Sex as a protest weapon

Sex as a protest weapon

By Clem Oluwole

(First published on August 30, 2012).

Imagine a world without sex. It is happening right now in Togo, a tiny littoral nation of West Africa. Beginning from last Monday, Togolese women within the age of consent are supposed to have shut down all sexual activities. Togo is not a place for hedonists to be at this time. The one-week sex boycott is not borne out of the failure of husbands to meet their conjugal obligations to their spouses. No. The Togolese strikers have mounted roadblocks on the highway of thrill to call for the head of their head of state, Faure Gnassingbe, who has fallen out of favour with the womenfolk.

The roadblocks, code named Operation Save Togo (OSAT) and spearheaded by a rights group coordinated by its leader, Isabelle Ameganyi, planned for women to withhold sex from their husbands. She believed the strike will infuriate Togo’s men to take action against Faure Gnassingbe. Ameganyi, a lawyer, told the Associated Press that her group is following the example of Liberia’s women who used a sex strike in 2003 to campaign for peace.

“If men refuse to hear our cries, we will hold other demos that will be more powerful than a sex strike,” Ameganyi said last Saturday during a demonstration in the capital city, Lome. The rally was organized by a coalition protesting recent electoral reforms which they said would make it easier for Gnassingbe to win re-election in the polls set for October. Gnassingbe came to power in 2005, following the death of his father Gnassingbé Eyadema who ruled the West African country for 38 years. Gnassingbe has not commented on the sex strike, nor has his wife.

Well, I really do not know what other weapon, which Ameganyi would employ that could be more powerful than sex. Their Nigerian counterparts weaponised sex in 2010 to compel our own President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, to run for the 2011 presidential election. And it worked. I don’t know how they were able to ensure compliance since sexual exercise is not an open sport. It was a howling success. Right now, President Jonathan is ensconced comfortably at the Presidential Villa, thanks to the efforts of the Nigerian chapter of the African Women in Diaspora (AWD), led by Lady Igoniwari Halliday, which mobilized millions of its members (including prostitutes?) to go on sex holiday, and consequently succeeded in ramming Dr. Jonathan down our throats in 2011. Today, the strikers and the rest of us are living happily ever after! Perhaps, Ameganyi has forgotten the Nigerian experience.

The leader of opposition party, the National Alliance for Change, Jean-Pierre Fabre, called for Gnassingbe’s resignation. Other opposition leaders opted for civil disobedience to protest against the beleaguered president. But the women settled for sex disobedience… the most potent of the weapons.

However, Judith Agbetoglo, expected to be on the strike train, argued thus: “I do agree that we women have to observe this sex strike but I know my husband will not let me complete it. He may agree at first, but as far as I know him, he will change overnight. So I don’t believe I can do the one week sex strike. Otherwise, I will have serious issues with him. He likes that too much.”

Others were skeptical of Isabelle Ameganyi’s call for a sex strike. “That is not serious at all. It is easy for her to say because she is not married herself,” said Ekoue Blame, a Togolese journalist. “Does she think women who live with their husbands will be able to observe that? By the way, who controls what couples do behind closed doors?”

Blame was right. Who controls what goes on behind closed doors? Sex sport is unlike what obtains in the animal kingdom where mating is done in the open for all to see. The sex strike is in its fifth day and the success or failure of the exercise will be measured in October.

Prostitutes are a section of the society in Togo that is most likely to boycott the strike. Prostitution is a thriving vocation in that impoverished country of seven million people and unless the organizers of the strike put an agreed sum on the table to cover the period they are supposed to shut down their thriving businesses (which have nothing to do with politics), there may be no deal.

Besides, Togolese sex workers are very aggressive and could go violent if they are compelled to comply without some form of inducement. It is their life. I know of their aggression too well because of the experience I had in Lome in the 80s when Gnassingbe Enyadema, the father of the incumbent president, was in power. Lome was on my itinerary during my trip to the West Coast to organize some international friendly matches for the Standard FC, Jos, of which I was the chairman. After spending almost a whole day at the secretariat of the Togo Football Association (TOFA) to strike a deal with one of their topflight clubs, I checked into a hotel. After taking a warm bath and a meal, I decided to perambulate for a while for the meal to settle before retiring to bed.

Then, at about 10 p.m., my sleep was interrupted by a knock on my door. I dragged myself out of the bed, wondering who the knocker was since nobody knew me in Togo. I could only assume that it must be one of the staff of the hotel. When I enquired about the knocker’s mission, I heard something like (room) service. My knowledge of French, which is the lingua franca in Togo, was very lousy. I opened the door and held it ajar. Darkening the door was a pretty, light-skinned Togolese sylph. She heaved her boobs to my face. Even a monk would melt at the sight of what she presented. I understood the body language quite alright. Then I remembered the Lord’s Prayer that says … lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. As for the temptation, I had been led to it already. Now, I had to deliver myself from the evil. When I lifted my right hand, her eyes twinkled, expecting that I would snatch her by one of the boobs and drag her in for the “room service”. Rather, I pointed the index finger to her face, swung it sideways and shut the door to her face without as much as uttering a word.

A few minutes down the hour, the knocks came back. Prostitutes are good in psychology. The presenter took it that since she had sowed a seed of temptation in me, she would allow it a little time to germinate. But unknown to her, the seed fell on a barren soil. I did not even bother to answer the door. All I did was to fake a deep sleep and each knock was replied with an amplified, fake snoring. After a long while, she beat a retreat. She must have passed me as one hell of a sloth that cherished his sleep more than pleasure. The next day, I took off to Accra, Ghana, in continuation of my trip. If I had spent another night in Lome, the hooker would have returned to see whether the seed she sowed the previous night had taken root. That is how aggressive the Togolese whores could be, as a Ghanaian colleague told me when I narrated my experience to him in Accra. I, therefore, wonder if the Togolese sex workers would be willing to down tools just to get Faure out of power. He can be there for eternity for all they car