OPINION: Violence In The Place I Call Home, By Hyeladzira Mshelia

…They stripped women naked in the streets while everyone Watched

The Delta State I know smells like childhood. It sounds like school bells and familiar streets and the particular comfort of a place that shaped you. I finished primary school in Asaba. I began and completed my secondary school there. It is home, in every way that word carries weight.

And so it is with a specific, personal grief, not just moral outrage that I write this.

There is a particular kind of fatigue that settles in when history refuses to move, when you find yourself, in 2026, reading things that should have been buried decades ago. It is the weariness of being perpetually, exhaustingly right.

It is the fatigue of women in Ozoro, Delta State, who stepped outside yesterday — not to protest, not to provoke, simply to exist, and were hunted for it. Surrounded. Grabbed. Stripped naked in public streets by groups of men, sometimes more than twenty at a time, during a festival built on one foundational premise: that a woman’s presence in public space is not a right, but an offense punishable by her own humiliation.

And there were witnesses. There are always witnesses.This is what happened: young women and students, going about the ordinary business of their lives, buying food, getting to class, reporting to work, were set upon in broad daylight. Not by strangers acting in secret. By crowds acting in concert. With confidence. With impunity. Because the community had already decided, long before yesterday, that this was permitted. That this was, in fact, the point. That is not a cultural tradition. That is a schedule of violence. And there is a critical difference between the two.

Tradition carries. It preserves language, memory, ritual, identity. It connects generations to something larger than themselves. But when what is being preserved is the terrorising of women, when the thing being passed down is the right to strip a human being of her dignity in public, we must be honest enough to call it what it is. Not heritage. Not custom. A system. A deliberate, recurring, community-sanctioned system for reminding women that their bodies do not belong to them.

This is the part that history keeps forgetting to bury — not just the violence itself, but the quiet permission granted to it. The crowd that watches. The institutions that shrug. The cultural scaffolding erected around brutality to make it legible as tradition, to make assault sound like heritage, to give violence a calendar date and call it a festival. We have been sold a lie that feminism is the source of some modern discord — that before women began insisting on their humanity, the world was orderly and whole. But look at Ozoro. Look at what that “order” actually protected. Look at who was comfortable in that silence, and who was bleeding in it.

Feminism did not create this discord. It diagnosed it. The chaos, the discomfort, the so-called culture wars, those belong entirely to the people who looked at equity and chose opposition. The movement was never the wound. It was always the attempt to heal one.

What happened in Ozoro is not a cultural anomaly. It is the logical conclusion of a world that has consistently, across centuries and continents, treated women’s safety as negotiable and women’s bodies as communal property. It is what happens at the end of the long road of dismissing feminism as radical. Of mocking the women who said this is not safe. Of insisting that those who name the problem are more dangerous than the problem itself.

And it will keep happening — in Ozoro, and everywhere else the world rewards silence over accountability, until we stop treating the protection of culture as more urgent than the protection of women. The women who were stripped in those streets yesterday do not need our outrage performed online and forgotten by Tuesday. They do not need think pieces that stop at outrage and mistake visibility for change. They need justice. They need the men who participated to face legal consequences. They need the institutions that have permitted this festival to continue, year after year — to be held responsible for every single assault carried out under its cover. They need the world to finally, irreversibly, decide that this is unacceptable. Not complicated. Not nuanced. Not a matter of cultural sensitivity.

Unacceptable!

I grew up in Delta State. I carry it with me, the streets, the schools, the memories of becoming who I am in that place. And perhaps that is why this particular story refuses to stay at a comfortable distance. Because this did not happen in the abstract. It happened in a place I love, to women who deserve better from it. The exhaustion is profound. But so is the clarity.

We are not confused about what this is. We are simply tired of having to say it.

— Mshelia, acting Chief Executive of Connected Development (CODE), wrote in from Abuja.