THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT Aisha Yesufu Doesn’t Fit In,
TWO things that aren’t supposed to go together: bread and noodles. But if you do summon courage and with that audacity venture into the unknown, you are likely to find taste buds surprised. Your surprise will then breed stories. Stories of delicious shock and wonder that you will share on twitter, and that might go viral. But you know what other combination aren’t supposed to make sense? A woman in hijab and a nationwide anti- police- brutality march. When you put them together though, you will certainly be surprised. And surprise, as I just suggested, is the mother of great stories.
Which is why the world cannot stop talking about Aisha Yesufu. Her ‘ type’ doesn’t belong in the canon of civil disobedience— she’s a Muslim woman, she’s based in the North of Nigeria, she’s married with grown children. Yet there she is, there she always is, at the forefront, vociferous, relentless, even justifying why dying for one of the causes she’s pushed for more than five years wouldn’t be an unheard of way to go.
Earlier this week, while being interviewed on the combative TVC show, Fireworks, Ms
Yesufu waved off the threats to her life because they have become common. What has she not been condemned to death for?
“There have been calls for me to be killed,” she said, “that I’m not a Muslim, that I’m an infidel, that I hate Islam, that I’m a gay rights activist. And then ironically, of course, the gay people say I’m homophobic.” You wonder how she’s able to sleep at night with such rife glowering pointed at her.
Something must kill a man— or woman— is how she frames it. And she’d rather her death, while she deliberately lives her life “to the fullest” every day, isn’t meaningless or stupid. “For me death is when I’m unable to speak against injustice because I’m afraid to die,” she said. “I would rather die standing and on my own terms.”
But why? What does Aisha Yesufu want? From where has she materialised? What makes a 46- year- old middleclass woman, born to Edo natives and raised in Kano, a university graduate ( Bayero University,
Kano), and is married to a civil servant, continually conscript herself into some of the most blatant public confrontations with the government?
From when she burst onto the
Nigerian psyche in 2014 as a cofounder of the Bring Back Our Girls group— the movement to pressure Aso Rock to find and rescue by any means necessary the 276 schools girls who had been abducted by Boko Haram from a high school in Chibok, Borno State— to the Say No To Social Media Bill in 2015, and now the # ENDSARS protests, she is constantly on the streets, fighting, mostly with biting words. These battles cannot be ignored because, as she sees it, the Nigerian population has become an endless supply of sitting ducks that are plucked off randomly. Somebody has to do something. Now, if that somebody happens to be