07 Jan 2009 |
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Adebowale Oriku The infamous child witch documentary shown on British Channel 4 still rankles, for some time it will remain the ultimate Inquisitional diorama through which a lot of people outside Nigeria will view the country. 2008 will be remembered in Nigeria’s biblical calender as the year when the Priests of Pentecostalism sacrificed thousands of children to the carnivorous god, Moloch. In a world where image is now almost everything, the stills from that moving documentary will recur in people either mentally or through other extraneous media. It has concentrated my mind a bit too. A few African literary critics, some of whom have contributed to NVS, have made a case (or several cases) against those who don’t seem to find anything good to write about Nigeria and even Africa. I certainly would like to write jolly stuff about Africa, about the happy, if mainly clappy (not that clap!), people of Nigeria, about the joyous marketwomen of Oshodi, overjoyed university graduates, euphoric bus conductors, eupeptic patients in LUTH wards. I would like to write about the particularly gleeful children of Nigeria, especially children in the farthest reaches of states like Akwa Ibom, children swapping tales under the moonlight – children all the happier that electricity has not made its intrusive appearance in their lives, after all there is nothing so folksy and so parlayable to African earthy genuineness than story-sharing children under the light of the moon. A sweet story took shape in my head, begging to be written. It goes something like this. A number of the children that are tortured for being witches end up dead, and upon their death, find themselves in limbo, or limbus infantum, as the earlier Popes might describe it. They do not stay as long as other children in the blissful analgesia of limbo before Jesus arrives and takes them away to the paradisal kindergarten where he is headmaster. Jesus teaches the children love and forgiveness. Hirsute guys with names like Lazarus, Silas and Isaiah help out in daily Sunday School-style sessions. A number of Marys and Marthas and Ruths too. Since the kindergarten may just as well have been situated in heaven, everyday the children are shown the film of the evil men and women who labelled them witches and hammered nails into their heads. Since time is secular in both the overworld and underworld, the arrival of the evil child torturers in hell is antedated. ‘That is gehenna, hell,’ Jesus says to the children, ‘and you can see your quondam tormentors in torment themselves there now. I wonder how the fools forgot my injunction to suffer children to come to me. Or are they so unlettered as to think I said they should make children suffer? Didn’t they finish reading the verse, that I continued with ‘forbid not children to come to me,’ for yours, children, is the kingdom of heaven? Which is where you re now, anyway. Children, those men and women in hell can see you too having fun here. Can you all stick out your tongue at them?’ Answering to the bidding of Christ, the children stick out their tongue at their former torturers as they languish in the flames of hell. In heaven, the children all live happily ever after, supplied with toys, pets, manna, honeydew, sundry beverage - the heavenly kindergarten is actually an expansive, timeless super-Disney. A shaggy-dog story? Doesn’t this answer the demand for positive tales out of Africa, out of Nigeria? Or do I hear someone say, Nigeria is not exactly Jesus’ heaven? Anyway, unless I really want to ironize to the very end, this piece of satirical story of the punishment of the children would not end so candiedly, unless I did not sit to write it. The alternative ending for the ‘witch children’ larking about in heaven with Jesus is the revelation that it is no more than the figment of one of the tortured children’s imagination, a fugue state into which she escapes to shield her tremulous, invaded psyche from her grownup tormentors. My experience of behavioural psychology has thought me that what I was trying to with spinning this sort of yarn was refusing to accept the punishment the poor children were subjected to. I’d also thought up a story in which all the children accused of being witches turn out to be, truly, witches, beaked and taloned little devils, meeting during the witching hours and winging away from their coven to eat out the guts of those who tagged them witches... Or simply make the children as impishly lethal as Steven King’s Carrie, whose fanatically religious and mentally unbalanced mother, among other factors, eventually turns her into a ‘witch’ of sorts, acquiring the power of telekinesis and telepathy with which she unleashes terror on her taunters. Of course, in a laughterless way, what the Englishman, Gary Foxcroft, who is saving children from harm in Akwa Ibom is closer to what the Dick Van Dyke central character does in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (saviour of children from the wickedness of grownup ne’er-do-wells), I thought of spoofing everything up, making him out as The Pied Piper of Akwa Ibom, leading the children away to a nevernever land… Then I was pulled up short, winched back to the reality of what it is to be a child in the 21st century Nigeria by another documentary shown on Channel 4. It was like déjà vu when the continuity voice announced that the Unreported World postscript to last Friday’s 7 o clock news was about Nigerian child brides. Here we go again, I could not help but whisper. Now before hypocritically blinkered Nigerianophiles, who nevertheless think it’s their right to remain England-bound, would go on about Channel 4 being a racist TV station or particularly anti-Nigeria, let me quickly point out that the channel is probably the most reportorially incisive