With Rohey Samba
The first time I saw her, she was on television. Split-eyed, roundish and fair…the kinda fair that comes from using skin lightening products on one’s brown skin. She looked more Asian than African.
Her wide grin on her short rotund face felt like déjà vu. If not for her short teeth, she looked almost beautiful. It was as if in another world, in another lifetime, I saw her. I knew her… She was the destroyer, the other woman. And I knew she was going to be aided into our lives by his family.
She did not particularly set out to humiliate me or wreck havoc in my life. Quite honestly, she did not know me from Eve. It was coincidence…pure coincidence that she happened upon a gullible man, whom I was associated with, and snaked her way right up into his life. Wenches like her, bat their eyelashes, play innocent and act like Virgin Mary to win over players like him. Thus the coincidence ends.
I caught him off guard. Told him off. Reported him to the relevant persons. He made the promises I wanted him to make. He said the things I wanted to hear. Deep inside, he meant it. But it was a waste of time. We can’t reverse the courses of our lives. We can only live by them. The cowry shells had spoken about her 5 years earlier. It was meant to be. She was going to be in our lives or, like really?
They would use her to frustrate me. Upload her pictures or download them, to gloat over my misery. She was exotic to them. From another place. But their indiscretions would cost them. I would have nothing to do with her. Unlike her, they knew me. They did not know her. Was she real? Was she fake? They did not feign to know. But they would learn on the job of being inconsiderate and forgetful. Their callousness would pay dividends.
My anger would turn to rage and then mellow down to motivate and inspire me…My anger was going to make me a better person than I ever thought I would be.
To compare me, when they had their own miserable lives to live. That was tantamount to waging a battle on an innocent. It was wrong. It was petty. As if I told them that I was going to be miserable.
I, who was long resigned to my fate. I, who was the owner and custodian of the crooked destiny, I was honored to belong to me. As it were, my story was almost complete. The question would be, where were their lives headed? I was at the beginning of the rest of my life. For that experience would change everything forever? But how about theirs? Where would their lives take them in the future?
You see, women who blame other women for men’s failings and women who fight over men fail to realize these points:
First of all, men cheat because they can! Not because your hair is done the wrong way. Not because your skin is too dark or too light. Not because you are some way or the other. You would spend a fortune at the salon to look good for a man only for him to impregnate your female servant with the foul body odor and nineteen century hairdo.
Secondly, if a man continually abuses you whether physically or psychologically and verbally, it is because you are willing. Acceptance is not the same as patience, neither is that defeatist notion of ‘where would I go with my numerous kids?’ It’s not your prerogative to change a man’s perception about yourself, but it your responsibility to make sure your man accords you with deserving respect or leaves you in peace, and not in pieces…
Finally, if you allow your man to god over you, God will leave you with him. By this I mean, when you let him provide you with everything you need, then you are his servant he will control for the rest of his animal life. No human being should stoop so low as to be at the mercy of another fellow human being, depending on him solely for all the basic necessities of life.
Feminists were not too happy with my statement on the SisterSpeak article “About love and polygamy”… published previously, and rightly so. The bone of contention was the statement, ‘We can’t change them, so we, I mean us women, must try to understand them and move on with our miserable selves in the narrow lanes of our love’s course. Lou gik gorr gikgut gegain…’
This statement on its own is a harmless statement of impropriety: right words, wrong place. But I stand by them still. Especially after reading the speech by HRH Zenani Dlamini, the daughter of Winnie Madikizela Mandela on the occasion of her mother’s passing and burial recently. In her own words, she:
‘Over the past week and half it’s become clear that South Africa, and indeed the world, holds men and women to different standards of morality. Much of what my mother has been asked to account for is simply ignored when it comes to her male counterparts. And this kind of double standard acts also to obscure the immense contributions of women to fight…’
Well, well…aren’t these my exact words albeit said differently?
Yet, the bane of our society comes from women who make their men, their gods, to the extent that they would traverse the length of the earth in order to keep them. If the man scouts for another woman, then all hell breaks loose, as the feminine jealousy and utter selfishness kicks in and makes them do all and everything to keep their god/man.
This stringency prompted mainly by dependence is the object of today’s article, and not the self-aggrandizement that comes from narratives of our personal life experiences. Women need to be self-reliant and economically sufficient to overcome the burden of dependence whether it be dependence on the brother, father or husband.
Whereas education gives each of us a head start in life. The opportunities are best utilized if they can afford us our independence from neediness in our marriages and in our lives overall …
So when the other women tag along, it was not the packaging we expect from our gift of life, but our different fates would reckon with it. It was the life we have been prepared for. At least we are alive and not six feet beneath the earth! And above all, we can only control our own actions and not determine any other’s, including our own child’s. So our lives must continue.
There are many unmarried women, who have all it takes but are still single, Abee? So ain’t no feeling high and mighty as a result of getting married.
Nevertheless, to become bait for the long-held notions of dominance over kin by mockery, derision and subterfuges from in-laws is something no woman should entertain in the overall scheme of things. For that is the precursor of all the evil things women do in polyamory out of anger, and in the process allow men to god over them.
Two gods cannot reside in one heart or there would be chaos.
The schemes of man are the minuscule part of the wider path of our destinations. We are prepared for her, long before we come to know her. And we will live better lives as a result of her…the other woman he chose to cheat with…simply because in our society, in this world, he can cheat when and as he wants…Nothing more. Nothing less.
Life is one dream whilst we are wide awake. It’s a dream we are committed to forgetting and in our efforts to forget, we forget we have forgotten. The cowry shells speak not of things that are yet to come, for that is a travesty of our intelligence to believe so, we homo sapiens. The cowry shells unwind the tapes of our consciousness, awakening us to the things we never knew, we knew.
This is the way it is!
