You started a war. We will finish it.

I've been very sick. But the internet - that small microcosm of Nigerians, that incredible place where the educated go to reveal their true selves, has made me sicker.

A woman; brilliant, controversial, bold -- came forward with a story of rape more horrific than anything I would wish on my enemy.

There should not have been a single word uttered against her. There should have been ashes and sackcloth and collective grief that eight years passed with this festering evil eating up one of their own, but of course Nigerians showed themselves mighty in the defence of the powerful. 

I wish any of the reactions surprised me. But they didn't. And the pain of this -- the pain of this child, this woman who cannot sleep through a night because men thought her a plaything, effectively silenced her with threats of further destruction, broke down the spirit of a child so much that her abuser was the only one she could turn to -- her pain was taken for sport.

Like the snake in the garden, they hissed. Eight years of silence and now this? How much attention does one whore need? Do you not know a lie when you hear it? Sssssslut. Shamelessssss. Dissssgusting. 

The gods of the universe fold in on themselves in horror. This is what they created? These creatures, who would pick up the pain of a child in a world that they know is designed to create such pain, and turn it over and over in their hands, to find a crack to prove that it is not really pain? It's just your imagination, you vile, ugly thing. Be quiet. BE QUIET.

That ANYONE would open their mouths and allow these things fall on the head of a child, of a woman surviving, of a human being, is the most heartbreaking thing.

And yet. 

AND YET. 

None of this surprises me. I have known since I was a child that no woman is rapeable, not before she is raped, not after she is raped, not while she is being raped. I knew it when I was seven, knew it when I was sixteen, knew it when I was eighteen. I knew it and kept my unrapeable mouth shut as men I loved and trusted raped me. There is none of us good enough to be left alone, or good enough to be believed. NONE.

But ENOUGH.

ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH.

The silence has gone on LONG ENOUGH. Does the Earth itself not cry out for us?!

Where is the justice? Where is it that we can go to find safety? WHERE?

I want to scream: What have we done to deserve your hatred?  Yes, ALL women. Every single one of us. What did we do to deserve this violence?! 

You allow us no safety. Even when all we want is to live, to take back the things you stole from us when you invited yourselves into our bodies, even when we want nothing more than to survive, you hunt us down and grind us into the ground. And some of us join you, and you spit in our faces, are those not women? They are, but they are women deceived, mouths full of the poison of the abuser, eyes sealed shut so that they can pretend to have found safe haven. 

We would laugh at you, barbed-tongued woman, if we did not know the truth of your situation. We weep for you, just as we weep for the daughters we are afraid to bear, afraid to let go of, afraid for, because there is no safe haven. Know this: The man whose approval settles on your shoulders hates you just as much as he hates the whore, the bold woman, the woman who dares to claim her name and her life. Push him. I dare you. His violence will spray across your face like acid and you will know that none of us are special to him. Especially not you, a woman who dares to forget her place. Know this.

It is enough.

Our blood is on your hands. On your fists and your sheets and at the bottom of your beer glasses as you joke and laugh. You can not escape it. It cries out from the depths of the darkness, it cries out for justice, for vengeance. BLOOD FOR BLOOD. LIFE FOR LIFE.

We are weary. The fight is before us, every second of every day. You do not alleviate it. You do not fight for us. You stick your toe in the water and scream it is too hot, too cold, too much. You leave us to it. And yet when we fight you tell us we are too angry, too heartbroken, that we are bleeding all over the carpet and it makes you uncomfortable. SHALL WE CONTINUE TO DIE IN SILENCE FOR YOUR COMFORT? IS YOUR COMFORT WORTH OUR LIVES?

You are demons, walking around wielding a power you have no right to. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Our mothers died fighting for some room to breathe. Our daughters WILL NOT. This is where it ENDS. 

