“Was it really my fault?”
asked the Short Skirt.
“No, it happened with me too,”
replied the Burka.
The diaper in the corner couldn’t even speak.
Darshan Mondkar
The second day of the public holiday for the Eid-el-fitr celebrations dawned bright and clear for many Nigerians. But while the rest of the nation celebrated, somewhere in Nigeria, another festival had cast a shadow over the morning. A series of videos broke the chain of pictures of citizens in their Eid bests. Videos that can only be described with one word. Horrific. A horror movie, featuring a twisted carnival of zombies as they descended on women, like predators on helpless prey. Women were stripped in public, in broad daylight, with neither regard for humanity and commonsense, nor fear of law and order in the name of a cultural “festival”. Animalistic, does not even begin to describe it.
The Alue-Do Festival is indigenous to the Uruamudhu community of Ozoro Kingdom, Isoko North Local Government Area of Delta State. Purportedly a festival of fertility to bless childless couples, certain symbolic practices are observed, including the act of playfully dragging and pouring sand on married individuals who are yet to have children; a cultural expression believed to invoke fertility. Like many traditional festivals, women’s participation is heavily restricted. Unmarried women are not expected to partake in the festival, with a directive to stay away from the procession. Whatever the festival was intended to be, what it devolved into is better not imagined. Across the community, women were assaulted, stripped, and possibly raped as they ran for their lives. Video after video – each more revolting than the one preceding it – bore witness to this violation. The perpetrators were not even accosted as they went on rampage. It is sickening. In the aftermath, the President-General of the Ozoro kingdom denounced the turn of events while vehemently insisting that “no rape occurred”. Arrests were made; albeit late. The outrage was loud, but as always, short-lived. After all, there is more than enough bad news for Nigerians to dwell on. We’re too busy surviving. But this is not just bad news to get over. This is a pattern. Barely a week passes without a report of rape, sexual assault or harassment. Patterns that remain in place long enough become cultures. Cultures reinforce patterns. Patterns become culture.
A Culture of Contempt
Speaking of patterns, this is not the first time community-wide sexual assault – as inconceivable as it sounds would occur. In 2013, 20 women and girls, including an eight-year-old were raped because the monarch of Agbarha-Otor kingdom in Ughelli North Local Government Area of Delta State had refused to participate in the traditional “Ekene” festival. The pattern is self-evident, but if you confined it to the south southern region of Nigeria, you would be very mistaken. Practically every culture in Nigeria features traditions that are deeply misogynistic at best and fatal at worst. Traditions that exclude, demean and harm women. The consequence of not complying is rarely spelt out, but the threat is very real.
The culture of misogyny is global. From the moment a girl child is conceived, she is a victim. The first right she is denied, is the right to even exist. In India, misogyny is so deep-rooted that female foeticide is commonplace. About 2 million female fetuses are aborted every year. In China, female foeticide was driven up as a response to the one-child policy given the cultural preference and significance attached to a male child. Despite stringent laws to curb this, including a law forbidding the revelation of the sex of a foetus via ultrasound, the culture of misogyny persists, and another 2 million female foetuses go “missing” every year.
The girl child is spared a little longer here in Nigeria. If she is lucky, she can escape female genital mutilation before the age of five. She is allowed to go to school, play a little, but not too much – because she has to start training for her “husband’s house”. And then just as the girl child approaches the precipice of puberty, while she is barely aware of her own body, culture swoops in like a hawk. Child marriage is technically illegal, yet 4 in 10 Nigerian girls are married off before their eighteenth birthday. Girls who should be in school are married off in the name of culture and religion or to settle debts. Even lawmakers who should be the model law-abiding citizen have not been able to spare themselves the disgrace of “marrying” a child.
Swinging too far on the side of trying to protect the girl, the mother hens inflict harm on her. Her breasts are bound, pounded down, ironed, to make them less attractive and presumably protect her from sexual predators. A cultural practice that is intended to protect them, leaves these girls with severe lifelong pain. In some cases, the breast tissue suffers so much damage that the woman is unable to lactate when she has a baby. At the peak of her reproductive age, many a Nigerian woman is coerced into putting her life on the line to bear a son. It does not matter if she has given life to five girls and had three cesarean sections. None of the girls are useful enough to carry the family’s name and continue its legacy. Not even in old age is the Nigerian woman finally let be. When her husband dies, she is subjected to widowhood rites that demean her and endanger her life. When she is even older and senile, she is labelled a witch and ostracized.
If she is able to escape cultural tribulations in her personal life, the public sphere awaits her. The Oro festival ubiquitous in Yoruba land forbids women from being outdoors for the entire day. The punishment for a woman seeing the Oro rites is death. Even in modern-day cosmopolitan Lagos, women must hide themselves away lest they draw the ire of the dreadful Oro. In Ibadan, the Oloolu masquerade is Oro’s evil twin. Any woman who glimpses it will “lose her menstrual cycle, and face death or paralysis”. Cultures threaten fire and brimstone on women who dare to question, and secrecy perpetuates the myths. Reality is daunting enough than to taunt the unknown. The few women who are unlucky to be in the “wrong place at the wrong time” scramble for safety.
Manifestations of Misogyny
One would expect these cultures to be vestiges of times past but they remain because society enables them. Not even literacy and education have been powerful enough to cure this malady. 70% of females who have graduated from university in Nigeria have been victims of one form of sexual harassment or the other, with a large percentage of the perpetrators being their lecturers or their classmates. Female students are expected to just accept the reality and silenced when things go awry.
