Category: Weekend Treat

• Frightening tales of married men at mercy of violent spouses
• Why men may begin to shun conventional marriage

 

Olatunji OLOLADE, Associate Editor

 

SEVERAL years later, as he took his wedding vows, Bidemi Oso remembered the twilight of 1988, when his mother ordered his father to kneel, raise his hands and close his eyes. His father, a manager at a dairy producer in Ogba, Lagos, fearfully complied in apparent dread of the whip in his mother’s hand.

Oso, rushed out to call other kids in the compound, screaming: “E wa woo, mummy mi tun ti ni ki daddy mi kawo soke (Come and see! My mother is punishing my father again!)” Pronto, about five kids scurried to the Osos’ ground floor apartment window. They peeped through dusty louvre blades for glimpses of the family’s breadwinner and presumed head, Mr. Oso, sweating in an extreme pose. Oso’s mom, standing arms akimbo, loomed over his father menacingly, using a koboko (horsewhip) on him each time his arms bent at the elbow or he lowered a hand to scratch his nose.

Eventually she noticed the children at the window and marched angrily towards them, causing them to flee.

At their Olukosi Street, Agege, Lagos residence, the Oso’s debacle was compound legend. Within the blocks of three houses, neighbours stared pitifully at Oso’s father, and cracked unsparing jokes about him in his absence. Housewives, couples and unmarried residents agreed that his marriage was his bondage. But none was courageous enough to free him; not even when he emerged elegantly decked in his suit, with black eyes and bruises sustained from his wife’s beatings.

“Everybody knew my mother beat up my father at will. They knew she punished him like a child. It was uncalled for. Regrettably, I participated in the jokes. But I was only a child. Now, I know better,” he said.

Few days to his marriage, Oso developed jitters. It dawned on him that he “might be signing up for a lifetime of hell” like his father. Thus he became scared.

“I didn’t wish to end up like my father. I can’t let any woman do to me, what my mother did to my father,” he said.

 

 

Thus as he took his vows, the 39-year-old resolved never to get caught off his guards. Beyond love and the promise of “sweet intercourse,” he dreaded marriage and its gendered power-play. “Attack is the best form of defence,” he stressed.

Thus right from his wedding night, he moved to assert his dominance over his new bride. He changed the hotel previously booked for their honeymoon, “because it was booked by his mother-in-law.” He said, “I needed to defy her (mother-in-law) and assert control over my marriage. She was fond of bossing her husband and other sons-in-law around. But I resolved never to be her stooge.” Of course, Oso’s bride, Bamidele, was livid but he stuck to his guns. The event almost ruined their wedding night. Then two weeks into their marriage, Oso gifted his wife with a “kafa” (a swivel kick clearing her off her feet), and plucked two of her front teeth with his fists, because she “slapped” him “thrice” during an argument on perceived infidelity.

Seven months into the wedding, their marriage officially hit the rocks. Oso said, “She is very violent. She had a knack for slapping me during arguments. She is exceedingly violent in bed too; she loves to strangle me during intercourse. She is a poor cook. She is very dirty and hates corrections. She is also an unrepentant cheat, who frequently flirts and exchanges nude pictures with her ex-boyfriend, and her mother and sisters meddled in our marriage. I had to assert myself lest they did to me what my mother did to my father,” he said.

It didn’t end well for Oso’s father. “He died in penury. My mother brutalised him physically and psychologically. She had an eerie hold over him. He was her slave…I don’t know what is happening to marriage these days. Once I saw my mother-in-law hit her husband, my wife’s stepfather, with the wooden sole of her slipper because he rebuked her for meddling in her daughters’ marriages. He retreated into his room to cry. It’s saddening,” said Oso.