FUCK YOUR COMFORT. FUCK EVERYTHING YOU PREFER TO BELIEVE ABOUT YOURSELF WHEN YOU SHAVE YOUR FACE IN THE MORNING AND WINCE AT THE NICK OF THE BLADE. PRESS THAT BLADE TO YOUR NECK AND KNOW THAT WE ARE COMING FOR YOU. THIS IS A WAR YOU HAVE STARTED, AND BY GOD IT WILL END.

Demon, know this. The curses are laid. The fight has begun. You drew the line. We have crossed it. There is no more comfort for you. This is war.

I wrote about rape (again) for Olisa.tv

You can see links to all my writing published elsewhere here, but I just wrote a piece about rape and victim-blaming over here, in reaction to an infuriating debate I had yesterday.

Victim-blaming is far too common, and like racism, which many people think is defined very narrowly as 'hating Black people', there are some kinds of victim-blaming that are 'benevolent'. A good example would be how parents/authority figures tell girls not to do certain things to 'limit the chances' of them getting raped.

I call bullshit.

"Stop and think, for a moment, what your desire to victim-blame is rooted in, and how much sense it really makes. Victim-blaming, in any context, assuages your fear of the possibility of experiencing a similar fate and shores up your knowledge that bad things only happen to a certain kind of person — a person less intelligent than you, less worldly-wise than you, less obedient, more slutty. 

Victim blaming ensures that you will always feel like bad things can happen to anyone but you (and people like you). If you know better (and you will prove that you do by citing all of the things the victim could have done to ‘prevent’ their rape), then they should have known better. And if they didn’t know better and they got raped, well there you go. Better luck next time!"

Read the whole piece here.

Silence(d)

"There are no voiceless; there are only the silenced."
Entertainment Splash came on the radio just as we passed what used to be the Ibadan toll gate, and after the stories about Lupita's Oscar and the imminent AMVCAs, the show moved on to the Obesere rape allegation. The presenters, two male, one female, went over the victim's story: she had been introduced to the musician because he had connections that could benefit her. She went to see him at his house, he made advances that she refused, then agreed to stay in his guest room till morning because it was so late. During the night he came to her room and raped her, penetrating her with a heavy gold ring as well.

I didn't have to wait long for the disbelief. Male Presenter 1 spoke up: "Sorry o, but this lady's story is strange." Female presenter: "Exactly! Why did she stay at his house if he had already made advances? Is she a child? She's 29 years old for God's sake, she can't tell me she doesn't know better." Male presenter 2: "She called it a business meeting yet she was there till midnight? Is she a learner?" They all agreed amid laughter that she was indeed a learner. By the time the show was over the other people in the taxi had more to add: she probably slept with him for money and then cried wolf when he refused to pay her, she just wanted to blackmail him because he's famous, you can't trust these women.

I listened to these comments in unsurprised despair. Rape is a seriously misunderstood and misrepresented concept in Nigeria; it is the most underreported crime in the country, with statutory rape being permissible under customary law and marital rape not even being illegal. A January 2013 poll gives some disturbing insight into the way Nigerians perceive rape, with 'indecent dressing' being listed as the top cause of rape, alongside 'lack of moral values, unemployment and inability to control the sexual urge', and the majority of rapes going unreported due to 'pressures that seek to compel women to remain silent about rape in order to conform to the expected societal standards of women remaining chaste till marriage.'

The sad truth is that Nigeria and its average citizens promote the deafening silence of rape victims: when women come forward with their stories, they are invariably described as attention-seeking liars. And when it cannot be disproved that they were indeed raped, they are responsible for their rapes because of something they did or didn't do. She went out at night. She went to his house. She wore a short skirt. She dated him. She was a prostitute. She was working late. She was going to sleep with him anyway. The list is endless, but the meaning is always the same: these women made themselves rapeable. In doing or not doing so-and-so, how could they expect anything other than to be raped?!

