A season of jealous spouses

By Clem Oluwole

(First published Monday-Sunday July 25-31, 2011)

Lately, men’s prizest possessions have been under threats by those who are the major beneficiaries of the instruments. Aside from Jamiu Sikiru, a native of Ijebu Ode, Ogun state, who was fed up with life and attempted to commit suicide on June 3rd, 2011, by cutting off his penis instead of confronting a moving train shunting between Lafenwa and Abeokuta, premeditated butcheries are now coming from spouses.

In humour-mongering, moving train is a metaphor for men’s genitalia. They are so called because a train pulls coaches carrying massive passengers just as the genitalia habour millions of unseen baby passengers. Subsequent reference to penis in this piece will be ‘moving train’ so as not to offend the sensibility of my female readers who may not wish to be associated with the word, publicly.

But why would any woman want to derail her man’s moving train?

Here are a few instances and reasons for what has become a global phenomenom.

On June 23, 1993, John Wayne Bobbitt arrived home, in Manassas, Virginia, highly inebriated after a night of partying. According to a testimony by his wife, Lorena, in a 1994 court hearing, he then raped her. John was tried and acquitted of Spousal rape. Afterwards, Lorena got out of bed one night and made for the kitchen for a glass of water. While in the kitchen, her eyes fell on a carving knife, shaped like the Samurai sword, and memories of past domestic abuses raced through her head. Grabbing the knife, she entered the bedroom where John was sleeping and proceeded to sever almost half of his moving train. She left the apartment with it, drove a short while, then rolled down the car window and hauled the severed manhood into a field.

Sometime in February, this year, a Saudi Arabian woman chopped off her Spouse’s moving train in his sleep because he had a plan in the offing to take a second wife. Saudi law allows men to be married up to four wives at a time. The assailant spouse hoped that her action would persuade men to think twice before brooding over the appetite to take another wife, while the men on their own part are canvassing for death penalty for their jealous women.

Last month alone, no fewer than two cases were recorded across the globe. In faraway Bangladesh, another Islamic country, a woman named Monju Begum, on June 4, derailed the moving train of a neighbour when he bulldozed his way into her shanty and attempted to rape her. But the train driver who went by the name Mozammel Haq Mazi argued that the tragedy was just a lovers’ quarrel gone horribly violent. Begum, a married mother of three, said Mazi had been harassing her for months for sex and when he forced his way into the house, she fought him, cut the weapon off and put it in a polythene bag, after which she took it to a local police station as a proof.

In Kenya, a divorcee and security guard in Diana, a suburb of Mombassa, named Ronald ole Kitare, 27, told newsmen that he never imagined that the woman he loved, cherished and planned to marry could amputate his manhood, and swore never to trust any woman again. The incident was reported on June 17, 2011. According to Kitare, his woman, Faith Kamulu, 20, came back home drunk, a state he had never seen her before and a feud broke out. Faith was said to have lost faith in the relationship with Kitare because his ex-wife phoned to call her ‘husband snatcher’, an issue she took seriously and even threatened to do something to ensure that Kitare would not have any other woman in his life. After some discussion, they resolved the matter and even had some fun. But the woman had a change of mind by midnight. She derailed his moving train with a kitchen knife that is always handy.

And lately in California, USA, a woman, Catherine Becker, laced her husband’s dinner with a soporific substance that enabled her to wreck his moving train and dumped it in a garbage disposal, turning it on. Becker, 48, told the police that she had to physiologically sever what joined them together, also using a (10-inch) kitchen knife, because her spouse had decided to physically put asunder, via divorce, what God had joined together.

Phew! Men are in serious trouble with women. While one of the episodes is excusable, i.e, the Bangladeshi woman who had to defend her territory from illegal entry through rape, I really do not know what counsel I should offer men who are under siege by their jealous spouses or girlfriends. Women are generally known to resist men’s advances. But they are also quick to block their retreat once they have given their consent. So, any funny attempts to back out of the relationships are oftentimes met with vicious resistance. In the meantime, any man harbouring a woman with butcher’s mentality and whose eyes cannot stay in one place, should learn to wear iron cast pants at bedtime. Or do u have a better idea?