Here in the First and the Best, many female students have experienced sexual harassment right on the campus. As they walked back from their post UTME exams, they were baptized with Aro, as their future male colleagues catcalled them from balconies of halls of residence. When they resume as full-fledged students, the University’s zero tolerance to sexual harassment policy only gives a facade of protection. They learn to avoid passing through Zik/Indy to Idia, even though it’s a shorter route. They’re warned to avoid staying out late even within the university campus. They adapt by having a male colleague follow them for TDB. It is a shameful state of affairs.
Outside the university campuses, it is the Wild West — a woman’s life is fair game for everyone to dissect. It is acceptable to call her ashawo and assault her because she is dressed “immodestly”. When she speaks against disrespect, she is told to shut up because they “have her type at home”. Landlords refuse to rent to unmarried women or single mothers because it is not culturally acceptable for a woman to live alone. Women have to go as far as renting a boyfriend or husband just to put a roof over their heads.
The Nigerian woman is rarely valued as an individual of her own. Many times, she is viewed as an extension of a man. This explains why sexual harassment is shrugged off when done to a single woman, but denounced harshly when committed towards a married woman. It explains why the girls were raped in Delta were raped to get back at the King for not complying with demands. Culture is not only what we institutionalise. It is also what we normalise. It is the culmination of what we repeat, what we accept, what we overlook. Our society has created a culture where women do not feel safe. Men have been reduced to animals with no control, and this in turn has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. The burden of crime has been shifted from the perpetrator to the victim.
Crime and Consequence
Natural law dictates that crime and consequence go hand in hand. Deterrence is the first tenet of justice. Sexual offenders are emboldened because there is no consequence. This is the only explanation for why a pack of men would be brazen enough to take to the streets with the motive of committing sexual assault, in broad daylight, in view of the entire community. They see, and therefore fear no consequence.
On the day of the festival, the National Association of Yorùbá Students issued an “Urgent Safety Notice” advising all female students in Ozoro to remain indoors. The warning was vague, yet compliance was expected. Despite the association having the foresight to anticipate sexual assault, not a single institution considered it important to provide security to the female inhabitants of the Uruamudhu community. This is the same community that houses hundreds of female students of Delta State University of Science and Technology. Because it was a cultural festival, the victim blaming was easier. Why were the women outside when they had been warned to stay indoors throughout the day? Why did they not respect the cultural norms of the society they were in? These questions added insult to injury, discounting the assault that had taken place, even though some women were unaware of the festival while others had had their homes broken into, during the rampage that followed the festival. Cultural events like these, beyond the ridiculousness of attempting to restrict women from the fundamental right of movement, excuse any harm committed in their name.
It is almost laughable that several public figures have been quick to disassociate the festival from its outcome, insisting that some hoodlums had merely taken advantage of the festival. Their statements insist that no woman was raped, only assaulted. As if the “lesser” crime of assault is supposed to be more palatable. Is it surprising that no rape victim has “come forward” in a country where women have been assaulted by the very police who should protect them? But again, this is par for the course in Nigeria. The same thing happened in the 2011 ABSU rape walk, in which both the University and the State government were quick to reject that the incident happened under their watch, and even threatened to prosecute “rumour mongers”.
For women, the natural order of crime and consequence has been flipped. Existing is the crime, assault is the consequence. The perpetrators go unpunished; the victim is admonished.
Can females live?
Can a woman just live? Can a girl live?
Living in this country is hard enough. Rape is on the news every other day. Sexual harassment is a reality of life. It is grim. Nigerian women are raped in their homes. Assaulted on the streets. Harassed at work. Every Nigerian woman is just a moment away from an event that could change her life completely. She could become a statistic in the blink of an eye. Ironically, becoming a statistic is the “better” outcome, because at least statistics are counted. Many women just end up erased, forgotten, as if it never happened, as if they never existed. When women voice out about the reality of their everyday lives, they’re told to dress better, look over their shoulder, avoid public places. They are expected to somehow circumvent decades of misogyny by constantly changing their daily routine, as if that has ever been enough to prevent assault. What were you wearing?, an art exhibition featuring outfits worn by sexual assault survivors at the time of their attack, dismantles the misconception that sexual assault is caused by the victim. Whether is a short skirt, a diaper or a burka, there is only one person responsible for causing sexual harassment/assault. The perpetrator. Yet, the culture of misogyny goes on to shield him.
The incident at the Ozoro festival is a tragedy that should never be allowed to repeat itself. But we all know that in a few months, another similar incident will occur. Like clockwork, Nigerians will be plunged into another bout of outrage. Women will write long social media posts, denouncing the incident and recounting their own personal experiences. There is still hope, as long as there is outrage. But outrage is as easy as it is short-lived. Even now, less than 10% of reported sexual offenses in Nigeria are convicted. A multitude of others are swept under the carpet to prevent the family from shame. Many women are afraid to even mention that they have been assaulted out of fear of the consequence. It is a futile cycle. Even a declaration of a state of emergency has gotten us nowhere. What we need is a culture overhaul.
Cultures are not sacred. They can evolve and improve. Our society must be safe for everyone, and this includes women. Any cultural practice, festival or rule that is detrimental to women in any way, should have no place in our society. It does not matter whose ox is gored. If anything, the custodians of the culture should be ashamed enough to scrap any culture that threatens the safety of a woman.
Women are human too. They deserve to live with dignity. They deserve to be safe. They deserve freedom from aggression. We must build systems that protect women and girls no matter where they are and how old they are. Perpetrators must never feel comfortable to casually harass a woman or emboldened to assault her. We must refuse every tradition that attempts to undermine women. We must denounce every culture that aids and abets the aggressors. Culture must stop being a shield for crime.
