NAKED YAMS AND RAPE: SEX IS NOT FOOD.

Nigerians are a prayerful lot. Here thieves pray. Thugs pray. Prostitutes pray. No matter who you are there is always a prayer in your mouth or heart; even sometimes to an entity whose existence you often doubt.

I don’t have much problem with the fact that most of us pray. What I have problem with are the substances of our prayers. We seldom pray for WISDOM or DIRECTION, and even when we do, we do not wait for the results – we still proceed to use our own wisdom, devoid of divine guidance.

Wisdom involves multidimensional thinking and circumspection. Circumspection means you should look at a matter from every angle, look at it spherically.

Earlier today, I almost argued with a friend here who had made a post that when women fail to be adequately dressed up; they invite rapists to come and have a share of them.

I have often seen variants of this nauseous opinion especially from people who have been taught from childhood that “a woman is so precious that she must be always fully wrapped up. Her face and skin must not be seen in public.” They believe that the mere exposure of the face, or arms or legs, of a lady is enough justification for her to be raped. This is at once pathetic and disgusting.

Rape is never a function of the victim; it is always a function of the perpetrator.

I have seen arguments in other veins comparing sex to food. Some have put the desire for sex on the same pedestal with the desire for food. If you told them you have been abstinent for, say, six months, they’ll look at you like, “tell me another lie. Are your impotent, how can a man cope without sex for six months!”

That reminds me. There was this senior friend of mine who told me he could hardly do without sex for two or three days. Not too long after, he had a road accident and suffered multiple fractures. His both legs were fractured. I went to visit him in the hospital. The legs were put in plaster casts and suspended to raise them above his supine level. As I sat beside his bed, the first thing I remembered was that conversation. “So, sir, how have you been able to cope without sex now that you are bedridden?” No, I didn’t ask. That would have been rude. The question was only in my mind. He was on sick leave for about nine months altogether. Compelled to abstain from sex, I presume.

Some can manage to abstain from sex for the thirty days of annual fasting – they abstain from sex as they abstain from daytime eating. Once their food cycle returns to normal, sexual practices also return to normal. Sex and food are seen are twins.

Talking about food, however, we have often seen NAKED FOOD – meat pies and cakes in show glasses; maize, plantain and yam being roasted NAKED on open fires.

If a man had been seriously famished, and as he walked by the road side, he sees meat pies or egg rolls naked in a show glass, all he has to do is to grab stone or metal and break the glass and take the food without the consent of the seller. Isn’t it? Or better, he should just pull a knife and threaten the seller and take the food away. Of course, it is the problem for the food seller, why should she display naked egg rolls or meat pies, or maize or yams? Why didn’t she roast the maize with the leaves intact? Why didn’t she roast the yams and plantains without peeling? If the plantain was roasted without peeling, the thief would not have forcibly taken it from the fire. The nakedness of the plantain is an invitation to the thief to grab his share of the plantain. Seriously?

If this is the way you think, you have a serious problem.

Yes, people should be decent. The standard of decency varies from culture to culture, from custom to custom, from age to age and from place to place.

See, if a man has the mind to grab a naked piece of yam from the fire just because it was being roasted without peels by the roadside, the man would equally have no qualms grabbing one that has the peels. I hope you understand what I mean, because I know wisdom is very scarce.

I have seen videos that I cannot share here. The videos are out there on the internet. You can find them with the appropriate keywords. There is a couple having full clothed sex in the backyard.  The video is described as that of a teacher and his pupil. He didn’t pull down his trousers, he only untied the rope. She pulled up her robe and left her hijab intact. No, don’t even say it, it was not acted porn. It is an amateur video. There was another video of young school girls about thirteen or fourteen years old. They were dressed in school uniform. Apparently they were caught on a lonely path by thugs and forced. The audio from the clip is Yoruba. One of the girls pleaded between sobs, “E jor, ma se normal, e fi ese mi sile, o n dun mi.” [Please, I will surrender to you, just free my legs, this position is painful.] But no, her assailants continued. They told her “we are doing it this way so that you won’t be able to tell anyone.”

