and postcolonial Yoruba land, however, Yoruba women broke away from the religious strictures on nudity and reclaimed their nude protest performance as a counter-check to socio-political malaise perpetrated by corrupt and oppressive rulers.

This study seeks, among other things, to analytically document the contexts of women’s political struggle using the 2009 Ekiti  women’s nude protest and theorize the dynamics of power relations in Yoruba women’s nude curse vis-à-vis socio-cultural and political developments in Yoruba land. The specific engagement of the study is, therefore, divided into three different parts. The first investigates the immediate causes of the 2009 Ekiti nude curse and examines its structural organization; the second analyses the actual protest/performance strategies of the curse; and the third explores the effects of the protest both from spiritual and politico-material approaches. Using ethnography in data gathering and eclectic theories such as group theory, agency theory and theory of binary complementarity in data analysis, the study observes that the female body is both a spiritual and material body capital in the process of socio-political mobilization and strategic vigilante. More than this, essentially, the female body is thus a site of war and power for the enhancement of quality democratic ethos and development in Yoruba land specifically and Nigeria in general.