To obtain justice, it simply is not enough to be right. One must often be powerful as well. Justice frequently flows in the direction of power and too many times when it is confronted with power- political power, fame, reputation, infamy, race, sex, physical power, name it- it will painfully bow out. So yes, a man who is married under a monogamous dispensation, who moves from woman to woman, impregnating them, taking no responsibility over the resulting offspring and boasting about it publicly, will get away with it. Not because it is not wrong, but because we have a zeitgeist- the spirit of the times- that has conspired with the power of this man, to contend with. Zeitgeist often wields a kind of influence over which we are hopelessly powerless.
It does not matter how deplorable or unjust an act is; if the spirit of the times decides that it is not wrong, it is not wrong. Slavery was Slavery. The Holocaust was the Holocaust. Colonialism was colonialism. Racial segregation was racial segregation. It did not matter how wrong these things were; the spirit of the times that prevailed during that part of humanity’s history decided that these things were not wrong and sure enough, the people who were involved largely got away with it.
For over 400 years, slavery carried on; for 80 years, colonialism and institutionalized racial segregation prevailed; and for approximately 12 years, the holocaust. These things took far longer than they should have- not because they were not wrong, but because the people at the time responded to them in ways that allowed them to continue to happen and to persist- possibly due to ignorance and fear by the affected, but obviously due to the impunity of its perpetrators, with the spirit of the times being the substrate upon which these practices thrived.
It is therefore not that a married man, actively hunting for women for sexual exploitation and abandoning them when they are pregnant, is not a wrong thing, it is that the zeitgeist considers this practice a thing to be praised and exalted- the implied and impending social challenges notwithstanding. For a society in which too many of its members (including men) have been raised in single mother households, or in polygamous households in which fathers were largely absent, neglecting and emotionally, psychologically and in many cases physically abusive, it is appalling how the connections cannot be drawn.
Applauding this kind of behavior and blaming the women involved, is essentially blaming your own mothers for giving birth to you, and raising you alone, and not your fathers who have willfully absented themselves from your lives or have made themselves present in ways that can hardly be described as present. It is essentially saying that these your mothers, who you have seen toil and break their backs to keep you afloat are at fault for, to borrow from your own words and flawed logic, opening their legs and having you conceived. They must therefore bear the responsibility to raise you and your siblings. uncomplainingly. When you applauded this kind of behavior in one man, you are vindicated every other man, including your own fathers, who abandoned their roles and are declared that they are not at fault.
Yet you who carry this flawed logic are the very same ones who, on mothers’ day and women’s day, upload to your social media profiles grainy photographs of your exhausted mothers who too often look much older than their actual ages from obvious hard toil – and offer thanks and praise for their resilience in raising you despite the absence of your fathers in your own lives. You have to take a stand, you know. Either your mothers who you celebrate on mothers’ day, women’s day and on your graduation day are loose women who lacked the self-control to keep their legs closed and therefore you will applaud men who move from woman to woman impregnating and abandoning them or, your mothers deserve better and you will call out irresponsible and deadbeat fatherhood wherever you see it. You cannot have it both ways. And if at all you have grown up in settings in which your fathers stepped up to their roles, how can you applaud an act that had it been engaged in by your own fathers, you could potentially have been robbed of your own familial health? How can the irony be so lost on you?
What we do not seem to know, is the deliberateness with which the game of power is played; and the cutthroat, ruthlessly shrewd way in which an untamed person in a position of power, will take advantage of every ounce of get-away that they can lay their hands on. In this case, this person will use the fear of the affected, the impunity of counterparts in that space of power (in this case, fellow men) and especially the sycophancy and cowardice of the spineless noisemakers and cheerleaders who stand on their side and ridicule the affected who suffer at their hands.
A worse tragedy, is the ignorance of the latter group who are so hopelessly consumed in themselves that they cannot perceive that they are part of this individual’s consummate manipulation and lies, and are being laid in their own bed for a kind of psychological intercourse, a double tragedy for these noisemakers who are women, when you think about it. These women are the equivalent of the Uncle Toms of slavery; slaves who, having been relieved from field duties to house duties, thought themselves better than the other slaves. To these women I say, the vulnerabilities that these women fell to are not any different from the ones that all women face regardless of education, position on the social stratum, morals, values, religion, what church or mosque one goes to, how many times one prays, et cetera. Degree or no degree, corporate woman in office or woman vending bananas and boiled maize on the streets- we all are targets first and foremost because of the basic fact that we possess vaginas and breasts.
In all of this, the head honcho and his band of sycophants, do not see irony in the fact that the same faithlessness that causes a leader to disregard the plight of their country; to deny justice to the oppressed; to harass and ridicule the people who speak truth to their political power, is not any different from the faithlessness that causes a married man to abandon his own wife and relentlessly chase after women he should not be chasing after, miring them in his web of deception, inundating them with unsolicited, unbridled sexual talk about their bodies and how he dreams of encounters with them, overwhelming them with his power of fame and reputation, and taking advantage of all this to exploit them sexually. The same insatiable appetite for power and wealth in the “dictator” is the very same one operating in this greed for sexual pleasure and misguided sexual “conquest”. This appetite causes both the “dictator” and his famed critic to use deceptive and underhanded means to get their appetites whetted at whatever cost to the persons involved. It is all one and the same spirit, manifesting in different ways.
As citizens, we have the responsibility to speak truth to power. Yes, as the head honcho speaks truth to the country’s leadership’s political power, he himself needs the truth being spoken to his own kind of other power: fame, reputation, talent, infamy and maleness. It is nothing but the same beast with multiple heads. How can we cut one head of the beast while we feed the same beast through its other head and expect to kill it? To applaud one while condemning the other is the practice that will keep us in the same place.
If the head honcho can self-reflect on his own impunity and callousness towards the cries that have risen up against him, then perhaps he can empathize with the “dictator” in his heavy-handed methods to silence the cries risen up against his greed and power. Perhaps he will see that he and the man he criticizes so much are not so different from each other after all, and that both of them are just two heads of the same faithlessness, unaccountable and insatiable power hungry beast; And that perhaps, the thing that he so much despises in the dictator is the very thing in him and the war all along was never against the dictator, but against himself.
