Thursday, 9 January 2014
Don’t worry, I am not going to talk about
Basketmouth and diarrhea of the mouth he suffered this past few days. A lot has
been said about it, said far more eloquently than I can and by way better
writers. I do want to add something to the discourse about rape and how it is
treated in Nigeria. I am going to do that by telling a story I have never told before even
though it's been nearly twenty years, at least not in a public medium like a blog.
When I first entered the Uni, I was so
excited to be released into the wild. I was never really your typical
"properly behaved" girl, so I don’t quite think anyone expected me to
be your average Sister Holiness. I was adventurous, but had been held back by
my strict background. Mind you, I was not a partying kind of girl, never have been. I didn’t
go out much in the day, much less at night. I didn’t do very well with alcohol,
got too tipsy too quickly, so I generally didn't bother with it. I never smoked:
partly because I am asthmatic and partly because I found kissing a dude right
after he'd smoked rather nasty. I didn’t wear skimpy clothes. I had seen
myself as a fat person, and always longed for a much slender body. So
calling attention to my body with clothes wasn't my thing. Well,
except my legs but even at that it was a rare day that I wore anything short. So, on
the level of ‘bad-girl-ness’ parameter I had been raised in, I was
pretty tame. The only thing was that boys interested me a lot. Before then, they had
been this big mystery I had been kept far from, so yeah I wanted to try them as
much as I could once I got the chance. Unfortunately, not a lot of them interested
me when I really got down to it. Those who did, did not interest me for long.
And of course, there is always those who interested me who did not find me as
interesting. Anyway, I quickly learnt that taking on too much of boys within a
short space of time did not sit right with me. It was tiring, it was emotional,
it was boring, it was way too much hassle and not a lot of fun I had imagined
it would be. So I kind of purged myself of it all.
Then came my final year, four years later, I
discovered that there had been a rumour about me from that early uni days when
I was on a rollercoaster. Someone said I had been raped. I suppose constantly seeing
a girl with boys and then suddenly she is keeping to herself is too bizarre, it
just had to equate to a girl who had been raped. Apparently, a group of boys had
said they raped me. They said where they did it, they said when they did it,
and this complete fabrication made the rounds. I was stunned when I heard it. I
could not fathom how screwed up a person has to be that he derives pleasure in saying
he raped a girl. He did not just claim that to have had consensual sex. That
would have been stupid, but by jove understandable. He raped. He and his
friends raped. WHO LIES ABOUT RAPING SOMEBODY???????!!!!!!!! Who does that?
What sort of fucked up world do Nigerian boys live in that it would ever be
okay to boast about raping somebody?
I did confront one of the boys - the main guy
it was supposedly done in his room when I supposedly visited him. He claimed he
never said rape. Actually, he said he never said anything. So, where had the
story come from? He doesn't know, but he isn't the person who spread it, he
insisted. What was I going to do? It had been four years. How do I trail the
story? Besides, I was very scared of what else had been said - what other
falsehood had been spun. And yes, to an extent, I wondered if it was my
punishment for dallying with boys in the first place. My punishment for not
doing the good girl thing - attached myself to one boyfriend for the rest of my
years in university, or maybe do even better than that - keep chaste all
through it, going from class to library to fellowship meetings. Moreover, I was
grateful it had merely been a rumour. Yes I was, and immensely so. Because it
could have actually happened, and you and I know that a majority of our people
would have said that I had been asking for it. Still, I cried and my
self-esteem took a huge beating.
I cannot therefore find the homour in rape
jokes. Who knows, maybe the rape rumour had started with a joke. Someone joked,
someone laughed, and by the next day it had taken a new form - it had become a
confession. Imagine my seventeen years old self hearing that, first time away
from home, fragile and vulnerable. Imagine if I had heard that rumour then. So,
no, there is no room for rape jokes in my book. I don’t frigging give a shit
about the context. Because all it does is desensitize people about the gravity
of the damage rape does to people’s lives. It trivializes to an extent that
someone can be sick enough in the head to actually lie about doing it. To what
purpose, I wonder. So yes, everything about rape upsets the shit out of me.
Ciao
i don't find any humor in rape jokes too! i think it is extremely distasteful, i have escaped rape three times, the first when i was almost 6 and the last when i was 22 and i know what i dealt with not to imagine victims of actual rape..
ReplyDeletebut then no surprises, i participated in the walk against rape after the ABSU thingy and the overwhelming response we got on the streets was that women are to blamed for rape, the way we dress, the way we smile and in general No means Yes. we have a long way to go as a country
I have always feared rape and thankfully have no experience of it. I do remember a family friend was raped when she was about sixteen. The first thing anyone asked was what she was doing there in the first place. It made no sense then and it doesn't now. While we are ignorant and insensitive to rape and its victims lets not forget that even we as women ostracize and are even meaner to rape victims. God help us.
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