I have always felt the urge to simply yank off whatever is dear to anyone who perpetuates gender based violence. I grit my teeth and hold back the tears when a man begins his confessions of how he molested his daughter or his friends daughter from age 12. These days everyone is involved; fathers, teachers, religious leaders, human traffickers, uncles, drug dealers, warlords and war urchins.
A woman’s body is what a human trafficker uses to disempower her. Raping her severally until she succumbs speechless to an indescribable pain that envelopes her being and turns her into a robot. Now the trafficker can pimp her. She is his oxen to be milked for money. Him feeding fat off an immorality so deep he simply sees her as commerce while she – broken and dispirited – loses her soul.
Rape is not to be taken lightly. The eyes of the victim loses its lustre and if she could she would kill her abuser and make him mincemeat for dogs and vultures, a deserving counter violence. When you rape a woman, you pretty much have killed her stripping her of her very essence, her name, her core. In the end you leave behind a shell, a no person who in turn can inflict the highest injury on anyone they meet, in the slow death of losing oneself. They walk around and look normal but without the requisite counselling, they are simply dead to themselves and others. Our children released by bandits, kidnappers and Bolton harambee cannot tell of the unspeakable things that happened to them. With sunken eyes and shallow faces, sallow skin and measured movements, our children rejoin us but we lost most of them already to the forest, the barks of the analogue who kept them hostage, with themselves needing help from the meaninglessness of it all.
I am passionate because the issue of gender based violence can only be understood from the lenses of another woman and even then only partially. For no one can truly live the life of a victim except they have been down that path. No one can truly understand. The fact that a woman can be tired if she has had a heavy day and is negotiating her way from an intimate partner means that if a stranger abuses a woman in such a violent way, she is pretty much decapitated. Stranger, gorgeous, smell, violence, invasion it is difficult to even fathom. I have met victims who have scrubbed away that smell until they are bleeding. That smell of a total stranger who in a flash took the life of another through rape. The stinking smell of dominance, shattered lives and pain.
These days it seems that some men think any woman is Canon fodder. And a rape victim carries the shame for the rest of their lives, suffers anxiety and is in and out of depression for the most part of their lives. Ask American actress Gabrielle Union. Ask Oprah. Ask many young Nigerian women, advocates against gender based violence. I do not wish it on my worst enemy.
And so reading through an online newspaper I found the pathetic story of Ms Renua Giwa- Amu amusing. The animator, artist, and creative took her life last year in England. Only 29, all she ever wanted was to go home to Lagos. She had suffered severe bouts of depression and was on medication.
But she had severally accused her father of raping her multiple times since she was seven. The father did not respond to press inquiries and her Uncles denied on her fathers behalf. In addition to all of this she had just come through from an abusive marriage. Two years of torture with a man she had called husband. There were pictures of a determined young girl whose life was ahead of her. Then there were pictures of her with signs of abuse where she had reported to the police of being hit by her husband and being choked by him.
It was clear to me that something was off. At the end of the day, the police found a lifeless girl in her flat. She never made it back to Lagos. A truly troubled girl carrying the burdens of the world destroyed by family and friends.
I am in awe of women who rise in the face of abuse, who wake up everyday and function, who take the first step to departing that toxic environment. Be bold. Make that courageous move while you are still alive. The violent he-goat does not deserve you.
Ms Renua Giwa- Amu passed away in December 2020 but I only read the article this week. Cold dead. Her traducers husband et al walking the streets of the world. Shame to all who spread unhappiness, break bones and souls. May yours be a life of perpetual restlessness. Otherwise seek help. Chase that demon that turns you into less than an animal. It’s time
