And so we became Witch hunters

         

         Growing up I remember watching mount zion films and Helen Ukpabio films with their religious plots with motifs of heaven consciousness, witchcraft and the paranormal. I will never stop saying that those movies had the most macabre looking characters I have ever seen. My parents faithfully waited to buy the sequel to each of the "Ultimate Power(Agbaranla)" series and then I was made to watch these "Christian" movies because they were supposedly good for my five year old spiritual life.

       If watching Perilous times, married to a witch, power to bind or any of the so called Christian films I was subjected to watching as a kid did anything good for my spiritual life I wouldn't know. What I do know is that those movies left me highly traumatized and with recurrent nightmares of eyes getting plucked and  Witches with male penises ( Helen Ukpabio has issues).

        I grew up with the consciousness that if you ate biscuits or ate puff-puff during a class mates birthday at school there was every probability that you would find yourself flying at night and chanting "puff-puff", "puff-puff" in your sleep. That was the classic example of how children got possessed that parents used with their children in the last years of the nineties. There was also the true life story everyone's parent seemed to know about but never who's story it was. It was the story of the child who didn't eat biscuits and sweets shared during a birthday but instead left them in the pockets of his school uniform where they metamorphosed into a dead human thumb.

         This were stories that nightmares were made of, and my parents would tell this stories to us over and over again, if they didn't see how pale our faces looked  or the giant goosebumps on our bodies I would never know. While I always politely declined food when anyone offered them to me, the stories I had been told and movies I had watched made me acutely suspicious of everyone. Everyone was a potential witch or wizard, myself inclusive you never know even the smallest things could make you possessed by a legion of angry demons like not closing your eyes tight enough or saying Amen loud enough when an exorcism(deliverance session)was taking place in church.

          You had to look as pious as possible, your hair covered up, any hair attachment or make up of any sort was prohibited after all they had been manufactured in the lagoon by marine spirits and Mammi water(mermaids). Using a coloured lip gloss or heaven forbid red lipstick automatically meant that you had entered into a covenant with Lucifer and there where even deliverance sections(exorcisms) where people confessed to getting initiated by "pomade" to prove this theory.

        So tell me why I wouldn't grow up bigoted, mistrustful and highly judgemental, tell me why I wouldn't see a  woman with a zillion tattoos on her body(the mark of the beast)and immediately call her the spawn of Satan and the Lucifer's hench woman.

        If I did that however I would have been wrong just like my parents before had been wrong, she with her "marks of the beast" had saved a boy written off by the rest of us as Ifot!(Ibibio for witch) because of his peculiarities or may be lack of them. She wasn't what I had become, she wasn't a witch hunter.

Just a dash of Different

        Every parent thinks that their child is the best thing since chilled lemonade on a hot sunny day.Every parent is convinced that their child is the poster kid for perfection. I want to be a parent someday hopefully a mother of three, two charming girls and one darling boy, I've even picked names and all.

        What then happens when you have a child who is a bit different, in this case different could be that boy who is every bit of effeminate or your little girl who is socially inept and withdrawn. I know that when we wrote our fantasies this wasn't how we expected them to play out. Because that's what they are, fantasies.

           Believe it or not there will always be that child who is going to be different from the lot and he or she might just be yours. I think that we have a biased and distorted notion of what different represents. Different means the unconventional, Different means exotic, Different means distinct. As upcoming parents of the next generation its important that we have this paradigm shift.

       Helen Keller was different and so was Steve Hawkings, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Oprah Winfrey, Fredrick Douglas...

       

Mrs Somebody

          “Fessura” is the Italian word for flaw,I could think of a thousand flaws
that plague the human existence like cancer for example or a destructive
influx like the Ebola virus that had the most part of the African continent
worried for a minute. Everyone,knows what flaws are and no one wants to be
identified with one. I for example happen to suffer from an extreme case of
malignant inertia,I just cant seem to ever get things done on time. Well, at
least I admit to mine.

         One flaw we never want admit if we even consider it a defeito
(portuguese for flaw) is the pressure we put on the girl to have a little gold
band on her finger. If,that isn’t a fehler(German for flaw) then you my friend
are as anachronistic as they come. Irrespective of your dreams,who you are
and who you want to be. It is assumed that the woman is not a complete
being simply because she lacks the little gold band on her finger. We may
think that the trend of wearing tight laced up corsets went with the Victorian
era, what we do not know is that the average African girl is still very much
enslaved by the corsets of finding a good husband that society has her so
tightly laced up in.

         The girl must marry or she is considered persona non grata and so to
snag herself “a good catch” she has to go through the arduous task of going
to the virtual market with other girls of her kind where she is expected to
compete with them to sell her self by using the best feminine tricks and
charms so that she gets the best buyer(a good husband) the man is the
demand and she is the supply. And if she doesn’t succeed at selling herself
right and gets no buyer she becomes a thing of mild popular contempt and in
extreme cases labelled a failure.

          There is more to being a woman than the little gold band,a woman’s
happiness,wealth,social distinction,reputation,ease and self actualization
should not always come to her by being “Mrs somebody”. What if? I didn’t
want to be a female gypsy moth who lives a dependent life,whose whole
essence of living is centered around the male moth who lives a dependent
life, whose essence of living is centered around the male moth, who seldom
moves more than a few feet from the male pupa,who has aborted wings and
so cannot fly, who waits patiently and obsequiously subserviently for the
winged male lays her eggs and then dies. What if I wanted my life as a
woman to count for something without being “Mrs somebody”.