But the 39-year-old is grossly misguided, argued Bamidele, his estranged wife. She said, “I don’t know what screwed up his childhood but he must have seen too much of bad movies from Nollywood.” Bamidele, 31, denied her husband’s accusations, claiming that he has anger issues. She said, “He is timid during intercourse and rather than seek help, he covers up his lack of stamina with rage. He lacks the finesse and maturity to keep a home. He hasn’t evolved. He is stuck in the past. He keeps venting and transferring aggression over stuff his father went through in his mother’s hands, on me. I am not his mother for crying out loud. I had to move out, lest he kills me or I kill him.”

The 31-year-old took a wise decision, according to Kemisola Idowu, a marriage counsellor and social psychologist. “It’s better she quits the relationship before it implodes, leading to the death of either partner,” she said.

While the Osos represent a fraction of problematic marriages across the country, its curious manifestations of intimate partner violence against men is resonant of a rising trend involving persistent acts of violence committed against Nigerian men by their wives. Sometimes, they are gruesomely murdered.

 

Wives with knives…

Few people would forget in a hurry, the stark narrative of the Sandas. In a judicial drama that lasted almost three years, Maryam Sanda was found guilty and sentenced to death for killing her husband, Bilyaminu Bello, by Justice Yusuf Halilu of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court.

Sanda stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife, with clear intent to kill, Justice Halilu said in the judgment on a two-count homicide charge brought by the Nigerian police against Sanda in November 2017.

Ibrahim Mohammed, a key witness and friend to the deceased, alleged that Sanda narrated how Sanda attempted to stab Bilyaminu with a knife, a perfume jar and a broken bottle of groundnut, in his presence. Bilyaminu allegedly sustained multiple cuts, wresting the weapons from Sanda’s grasp. Although Mohammed eventually left for home, he suffered a heart-wrenching reunion with his friend, at the hospital: at their next meeting, there was a hole near Bilyaminu’s chest, bite marks on his stomach and stitches all over his body.

Maryam, however, denied attacking her husband, claiming that he pushed her to the floor, following an argument over nude pictures found on his phone. She testified that a shisha pot broke her fall, and its shards pierced Bilyaminu when he slipped on water that spilt from the pot.

Regardless of her defence, Sanda was sentenced to death by hanging. But the deed had been done. Bilyaminu died a sad, gruesome death.

And Nigeria won’t forget in a hurry, lawyer Udeme Otike-Odibi, 48, who reportedly chopped off her husband’s manhood after stabbing him to death. Giving testimony on the incident before an Igbosere High Court in Lagos, Assistant Superintendent of Police, ASP Olusegun Bamidele, of Homicide Section, State Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Panti, told the court that Udeme, in her statement, confessed to killing her husband, 50-year-old Symphorosa Otike-Odibi, also a lawyer, and cutting off his manhood, after suspecting him of having an extra-marital affair.

The murder took place at the couple’s home in Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria, on May 2, 2018, as Udeme, who is a dual British and Nigerian citizen, was preparing to fly to the United Kingdom. ASP Bamidele said: “She stated that the deceased was having extra-marital affairs and whenever she raised the issue with him, his responses were not satisfactory…She had a discussion with him and there was a hot exchange of words, which made her go to the kitchen and get a frying pan and a knife.

“When she returned to where the deceased lay, she hit him on the head with the frying pan and said, ‘Tell me, what is in your mind that you are withholding.’ She stated that the deceased called his mother to report her conduct but she continued to hit him on the head, again and again. Finally, she confirmed that she used the knife tostab the deceased in his abdomen. She also said while the deceased was lying on his back, she was still angry.

“She sat beside him, looking at his intestines coming out, and said: ‘If your penis is the one that is giving you licence to have the feeling of another person, it’s better we cut it off.’

“She proceeded to do so with the same knife she used in stabbing him and hung a piece of the penis in his right hand.”

Assistant superintendent Bamidele said Otike-Odibi later sent her friend a WhatsApp message which read: ‘” have done something terrible.”

Police later seized a frying pan, a blood drenched knife and Otike-Odibi’s Nigerian and British passports from her home.

