The Afterlives of #EndSARS

Member of the Feminist Coalition and organizer of the #ArewaMeToo and #NorthNormal movements, Fakhrriyyah Hashim, reflects on #EndSARS five years after ‘Feminists against SARS’ redefined national consciousness on police violence.

Five years ago, young Nigerians created a movement that was many things all at once. For two weeks in October 2020, #EndSARS was a mass offline movement across several states in Nigeria, as young Nigerians across ethnic, class and religious lines organized with hopes that their future could be different. It was digital activism that can be traced as far back as 2017, using Twitter for mass coordination and awareness. It was feminist organizing, with the Feminist Coalition emerging to not just counter the overrepresentation of men’s experiences of police violence and silencing of women, but also to speak for women, who often bear the harshest brunt of social movements. It was a queer statement, as #QueerNigerianLivesMatter insisted that a movement against police violence that normalizes violence against queer lives was counterproductive. It was class solidarity, as upwardly mobile people and less mobile people recognized their shared vulnerability to state violence. It was also an anti-colonial refusal of the policing afterlives of British colonialism and the indigenous elite's continuation of these structures.

What is police violence? What is state violence? How did #EndSARS help us define both? #EndSARS revealed these to be within the same oppressive cycle of power where underpaid, exploited police officers redirect their own precarity onto Nigerian young people through extortion, harassment and too often, fatal encounters. As a result, Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) officers targeted young people whose appearance and existence, locs, dyed hair, iPhones, being visibly queer, being a woman in ‘the wrong place’, were considered improper. #EndSARS showed how state violence operated: not just through individual bad actors weaponized by the state, but through an elite, exclusive structure that renders everyone unrepresented and oppressed.

Therefore, when young Nigerians organized to demand an end to SARS and bad governance, the state's response was devastatingly predictable. On 20 October 2020, the state responded to peaceful protesters sitting on the floor and singing the then-national anthem with death. After the massacre at Lekki Toll Gate, surveillance of activists, frozen bank accounts, the Twitter ban, and coordinated online harassment followed over the next year. Feminist organizers faced accusations of feminized corruption, virtually backstabbed by former ‘allies’ who praised feminist leadership when it served their interests. Queer activists were told their visibility was unwanted and distracted the movement. Ethnic divisions that #EndSARS briefly united, reasserted themselves. The digital platform, Twitter, itself became caught in a global elite capture as Big Tech made explicit its empire aspirations.

Five years later, we remember #EndSARS not away from these fractures but through them. This memorial arrives at a moment where subsequent movements emerging out of #EndSARS have largely remained feminist-exclusionary. Twitter, now X under Elon Musk’s ownership, has lost much of the safety and moderation systems that made it a relatively safe commons that enabled #EndSARS. We continue to witness the silencing and public punishment of women political actors, from Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan’s removal from the Senate to the ongoing state and non-state harassment of feminist activists online.

Amid these devastating conditions, new generations of Nigerian feminists find solidarity and inspiration in what the Feminist Coalition represented. ‘FemCo’ has now become shorthand for a particular kind of Nigerian feminist organizing that is centred around digital labour and community management, extending this label far beyond the original fourteen women who formed the coalition. Young feminists invoke FemCo as proof that radical feminist organizing in Nigeria is possible, even as they navigate the personal costs and systemic barriers that make such organizing increasingly precarious.

Memory work is a radical feminist political project. We remember because #EndSARS is not in a vacuum but a contemporary addition to a series of movements emerging out of Nigeria, from the Egba Women’s Movement to the Aba Women’s War to the movement for the survival of Ogoni people and more. Every subsequent movement will build on this foundation and will choose to either learn from #EndSARS failures or inherit its tensions.

As a scholar who has spent the past five years researching #EndSARS’ digital networks of feminist/queer organizing and connections to histories of resistance, I recognize that we need to engage the afterlives of this movement in more reflexive ways. This interview with a member of the Feminist Coalition and organizer of the #ArewaMeToo and #NorthNormal movements, Fakhrriyyah Hashim, five years after the movement, is a lens into how those most central to organizing understand what was built, broken, and continues to persist.

We discuss the disconnect between the global celebration of #EndSARS as globally visible African digital organizing and the reality that police violence continues. We also examine the gendered backlash that has pushed many Nigerian women out of visible political organizing spaces, as well as what commitment those who organized #EndSARS feel toward younger feminists who have continued to emerge post-2020.

Our conversation continues below and has been edited for brevity...

This interview features in our special issue commemorating the fifth anniversary of the #EndSARS protests. Subscribe to The Republic to read the stories that keep #EndSARS alive.