and unprejudicial of all the public service networks in Britain, it is not shy to call itself the fringe, alternative station, often offering a sassier sidelight to BBC’s rather staid news coverage. Its documentary and news programmes like Despatches and Cutting Edge often deliver. During Christmas, when the Queen was declaiming her Christmas special message to the nation, Channel 4 was playing host to America's and Israel’s nemesis, President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Channel 4’s Unreported World programme on Muslim young girls married off to older men in the name of Islamic tradition packs some punch too. Girls, sometimes as young as ten, are given to men usually old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers as fourth or umpteenth wife. Somewhere in the documentary, there is a mumble-mouthed old man of 84 justifying his marriage to girls as young as twelve. These Muslim men violate – my word, I refuse to use a pleasanter word – violate the girls, deflower them, impregnate them as many times as possible. The nub of the documentary is how the girls end up often incurably with vesicovaginal fistula, the wall of the bladder collapsing into their vagina as a result of the trauma of pre-nubile birthing. There is a hospital ward, full of girls whose lives have been blighted by fistula, with tubes taking urine from their despoiled privates to plastic pots on the floor. Again, the saviour-doctor in the wretched ward is white, an elderly man who is weighed down with the burden his African brothers have put on him. Look closely at the doctor, you’d see Dr Albert Schweitzer is still doing the work he began in Africa more than a century ago. Some of the young girls end up in seedy brothels instead of hospitals. Few of the so-called husbands will want to touch girls abidingly dripping piss and giving off the pissy fetor. Some of those who find solace in the brothels had only luckily escaped from the odalisque-full harem of their ‘husbands’ before their womanhood would be irremediably damaged. Of course there is the odd man out, the guy who is going round the villages and towns, evangelising the wrongness of violating a girl of ten or even fourteen. But quite a number think it’s kosher. And there is the imam or hafiz who explains in passable English that though it is all right to marry a pubescent girl, it is not all right to sleep with her until you are certain she can carry a child – the Quran says that. Oh, what tosh! Fancy how these poor girls have become so dehumanised, so objectified by leching old men waiting to unwomb them as and when. And do they really wait? The goats. The rapists. The sadists. The paedophiles. Our society is so enlightenment-shy that dirty old men - even in the south - carry out paedophilic acts without us even thinking of giving them that label. The documentary shows how northern Nigerian states have fought shy of being signatory to the Child Rights Act passed by the federal government. The only northern state (Katsina?) that signs up to the bill again qualifies the law with giving the Islamist northern men the carte blanche to make a move on girls who have reached puberty, piffling over the matter of the right age such girls can be compelled to provide favours. Even in itself, the federal government’s Child Rights Act is one of our laughable copycat dead letters, drawn up so belatedly only a few years ago by the otherwise insensitive and self-serving men and women in the National Assembly. The thing about this second documentary on the state of the Nigerian child is the subtly grating effect it has on the viewer. Although it is not as baleful viewing as its child witches precursor, it is no less bothersome. Again you have to dwell on cooking up a story you are going to tell friends and colleagues about what is happening in a country where you only pay occasional visits to. I always tell them that it may just well be as bad as it looks. But something a lot of people may miss when Nigeria is being conjectured as a country of child-torturers and molesters is the role religion plays in the two documentaries. The first shows us the malign idiocies of some pentecostal Christians; the second a commentary on Islamised gloating over their sexual deviancy by middle-aged men. This, taken together with a world of other things, you cannot but wonder whether what some atheists say about religion is true, that it does more harm than good... Well, I really don’t want to get started on religion now. As to how the power of imagination may serve the cause of the barely legal girls in the second documentary. Well, one may write them into the Islamic heaven. In this other species of heaven, it is the girls' middle-aged molesters on earth who would reawaken into enjoying the services of 70-odd virgins. In this sensual and most pleasurable of all heavens, the girls cannot even hope to become one of the virgins waiting hand and foot on the men who mistreated them on earth in the first place. So that leaves me with only one way of satirising the aging satyrs who indulged themselves with underaged sex in northern Nigeria and elsewhere, all in the name of a religion drawn up more than a millennium ago. I would turn the Muslim girls into multiple Juliettes. Juliette is the name of the debauched teenage main character in de Sade’s eponymous novel. The Marquis de Sade is the French philosopher, writer, mad man, pervert whose name gave us term sadism. Even today, the contents of de Sade’s novels would still challenge the accommodating mind of the most liberal of readers. I’d remake, repackage the violated girls in the second documentary and their unseen ilk into virgin she-soldiers rebelling in Islamic heaven with their teeth and whatnot, and now with more emphasis on masochism. So much for heavens.
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