The women were of different backgrounds, but their stories are similar in that they are survivors of violence and brutality in an environment that should be sanctuary of love and affection. The occasion was the commemoration of this year’s International Women’s Day organised by Project Alert. Gboyega Alaka reports
My name is Funmilayo Thompson, and I’m a strong survivor of domestic violence. My ordeal started right from my wedding night. And it started with rape. People say sex in marriage is about love-making and a beautiful experience. Well mine wasn’t. I had been a spinal cord patient and my husband knew this, yet he never took it easy with me. It started with verbal abuses and graduated to the physical. He knew that once he grabbed me by the neck, I would be gasping for breath, yet he never desisted. Anytime he was around, he would always look for a reason to attack me.”
Those were the opening sentences in Funmilayo Thompson’s (not real name) horror narrative. The occasion was the commemoration of this year’s International Women’s Day by Project Alert, a Lagos-based advocacy group on violence against women. The advocacy group opted for a Domestic Violence Forum, with the topic, ‘Finding yourself: Rebuilding your self-worth after an abuse,’ for this year’s event; and for about two hours, Funmilayo and her fellow domestic violence survivors shared their stories, eliciting sighs and hisses from the select audience of counseling experts and journalists.
Funmilayo told the bewildered audience of how her husband, Biodun (not real name) beat her mercilessly even during pregnancy and right after delivery. “I couldn’t tell people what I was going through, but at a point, I had to solicit his close friends to help talk to him. I knew him back in secondary school, but there was years of break in which we both lost contact. Let me say at this point that I’m partly to blame, because after seeing traces of the violence in him during our short courtship, I turned him down. But because I was having issues with my uncle whom I was staying with, I eventually gave in – sort of to have a refuge over my head.
“Along the line, the kids started coming and I discovered that it wasn’t about me alone. He just wasn’t ready for kids. Sometimes, he would hit me against the wall. On one occasion, he so hit me that my mother had to intervene?’ But he pushed the elderly woman and threw the barely two-week old baby. Thankfully, my mum was alert and caught him before he landed.
“Once, he drove his car filled with family members in between two trailers causing the car to be crushed. Graciously, we escaped unhurt, but it reminded me of my past ordeal that resulted in my spinal cord injury. But I thank God that his family were not unaware of what I was going through, including the fact that I was the breadwinner. Part of the problem also was the fact that I was well-read, and I always told him he needed to go to school.
“On one occasion, he attacked me and I lost my speech and the use of my left side, but he wasn’t remorseful, even till date. I say that I’m a strong survivor because you needed to have seen me back in those turbulent years. But now I am walking, I’m talking again and I’m looking beautiful again. I also thank God for my kids. He had a habit of saying, “By the time I finish with you, you will pack your things and leave.’
The violence got to a level where both his parents told me to file for divorce. They told me, ‘We love you and wish to keep you in the family, but your life comes first.’ They both came to Project Alert and told them not to allow my husband know my whereabouts. Even his brothers were telling me of his infidelity. Meanwhile, he would tell me he was going to work. It got to a stage that I took to alcohol. I lost all sense of being a woman because whenever he wanted to sleep with me, he would hit me or drag me or hold me down by force. Sometimes he would insist he wanted my back on the ground despite my situation. And usually the children would wake up and see everything, to the extent that they would go to school and be relaying it to their peers.
“But my boy touched my heart one day when he said to me, ‘Mummy, I don’t want you to die, let’s run away.’ So now I have my freedom back and I have filed for divorce.”
‘He forced me to swallow his sperm during pregnancy’
Dark and pretty Bolanle Adigun’s (not real name) story is almost similar. Like Funmilayo, she also experienced violence on the night of her wedding. “When I was three months pregnant, he forced me to swallow his sperm against my wish. That was despite drawing his attention to the fact that I was pregnant and whatever I took in could affect the baby.
“Four weeks after our wedding, he was celebrating one year of his father’s demise and he raised the volume of the sound system so high, I went to sit outside. But one of his friends came out and asked why I was sitting out alone. I told him. And lo and behold, he came out, dragged me in and beat me to pulp. For days, I was so weak and useless and it was his younger brother who was helping me in doing basic things like fetching water.”
“Surprisingly, he extended the violence to our son. He started beating him from seven months. He would use those thick leather belt on him and fling him as if he were a mere object. And I dared not intervene, else he would turn on me. But I intervened anyway, because this was my child and I know what I went through to have him. I was in labour for 27 hours. And I would ask him, if you could be doing this to a seven month old baby, what would you do to him when he becomes a teenager? It got to a stage the boy would be cowering. The verbal abuse was at another level, to the extent that it is only when he traveled that the boy was free and happy.
