Lupita Nyong’o, perhaps Africa’s
front-line actress in Hollywood, confessed to fear. She played the role of a
nubile girl in a play set in the Liberian civil war. In the drama, three girls
wallow as sex slaves to the vile virility of a rebel soldier.
The play, titled Eclipsed, and
written by a Zimbabwean writer, Danai Gurira, shows how a human can translate
from innocence to beast, and even sometimes enjoy that bestial metamorphosis.
That explains why Lupita was terrified to act that part.
If an actor quakes over that role,
imagine the innocents who have lived it, and those now living the nightmare as
though routine. If to pretend offends, imagine the life Ese Oruru just walked
out of. Imagine the others now highlighted profusely in the media, like
Progress Jacob, Blessing Gopep and Lucy Ejeh. They are all underage, human and
enslaved.
We can lament this about religion,
and it is true. We can grieve over the impunity of some bigots who have claimed
that being Muslims make them lords over a young girl’s flesh. We can also
wonder at the perverse stamina that propels a young man to take a 13-year-old
on a 15-hour road trip into servitude.
Then we imagine her. A girl who grew
up in trousers and tee-shirt, in skirts, her waist that wiggled to the beats
and subversion of rap music, who walked free on the street, who loved the
vanity of braids and other hairstyles, who knew only play and school work and
mother’s errands. This same girl, only 13, is now presented as suddenly wise or
wild. We are told that she left all that to a devout devotion. She became
Muslim, and followed a man up North without her parents’ consent. And they
expect us to accept it.
We also imagine the sort of
conversation she now gets accustomed to. She speaks a different language, and
when she speaks to her mother in Urhobo she is bullied into speaking an
accepted one. Imagine the cuisine. She did not have the right to be hungry for
the right food. She, an Urhobo girl, was not permitted to crave usi and banga.
If the matter lasted a week or two,
we might have excused all the big names and institutions involved. But it
lasted an eternity from August 2015 to February 2016. It might have lasted
longer but for the audacious front page of The Punch, in language and
aesthetics. It said Ese Oruru was abducted and “forcefully” wedded. The right,
word, “forcibly,” tells the right story. Not to worry.
So all that time, no big man could
give an order to release the girl? The Governor, Seriake Dickson, was busy
swaggering around over election, and he did nothing about it. Was that not
irresponsible of a governor who is the chief security officer? He woke after
the media hoopla and issued a rhetoric of concern. Neither the Emir of Kano nor
Emirate Council have acted with wisdom.
The police, the DSS and others kept
silence. Why? They did not want to offend the big power vortex. They did not
want to lose their jobs for doing their jobs. It is because we have not decided
what law is important. That is the bigger issue. Where is our loyalty? Is to
tribe, faith or royalty? So, when we brandish our fidelity to the rule of law,
we must ask ourselves, what law? Is it the rule of Islamic or royal or
Christian law? Or is it the federal constitution? That was the innuendo buried
in the IG’s words that Ese’s matter lay in the hands of the Emir of Kano.
We are in a democracy but we do not
have a democratic sensibility. We are in a modern world but we still exude
ancient values. Laws will make no sense until we have sorted out what kind of
society makes sense. We still live in a universe where a senior lawyer can
cloak impunity and ask a flock of senior lawyers to defend him. These are SANs
sans shame. It is no different when an adult debauches a minor. King Solomon
calls it “folly set in great dignity.” So, for a rule of law to make sense, we
have to decide whether sharia law has a place in Nigeria, and if it does, when
and how. We have to decide what law takes precedence, the constitution or the
sharia, or the renegade fury of a monarch. The Nigerian conscience is a war
zone between the “king is law” and the “law is king.”
When Vladimir Nabokov wrote the
novel Lolita, the western world fell into a scandalised rapture. The novel,
rated one of the best ever written in the English language, was about an adult
romping with a girl of Ese’s age all over America. The lascivious man did not
end well, the girl ruined for life. The movie is hardly acted because the girl
who acted Lolita the first time was unable to soar in her career. A stigma
sullied her brilliance.
The prosecution of pedophile Yunusa
and the battle release of others, including Lucy Ejeh, will help begin that
sojourn to our concept of the rule of law. The legal positivists tend to give
credence to the sources of law over the concept of natural law. I think when
natural law supervenes, we have justice. We must have all those involved fall
under the hammer of the Nigerian law. We either have Nigeria or not.
The most disappointing for me is the
silence of President Muhammadu Buhari. He cannot wage a corruption war and act
as though the Ese saga is not corruption. Corruption of childhood, of law, of
religion, of natural rights. A girl was abducted, coerced into the family way,
and made to swear to a God against her will. You cannot be the president of all
and cocoon yourself in silence. It is not right, nor presidential. It is even
more potent since he is a devout Muslim.
The failure to tackle the Oruru
matter is a failure of Nigeria as a village. Hillary Clinton wrote a
best-selling book, It takes a Village, and showed that nurturing a child is a
communal effort. She took her inspiration from African ethos. Of course not the
Africa that failed Ese.
Ese means gift in Urhobo, and Oruru
means it’s well done. Nigeria gifted Ese an abduction, and early pregnancy and
eviscerated future. Girls of that age know little about motherhood. As a
reporter in the U.S., I reported a story where teenage girls simulated the
lives of mothers. They had toy babies that woke up at night, cried at odd
moments, etc.
In Touch, The Nation newspaper,
07/03/2016The girls told me they would only become mothers when they were
temperamentally ready. In the movie Spotlight, a character says, if it takes a
village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse it. That was Ese’s story.
In Touch,
The Nation newspaper, 07/03/2016
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