Questions will linger, even when it seems the cause celebre is over. No affair of the heart, especially where sex roils, ever fades into the grave. Even when it is only suggested, without a scintilla of proof, it overruns the human imagination. Hence writers and movie directors have steamed movie screens and pages with the forbidden romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Why? Because sex is the only deity without a shrine. The shrine, however, is not tactile. You cannot touch. It lurks and frisks in the heart, eluding even the owner of the heart.
In its name, war theatres have burned, bullies roared, mansions erected, kingdoms rose and fell, dictators trembled, patriarchs bowed, families atrophied, fathers betrayed son and daughter, father defiled daughter, father cuckolded son, son overthrew father. Sex stalked the best tales of history. Josephine and Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. Anthony and Cleopatra and the Roman epics. Gowon and Edith, Ojukwu and his re-enactments of David and Bathsheba, all in the Nigerian civil war. Even the birth of the holy of holies, the Church of England, was powered by the fiery loins of Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. Many suicide bombers would be earthly saints if they didn’t fantasize about the many virgins swirling in the hereafter. Even MKO Abiola, our great June 12 hero, was nothing without his pacts with his flesh.
Even in literature, tales fail where sex does not perspire. Homer’s The Iliad was all about Penelope, Okonkwo’s machismo would fall limp without his escapades, Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman will faint if the protagonist did not rethink the lush loins he was vacating. The great writers, Flaubert, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Sophocles, Euripides, all paid homage to sex.
So, when Busola Dakolo added to this human obsession, it only proved that the shrine was all well and good in our country. Some say they believe her. Some say she made it up. Those who believe say her story says it is not only hers but also of others, all those who have erupted into the public space with personal accounts of Pastor Fatoyinbo’s sizzles in the dark. Why, some said, did she set him up? Why did she come down in her night gown with all its prompts and temptation? Why did she drink the Krest? Why did she go to her home after the corruption? Why did she wait for two decades before blabbing? Why give him another opportunity for the pelvic explosion on a car bonnet?
Whatever happened in that alleged dawn of rape and Krest, what her doubters must realise is the pedagogy of the oppressed. That is the education of Busola. A defiled person is not a normal person after the fact. If she was raped, why did she not scream at the time? Remember that this was the man she held in awe, a sort of divine rescuer. He came to replace a deadbeat dad, who was never around. He came as God’s messenger to her life. She also knew the man was a “redeemed cultist” with all the fear and trembling.
She was not only cowed in body, but also in spirit. She was therefore a dazed person. How was she to confront this defiler? How was it not her fault, she would tell herself. She would, in that subjugated cast of mind, want to seek validation even with her conqueror. She would want him to tell her she was not a bad person. That way she would keep going to him, and not only him but other men. Maybe, somehow, she would realize that it was not her fault.
That is what her traducers don’t know. Humans bond with their oppressors. They go back for comfort. It is the tyranny of oppression that the oppressor’s greatest asset is not the conquest of the body but of the spirit. According to Busola’s account, the man first conquered her spirit, therefore earning her trust. Conquering her flesh was a forgone conclusion. So, once the spirit submitted, rape was easy, even in the cosy intimacy of her home that he apparently frequented. He knew the comings and goings in the household, so he also plotted his comings and goings. This also happens in marriages, where spousal abuse is routine, but the victim remains trying to redeem themselves with the abuser, hoping they would find absolution. Singer Tina Turner suffered for many years under her husband, and she did not know she had great legs until she was free. It is such freedom that Busola sought and found elusive.
Her sort of oppression is commonplace in the realm of politics. Donald Trump is a great modern example. He would not have won, if he did not have the support of women, including suburban and educated ones. They saw protection in a man who has shown open contempt for women in word and deed. In the patriarchal age, who delayed suffrage for women, was it men? NO. it was women in the United States who fought against women’s rights icons like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
The man, who would soon be United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, or BoJo, has never had a reputation for treating women with respect. Recently, he had a row with his girlfriend and his neighbour had to call the cops. Not long after, he posed on a lawn with the same woman, two of them feigning a smile.
The Russians have for about a century lived happily under one tyranny after another, but they would go to war to defend their oppressor. Is Kim’s North Korea not an instance of such power of one man over a people for generations? Same applies to Filipino leader Duterte, who jeered, ‘’so long as there are many beautiful women, there will be many rapes, too. Or Brazillian leader Bolsonaro, who mocked a woman that ‘’I would never tape you because you dont deserve it’’.
Father bequeaths it to son. In Nigeria, have we not seen people vote for the same person over and over even with no example of progress. They weave myths about the personages, and they believe everything they hear and dismiss facts evident before them.
Eventually such powers fade, but before then, they bow before their oppressors until the light comes. It happens in politics as with the men of God. The men of God use miracles, as though miracles are the real evidence of God’s presence, when the devil also can do miracles. Even Jesus dismissed them as workers of iniquity. If they focus on the weightier matters of the law, they would distinguish the phony from the true.
The people who suffer avidly under such politicians and prophets are the political and pious equivalents of Busola Dakolo. But like Prometheus in Aeschylus’ play, Prometheus Bound, suffering is for a while. In the Greek sequel, the man seeks freedom by reconciling with Zeus. But centuries later, an English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, rewrote Prometheus Unbound, making the man obtain freedom by rebelling against the gods. That is the recipe Busola is seeking, to rebel against the man who played God in her life, for decades.
Rousseau had an answer that resonated in the French revolution. He exclaimed, “force them to be free.” That, perhaps, is what Busola is doing for herself.
By Sam Omatseye