I am a Nigerian woman. I have been raped. It never once occurred to me to report my rapist: I was sixteen, I snuck out of school to see my 26 year old club-owner toaster, I went to his house, and he raped me. I knew without being told that I would be blamed for it, so going to the police never entered my mind. I continued my life as yet another unreported rape victim, because the country I grew up in, with its patriarchal culture and religious fundamentalism, had taught me that I was responsible for my rape, my shame was mine alone, and my truth would not be believed.

Rape in Nigeria is a systemic, institutionalized issue protected by culture, ignored by the law and decried only in theory. We have a culture that tells people that women's sexuality is not valid outside of the context of a man and babies, that men are animals unable to control their sexual urges and women are somehow responsible for this absence of self-control, that women's bodies are public property, that a woman cannot be defined outside of a man's ownership of her, that her chastity is what defines her value as a person, and her marriage is what cements her womanhood. And so a raped woman is, very simply, a woman who has cheated herself, by herself.

She knows her options are limited - almost non-existent. She goes to her family, and she is begged to be silent. She goes to the police, and she is disbelieved. She goes to her lover, and he is offended that someone else has eaten from his pot. She goes to her friends and she is asked why she did what she did to bring the rape on herself. So she goes to no one. She picks up the pieces, cries herself to sleep, reminds herself to calm down every time she passes her assailant on the street or at work or at home, prays it never happens again, suffers through the same cycle if it does.

In Nigeria, the rape victim almost always has no allies, no friends, no support. In fact, she barely exists: a victim is someone against whom a crime has been committed, hapless, innocent, deserving of justice. Nigerian people can almost always find a way to blame a woman for her rape (assuming of course that it even happened at all; you know you really can't trust these women). And if you can be blamed, you are not a victim. If there are no victims, there is no crime. If there is no crime, we do not have a problem.

Nigeria does not have a rape problem.

Hardy Har Har, Tokstarr

Tokstarr, or Toke Makinwa to the uninitiated (ahem), is possibly Nigeria's most ubiquitous media personality. Someone once said that she's like MTN: bright yellow and everywhere you go. I found it hilarious, if a bit harsh. I don't listen to radio, so I don't know what she's like, but I was wandering around on Instagram, and one of her photos is the whole reason for this blogpost.

There's a lot I find very disquieting about the fact that this photo is on her Instagram. Here is a young woman with a significant following posting a (racist?) 'joke' about a 12 year old child having sex...and the punch line is that this child is a whore. To my mind, she must have first found it funny herself, for her to consider it appropriate to share.

Where to even begin?

I'm not Chinese, so I don't know if the play on their language would be considered offensive. But you don't have to be female, or an adolescent, to know that there is absolutely nothing amusing about rape, which is what any kind of sex involving a 12 year old child is. 

More disturbing than the mere fact of Toke posting this picture was the sheer number of 'LOL'ers, many of them female, one of whom even took it upon herself to 'school' the lone woman who took exception to the 'joke'. 

I've noticed that when people take exception to tasteless jokes such as this, they are invariably accused of being too sensitive, lacking humor, or having nothing better to do than make a fuss over nothing. But this isn't nothing. Rape isn't nothing. Paedophilia isn't nothing. Calling a girl (or any female for that matter) a 'ho' isn't nothing.

It wasn't long ago that Basketmouth got serious flak for posting a rape joke on his social media. I however find this joke even more distressing than Basketmouth's, because not only does it make rape seem okay, it goes further to shame the victim by calling her a 'young ho'. Add to that the fact that it was posted and laughed at by women, and one has to wonder just how much of a problem of internalized misogyny we have in Nigeria. I think it is important for any marginalised/oppressed/mis- or under-represented group to be careful about the messages they put out in the world. Having men misunderstand or make light of the very real, very serious issues women face is bad enough; should we have to deal with women doing the same thing too? 

Last year, the Nigerian populace was outraged by the legislature's apparent attempt at legalizing child marriage in the country. I did a simple twitter search, and found Toke's thoughts on the matter.

I wasn't surprised to note her own (mild?) outrage. I just have one question for Toke: are Instagram likes all it takes for you to change your mind about children and their sexual availability?