Excuse me, is dressing in full flowing gown with hijab or dressing in pinafore school uniform not decent enough?

Just now, I thought about money. If you carried a wad of cash, you would most likely not stroll through the streets displaying the cash. You would try as much as possible to conceal it. Can we view concealment of women’s bodies in similar perspectives? No! Except for those who patronise nudist beaches or people who are mentally ill, there is hardly any woman who bares her private parts on the streets. If you had a wad of cash concealed in an envelope or opaque nylon bag, then that is a reasonable enough concealment. It doesn’t have to be a metal box.

However, for thieves of certain calibre, excessive concealment becomes a point of attraction. If you walked the streets carrying a small safe with you, the safe would adequately conceal everything in it and possibly also have a key and combination lock. However, the mere fact that it is a strong concealment sends indication to some people that something precious lies within it. It might in fact be empty but they would imagine that it must contain a lot. There are areas of downtown you can never go with even an empty laptop bag. Once some people see the bag, they presume something precious must be inside.

Jewellers display their wares in show glasses. Occasionally they get attacked and robbed. Do we blame them for having something precious in a show glass? Do robbers not go after banks even because of  the vaults? Is cash in the vault not concealed enough?

When robbers break show glasses to steal food, jewellery, clothes or anything on display, we do not blame the sellers for displaying their goods, we blame the thieves for taking the goods without the consent of the original owners – whether with or without violence.

There’s a street called “[Cat] street” in Akure. Not really cat, the other name of cat that makes it longer. One night I innocently strolled through the dimly lit street in company of a friend. We were shocked. The daughters of Jezebel displayed wares – they wore lingerie, they gyrated and whistled. It was shocking, it was disgusting – my friend and I doubled our paces and laughed at each other’s naivety afterwards. We hadn’t known there was such a place. No, I do not endorse prostitution but those misguided women that displayed their “wares” were probably looking for customers. Their open display of their wares is not an excuse for forcefully taking their “goods” without their consent. Most rape victims never displayed their bodies in such manner. In fact, for some rape victims, their only offense was being decent – they wore hijabs or tied scarves that covered their ears and rapists thought, “Wow, that girl must be very decent, if I have my way with her, I would find some ‘tightness’ that is not common in society anymore.” Thus, the decency becomes an attraction to some category of rapists.

I have lived a good part of my life in Akure. The wives of the Akure monarch by custom and tradition do not often  wear buba (blouses).  They tie their wrappers up to the chest level  leaving their shoulders bare but their necks adorned with necklaces. They go with or without  gele  (headscarf) or iborun (muffler.) This royal dressing is not considered indecent.  Yet society that approves of that traditional bare-shoulder dressing would condemn ladies who wear modern show-me-your-shoulder gowns. No, dressing without covering the shoulders is not whoredom and it is not an invitation to rape.  Before the Abrahamic religions came to Africa, our fore mothers dressed in wrappers without blouses and it was never considered indecent or an invitation to rape.

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Rape is such a sensitive subject that one has to be very careful in discussing it. In trying to drive home a point here, I have talked about food, jewellery, cash, wares and clothes. Someone might read this and complain that I have demeaned women by comparing their bodies to such inanimate stuff. No, it’s not about the objects or bodies, it’s about display and concealment and I do not objectify women’s bodies. One more thing we must note, boys and men get raped too – and for the male, the shame and pain is greater. Thus, male rape is more under-reported so much that we hardly hear about it in our society. Just like an ignorant society often asks, “What was she wearing that warranted the rape,” they also question male rape victims, “why did the armed robbers rape you? Are you gay? Did you act like women? I don’t understand why a man would find another man attractive enough to rape him. It must have been your fault, somehow.”

No! It’s never the victim’s fault. The truth is, you just DON’T UNDERSTAND. When next you pray, ask God for wisdom and understanding of issues that plague humans.