“From today onwards u will never put too much
pepper in the soup, I nugo?” ....” yes!”
“Give me your hand.”...... tuzaii !
‘How many now’.....”5”
Tuzaii!
“if I miss again eh...I will start from the
beginning”....”sorry”
Tuzaii!
At first glance this surely looks like a madam
disciplining a house help, eh? Think again
(feminists you er, might want to look away now,
ahem), that’s a husband disciplining his wife!
When I first heard this tale the first impulse was to
laugh myself to tears, then amidst the laugh, I
paused; this was by no means ripe for giggles.
What is the world turning to? With the so-
called civilization and accompanying education
why do savage animals still walk among men and
docile sheep among women? For a man to beat
his wife is grossly unacceptable, but to flog your
wife like a kid; actually asking her to bring out her
hand in the process, is the base (no height can be
associated with such behaviour) of debasement,
Jesus Christ!
But who is to blame? Is it the society that has
handed unfair liberties to the man, whilst
struggling to take the little allowed women? The
society that places undue emphasis on ‘stability’
of a home above the happiness or well-being of a
wife; it’s common to see victims of domestic
violence put under pressure to return to their
pugilist of a husband, when such pressures are not
put on the husband to stop seeing his wife as a
gym equipment.
The society is also all too ready to lay the blame
on the door steps of the woman, if the man
finds succour in the waist of teenage girls; “his
wife doesn’t give it him the way he likes it”! If the
abandoned wife as much as looks nostalgically in
the direction of a handsome lad, then there is a
family meeting “Mama Nkechi has gone wayward!”
Meanwhile nobody bothers to tell papa Nkechi to
stop following Nkechi’s age mates, O nwoke ka O
wu: end of story.
Or do we blame women themselves who being
buffeted by economic uncertainties see marriage as
their economic Eldorado, in which they are
prepared to take whatever comes with it. Take the
case of the lady with the flogging-husband, a
young lady that had just finished secondary school,
she was barely nineteen when her would-be
husband came calling. The husband didn’t even
come to her, he instead went straight to her
parents, with the usual ‘I saw a palm tree outside,
and I like the palm tree and I’ll love to buy the palm
tree’ crap. Since the parents were on the lower
rungs of financial comforts they agreed on behalf
of the girl, the mother was assigned to work on her
daughter to make her realise that the ‘progress’ of
their family depended on the marriage.
Instead of ‘he loves you’, she was saying...'he's an importer'
Instead of ‘he is a nice young fellow that will take
good care of you’ she was saying ‘his shop is filled
with goods’
As if all the goods from China would somehow
pass as a good-loving husband. With the girl not
ready to get into argument she was never going, to
win jumped into marriage without knowing as
much the type of mobile phone his groom uses.
The husband having acquired a new toy proceeded
to treat her as such; brandishing the proverbial rod
at the slightest provocation to avoid spoiling the
‘child’.... tuzaii! tuzaii!! tuzaii!!!
A lot of you while reading this may be thinking that
the girl’s lack of education might be blamed for the
docility, perish the thought, I knew guys who beat
their girl friends to pulp back in school (yes,
university) and the girls did not have the cojones
to pull themselves from such relationships, and it
was just dating! How do you think such girls will
react when they get married to Chris Brown
wannabes?
What of the Church that appends the marriage
certificates; do they educate and counsel the brides
and grooms before wedding them? Do they even
broach the subject of domestic violence in church
or is it also avoided à la corruption? Am saying
this because I cannot remember the matter ever
been discussed in church sermons, and am sure
that most wife-beaters seem to be oblivious of the
inhumanity of their actions; as far as they are
concerned they are merely disciplining their
insubordinate wives! Once again, I draw an
example from the flogging-husband, he only
realized he was being most unkind to his wife,
when his landlady got wind of the mistreatment
and gave him a deserved tongue-lashing that
included such words/phrases as ‘devil’ ‘wicked’
‘animal’ ‘like a housemaid’ and ‘you could never
marry my daughter!’
Whether he stopped is a discussion for another
day, what I am saying in essence is that as a
result of a good number of guys coming from
homes where wife battery was the norm, it’s quite
natural that they will introduce such into their own
homes. The onus now lies on us to make them
realize that like the killing of twins, domestic
violence is now an unacceptable relic; we all have
a role to play in this. From the acerbic words given
to a wife-beating friend, to the cold-shoulder given
to him by the parents, and from the counselling of
the church to the reclaiming of their lost pride by
the women folk; in each small measure we can
make the home a place free of slaps, punches and
whips (you can keep one for the kids just in case).
25 November 2011