By Sam Omatseye
SOMETIMES laws make us cavemen. Rather than civilise us, they make us barbarians. Even in suits and fancy couture, we act like men with painted faces and bleeding machetes. It is the surgery of the cavern that Governor Nasir El-Rufai has promulgated into policy by signing a law to castrate rapists. Castration casts us back to the Dark Age.
But he is not the first. Its John the Baptist is Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State, who signed it into law much earlier. When it happened in Ekiti, I saw it as an activist aberration, and I believed it would not go far. Even that law gave an option of life imprisonment, which seemed to me like a sort of sublime cop-out.
In Kaduna State, the campaign started with the wife of the governor. She called for men’s algae to be cut off. The idea is deterrence. No man or boy over 14 years with lust for a woman’s sovereign pride should have a second chance at pleasure.
For a few years now, rape has stalked us as a nation like a savage beast in the dark. Boy against girl, pastor against adherent, father against daughter, teacher on pupil, brother at sister, Imam against follower. Incest, political impunity, familial bestiality, school perversion, adulterous ferocity, underage forays, murder in the cathedral. It has been as though the news of the day will not end without an offering of sexual predators.
On that score, this paper made the rape victim the person of the year. The nation is one sprawling land of erotic failures. Bedrooms swoon for the wrong reasons; so also classrooms, pulpits, uncompleted buildings, hospitals. Bare floors in offices. Markets on the quiet. The leafy security of roadside bushes.
These are animals on the rampage. Couched as men with libido on the run, they are wild men who think the nation is a tapestry of the wild. In school, a teacher pins down a child in a bathroom. A father enslaves a daughter and fertilises a grandchild in her womb. A politician strikes a young woman and even his governor is reluctant to unveil official rage. A university teacher blackmails a student to pay with her thrill. He forbids her cash in exchange for passion. A pastor eases from pray into play into prey. A hoodlum sullies a hijab.
Then there are the silences. The daughter who loves the father too much to squeal. The student too afraid to fail. The faithful who adores the pastor. The one who thinks herself guilty, who convicts herself as the seducer. The niece who thinks her mother will not believe her against her brother. We also have the patriarchal impulse of the age. Men make the laws. Men convict, and men acquit men. A phallic self-righteousness. A moral thunderclap.
The consequences are palpable. A girl’s supreme pride is punctured for life. No self-esteem. Pregnancy without fathers. Weddings cancelled for life, a life of scandal. A culture of impunity enshrined.
So, why not castrate them? Make them incapable! It seems an easy answer. The point is that it seems too easy an answer. It is a barbaric act to rape, to force a woman to give up her pride. If she does not consent to a man’s advances, he rapes her. When I was a student at the University of Toronto, female students habitually wore the label “No means no.” It was a line against men out of line. That was in a so-called civilised city.
But while the case in Ekiti State is bad enough for calling for a butcher’s knife, Kaduna smacks of hypocrisy. The law defines rape as sexual coercion, and that means whoever is involved in the union must consent. How do you make a girl of eight years or 10 or 13 a bride, and not call it rape? There are many men in El-Rufai’s Kaduna State who should appear, strip down and lie face up in the surgical room. They are men who married minors, who are sleeping with them as I write, who have imposed a biological distortion on the helpless nubile, who have burned them with VVF, and rendered them sexually meaningless for life. They cannot mate, or mother. They are maimed for life.
Those the law covers usually commit the offence once or twice. The child brides are kept in sexual servitude for life. The man says he loves them when the girl is not prepared both in flesh and heart to comprehend love as a concept or even marriage as an institution. The Nobel Prize-winning novel Lolita explores how a young girl can be debauched even in an western milieu. So with the Kaduna law, we condemn criminal rape, but celebrate institutional rape. We are birthing taxpayers and voters from rooms of perversion.
So, I call for the making of institutional eunuchs. Make all the men who have child brides to be knifed out of action. We shall have husband eunuchs. That is a more effective way of making respect for the female folk run deep in the culture. When in his play Twelfth Night, he says “Be you his eunuch, and your mute I will be,” he might be talking about what women might do quietly in marital beds.
No religion endorses sexual coercion. Consent is usual. When Salman Rushdie wrote Satanic Verses he hardly expected the backlash against a scene in which a eunuch stirs a brothel portrayed a parody of the prophet’s harems. The bible shows how the harem is a place only for eunuchs.
We cannot respect the woman until we respect the girl. That is at the bottom of the story. The threat to the chaste is not only the rake, but the law. If the law is savage, it cannot be above the society. Laws have for centuries canonised barbarism. Laws have loved caning even in modern times. We know that the guillotine did not end with the French. I raised a little hubbub in Colorado years ago when I wrote against the death penalty. I had spoken to the victim minutes before he expired.
To enact a barbaric law is to endorse a barbaric society. We cannot show that we are higher than the person we convict. That is the crux. When the law comes into effect, the butcher will not work only on cows and goats, but human abattoirs will now be built. We shall have genital dumpsites. Maybe ritualists will make deals with the surgeons. A new economy is born.
This is all dark comedy. It recalls a scene when a thieving governor who loved to cut the hands of thieves walked into President Obasanjo’s office. In a gallows’ grin, he said: “So, your hands have not been cut off?” It is the same hypocrisy that gave us the castration law. I want them to go to jail for life with hard labour. Castration is not good for our moral tone.