Every woman remembers that increase of pressure on their hand when they were children.
How our mothers would stop to greet some boring, old man and suddenly their grip on our fingers would tighten in fear, in anger and warning.
As girl children, there were always laps in which we couldn’t linger, sweets we could not accept and men whose eyes never seemed to leave us. Often we’d call these men ‘uncle’ though they weren’t. We’d be forced to say hello, accept their kisses, give them hugs and come when we were called.
Custom, for better or worse, dictated that we offer any man we were vaguely familiar with a respect and familiarity they had not earned and, in hindsight, misnaming these bloodless ‘uncles’ was a terrible trap.
Uncles, after all, are painted as benevolent beings. Trusted second fathers who aren’t as strict as our familial patriarchs and with whom a little more is allowed.
Today, in Namibia, young women who were once little girls cry that we have allowed too much.
They say ‘uncles’, men, teachers, the police and the rusted machines of a failing Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare have allowed sexual offenders and rapists to thrive while women and children cower below a tombstone of apathy, victim blaming and incompetence.
“Shut it all down!”
It’s an instruction, a hashtag and a movement.
It is a scream that emanates from the very depths of our collective being and if the statistics on sexual and gender-based violence are anything to bring a city to a standstill about, #ShutItAllDown is as much concerned with children as it is with women.
You see, ‘uncles’, men and fathers not some scapegoat monster have set their sights on minors.
They rob at night and rape a 12-year old in front of her mother and sister.
They repeatedly rape and impregnate their own daughter and blame the devil of red wine.
Another remembers three minor girls aged 5, 7 and 8 at a house where they used to work and rapes them in the place they call home.
A 33-year old rapes his 15-year-old cousin who is mentally disabled and a man at Okahandja, a blood uncle, rapes his 7-year-old niece
One more rapes his two-week old daughter to death and another saw fit to fly from their homeland to rape five teenage girls.
And, surely, they must all think “why not?” when Namibia is a rapist’s paradise.
Why not when they can sleep well below the protective blanket of low bail, lost dockets, multiple year trials, apathetic law enforcement, victim blaming and shaming, familial pressure to ‘forgive’ and very little social and economic consequences for abusers.
Perhaps as we scramble to save tourism, we should put our perpetrator friendly status in our travel brochures.
“Namibia – Magical Skies, Unspoiled Nature, Home of the Free Roaming Rapist.”
What a shame.
What a shame that we have failed Namibian women and we have also failed her children. What a shame that we have forsaken the minors raped at home, those who will no longer learn Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) thanks to narrow-minded and homophobic leaders and we have left those arrested for protesting the very thing for dead.
This, because what we must now appreciate is that while law enforcement beat, teargassed and detained #ShutItAllDown attendees, there were rapists and sexual offenders happily watching their victims and protestors get arrested. There were murderers feeling untouchable and potential perpetrators being silently emboldened by this climate of apathy and arbitrary arrest.
And so the blood continued and continues to flow.
We wake up to the news of a man who shot and killed his girlfriend at Ombili… and at the very end we learn they have two children.
Suffer the Namibian children.
Your country is bleeding and broken.
And your ‘uncles’ aren’t always what they seem.
