Arming corpers against penile attacks

Arming corpers against penile attacks

By Clem Oluwole

(First published on June 11, 2013). 

If my mum were to be alive today, she would not have believed that her favourite son, who imbibed the mentality of a misogynist, would be in the vanguard of those championing the cause of women. I have said in this space before how the sight of anything in skirts used to well up anger in me when I was growing up in faraway Kumasi, Ghana. Three reasons were responsible for my infantile ire.

For the benefit of those who might not have read me then, here are the three reasons why I distanced myself from the opposite sex. One, the role Eve played in the fall of man in the Garden of Eden which held the good things of life for mankind, including deathlessness. Eve had listened to Satan who convinced her to eat the forbidden fruit. It would have been better if Eve and Satan had kept the act of disobedience between themselves and suffered the consequences alone. But Eve succeeded in dragging a gullible Adam into the mess. Ever since, men have been under a curse, toiling and toiling before he could put food on the table for Eve to eat.

Two, the world’s strongest man, Samson, was betrayed by Delilah, a scion of Eve. In the end, Samson was captured like a fowl, after revealing the source of his divine strength to the evil woman. At the end of the saga, a blinded Samson, who became a fun sport, regained his strength and turned the arena of entertainment into a theatre of slaughter… over 3,000 Philistine revelers were mowed down when he collapsed the building on them.

And here is the third reason: When I was a kid, a legend was told that a mighty Ghanaian warrior named Ossei Tutu, took it upon himself to conquer death and save mankind from eternal mourning. Tutu had set out to the abode of death to secure immortality which was lost when Eve and Adam defied God.

According to the legend, Ossei Tutu’s journey to the great beyond was to last for seven days. Within that period, no one in Tutu’s household was expected to despair let alone break down in tears. Ossei Tutu had seven wives and the youngest of them was barely seven days into the marriage when the great warrior undertook the trip to battle with man’s public enemy number one.

All was calm in Tutu’s compound until the late hours of the seventh day. Anxiety hanged over the entire community. Then, a few minutes before midnight, Tutu’s youngest wife despaired and collapsed in tears. By then, Ossei Tutu was within an earshot, bearing death on his shoulders. But as soon as he heard the wailing of his loving spouse, death sprang back to life and forced Ossei Tutu to reverse the homeward journey. The courageous warrior lost out not to death but to a woman. Life was so good in Ghana at that time and I cherished immortality.

When you aggregate all these reasons, you would not fault my tilting towards misogyny as a kid. But that posture changed when I matured into adolescence and came to realize how boring life would be without the necessary evil as some male chauvinists stigmatize the womenfolk.

So, when I read about the move by the authorities of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) to commence training for female corpers on martial arts, I was so excited you could ride a stallion in my tummy, to borrow a Yoruba proverb.

According to the Director-General of the scheme, Brigadier-Gen. Nnamdi Okore-Affia, who looks more of a “Kora” than a Nigerian, the novel idea is intended to equip female corps members against penile molestations from okada riders, traditional rulers and allied rapists. And lest I forget, “Kora” is the Yoruba’s corrupt description of a Lebanese.

In the D-G’s words, “The main aim is to give these young ladies a fighting chance so that they would be able to defend themselves before the deed is done. They will probably not be helpless victims, but able to fight for themselves rather than crying for help.”

There are different faces of rapists. The cruelest among them are the pedophiles. This category specializes in defiling the under-aged. Even among the pedophiles, there are those who go for toddlers. An instance was the case of one 45-year-old man whose name was given as Chibuike Onwu of Nkanu LGA in Enugu state. In a manner that a hawk swoops on chicks after the mother hen is frightened off, Chibuike pounced on a toddler sleeping in her cot while the mother, Jennifer John, had gone out to buy some foodstuff to prepare lunch for her kids. On returning home, she discovered an empty cot. She raised an alarm. A search was immediately conducted and Chibuike was found in a nearby uncompleted building where he had ferried the baby for defilement. That dastardly act took place July, 2010.

There are also pedophile dads. In the same 2010, a retired naval officer in Lagos was caught tossing his two-year-old daughter up and down his laps not for lullaby. He was mired in incest! There were also incidents in 2011 of a 43-year-old and a 70-year-old descending on girl kids under seven years of age.

Then, there are those raping the elderly. A couple of days ago, young women at Opi community in Anambra state under the aegis of Coalition of Women (COW), came out in their hundreds armed with placards to protest the rising cases of rape of the helpless aged.

The phenomenon of raping is under-reported in this country. This is largely due to the fact that families tend to protect their daughters who have been defiled or raped from public stigma. Such secrecy has enabled rapists to escape punishment. Besides, Nigeria is perhaps the only country that treats rapists nicely. Under the extant law, rape is punishable by life imprisonment, with the possible addition of ‘koboko’. And because the law is rarely enforced, the criminals multiply in number.

Rapists are evil doers. They are armed robbers who terrorise innocent girls, young and aged women with pump action and grenades. They deploy the arms and armaments, which are tucked between their legs, to rob them of their womanhood and dignity. Parents and guardians should stop hiding their pains and people should stop stigmatizing them because any weaker sex can fall victim.

The step taken by the NYSC leadership is timely and commendable. The female corpers are just a tiny fraction of the population of women who are vulnerable to penile ambush and assault. The ministries of women affairs at the state and federal levels should key into this novel initiative. Similarly, all women-focused NGOs, associations and even market women should buy into this self-defence tradition. Also, the ministries of education at both levels should introduce martial arts in the primary and secondary school curricula for girls in such institutions. These stakeholders should be in the vanguard of getting their constituencies to acquire martial arts skill, preferably in kung-fu, jujitsu, wrestling, karate and even boxing. It will be quite interesting to see our vulnerable girl kids and women opening up not to rapists but slashing the air with their well-trained deadly fists and legs as they defend themselves against the social vermin in our midst.



Finally, with the martial arts acquisition cutting across the board, it will serve as a deterrent to overbearing spousal rapists who are in the habit of weaving their way down when their wives are not in the mood.