By Joseph Diescho
‘Our history has not hurt us enough, otherwise this abuse would have stopped a long time ago’ – wrote the acclaimed African writer, Ben Okri, in his book Dangerous Love.
Last week the nation was implored by the national political leadership to pause, toll bells and pray – this in an effort to bring an end to the spate of debilitating violence meted out against vulnerable women by their male partners in supposedly love relationships.
At the Sam Nujoma sports stadium, multitudes of Namibians residing in Windhoek and surrounds brazed the scorching African sun and swarmed the stadium to join the President in prayer, and to, in concert, observe a moment of silence in remembrance of the fallen victims of family violence.
The lamenting was about but not limited to the killing of women, but also innocent children.
The wonderment, however, continues and questions persist as to how we can begin to comprehend the big picture on the situation, parts of which are very disturbing to our soul as a nation.
This is necessary in order for us to move towards appropriate responses to combat these dastardly deeds against fellow most vulnerable citizens of our Motherland. The words of the four-year little son of the slain Tiffany Lewin, the heroic boy who took it upon himself to stab his mom’s murderer, ‘Is my mom in heaven?’ must send a chilling feeling down our indifferent spines: is my mom in heaven?’
For us as parents, literally and figuratively, the question is what is heaven saying about us?
No, before we worry about heaven, the earlier question is: Is what we are praying against a new phenomenon altogether, or is it something that has been part of us but just was not well known or sufficiently reported about?
If it has been with us, why did we not know of it so that we would have been stung into action such that we are praying only now? If it is new, is our reaction commensurate with the illness?
Differently phrased, do we understand what we are praying about so that we are offering God the right intercessions so that He may give us the most appropriate response at this time in this place?
It is understandable that we react in disgust and incredulity when we hear about such horrendous goings-on in our mainly peaceful and stable country.
The point, however, is whether our emotional responses are not just mere knee-jerk reactions to something that needs a much more thought-through strategy that can translate into short, medium and long term interventionist programs of action with clear battle plans to combat these atrocities that are eating away at our hard won peace and our tranquil life style.
To start with, the program at the Sam Nujoma stadium turned out more of a free-day carnival with people roaming about and children in school uniforms having a nice time together away from school.
That was not the purpose. Many government officials took advantage of the President and the Cabinet’s spirit by staying idly at home or doing their own things in government time.
There was neither the seriousness that the situation required nor the feeling/the sense of “we cannot take this anymore”, which is what the government was especially trying to express.
Sitting in the heat last week in the stadium, I wondered in my head what the atmosphere would have been like if an occasion like that was taking place in Washington, DC, convened by President Obama.
I wondered what message would have been delivered at such an occasion by leaders such as Obama or the Cuban leader Fidel Castro or the late President Hugo Chavez or Samora Machel, to their people in pain!
The answers came very swiftly to my mind: Both the message and its delivery would have been very poignant and it would have struck a core nerve in the audience – the message would have proceeded from a core national philosophy which would in turn have informed the mood and the collective response, namely, ‘This is not right and cannot be allowed to continue in our name’, to the point that ‘the whole people’ would have been propelled to do something about it.
People would have listened to the address of the head of state in anticipation of something major, heartfelt, and more impactful. There would have been tears in the stadium in response to the genuine clear clarion call by the leader!
In our case, the President gave a mundanely toned speech, the President was not heard, and most people took nothing home with them.
We therefore need to stretch our imagination a bit more about this epidemic and look in ourselves to find, first explanations for the backgrounds to these ills, second name the disease so that we can all speak about the same thing and third find and /or design thematic and systematic strategies to move towards a solution – it is not enough to not just talk about the problems with high rhetoric and admonitions, just to wake up the following morning and move on with the same fears and concerns
What are the sources of this disease? The issue of gender–based violence is not exclusive failure to Namibia. Virtually all countries have their fair share of this painful reality in post-modern society.
In some societies these sorts of crimes go unnoticed or unreported as the size of the population is too vast so that an isolated killing of one woman or a few is nothing in the scheme of a myriad of many other big crimes that warrant immediate attention. But in Namibia, the killing of one innocent woman is not a small problem, and therefore gets full media coverage. It is in this context that the international reportage that Namibia is the country with the highest number of deaths on its national roads is very unfortunate and disheartening and points to the unnecessary losses of life. According to the World Life Expectancy report by the World health Organization and a study done by the University of Michigan, Namibia loses more lives on the road than any other country in the whole world.
Namibia is followed by Thailand, Iran, Sudan and Swaziland.
What from our own history informs this state of affairs of gender-based violence? For purposes of conversation, let us consider the following markers of our painful history from which we do not seem to have learned enough. First, Namibia was the first country to experience genocide in modern history, even before the infamous Holocaust that is talked about more often in the world.
The dehumanization that this experience must have visited upon the Namibian psyche must be borne in mind when appreciating the attitudes towards respect for life and rights of others.
Second, there is the undeniable background of women’s abuse in terms of historical men-women power relations that are fundamentally predicated upon the unfettered power of men over women.
There is no better place for this relationship to play itself out than the family or in romantic relationships where the rules are becoming less and less clear with the evolution of values and roles pertaining to men and women respectively.
In other words, in a set-up where a woman is objectified and marginalized as property of the good man who acquires her, she becomes more provocative when she asserts herself as an equal partner in a relationship that is expected to be traditional. When this relationship is complicated by imbalances in economic or financial positions of the people in the relationship, the climate becomes deadly. Hence the men resort to brute violence at the slightest provocation, be it out of sheer jealously/possessiveness, or anger as a result of infidelity, real or imagined, insecurity as a result of low testosterone, or simple rejection.
Third, we have come out of the politics of the liberation struggle, which taught both sides to be indifferent towards one another whenever we disagree. When we disagree, we are enemies and we embark upon a language of hostility that even the political leadership continues to use to offer validation to violence as an expression of intolerance.
Our history prepared us to write one another off and simply not feel for others when it did not affect us directly. The culture of us versus them, wishing one another away as a solution to our problems created the low tolerance for disagreement of whatever nature that we all suffer from.
When national political leaders are so intolerant so much so that they are heard calling other people ‘cockroaches,’ ‘Judas Iscariot’ and ‘enemies,’ it is hate speech and the spin-offs are what we see expressed at individual levels of intolerance management.
When young citizens hear day in and day out how political party leaders have nothing good to say about other political role players in the country, how can we expect expect them to be tolerant in situations that threaten their security, for better or for worse, even more directly? When economic opportunities are withheld from normal citizens purely on the basis of political party differences, how can they turn to violence as a means to settle personal scores?
When fellow Namibians of all colours and language groups are not given equal opportunity to contribute to the well-being of the nation, how can they not feel left out? How can we expect gullible young people to be normal and tolerant when their role models are engaging in the language of interposition, nullification and destruction?
Fourth, there is the breakdown in the family structure which creates a new environment where men and women start relationships too early in their lives and compute that relationships, not marriage, constitute the core of their relevance in life, and without which the young men’s manhood is questionable.
When these young men compute that their girlfriends are theirs and their pride’s extensions, and that any threat to such comfort zone would impugn their power and sense of masculinity in society, what follows is to fight and remove any such possibility by any means necessary.
Fourth, love relationships have become zero-sum games. Both the men and women have internalized a false consciousness that life cannot go on without the lover. So when one of them cannot get everything he/she wants from the other, or when one of them opts to discontinue the relationship, the only consideration is my way or no way. The acts that are being committed are not only criminal in nature, but are expressions of fatalism and nihilism. The offenders also say they do not care about life anymore!
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK