By Daniel Kakuru.
Last week, a girl child from Nigeria fainted in the throes of an afternoon lecture. She was carried out by classmates, shoulder-high. Under the shade of a tree outside her lecture room, she was stripped bare, fanned with pieces of paper and handkerchiefs. No, she was not necessarily lucky; she died and we mourned her on Twitter.
I am sorry, this story is moving so fast. But it’s because these events happened even faster.
They say she fainted because one of her male lecturers had just been announced dead. HIV and what it comes with had killed him.
What else does it mean when a girl child is shocked beyond the right limits because HIV has killed one of her lecturers? Were they related by blood ties? Certainly not. Was there anything the two knew and the rest of the world didn’t? Perhaps. Had they stood before each other, naked, more times than they could count? We shall never know.
All we know is that the cause of his death scared her more than did his death altogether. And because we know not all her biodata, we shall have no kind words for her. We shall continue to mourn by trolling her on Twitter. When all is done, we shall move to a next topic. Maybe it will be a string of fictious confessions from survivors of rape; we still don’t know.
In May this year, a friend of mine had a one-night stand that lasted longer than the participating parties had agreed it should. You know those guests who feel at home and just can’t leave? She was that kind. We shall blame, not her but, his impeccable service delivery.
Until announcements of her disappearance were aired on radios; until she was rumoured kidnapped and killed; until her photographs were pinned to trees in the village with a sum of money pledged as a gift for whoever would find her, she wasn’t planning to return home.
This story is moving rather slowly. Because the events happened slooowly, slooowly, and spanned over a protracted spell of time.
“Because what goes up
Must come down……”
Royce Da 5’9, 2011 (Lighters, Bad Meets Evil ft. Bruno Mars).
Whatever goes up will always come crashing down. The one-night stand was bound to end in tears – and it did. Four months down the road, she was vomiting like a rocket. Her lower abdomen was beginning to swell. A committee of illiterate village women convened a conference and observed the pulsations around her neck. Their findings raised our eyebrows. You know what? At the end of their study, they decided she was pregnant. She was asked to pee on a stick and yes, it turned positive.
Now, this here is a sad story. In spite of looking and weighing more than an average twenty-year-old, poor girl was fifteen. A police case was filed. Defilement.
Ani yakutise olubuto? She was asked.
Oli omulenzi abeera ku mizigo gya taata.
Our man had lost memory of these events from May. Word was relayed to him that his irate landlord had gathered a collocation of armed police officers and they were headed to his house to arrest him and charge him with defilement. First, he switched off his phone and discarded the sim cards in a pit latrine. He fled, we are told, to a distant place in the middle East, changed his name, bleached his skin and turned pink. Something as simple as an erection changed his life for good and there’s certainly no turning back.
It is a weekend and countless people are going to make preventable mistakes. There is a girl child out there who says condoms are uncomfortable during intercourse. She says injectable contraceptives are dangerous; they will make her bleed to death. Intrauterine contraceptive devices and sub-dermal implants? She says, fuck them. (Un)fortunately, this girl child is in a weekend marriage with a boy child who too would rather die than wear a condom to a bed where his genitals will have a ritual to perform.
These darned descendants of Adam and Eve have agreed that they will use the most illogical of all contraceptive methods: withdrawal. It takes a certain degree of stupidity for one to believe that this method works. Men hunt down female genitalia for one particular reason: to enjoy the satisfaction that comes with cumming and coming back to their senses. Without that ultimate consummation, sex is as good as manual work – tiresome but unrewarding. But here is a wretched couple who are convincing each other that it is the most appropriate of all methods.
Dear child, you are responsible for the choices you make. A few months from today, the two of you will be stuck with an unwanted pregnancy. You will be telling us that you’re fighting demons, yet it’s your wrong choices that brought these demons to you. Do not let twenty minutes of unprotected sex condemn you to twenty years of child support if you aren’t ready for it. Do not let twenty minutes of unprotected sex condemn you to twenty years of life as a single parent raising a callous child that can neither receive nor give love. Do not let twenty minutes of unprotected sex condemn you to a lifetime of swallowing anti-retroviral drugs that can hardly cross the barrier erected by the oesophagus.
The writer is nothing more valuable than a #MugOfPorridge.