While women are encouraged to feel “powerful enough” to confront or leave an abuser via marriage counselling and feminist orientation, abused men are simply counselled “to be a man.” The latter are oftentimes made to believe that they are the ones with flawed reasoning and character, hence they are frequently urged to seek professional help to fix their behaviour, argued Ibrahim Ahmad, a psychiatrist.

There is no gainsaying women are more on the receiving end of domestic violence, thus attracting global attention. To this end, the World Health Organisation (WHO) defined intimate partner violence as one of the most common forms of violence against women that includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and controlling behaviours by an intimate partner.

“The overwhelming global burden is borne by women. Although women can be violent in relationships with men, often in self-defence, and violence sometimes occurs in same-sex partnerships, the most common perpetrators of violence against women are male intimate partners or ex-partners. By contrast, men are far more likely to experience violent acts by strangers or acquaintances than by someone close to them,” argues the WHO in a recent report.

Likewise, the UN General Assembly, addressing the issue as Gender based Violence (GBV) declared it as any violent act that results in physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women in the context of wife battering, rape, commercial sexual exploitation, intimidation at work places, social exclusion, domestic abuse and violence, female genital mutilation or anything done by men to establish authority over women socially, intellectually or economically.

While WHO, the media, the UN, governments and women’s rights movements have fought, rightly, for more societal attention to domestic abuse and sexual violence against women, male victims of these crimes still tend to get short shrift, from the media and activists alike.

Widely broadcast social experiments have shown that while people are quick to intervene when a man in a staged public quarrel becomes physically abusive to his girlfriend, reactions to a similar situation with the genders reversed mostly range from indifference to amusement or even sympathy for the woman. These attitudes stem from traditional gender norms which treat victimhood, especially at a woman’s hands, as unmanly.

For instance, Tope Coker, a teacher, revealed how her grandmother continually assaulted her grandfather without reproach. She said, “There was this day when we heard a frightening noise from their room. We all rushed inside to find our grandma sprawled on the bed, sobbing vigorously into the sheets. We saw grandpa, God forgive us, crouched in a corner beside the bed. He was sweating and visibly disoriented. He occasionally rubbed his temple and remained silent while we railed at him for daring to assault his wife even in their old age.

“I told him I was disappointed in him and we stopped calling him. Few months later, the house-help came to reveal to me and one of my cousins how grandma had been persistently beating grandpa till he cried. She said, grandma often starved him and denied him food, sometimes restricting his diet to cold cornmeal and bean cake. She even made a recording of her assault on him on two different occasions. I was dumbfounded and I felt terrible for tongue-lashing grandpa earlier.

“Grandpa said he felt too ashamed to reveal the other day that it was our grandma who pounced on him and beat him up. His attempt to escape through the door resulted in a scuffle and the noise that attracted us. He said she hit him with a plastic lamp on his head and that was why he was rubbing his temple.

“When we confronted grandma, she burst into tears recounting how she endured grandpa’s beating and philandering while they were a young couple. She wanted us to applaud her persistent abuse of her husband as payback. That was some sick excuse, and I couldn’t accept it even though some other family members accepted it,” she said.

Coker said the incident estranged her from her grandmother until her death in 2017, and drew her closer to her grandpa until his death one year earlier, 2016.

 

 No romance without finance

Tunde Braimoh, 66, argued that it is about time men took deliberate measures to protect themselves. He said, “We must realise that as we grow older, our wives seek to be free. They do not want to answer to any man. They stop needing you once your children secure lucrative jobs and cater to their needs. I have friends who got married to a wife and they were left to rot by both wife and children. At their death, they were given lavish funerals. These were able providers who took care of their families. Their wives simply relocated abroad to live with the kids.

The retired haulage entrepreneur, who has three wives and eight children, argued that, “A man must marry more than one wife and work hard to cater for his family’s material and emotional needs. When you have more wives and children, they can’t all get mad and hate you at the same time. There will always be that wife and child who would take care of you, and to whom you would remain beloved, until your death.”

But 64-year-old widower, Peter Idoh, argued that you can only enjoy such luxury if you have the wisdom and stamina for it, and if you are rich in your old age.

