Ozoro Festival, SA's, and Why We Cry (2)
A white Russian blogger who couldn’t put two sentences together left Europe, traveled around Africa, used the privilege of his skin (race) to sleep with African women, recorded these encounters without their consent, and uploaded them online. What many saw was the supposed “promiscuity” of African women—a racist idea that is christened with new labels/names that continue to circulate in various ways for every woman of African descent.
When I "mistakenly" came across a snippet of one of the videos, I was furious. Following the incident, a debate ensued online about which women of African countries were easy to "get laid". All I saw in that brief moment were layers of violence, contradictions, and complexities on display that add to the intersection of racism and intimate violence that Black women have experienced for centuries. This incident reminds me, as a scholar, of the historicity of white men's fetishism toward Black female bodies.
I wanted to come online to have a "meltdown," but I remembered what my mother says about my passion. My mother said that I approach certain issues like a visually impaired person throwing a party ("Oloju kan se inawo"). By this phrase, she meant the intensity and fastidiousness with which a visually impaired person ensures nothing slips and everything is done right. And because she still "mothered" me from her grave, I restrained myself.
In retrospect, I realized my mother was not wrong. Furthermore, my passion is not wrong, and as I study more, I realize she was saying I need to regulate myself before acting; some clarity doesn't come when you are dysregulated. In psychology, they ask you to regulate, relate, and reason.
Kirk Franklin tells us "Why We Sing." Many have asked why we get "turned on," borrowing a phrase from a sexist government official's response to Rinu Oduala's concern about the Ozoro festival.
We cry because SA reminds us of women of African descent who were branded and graped during the Middle Passage. Although they were placed on the quarterdeck, not in the hold like their male counterparts, they were vulnerable to exploitation. We remember bodies sexually devalued on plantations and forced to breed.
We cry because we are forced to relive bodies on auction blocks, exposed, fondled, handled, and even poked before purchase—bodies subjected to unwanted gazes, forced to strip at social functions because of their vulnerability, and photographed without consent. Black female bodies probed, groped, and operated on without anesthesia; exhibited in museums; and other atrocities on Black bodies too numerous to name.
You ask, why do women rage about SA? The picture attached to this post should give you more answers. If you are not familiar with him, he is a male Nollywood actor popularly known as Baba Ijesha, who SA'd a minor and served prison time, but he is now trying to rewrite a story we all witnessed.
