The Revolution Is Uncomfortable. That's the Point.

A friend of mine said something recently that I have not been able to shake. She said the revolution happening now is necessary. It may be uncomfortable for some, triggering maybe. A lot of the voices raised in regards to this motion might not be morally correct or might be a little twisted. But they are all part of a necessary process to get to where we need to be. Which is total liberation and equal rights for all people.

She also said something else. That you do not suppose that a person who the system has always favoured would want it changed.

Both of those things are true. And both of them have been true for a very long time.

Discomfort is not new

When Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti mobilised 20,000 Abeokuta women to march against the Alake of Egba in the 1940s, it was uncomfortable. A woman, organising market traders, challenging a king. The colonial administration did not like it. The traditional power structure did not like it. Nobody in authority liked it. They were forced to deal with it anyway because 20,000 women standing outside your palace is not something you can ignore.

When Huda Shaarawi removed her face veil at Cairo's train station in 1923, it was uncomfortable. She had just returned from an international women's conference in Rome. She stepped off the train, lifted the veil from her face, and a crowd of women who had come to welcome her home did the same. Egyptian society was scandalised. Newspapers wrote about it for weeks. The discomfort was the point. The veil was a symbol. Removing it was a statement.

When Nawal El Saadawi published Women and Sex in 1972, it was uncomfortable enough to get her fired from her job at the Egyptian Ministry of Health. She wrote about female genital mutilation, about patriarchy, about the sexual exploitation of women. She named things that everyone knew existed but nobody was supposed to say out loud. She was imprisoned under Sadat. She was exiled. She received death threats for decades. She kept writing.

None of this was comfortable. All of it was necessary.

The pattern

Look at the women in this archive and a pattern emerges. Almost every one of them was called too much. Too loud. Too angry. Too radical. Too ambitious. Too difficult. Too dangerous.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was called dangerous by the apartheid state, controversial by the media, and difficult by members of her own movement. She held the anti-apartheid struggle together for 27 years while her husband was in prison. She was banned, detained, tortured, and exiled to a remote town. She refused to be quiet. That refusal made everyone uncomfortable.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED talk called "We Should All Be Feminists" and suddenly became the target of people who had never read her novels but had very strong opinions about what she should or should not say. She was labelled angry, Western-influenced, elitist. She was talking about the same things Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was talking about 70 years earlier.

Leymah Gbowee organised Christian and Muslim women in Liberia to stage a sex strike and sit-in that helped end a civil war. Some people thought it was vulgar. Some thought it was manipulative. It worked. She won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The discomfort always comes before the change. Always.

"Angry feminist" is not a new insult

My friend pointed out that men who benefit from the current system will resist anyone who questions it. That resistance takes the form of labels: angry feminist, man-hater, troublemaker. These labels are meant to discredit the speaker so that nobody has to engage with what she is actually saying.

This is not a social media invention. It is as old as the struggle itself.

Margaret Ekpo was called a troublemaker for demanding women's representation in Nigerian politics in the 1950s. Gambo Sawaba was imprisoned multiple times and reportedly tortured for advocating for girls' education in northern Nigeria. The label changes with the era but the purpose stays the same: make the woman the problem so you never have to address the problem she is raising.

When someone calls a woman an "angry feminist" today, they are doing exactly what colonial administrators did when they called Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti a nuisance. They are doing what the apartheid state did when they called Winnie Mandela dangerous. The words update. The strategy does not.

The uncomfortable truth about comfort

Here is what discomfort really means in this context. It means someone who was never forced to think about a particular injustice is now being forced to think about it. That is not pleasant. It is not supposed to be.

If the conversation about women's rights were comfortable, it would mean nothing was being challenged. Comfort means the status quo is intact. Discomfort means something is shifting.

My friend was right. The revolution happening now is messy. Some of the voices are imperfect. Some of the arguments are flawed. That has been true of every movement in history. The Aba Women's War of 1929 involved the destruction of colonial property and the intimidation of warrant chiefs. It was not polished. It was not neat. It worked. The British were forced to reform the entire system of colonial taxation and governance in southeastern Nigeria.

Progress has never come from making people comfortable. It has come from making the cost of maintaining injustice higher than the cost of changing it.

What the archive teaches us

Every woman in this archive faced resistance. Every single one. The ones who fought colonial powers. The ones who challenged their own governments. The ones who wrote books. The ones who ran for office. The ones who simply refused to be silent.

The lesson is not that resistance can be avoided. The lesson is that resistance is confirmation. If nobody is uncomfortable, nothing is changing.

So when you see a woman online saying something that makes you bristle, before you dismiss her, consider this: the same reaction you are having is the reaction people had to Kudirat Abiola when she demanded the restoration of democracy in Nigeria. It is the reaction people had to Lilian Ngoyi when she led 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria. It is the reaction people had to every woman who ever stood up and said, "This is not right."

The discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong with the message. It is a sign that the message is landing exactly where it needs to.