Francis Imbuga in his book Betrayal in the city says : ” When the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it is not enough to say the man is mad.”
I would be a little naive to brand those girls as immoral, uncivilised, mad or psycho-pathetic. Why ?
The use of nudity is not new and it is a very strong gun mostly used by the vulnerable amidst the sophisticated strong ( the vulnerable have only their dignity, while the powerful have the ‘ state forces of coercion ( police, army , money and their fellow beneficiaries of the status quo) the me and you.
Nudity was used as tool to humiliate and break the rebellious spirit of the slaves, victims of colonialism and those deemed below human level eg extremely violent criminals . It has been used in Palestine-Israel war and in many violent infested areas : where men and women are paraded naked either sodomised or raped in front of their children or loved ones .
Nudity hides those things men and women most enjoy mostly in darkness or in hidden arenas such as bedrooms, lodges and for the poor man and woman in the bushes ( sex or that thing king David told his son Solomon destroys great men .)
Cognisant that though enjoyed by many : it is assumed that, private parts are the most ugly of all man’s body parts as compared to the face, hands , legs etc .
Nudity is symbolic and could be a reflection of a much more bigger issue than we can say in one statement .
Nudity alienates the victim and those watching the nude person also get alienated .
For example in Ganda Anthropology: If you by either bad luck or anything else, if you see your parent’s nakedness, you have to be cleansed by bathing with a plant called “omwetango.” You are even not allowed to burry a parent in case you were the one looking after them in sickness.
Note : it is only babies ( innocents or mad persons) who are not occasioned /conditioned to see nudity as an abnormal. ( why is it that those we call the ” primitive tribes” or peoples ,move or stay nude without any salient challenges eg: Are they semi-living beings not to experience shame. Why ?
The nude person brings out what all human beings have but are occasioned/conditioned ( check Freudian & B. F Skinnerian Child Psychology and conditioning. )
” Normal ,” or perceived to be acceptable to other humans , dread to put to the public their private parts ( all humans are naked) but hidden in clothes, though the reality is all sane humans know and can with accuracy or intuitively , see or know how the other looks like without the thickets of cloth covers.
Nudity hides things which all do but don’t do them in the public ( defecate, short call, bath we all wash our bodies nude but not in public. )
So mad people or those who have been hard pressed ( those who feel that all is lost on them ) will always bring what the public fears to say or see to the public eye- nudity or privacy is as such used as a weapon .
In Philosophy and theology , ” nudity/nakedness are very strong symbols.
The book of Genesis 3:10, when God asks Adam and Eve why they are hiding from him , they replied ” because we discovered we were naked .”
Here nakedness implies loss of innocence, sin , alienation from the divine and perfect. Its a birth of imperfections and the explicit and implicit fear of what ” we are .” -Corporeal Finite beings . With those body parts we most hide ( private parts) being most prone to rot at death.
The Adam / Eve nudity could also imply being guilty, exposed and vulnerable to God’s man’s and nature’s judgment. The man blamed the woman and the woman blamed the snake for causing their troubles . (Genesis 3:)
The Yawhist ( author of the first books of the Old testament) is very aware of the Hebrew word for naked which is ‘aerom from two possible roots: ‘aram which means naked, act wisely, prudently, cautiously or it could be from the root word ‘eyar which means to be in grief, agony as the agony of death or grief over a death. Could nudity imply here death of or grief over man’s innocence?
Prophet Hosea was commanded by God to marry a prostitute- Gommar .
This is a classific metaphor ( prostitution depicts nudity and infidelity –of course the issue of sacred and secular prostitution is a matter for reflection)
All Israel prophets allude to the fact that because the Israelites’ perpetual sinfulness, God was going to allow their enemies to rape and lay -nude their nation and people:
Prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah all use nakedness as a prophetic symbolism; eg Isaiah preach naked (Isaiah 20:1–4) and prophet
Jeremiah 13: 25-27 uses nudity to convey God’s message : He says ; “This is your lot, the portion I have decreed for you, declares the Lord, because you have forgotten me and trusted in false gods. I will pull up your skirts over your face that your shame may be seen your adulteries and lustful neighings, your shameless prostitution! I have seen your detestable acts on the hills and in the fields.”
In the new testament; The naked Christ on the cross is a sign of the worst : shame/humiliation /emptiness of man amidst the sophisticated divine love and mercy amidst man’s stupidity and ingratitude.
(Luke 23:34 ) Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
But also nudity and the cross in the new testament implies victory over vulnerability ;
In the Christ , we are no longer tied to human symbols ( clothes are symbols of perishability and vulnerability.)
Note : Muslims don’t burry people with any clothes.
(Mark 14:52 ) tells of a young man who fled naked from the garden of Gethsemane at the betrayal and arrest of Jesus. ( Some Biblical scholars argue that this disciple daring to run naked, depicts fright , panic and the terror.
The disciples confidence is only restored when the two disciples met Jesus on the road to Emmaus and during supper, Jesus clothed them with confidence (Luke 24:13-35)
So as you see using a religious eye : Nudity as well as clothes are not an innocent thing . Cognisant that the Latin rendering of nudity : nūdus (feminine nūda, neuter nūdum); first/second-declension adjective. unclothed, nude, naked. stripped, deprived, or destitute.
Note: In Greco-Roman Anthropology nudity and depiction of nude art has spiritual and masculinity connotations; rarely do they use the women in nudity depictions ( why ?) Women were held to a stricter moral code.
Karl Marx in “Das Kapital ” and the Communist Manifesto , introduces an important concept which may help us understand why desperate people resort to extreme means to convey their message. Karl Marx uses the example of the poor worker/peasants(Proletariat) and the Bourgeois:
These ,he says, when the proletariat are over /greatly exploited by the rich , they become dehumanised ( loose a sense of a normal humaneness .)
