The Interwoven Legacy of Sexuality and Shame in African Culture and Clothing

Colonial Threads: The Interwoven Legacy of Sexuality and Shame in African Culture and Clothing

 

Time and time again, harmful representations of African clothing and customs are used to sully African culture, and by relation, African peoples. 

 

Even children’s books,  representation used to largely come in the form of very dehumanizing caricatures, emphasizing the ‘savagery’ that was tied to the grass-skirted, loin-clothed, or even bare indigenous peoples.

 

The issue colonists had with the unclothed natives was the ‘savagery’ and ‘primitiveness’ of their lack of clothing. However, after taking a quick look at the way that classical art of ancient Greece simultaneously was heralded as the intellectual foundation of high art of the time, it becomes increasingly clear that the issue is not the nakedness of the natives, but the existence of the natives themselves. 

 

On top of the shame  from the racist connotations that the west attached to the way natives presented bare, natives were also faced with the added burden of danger in the sexualization of their bare bodies. Clothing with the purpose of covering up was introduced into African culture through the suffering of Aboriginal women who partly took it up to reduce their sexual vulnerability under colonial rule.

 

Even in pictures of colonized women posed by European photographers, women were posed to make eye contact with the lens, as if directly looking at the viewer. This pose was reminiscent of emerging pornographic photography at the time. While the women were unaware of these connotations in their naked state that was otherwise commonplace to them, the groundwork to further sexualize the mere existence of African women was already deceitfully laid.

 

The colonial lens has lent to the corruption of the image of the naked African body– to see it as ‘unclean,’ ‘unnatural,’ and ‘unwell,’ further legitimizing and necessitating its colonization. Clothing has been used to denote proximity to ‘civilization’ and widen the contrast between unclothed Africa vs clothed Europe.

 

Clothing that conformed to European standards was not only taken up for protection from prying eyes, but began to reflect standards of ‘morality’ and ‘normalcy’. The pervasive demonization of bare African bodies is a larger symptom of the still-invasive colonial project to ‘reform’ Africans.

 

This has been ingrained so deeply into the culture of African society today as seen through the proposal and consideration for a Nigerian bill for an act to prohibit and punish public nudity, sexual intimidation, and other related offenses. The Public Nudity Bill went through two senate readings in 2007 and 2008, respectively, with it finally being dropped because of its discriminatory nature towards women which failed to honor and consider the cultural diversity of Nigeria. The way in which the bill used the terms ‘nudity’ and ‘indecent dressing’ interchangeably only serves to prove how still-permeating the colonial mindsets and traumas bleed into African society.

 

In Lagos, Nigeria, women accused of crime have their own autonomy taken from them, are dehumanized, and are forcibly stripped as a sanctioned punishment from ad hoc groups. Sexual and gender-based violence that disproportionately incites violence against women and girls and continue to use clothing as a weapon to further harm and rob women of their autonomy, recreating and reinforcing the colonial custom of gendered violence through clothing.

 

When we see and think about how clothing is weaponized against vulnerable communities today, we ought to look at the colonial pain and strife that informs these unjust cultures of violence. To truly enact change, we must utilize this knowledge to free ourselves and dismantle ideas that continue to perpetuate the demonization of African bodies and culture.

 

 

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