No one knows when the women stopped dating. It was gradual, incremental like the move from twilight to sundown that ends with the world going dark. At first it was just a catch phrase. A status liked forty times.
A tweet echoing endlessly into the cybersphere that seemed to give life to what Namibian women were thinking as the headlines announced that their species was rapidly becoming endangered.
Historians would trace the phrase back to Esther Veii Beukes, a young blogger who’d read about the gruesome stabbing of a pregnant woman by her husband in the wake of a murder of a female pastor by a man thought to be her boyfriend and took to Facebook to post four words.
“Stay single, stay alive.”
Some people laughed, others stayed silent but with every thumbs up, something was stirring in Namibian women’s souls that recognised the truth of the words as broken bodies lay piled high in morgues for the simple crime of daring to dump or argue or annoy.
Slowly but surely, Namibian women turned inwards.
Bars frequented by locals emptied of anything with breasts, cocktail dresses swung silently in shop windows rustled lightly by an ill wind and women banded together at martial arts classes, feminist book clubs and at grim faced protests that held Esther’s words high.
Good men who had never hurt a fly found themselves rebuffed by every kind of woman who feared that any love allowed to grow and then unexpectedly grind to a halt would end in their end while good women gave up all of hope of love to spend their days gnashing their teeth, wincing at headlines and doing their best to fuel the fancy of foreigners.
People threw opinions like grenades in guerilla wars.
The men blamed the women. The women blamed the men. They all blamed the government, gender equality, patriarchy, miniskirts and madness while still more cowered under the curse of an invisible God.
Waiting it out, sending up prayers, counting the bodies.
Art that wasn’t drenched in blood and indignation was labelled trite, disrespectful, irrelevant and irresponsible but the poets, the writers, the singers and visual artists knew that there are only so many ways you can reimagine hell.
The world turned.
Namibian men burned with shame or the shock of the blood on their hands and women gained back control the only way they knew how.
They stopped.
Stopped loving. Stopped dating. Stopped being the light and bright beings that had ever enchanted men since the first.
It wasn’t the answer but it was a way.
It was loneliness and against nature but it was peace.
They called themselves The Solitaires.
They splashed Esther’s slogan all over the city in graffiti, on posters and on big billboards on the sides of buildings and when a woman sought them out, beaten, bruised and on the brink of her demise, they acted.
They found him. They beat him. They reproduced every mark he had made on the woman’s body and tied him to a traffic light in the centre of the city.
Naked. Noiseless. And with a Queen of Spades stuck tightly to his chest.
It would take less than two hours for his image to find its way to every newsfeed on Facebook. Passersby would take his photograph, spit at his feet then upload his picture and hashtag it #womanbeater which everyone equated as one step away from #murderer.
From that day on he would be shunned.
Right of Admission reserved signs would swing steadily in his face at every bar, shop and shebeen until he was forsaken.
Until he was just as alone and just as afraid as the women who stifle their screams with their pillows at night.