These in extreme cases act like mentally sick(mad) persons and we all know mad people have nothing to loose save the ” humanness which they already lost as a result of their alienated constrained or blurred lives.
When we look at these nude girls they depict women or girls without sanitary pads as shown by the paint of blood oozing from their pants , naked breasts ( these are all reminiscent) of young girls in our country without sanitary pads, young girls without bras, young girls and women who are forced to sell their bodies in the middle east because of lack of employment or extreme destitution or stay outside in the night prostituting in skimpy clothes .
All these women and girls in prostitution are ‘bought’ by us the elites, the rich , middle class , the well off for our pleasure by night . But by day we are too ready to blame, condemn and declare women and girls as sinners and spreaders of HIV/AIDS or those who lack godliness etc .
The poor nude girls represent our village mothers who did all they could despite our reckless fathers spending most of their time womanising or drinking malwa , but now that we are OK their children have left them in villages , weak and beaten by hard work during those years they spent looking and educating us .
Today, the poor old village mothers are half naked , in dilapidated huts with torn gomesis , their long and wrinkled age old breasts dangling out as if they are going to use them to trap fish in a village swamp. That is the state of most mothers whose now “well educated children” are here in Kampala driving cars which are as big and expensive as a village church .
The nude girls are representative of all of us . We are annoyed with them because we see ourselves ; we see our true nakedness as a nation and world which prides in mundane values .
These semi nude girls have chosen a softer tool- nudity . Other youth when angry with the systems they are in, choose guns and suicide bombing. We have seen this in Arabian countries, in Palestine-Israel, in Somalia, Yemen , Iraq, Syria etc where young people ( place bombs on themselves and detonate them ).
These are more evil than our nude girls ( why?) because they bomb indiscriminately to cause maximum damage so as to wake up society from its comfort zone and slumber .
In most cases use of nudity is a wake up call , which if not heeded to , the young people may graduate to what we see among the ” suicide bombers .”
May be even us in higher education institutions and the entire Ugandan Education terrain, we may need to ask ourselves an important question;
Do our female students have sanitary pads, decent meals in and outside school? Are we very sure that the nude girls are not a reflection/mirror of that girl child in West Budama at Paya, Mwero primary school , or in Bupadhengo , or Lumino near lake Victoria or in Butiru- Bugitimwa- Bugishu or in koome/Ssese islands on Lake Victoria or in Zombo primary school or Kabukolwa Secondary School?
Do those girls have the basics amidst the affluence of our privileged-planned children at the elite schools in and around Kampala? Those we visit with dishes of pork , goat meat, pizas .
Those that the thieving head teachers demand of us dozens of pens, reams of papers etc ?
When the youth loose their humanness – ” obuntu” not “obuntubulamu” because obuntubulamu has to do with human values /ethos but obuntu has to do with being human or what Jean Paul Satre called ipseity/Selbstwert ( selfhood /self worth or identity ) these end up in a state of hopelessness or depression ( die Senkung -in German )
The philosophy of Existentialism brings it very well with the German translation of hopelessness: “die Hoffnungslosigkeit” hopelessness, despair, desperation, frustration.
The state of hopelessness or frustration is an extremely dangerous thing because a hopeless ” person, ” or helpless (hilflos) person has lost all and looses nothing apart from that which all other human beings would hold sacred : ‘their self worth or dignity .’
Frederick Nietzsche, in his discussion on European society and the trends in its morality made a very astounding discovery; in the death of God .
He said : Europeans had killed their God and that spelt the end of their morality .
It is very easy to brush Nietzsche as a mad man ; Why and how can humans kill a God ?
But when you put on a critical eye reflected with what Europe is today , Nietzsche has a point .
Today the excessive utilitarian and ethical relativism reminiscent of European society has killed all the known ethos mostly their Christian Religious and historical moral base.
As a result some even marry dogs , cats, men and women are no longer ashamed to call themselves sodomites etc . People go to beaches and attend public parties nude, there is sex olympics, nudity parties .
Here we have for a long time seen PhD holders sexually harrasing female students.
We saw in Ugandan Parliament a married female member of Parliament caressing-
romantically another male member.
We have seen on TV and in stories how religious people do despicable things eg having sex to transmit so called blessings , bathing or washing women’s private parts to give them blessings etc
The rot around in our streets and in our societies is what the nude girls symbolise.
By condemning these girls we are no better than the Pharisees who brought to Jesus a woman caught in adultery John 8:1-11
They all vowed to kill the woman because according to Jewish law ; she deserved to die for the grave sex offense: But Jesus seeing inside all their hearts and knowing who they are said: “Let one of you who has never sinned be the first to throw a stone.” They all walked away one by one beacuse all of them had at least ever sinned .
Chunua Achebe in his African classic ” Things Fall Apart ” ends his novel with the sad story of his main character Okwonkwo committing suicide ; Okonkwo hanged himself because he couldn’t stand to see his beloved society being raped by the Albinos ( white man ) Okwonkwo is blamed by his close friend Obierika for bringing a suicide curse on Omofia .
Indeed, today, we are no different from Obierika .We are condemning the nude girls because we have been conditioned by a pretentious modern society which enjoys watching pyrography spread all over our laptops , phones, tabs and in magazines. we read but are very scared to see those who have committed: individual/diginity suicide .
I end with a reflection for all from Nietzsche: A statement of Atheism?
The madman.- Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”
As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you … God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
— The Gay Science §125
Muwagga Mugagga Anthony is a
Professor of philosophy of Education at SoE/Department of Foundations and Curriculum Studies, Makerere University
