PSA: Comments

If you guys needed any more proof regarding my tech ineptitude, here it is: someone pointed out to me that only people with Google+ Profiles are able to comment on my blog. I wasn't aware of this, and while I'm proud of myself for figuring out how to change that in less than 20 minutes, I'm afraid all your lovely comments posted on google+ will vanish into the ether.

I only hope that one day in the near future I will figure this thing out, once and for all. Till then, please bear with me! 

The Scenic Route Still Gets You There

I wrote my last exam in Uni this morning. Can I get an "Amen!"?

I'd been looking forward to this day, anticipating this moment, for such a long time that I didn't know how to feel when it finally came. The end of my apparently endless undergraduate career, lengthened by three strikes that lasted a total of a year, and a year-long break to have my daughter (and, as it turned out, grieve my mum), arrived this morning at 10.24 am, and there were no fireworks! I found it a bit underwhelming, in all honesty.

But here I am done, dusted, on my grown woman shit, and pleased as punch. My sixteen year old self would never have been able to picture the events of the last six years - hell, my current self still has trouble recognizing my reality sometimes, but I am finally done with the University of Ibadan and vowing never to write another exam ever again in my life.

I still believe going to Uni was a waste of valuable time, considering how crappy the system is, but I'm grateful for the friends I made. I really lucked out in the friendship department, a fact which was never more obvious than when I fell pregnant in my not-so-final year and then lost my mum months later. If you're one of those people who think female friends are too much hassle, you need new friends (or a different attitude). I never liked school, but having people who genuinely had my back and with whom I could make awesome memories definitely improved my experience.

I'm really not sure what the point of this post is supposed to be, beyond sharing this small seed of happiness that I have. Like one of the half-unread books on my shelf says, life turns man up and down. Even if it was not part if the plan, you can still make it work.

Misadventures in Tech Land

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Girl Power, Rah Rah - Nah.

This post is a bit 'for the record'-esque, so I will be brief: my feminism (because I believe in the concept of different feminisms) is not about usurping power, it's about being given equal opportunities and equitable treatment.

Let all children, male or female, go to school. And let girls have safe, clean toilets at school.

Let all people, male or female, get jobs based on merit, let their salaries and promotions be based on the same performance criteria, and let pregnant women be treated fairly in the workplace.

Let all parents, male or female, be allowed to participate in their children's lives in the public sphere in the same ways/whatever ways they choose, without their competence being called into question.

Let all adults, male or female, be able to explore and express their sexuality in healthy, consensual ways without judgment or reprisal.

Let girls and women contribute, lead, create and succeed, without questioning their abilities or qualifying their output with 'feminine' (read: 'less worthy of respect') qualifiers. 

Let boys and men be vulnerable, in need of help, emotional, asexual, non-violent, paternal and faithful, without qualifying their actions as 'feminine' (again, 'less worthy of respect') qualifiers.

My (and most other feminists') feminism isn't anti-man, man-hating, militant rampaging. It's not about men. It's about systems of oppression and the usually but not exclusively male-run, male-upheld institutions that promote and perpetuate them. It's about patriarchy, about kyriarchy, about the dehumanization of women and men due to subjugation, abuse of power and denial of rights.

So, guys, don't flatter yourselves. This shit ain't about you.

Die. It's Easy.

It is probably for the best that Nigerian hospitals don't have the manpower to perform routine autopsies on the unusually deceased, because the sort of Cause of Death reports we would receive would be the stuff of a truly macabre imagination. In Nigeria there are a thousand ways to die, many of them too amazing to be anything but stark reality.

You can die from a two-year old misdiagnosis given at a government hospital, or from an asthma attack because there is no oxygen, or from an asthma attack because the nurse won't listen when you mention she is overdosing you, or from an asthma attack when your inhaler turns out to be fake. You can die by falling from an old crane with maintenance issues on a construction site, or a truck driving into your shop when its brakes fail on a bad road. You can be T-boned by a speeding trailer on your way to NYSC camp, or in a plane crash along with all your classmates because there is no water for the Fire Service to save you with. 

You can die when the power goes out while you're in surgery, or when your doctor lies about your child being breech so he can charge you extra for a (subsequently botched) Caesarean section. You can die when a plane falls out of the sky into your house on a quiet Sunday, or when long-forgotten bombs go off in a military cantonment kilometers away, or for maybe being gay. You can die when a building collapses or when your pastor sets you on fire. You can die when your aunty decides you're a witch, when your husband stabs you 76 times, or when you are forced to marry your rapist. 

You can die for some obscure reason, when terrorists come to visit, or at national job interviews.

And you will be forgotten, eventually, by everyone but those who loved you before you died. No one will care enough about how you died to make sure nobody else dies that way, because this is Nigeria after all; people die all the time.

'Nuff Said.

I'll just leave this 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.