I encountered rape very early in life. I was perhaps 14 when
a random visit to the home of a local ruffian presented me with my first
glimpse. A girl, lying on the bed, with only a tiny towel to cover a miniscule
part of her honour, stared at me from a threadbare mattress, her eyes pleading
yet seemingly resigned to her fate. I had been sent to the room to “take kola”.
I remember her clothes were in a bucket by the door, a bucket filled with
water. Her story was sad. A visitor from the east, she had only asked for
directions to her brother’s house in Angwan Kanawa and was lured to the house
of Baba Wani’s aged grandmother, where he and his boys took turns on her. I got
to the house on the second day. The monsters were clearly done with her and
were offering her as kola to any young man that came to the house. I recall
crying as I begged them to let her go, I recall the girl saying nothing,
defeated I think. I recall she kept her legs parted, tired of fighting, she
existed in a state of ‘cooperation’.
They let her go the next day. Fate however, knows how to
mete out poetic justice.
