Silencing the African woman’s body: protest, disinformation and criminalisation

In this short article, we examine the arrest, detention, and prosecution of three Ugandan women who protested naked in September 2024, using their case as a lens to explore the criminalisation of naked protest, rights-based resistance, and gendered disinformation. We argue that their treatment by the Ugandan justice system was not a genuine legal process but a façade - one that reinforces colonial standards and serves as a tool for criminalising dissent, silencing rights-based resistance, and entrenching patriarchal control under the guise of law. We situate these women’s naked protest within African feminist histories and recent scholarship, including work by Tamale and Diabate, to challenge popular critiques that framed this protest as misuse of women’s bodies, signs of mental instability, or attempts to gain cheap popularity. We then turn to the role of gendered disinformation, showing how it was weaponised in these protests to erase the accountability demands of these women and other protestors. Importantly, we do not stop at critique. We also identify strategies of counterspeech, drawing on a published interview with one of the protestors – Opoloje - and an opinion piece written in the aftermath of their arrest. These voices offer insight into how women resist disinformation, reclaim their narratives, and reassert the legitimacy of their causes. We conclude that naked protest, far from being irrational or culturally deviant, is a radical and embodied form of feminist resistance - one that demands to be taken seriously, especially in contexts where corruption and authoritarianism continue to undermine the rights and dignity of women in Africa.