“There was also the issue of philandering. There was a time he brought a lady into the house, claiming she was his cousin, but as God would have it, his real cousin came visiting and told me they were not related. Anytime he traveled, he would surely come back with one kind of disease or the other. And then he would put the blame on me. ‘It is the toilet you use in school.’ Then I was in the final year in the university. And when I finished at the university, he said ‘It is the toilet you use in the church.’
“When I gave birth to my second child, it was a miracle. You need to see the marks of infection all over her body. I finished from the university but I was not bold enough to tell him because I knew his remarks would be deflating. On one occasion, he used a substance to abort my pregnancy without my consent. I usually fell ill during pregnancy, so he brought Moringa for me to take; I told him I couldn’t, but he literally forced it down my throat. The moment I drank it, I felt something like hot knife slashing through my stomach.
“Along the line, I lost my parents; and seeing that I had nowhere to run to, he further turned on the heat. He even brought another woman into the house, but I was beyond caring.
“I eventually ran away from our home in Ibadan. That was in 2016. I couldn’t take it no more; I had become so lean and nearly going mad. I pretended all was well until he left for work, then I packed my belonging and left with my children.”
‘I took up arms to put him at bay’
Nneka is tall and pretty and it was hard for the little audience to figure how a man could subject her to any kind of brutality. Yet her story is a potpourri of everything negative in a marriage – physical abuse, emotional abuse, fight-back and tension.
“The first time he hit me, I wanted to sew a clothe for an occasion; he wanted to pick a style for me, but I insisted on another. Somehow, this angered him and the moment we got in the car, he started shouting and hitting me. He was so vicious that he left me with a cut on my lip.
“I was so confused, and thinking I was wrong, I apologised to him. But that turned out to be a mistake, as he stepped up his domineering behaviour. I tried to intimate my parents on what I was going through, but they told me to sort out my matrimonial issues.
“When I put to bed, I wanted to do exclusive breast-feeding, but he wanted me to give him milk. Again, I insisted. When my baby had catarrh, he again stepped up his agitation. He told my mother, who had come to help us with the baby, to warn me, threatening to beat me if I didn’t comply.
“He continued his suppressive ways even after my mother left. Then I started hearing stories of his exploits at a nearby hotel. I also heard stories of how he brought girls to our matrimonial home whenever I was away at school. I married him as an undergraduate. When I eventually found the courage to raise the issues, he raised his voice, accusing me of sleeping with pastors who now paid me back with visions.
“In anger, I left to sleep in the children’s room. When I woke up to switch the change-over, I discovered he was not even in the house; so I locked the front door. Around 3am, I heard him knocking but I ignored him. Finally he forced open the door and came at me with a mop stick. At that point, I said to myself, ‘If I don’t die today, I will not die again.’ He said I should just leave his house, that I was the least girl he ever had dealings with. In any case, it had become his habit to throw my things out once we had the slightest disagreement. He pushed me out of the house that same 3am, made sure I was out of the compound gate. In desperation, I started shouting until his friend who lived opposite took me in. In the morning, I called my parents and his. One of his brothers, who lived in Ikotun, came to intercede but he threw my laptop at me and threatened to destroy all my clothes. He also made to hit me again. At that point, I made up my mind not to go back to his house. We were in his friend’s house for two days. Later, he told his friend to throw me out of the house, but that one refused. He came back again on the pretext of settling with me, but instead used the opportunity to step on my stomach and on my eye. In the end, his friend had to push him out.
“To cut a long story short, I reported him at Alausa. I was out of his house between June and September last year. Later, he started begging that he had changed his ways. He said the reason we were having issues was because we didn’t date long enough. We only dated for a month. He refused to sign an undertaking, saying how could a marriage be based on an undertaking? Even barrister and madam (Josephine Effa-Chukwuma) told me they have seen changes in him; so as I speak, I am back with him. But has he really changed?
“I went back with a determination to meet him force for force. True to type, he went back to his ways. One day, he beat me with a belt and I fought back and threatened him with a knife. I flogged with the knife so badly he couldn’t raise his hands for a whole week. One night, I got a big stick, woke him up and told him, ‘I could have killed you this night if I wanted to.’ I told him the next time he beats me, I would smash his head and kill him in his sleep. That night, he was so scared he couldn’t sleep. I also started keeping a knife nearby in readiness for his attack. He started telling our one-year-old son that it is this woman that will kill him. Now he is the scared one. He even brought policemen under the pretext that I was threatening his life, but I showed the officers photo evidences of the injuries he had inflicted on me and that it was in self-defense. Eventually, I told them I would not threaten him with again but I will use other weapons. Any time he inflicts pain on me, I will make sure he feels the pain in return.”
