Thither… Hither
Hello everyone! We are super excited to share a write up by Adeyemi-Bisileko O.A Esq that expresses his thought on violence and the need to rise up and make peace.
The year is 2300 and it’s almost Utopia. Nations have fought wars in the distant past, worn themselves weary and stretched to the brink of ruin, and thus have learnt to love themselves back to life.
Borders yet exist and the laws too, but they exist primarily for the welfare of each nation as it connects to a global vision that almost everyone agrees on and actively works on. There seemed to be no limits to what the world could achieve as one, but this path had been defined by blood, loss, sweat and death and everyone knew that this was no honeymoon or fairy tale with a guaranteed happy ending.
As a result there was ever a need to remind each person how far humanity could fall if there were no checks in place. It was agreed that a people known as the memory keepers be selected and their duty was to erect memorials in strategic parts of the world, stories told in remembrance of the fallen heroes and to educate the younger generation.
The lessons today were in form of what earthlings of that time called a throwback and it happened to be on a Thursday, one of the few phrases which had survived from a world that was only a couple of centuries away, yet in character could as well have been the Dark Ages.
Most meticulous were the memory keepers in ensuring that nothing akin to hate or apt to incite or provoke was shown to these impressionable minds, but yet the clips shown and history as it was taught sufficed to tell the children of where we had been as a globe.
Chief amongst the subjects taught and shown were the millennium goals of the last age and the obstacles that had been faced. The adults would have needed no classes, but seeing how far we had gone, everyone needed to be reminded of our collective destination. Viola’s violence against her younger brother all in the bid to correct his naughtiness, Tobi’s disregard for his wife’s feelings which venom was passed down to the children giving them a skewered view of family , the child often bullied because he was perceived as different with nerdy glasses and an uncanny ability to understand deeper concepts that only further pushed the child into isolation and valuing his company above all else, the grandmother who saw it fit to mutilate the genitals of her female grandchild in the bid to uphold tradition and keep her sexual drive in check, of the male child being the only male amongst female siblings who never had to learn the art of domestic chores and went through life thinking such beneath him and that the entire female gender existed for his pleasure and to do his bidding. Of the male child exposed to sexual discovery by an “aunt’’ and could never keep his raging hormones in check, and of a girl abused by her teacher and closed up, never seeing the light in herself less others again, of a society that hails the male for such discoveries achieved early and slut-shames the girl into silence, of the child ripped away from family and all that’s familiar to serve as a servant to the urban family. Books would fail to tell of the horrors seen by the child, of early wakings, tottering between near-starvation and barely eating, driven by a will and dreams bigger than himself/herself and late sleeping…
The list would be endless and the screen would fade into oblivion and the children would leave with a firmer resolve to brighten their world to a never-setting sun of equality.
With heavy breathing and pounding hearts would the humans all wake as ones tugged awake by a corpulent puppeteer, having dreamt the same thing.
This is the year 2018 and the United Nations 16 days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence is on, but ripples are already endless behind the scenes of organized marches. The space/time continuum has been broken and humanity shown a glimpse into the future if they continued life without making deliberate alterations to the known order of things.
Each is halted in his/her tracks, broken by catharsis and rising with a stronger resolve to amend their ways and make the world so much brighter and hand that baton to each generation….
With this, the future that holds peace and equity only as an aftermath to brutal war and upheavals begins to be extinguished now as men(generic) refuse to be bound to a future over which they have no say or control…
And even now rises the chant throughout the globe like a paean…We want peace now!!! We want equity now!!! We end violence now!!!!
In July 2018, I was on my way to the airport to get on a flight to Brazil. The weather was fine, the birds singing happily and everyone driving on the road seemed to be sane and happy. My dad turned the radio knob trying to find a radio station airing a nice program. This is where the sensitization began.
Abena is a graduate of the University of Cape Coast and currently a graduate student at the Ghana Institute of Journalism. She is a young people’s development activist and also has a social enterprise called Benewaa, it’s a clothing line that does advocacy through customized caps, t-shirts, sweaters and cardigans.
Abena has a special interest in women and girls in rural communities. To her, rural women and girls face double the challenges their counterparts in the urban communities face. Challenges such as rape, domestic violence, harmful cultural practices like female genital mutilation, early and child marriages among others. Most parts of her childhood were spent between a rural community and a fishing community where girls had little or no aspirations and had no role models except the older women in their communities who themselves were usually domestic farmers, petty traders and fishmongers.
She usually does these training in partnership with other organizations, they join PTA meetings to educate parents on the need to prioritize the education of their daughters.
Since its conception, CHOP has had 19 outreaches in different communities with the aim of having a society where young girls move from being spectators to being relevant participants in the society .
Because of these outreaches, many girls have become more aware of the power and creativity that they are blessed with and they have been able to learn to speak up because they matter.