A friend of mine almost got raped by a professor when I was in the university. I remember vividly the incident. The day itself was as uncertain as the news that hit me when she burst into my room and fell on my bed in one swoop, crying bitterly.
It was one of those uncertain Buea afternoons when the elements battled one another. It had rained and then suddenly the sun had burst out from behind the dark clouds boring holes filled with rays of sunshine through them. And then it rained again. Even the rainbow that clamoured for space amidst all that seemed uncertain.
She was crying bitterly, her face shielding her hand. I stood in the middle of my room, confused, a ladle in my hand and my eyes darting back and forth into the kitchen looking at the pot of soup on the stove.
Eventually she calmed down and explained the whole incident to me. As she talked, I took a look at her. There were obvious signs of a struggle on her body. The strap of her blouse was almost cut and she looked disheveled. There were also signs on her skin. She is light-skinned and so it was easy to see the reddened part of her arms where the perp had held her strongly, no doubt to hold her down.
I knew that the professor had been on her case for a long time. He wasn’t even a professor so to speak. He was a just a low-level lecturer in the sociology department. He had been on her case for a whole school year and she had resisted each one of his advances.
But the cunning old fox had one last trick up his sleeve. He had intentionally filled her marks wrongly during a sociology test and when she got her test paper, the mark she got on it did not match what was put up on the notice board at the SMS department building.
He had her.
She ran behind him for weeks, begging him to correct her marks but he kept on eluding her and telling her to give “it” to him. She kept resisting. Finally, exams were around the corner and she needed to have her marks fixed. She was in her 3rd year and she needed to graduate.
It was that Saturday afternoon when rain and sun were battling that she went to the lecturer’s house to have him do right. To beg and cry, if she had to.
Exams were to start the next Tuesday.It was then that it happened. She had told me about going there some few days before and I had told her it was a bad idea. But is she must go, she should take me with her and I would pose as her boyfriend. I would wait outside (if I had to) while she begged him to have the error corrected. All I needed was for the lecturer to see me, the supposed boyfriend. Perhaps he would be ashamed and stop the harassment – I told myself.
But she went all by herself. To a lecturer’s house. She was saved by the fact that she had worn a sanitary towel. She had told the lecturer that she was on her period and could not engage in any sexual while they wrestled. Him, trying to pin her down and she trying to break free.
Eventually he overpowered her and reached into her pants and felt the sanitary towel.
It was then that he stopped. Perhaps convinced that she had not been lying about being on her period, or perhaps ashamed at the fact that he was on the brink of raping a 22 year old.
We would never know. But he stopped, and she left.
And she choked back her tears, bravely. All the way from wherever the lecturer lived and back to the mini-cite, and into my room where she burst into tears the moment she opened the door.
PART 2
I’ve avoided a number of touchy subjects on PoiseSocial because the construct in which they appear seem to never have an appropriate time to write about them. Mostly because they are hot button topics and a lot of comments get ‘lost in translation’. But because (for this particular case) the online feminist movement usually appropriates the conversation to the detriment of everyone else including some women.
Some attempts on my part have been met with one of those newly-minted words straight out of the feminist dictionary – mansplain. “Why are you mansplaining things that concern us women?”
Anyway, here I am and I am going to talk about this. And I am writing about this in the wake of what happened to the former student of the JMC department of UB. I’m sure you all must have heard the story. I conveniently waited till now to prove a point.
I like to give to Caesar what he is due. And I think that although the feminist movement has creased a few lines here and there (remember Chimamanda and the opening the door for the woman saga?) it has done a lot of good to bring to the conversation table a lot of issues that have been affecting women negatively for a long time.
The issues surrounding patriarchy, particularly in our difficult African context, are being talked about. Ad nauseum - some might even add.
These conversations have shed a lot of light on the issues surrounding rape and sexual assault which many men do not know. These conversations have shown how society often turns the victim into the accused by blaming her for the assault. "She got raped? Oh but, what was she wearing?
When the girl in Bamenda was raped by the policeman, someone in one of my WhatsApp groups said she doesn’t look like she was raped. I remember seeing similar comments on Facebook. Why did she go out on Ghost Town day? Why didn’t she have an ID card? She didn’t even dress like someone that another person would want to rape.
As if any of that should justify her being raped
Come to think of it, my friend that day was not her usual self. And by that I mean her looks. She was always a good dresser but that day she looked different. She had worn an old, long skirt and sandals. She had on a full blouse and wore no makeup. It was almost as if she was trying to make herself unattractive – no doubt to dissuade near-rapist.
Perhaps she thought she was responsible for turning him on.
But to get back to the story, the question I ask here is “what story?” Like the many other sexual harassment and assault stories this one too has died a natural death. It almost seems all the online outcry was nothing but fodder for fireside gossip than any real attempt to bring the topic to the conversation table.
That is why I said I was trying to prove a point. I waited a few days to see how long it would take before the champions of the feminist movement fizzled. And it came sooner than I expected.
Granted, we live in an eventful time when between the corpses popping on our screen from the Anglophone crisis and Blanche Bailly’s brand new pair of breasts figuratively thrown into our faces on Instagram, the news cycle is moving at a fast pace and we find it hard to keep up.
But these events are recurrent. They happen over and over. And now it may feel like I am “mansplaining” but women have to do more and we as society have to do more as well. The online conversation is loud, but it remains that; an online conversation. Online conversation can hardly change the status quo.
I was foolish to think that former JMC students would rally together, since the last saga affects that department (which apparently is rife with its dirty tales of sex and sexual assault) and do something together. Not on Facebook when the whole thing is sometimes reduced to a joke, but in actual fact on the ground nothing is done.
A sexual assault support/whistleblower group for example sounds to me like a good idea. One that is created by students on the initiative of ex-students and used to address the issue to make sure that students like my friend do not get caught in the snare of lecturers who desperately want to get between their legs. Until we move the conversation from our smartphones to the ground with concrete action we shall be left with nothing but jokes on Instagram about Epie and his 500frs. Or was it 1,000frs?
Anyway, you get my drift, I suppose...
Because we can go on shouting on Facebook, but we can only go so far. Sure, a lot of men are understanding the issues better now but I believe talking about it is not enough. Doing something is a lot more effective.
It won’t be a panacea to the problem, but it would, at the very least, put a dent into that bucket.
- Wandji Wilfred.