TABOO MONSTER

I have not blogged much about serious issues these days because i have been caught up with work and my serial story which is is still in progress.I absolutely love the gift of story telling , it is one of the best gifts God has given me and i am grateful to be able to take you guys into my mind, i know sometimes it is surprising what you find there but still in the recent days i have ben influenced with believe it or not politics, the crisis in the middle east has fascinated me, so much so that for 9 hours non stop one day i went to read all about the previous wars that have occured in Africa, the Middle east and the western world my eyes were literally swollen, my discoveries are for another post.

on sunday i received a BBm from one of my contacts, it was a story meant to sensitize mothers to be aware of what goes on in their houses, especially with their daughters, the story talked about a woman who heard screams coming from her daughters bedroom in the middle of the night, she got up but saw her husband coming from the direction of the noise, he assured her that he would check up on the girls and she should go back to sleep, relieved she obeyed,not too long after she heard another scream, she rushed out and saw her husband coming out but this time she ignored him and rushed into her daughters room, what did she see, her 7 year old daughter was lying in a pool of blood and their house girl was moping the blood. the twelve year old daughter was the one alive to tell the story, her daddy had been raping her for sometime now and that night he went for her younger sister who was 7 years old, he raped her twice but the little girl did not survive the bleeding, she died on the way to the hospital, the man is free on bail awaiting trial.



I didn't even question the authenticity of this message i forwarded it to all my contacts, why you may ask, in these days of falsified tales ruining our solitude from fake BB messages droping on our BB's and the series of complaints afterwards, why did i do that because of the message behind it.

I remember as a child with no sister i lived for the play group, both parents being bankers and brothers who were becoming less patient with a lil wannabe tomboy tagging along them, my friends became my life, i did not mind skipping lunch if that meant i could spend more time with my friends, its a pity the skinny kid phase did not last very long but moving on i remember sitting with a bunch of my friends ranting about one thing or the other suddenly the topic led to the new uncle who had just moved in with one of our neighbours. now i remember him as skinny, light complexioned and good looking teenager but back then at the age of 9 all i remembered was he looked at me funny, my friends said he was very nice and was always offering to buy them biscuits but for some reason i didn't like him, call it sixth sense, call it divine intuition, call it advanced maturity from reading novels meant for adults at the age of 9 or 10 call it whatever you want but i did not like the new uncle and did not like the way he looked at me, my best friend isioma came one day with biscuit in her hands, she said the uncle gave her, he apparently had told all my friends to tell me to come see him, " he likes you ada and i think he will give us more biscuit and empty containers if you go and see him" my parents taught me never receive gifts from strangers or talk to strangers but the empty containers on the other hand i craved, we used to heat water and mix it with sand and call it semovita, and cook flowers with all sorts of stuff and call it soup and we loved empty containers, i know weird childish habits thank goodness we never ate any of our concotions so after much convincing my best friend and i went to see the weird uncle , he asked me to come closer if i wanted the containers he had arranged for me to take, i bluntly refused and to cut the long story short the man almost dragged me inside his one room bq i ran and reported to my parents, the couple he was working for sent him packing, i later learnt that a lot of girls not so lucky had been lured into his place and no one knows what happened.

The truth is no one talks about this kind of things, it was a taboo to discuss sexual molestation of an infant in public, it simply was too shameful i later discovered more tales like this in secondary school,my friends and i were together gisting and i remember telling them this same story and soon enough everybody began to share, i was shocked a lot of this girls had been raped or sexually molested by an uncle, cousin, brother's friend etc i remember shouting why did you not report to your parents and getting a look, you know that kind of look that said "forget all about your fixation with american law fiction novels and come back to africa" who was going to believe you, who were you going to talk to , tell your father that his brother crept into your bedroom at night, or tell your mother that your next door neighbour forced his tongue down your throat what were you doing in your neighbour's house in the first place, most parents are explicit with their instructions, don't go anywhere or open the door for anybody till we come back of course we never obeyed , at somepoint my brothers had a spare key cut from our bunch so they could go and come as they wanted...don't judge me like you guys did not do worse,

but all this did not prepare me for the story a classmate told me in university, there was this girl i knew, the most polite way to describe her would be extremely weird, she looked weird, she acted weird, she talked weird and in all honesty i try to be the girl who gets along with everyone but i just could not understand this girl, she dressed like she was stuck at age 14 and talked like a 15 year old but i could not see any physical deformity, i remember vividly in my third year in college i just confronted her bestfriend "what's her story, i mean this is year 3 everyone has brushed up why does she still dress like a 12 year old school girl" i guess her best friend felt she needed to share this with someone, turns out that the said girl had been continuosly raped by her elder brother from the age of 9 till her teenage years i could not believe it, i had heard of uncle, neighbour,strangers, molest children but your own flesh and blood brother, my first instinct was that the best friend was lying, so i confronted her. Let me point out that i didn't need to, it was none of my business, the lady in question was not my friend but i just could not push that story from my mind, in tears she broke down and told me everything, her brother had systematically raped her from the age of 9 until her senior year in secondary school and she had told no one, that day i remember almost running mad, her parents stayed on campus and i kept on begging her friend to show me the direction to her house, i was going to report her brother myself. that lady never recovered from that abuse, she was slow at everything she did and i know that the abuse was the cause.

I have met people that influenced my way of life, i remember meeting a 9 year old fulani girl living on the outskirts of a thatched house after unipetrol estate satellite town, she had been giving out in marriage to a much older man, we encouraged her to run away from home and we would take care of her, but what did we know we were 10 years old, the wedding took place and we went to see out of curiousity, i have met a man who told me that his mothers younger sister disvirgined him when he was 12, i have heard so many stories of sexual abuse that honestly nothing shocks me anymore. if we are honest with ourselves we will realize that the percentage of infant molestation, rape , sodomy etc in our society is higher than we wish to acknowledge. show me 100 men and 15 of them will tell you of sexual abuse experienced at the hands of some house girl, show me 100 women and 50 of them will tell you of sexual abuse experienced at the hands of everybody from gateman, to house boy, to uncle, to family friend and now its taking a twist to involve fathers and brothers.

I am encouraged by Omawunmi's new video na who i go ask, potraying Incestuous sexual abuse in the hands of a father,i am encouraged by the NGO's set up to encourage children and adults alike to speak out about sexual abuse and molestation , but the voices are still too faint, the brave are still too little to be of much relevance, show me 10 sexual abuse cases reported and i will show you 150 which will never be reported,the society does not encourage it, the monster in your home should be protected, what will people say?? so its covered up, the cries are cleaned up and the blood stains washed but people forget about the scars, what happens to that child, I have seen first hand a case of someone in her late twenties who is still struggling with the effect of abuse from childhood, what about you? you come out and announce you want to destroy a monster but the monster that lurks in your home is much bigger and you ignore it. maybe we should stop pointing hands and throwing stones at the rape victim and start knotting ropes to catch the perpetrators , or maybe we should save the big words and look inside our homes, will you break a taboo to fight a monster or will you crush that victims voice because its a taboo..its your choice as you can tell i have made mine.

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