Interesting, you may say, but how long will such tactics work? Isn’t she sitting on a keg of gunpowder? This were the fears raised by panelists, as Nneka anchored her narrative. They advised her to instead get her man to seek experts’ help on a problem which they said could be anger or something more psychological.
‘He beat me until I broke my back’
Although Funmilola Savage (not real name) went through her ordeal in the UK, where laws against domestic violence were strong, but she was nevertheless handicapped and couldn’t take actions against her husband because of what she termed ‘the culture we were brought up in and what we were made to believe.’
For instance, her mother-in-law’s words were always ringing in her head: ‘Are you going to send your husband to jail? How do you think your children would feel, growing up and knowing that you sent their father to prison?’
“I left 11 years ago. My problem started with low self esteem on the part of my husband. He felt I was better than him in several aspects and in a bid to suppress me, resorted to physical violence. The beating was intense, and because I had had a child before we got married, he would always blackmail me with words like, ‘Are you going to leave and get married to another man and have another child for another man? Your mother did not stay in her husband’s house, do you want to start your own too?’
“He even brought women to the house and made me call his girlfriends, so that their husbands, seeing that it was a female voice, would not suspect it was a man calling. In the middle of all this, I knew I had to leave but I didn’t know how because he had already collected and burnt my certificate. I studied Pure and Applied Mathematics. Every other course I did, he collected the certificate and burnt them. He would not allow me to work or relate with any family.
Why did I leave him? I was pregnant with my third baby but he didn’t like me going to the hospital; he felt I was going to see another man. One day, he started beating me and I broke my back and fell into labour at five months. Miraculously, the baby survived, but I was on wheelchair for about two months. It was then I told myself if I didn’t leave, I would have to be taken out in a body-bag. It was the sort of battle that got me stitches all over.
One day, when he left for work, I packed my things, took my children and left. I moved to Manchester, but I couldn’t work because I had a child with a special need. Besides, he would find out and come after me. In my dilemma, I started teaching foreigners English. Then somebody called from Nigeria and told me my obituary was in front of my parents’ house. I later found out my husband declared me dead to the British government, so he could marry another woman. I called and told him I knew what he had done, but rather than show remorse, he said ‘Fine, you will now have to die. It is because I left you alive that you want to start a fight.’
To avoid being killed, I packed my things and my children and headed for Nigeria. To the glory of God, I have been waxing stronger since 2011. My first daughter is doing her Youth Service, the second is writing an SSC examination and the third is secondary school. The men would always want to make you feel you cannot survive without them, but it’s all lies.
‘His abuse is of another level’
My name is Tosin Adewale (not real name) and I’m a lawyer. I met my husband in church. He was the head PA to the head pastor, where my father was also a pastor. I first got a glimpse of his true colours a night to our wedding. Apparently he had been calling my phone, but I didn’t hear, when I eventually returned his call, he rained abuses on me endlessly. If not that preparations had gone far, I would have backed out immediately.
“Not long after our wedding, the verbal abuse started. And his abuse is on another level. He is not the type that knows how to walk away when he’s angry. And then, he slapped me. I wouldn’t say I didn’t expect it, but I was shocked all the same. And then he is not the sort that knows how to say sorry.
“Three months after I gave birth to our first child, he got aggravated as usual; meanwhile the baby was crying and I made to go and carry him, but he insisted I mustn’t move an inch. Eventually I went to carry the baby because I couldn’t stand the sound, but he came at me, dragged me, took the baby and put him on the floor and said ‘how dare you?’ He started punching, tearing and really beating me up. That was the first real beating. I ran out to call his parents but he got angrier and said ‘How dare you call my parents? ‘
“Both our parents came and settled us, but it only lasted for a few days. Then he came with the idea of us running a family business. Before then, I had my events planning business, but he apparently was figuring out a way to tame me and make me dependent on him. Things got really bad and I became depressed and lean. When I fought back, the whole thing escalated. He shredded my clothes and beat the living daylight out of me. We were living alone in a bungalow and there was nobody on ground to intervene.
One day when he had gone out, I packed my tings with my baby and maid, passed by my son’s school, picked him up on the pretext that I was taking him to the hospital and disappeared. It’s been three years now, and as I speak, I have filed for divorce, although he is yet to be served.