The agency of Northern Nigerian women continues to be erased. Understanding the ways in which they express agency requires a context-based, culturally grounded theory of feminism.

As part my doctoral project exploring the concept of “gendered agency” in northern Nigeria, I have spent the past year conducting fieldwork research. This entailed travelling around the north-eastern region of Nigeria interviewing women who have been displaced as a result of the Boko Haram insurgency which has ravaged the region for the past decade, resulting in mass displacements, loss of lives, and property, and a general disruption to the social fabric and security of the region.

The insurgency has elicited media attention, both national and international, most notably the kidnapping of over 250 girls from a boarding secondary school in Chibok in 2014. The spotlight suddenly being placed on this region, along with Boko Haram’s use of girls and women as pawns, has led to debates about northern Nigerian women, both in academia and the media. Prior to this, due to the conservative nature of the region, Northern Nigerian women have historically not been as seen or as heard as their southern counterparts. For example, after Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood — the Nigerian film industry — is the largest in the world. Yet, when watching mainstream Nollywood films and TV shows, there is hardly any trace of the existence of Northern Nigerian women. The Boko Haram conflict thrust into the limelight a group who had previously been largely invisible in the media.

Much of the media coverage of the Boko Haram insurgency constructs northern Nigerian women along tropes of victims and vulnerable citizens who lack any form of agency. For example, in the opening sequence of the film Black Panther, a Wakandan intelligence officer played by Lupita Nyong’o is shown rescuing a group of girls dressed in black hijabs in Sambisa Forest, the home base of Boko Haram and where they keep their kidnapped hostages. This was a clear nod to the infamous kidnapping of the school girls in Chibok which made global headlines. Even in a scene intended to highlight the agency of a Black woman — Nakia, the intelligence officer played by Lupita — the representational tropes used in this scene frame Northern Nigerian women and girls as victims and vulnerable citizens in need of saving. This anecdote captures the central tension in my work around gendered agency and the media representation of northern Nigerian women and girls.

In a lot of the discourse surrounding northern Nigerian women — both in formal and in casual conversations — it is common to hear phrases such as “these women need more agency,” “we need to empower these women,” and “this is why we need feminism.” These are the underlying views which guide development initiatives and interventions by NGOs and international organisations in the region. This is evident in the types of interventions and programs they deploy.

The goals of these interventions and programs are usually focused on skills training and acquisition, or in the form of capital for a small business start up. Such discourses are also prevalent in Nigerian online spaces, where the tone is very top down, biased, and not at all participatory, with a failure to take other realities into context. These discourses are problematic because they end up applying a blanket understanding of these concepts — which have usually emerged from a very specific context complete with specific underlying assumptions — without any contextual understanding of the realities of northern Nigerian women.

The aim of the interviews I conducted during fieldwork was to learn about the experiences of northern Nigerian women, in the hope of providing a culturally and historically grounded account of the struggles, negotiations, and navigations which shape their everyday lives. I also sought to explore what these terms — agency, empowerment, feminism — mean within the specific context of their lives, beyond the dominant definitions.

There is insufficient empirical research or feminist theory exploring the possibility of feminism and what it looks like in northern Nigeria. Nigeria is made up of more than 250 ethnic groups and divided almost equally along religious lines of Islam and Christianity, with the majority of Muslims located in the northern part of the country and the majority of Christians located in the southern part. Feminist research, or even research that generalises “Nigerian women,” likely refers to southern Nigerian women.

The realities of Nigerian women vary depending on a variety of factors such as religion, ethnicity, and social class. Much of the literature and the dominant discourses of feminism, even within a Nigerian context, are based on assumptions that do not apply to the lives of northern Nigerian women. Thus, the agency of this group of women is automatically erased from the dominant feminist discourse that they are always measured against.

There is an urgent need to develop a context-based understanding of women’s lives. It must be nuanced enough to acknowledge the existence of patriarchy in Northern Nigerian societies, while simultaneously recognising the active participation of women and their resistance — both formal and informal, overt and subtle, visible and invisible — within and against these patriarchal structures. Without this, it is impossible to imagine the possibility of feminism within the context of this region.

What theories of feminism can we employ in this context to accommodate and account for the types of activities Northern Nigerian women perform? How can we think about feminism in Northern Nigeria in a way that will offer a better understanding into the lives of the women? The answers to these questions call for an urgent understanding or a theory of feminism that is context based, addressing culturally grounded feminist concerns.

Feminist scholars such as Saba Mahmood and Sumi Madhok have emphasised the importance of feminist research and scholarship on women’s agency. Agency is often used interchangeably with different variations of free will and is usually used to talk about one’s freedom to choose or act in a way that they want. This view of agency assumes a particular ideal subject and reality and privileges certain subjects — usually individualist and masculine — conditions, contexts, and societies. However, when we look at agency as simply freedom to choose or act according to one’s desires, we are unable to fully capture or understand the multiple ways in which people express agency, especially people whose realities are far from those “ideal” realities. What about those who live in complex conditions of subordination, like many women in Northern Nigeria?

In order to understand gendered agency in Northern Nigeria, it is important to make sense of women’s lives within the context of their realities and to understand how they navigate the social, cultural, and economic structures that govern their lives. We must therefore reconceptualise agency so that it is context based and capable of capturing alternative expressions and theorisations of agency which centre the experience and articulations of Northern Nigerian women within the context of their realities.

There are material and real-life implications of erasing the agency of Northern Nigerian women. Policies and interventions aimed at improving the lives of women and based on concepts such as employment and agency need to stand on context-based research in order to be effective.

Husseina Ahmed is a PhD candidate at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

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