Empowered or Packaged?: Black Femininity and the Politics of the Gaze in Koroba

      The male gaze in film, as Laura Mulvey argues, operates to position women as passive objects of male desire. The camera will linger over the female body, fragment and sexualize the body in a bid to claim male visual control. Koroba employs such visual mechanisms with frequency. The camera constantly lingers over Tiwa Savage's hips, legs, and bust. Her slow, deliberate dance movements abetted by revealing costumes encourages the viewer to linger over her corporeality. The cinematography, including close-ups, slow pans, and tasteful lighting, operates toward a visual pleasure organized for an imaginary heterosexual male viewer. Even in contexts that are desexualized, such as a village market or beauty salon, Savage is represented as spectacle. Her body is dressed in vibrant, tight-fitting outfits, and the camera's movement with her underscores a performative eroticism. In Mulvey's terms, Savage is a "to-be-looked-at-ness" her body is where visual pleasure is invested. 

    No coincidence. Tiwa Savage is an Afropop artist with an international career, operating in a commercial music industry that often demands hyper-visible, sexualized branding. Her performance and body are therefore not just aesthetic choices, but commodities too designed to circulate in the global marketplace, to be consumed by African and by Western audiences. bell hooks, writing in "The Oppositional Gaze," finds both the male and white supremacist gaze wanting, contending that Black women viewers learn to look back in resistance, refusing to internalize dominant modes of looking. This "oppositional gaze" becomes the basis for a re-reading of works such as Koroba, where a surface reading might make one to assume sexual objectification, but a closer analysis finds subversion. 

    Tiwa Savage's appearance in Koroba is not passive or submissive. She often looks directly into the camera, glaring at the viewer and holding her own image hostage. This is a perversion of the traditional male gaze, which usually puts the woman in a position of ignorance or indifference towards being watched. Savage's awareness is employed as an act of empowerment she is not being watched so much as she watches back, unflinchingly. Moreover, the lyrics of the song complicate the images. In Koroba, Savage narrates double standards, power and money in Nigerian society. She employs sarcasm in criticizing judgmentalness against women who use their bodies to make themselves wealthy, even as she goes public against political corruption. This empowerment through lyrics drives the suggestion that Savage is not singing simply for other people's entertainment purposes she is using the platform to speak and highlight double standards and assert her freedom. The use of African aesthetics braid hairstyles, Ankara prints, community background, grounds the video in a local, culturally specific space. For bell hooks, the appropriation of Black identity and representation is central to the oppositional gaze. Rather than adhering to only Western ideals of beauty, Koroba celebrates Black womanhood, or Black femininity, precisely in a Nigerian context. 

   They're not background set dressing but leading players dancing, hairstyling, playing football, and committing everyday acts of resistance and joy. These collaborative representations of Black womanhood function to dismantle the isolating, fragmenting gaze typical of Western media images of Black womanhood. It is this duality of visibility that is at the core of Koroba conflict. To be visible can empower but also commodify. Tiwa Savage reclaims control of her narrative. She is an economically empowered, sexually empowered, and politically aware woman. She over visualizes her body and fashion to push back against African women have to dress modestly in order to be respectable. Her dancing is not necessarily a concession to male desire it can be read as bodily resistance and appropriation. In addition, by placing herself in traditionally masculine arenas. i.e., the football field and political arena Savage places female presence in spaces stereotypically held by men. This realignment of space for power both powerfulizes feminist empowerment theory through visibility and agency. However, the capitalist music industry puts its own constraints on this. For the sake of staying in the limelight on the global stage, artists like Savage are often compelled to commodify themselves for sale. Her sexualization can be argued to be working towards feminist objectives in one way, but works towards a broader culture that benefits from Black women's bodies being eroticized. The choreography, the look, even the narrative can risk being lost to aesthetic consumption, where freedom is a spectacle for sale, instead of a revolutionary rewriting of cultural norms. In so doing, Koroba becomes part of the very systems that it is attempting to critique. 

   In conclusion, Tiwa Savage's Koroba is a complex text expressing the complex reality of enacting Black Nigerian femininity within a transnational media. Based on Laura Mulvey's theory of male gaze, the video can be read in order to cater to patriarchal visual norms of sexualizing and commodifying the feminine body. But in bell hooks' oppositional gaze, instead, a Black feminist spectator can read the same images as a form of resistance where Savage takes control of her own image, resists socio-political convention, and places African femininity at the center. Empowerment and commodification are less resolved than negotiated. Koroba demonstrates how Black women negotiate agency in systems designed to contain them through the application of performance, style, and lyrical narrative as survival strategies and as sites of subversion. Savage and her audience look back literally and metaphorically through an oppositional gaze that transcends surface appearance to a more unencumbered gaze of Black womanhood.