He said, “Before I received my pension, women scorned me a lot; even women my age. Then I received my pension and I became the beau of most women, married women inclusive. A woman who refused my overture stating that she couldn’t answer to any man again suddenly volunteered to move in with me, promising to take care of my needs.”

Interestingly, men like Idoh encounter resistance from older women who want their own lives, not a full-time relationship. While many in this generation of heterosexual, divorced or widowed women want male companionship, they don’t necessarily relish the thought of moving in with a man.

For instance, 67-year-old retired business woman, Gladys Irueteh, stated that she is done putting up with the rigours of marriage and the live-in relationship. According to her, the burden of co-dependence, the daily tension within close quarters and the sacrifices made keeping a home, care-giving and doing the emotional legwork to keep her marriage humming petered off at the collapse of her second marriage.

 

 Men shunning marriage…

Recently, a social media user generated outrage by teaching women via a post, on how to kill a cheating husband. The married woman, identified as Chidinma, received backlash from Nigerians for allegedly teaching other women how to kill their husbands “professionally without leaving any evidence behind.”

In a post on a Facebook group called “Extraordinary Mum’s and Singles Ladies B,” she reportedly wrote, “Please, please, my fellow ladies, if your husband cheats, do not stab him. Simply go and remove his car break. If he survives it, either the spinal cord will break, or his two legs. With that, he will only be facing you. Thanks.”

And just recently, a medical doctor simply identified as Mr. Jones reported in another social media post how a colleague at the Federal Medical Centre (FMC), in Owerri, Imo State, was brutally attacked by his wife after a quarrel. He said the doctor’s wife allegedly cut off his nose, upper teeth, the tip of his tongue, lower gums, and after the assault, she called the husband’s mom to come and carry him.

“Luckily, for the doctor, he was rushed to the hospital and we stabilised him. He is conscious but cannot talk since he’s on tracheostomy. Now, I’m scared of this marriage thing,” said Jones.

At the backdrop of these proceedings, a creepy trend ensues amid suburban youth. Dare Thomas, 25, has “three children from three baby mamas.” He doesn’t intend to marry any of them. “I won’t tie myself down to any woman. They are users. I can never keep to one wife,” said the manager of a Dopemu, Agege based lotto and betting agency.

Like Thomas, Matthew Aina, a loan procurement manager with an Ikeja, Lagos-based bank, stated that, “Conventional marriage is outdated. It’s a scary transaction between two parasites. We use each other but the woman uses you more. Remember, ‘it’s always her matrimonial home,’ not yours. It’s easier to maintain civil partnerships with one or two baby mamas (birth mothers) of your children. I only have to worry about my children’s upkeep, and I can have as many women as I like. No problem with wives and in-laws,” said the 34-year-old.

Such reasoning is grossly flawed, argued Nafeesah Adekola, 56, a sociologist.

She said, “From a religious and sociological point of view, the marriage institution serves a pivotal role in sustaining society and enriching civilisation. Marriage should enhance an adult’s ability to parent. Both male and female must fulfill their gendered roles, and that can only be fulfilled in an appropriate family setting – irrespective of what modern theorists or so-called disrupters say.

“Married people are more likely to give and receive support to children and nourish growth within structured frameworks of family and society. When family members move outside of these roles, the family is thrown out of balance and this triggers a devastating impact on societal norms and civilisation. Society must recalibrate in order to function properly,” she said.

Thomas, Aina and their ilk are perhaps wary of having their manhoods severed or being stabbed to death by jealous wives. A peep into Bidemi Oso’s mind, however, reveals a wariness characteristic of a scared romantic.

The 39-year-old still hurts every time he remembers his father kneeling with his eyes closed and his hands raised in their dimly lit living room, while his mother hushed him quiet with promises of pain and a whiplash.

Mrs Oso was menacing: venomous threats leapt from her lips in measured cadence. The effect was frightening. It kept his father from attempting escape from the dark living room. Thirty-two years since his ordeal, Oso is still with his father in the dark room.