IT IS NOT MOLUE…IT IS AN AIRPLANE O! (By Oluwole)

Struggling, pushing, shoving were the actions one could see from the pictures and video that rent the social media today about passengers trying to board their Arik flight to Lagos.

Déjà vu was the effect it had on me. Same scenario, in fact, same airline subjected us to this undignifying and embarrassing situation on April 25, 2015 at the Katoka International Airport, Accra Ghana.

My colleagues and I booked our return ticket long before we even left Lagos for Accra a week before. It was supposed to be a 0700hrs flight from Accra to Lagos. We got to the airport and checked in before 0600hrs. And then the wait began. 0700hrs – and there was none. 0800hrs – we were still hoping. 0900hrs – hope alive. 1000hrs – were we feeling hunger? To make it more interesting, no announcement from anyone. The Arik staff on duty was about to go off duty and did the best she could, which was to bring a trolley full of snacks and drinks for us. We were too angry to eat. We did not want food but Lagos. Time indeed heals all wound. One after the other, we walked to the trolley and helped ourselves, getting slight succor. We, however, still forced ourselves to remain angry.

And the lady for afternoon duty arrived. And before our very own eyes, passengers for the afternoon flight to Lagos started arriving for check in. 1200hrs – boarding passes were being issued to afternoon flight passengers. Morning flight passengers would have none of that. And all hell broke loose. Screaming, shouting, several punches to the table top of the ‘innocent staff.’ It only abated when we were assured that two flights were on their way from Lagos – placebo.

1500hrs – grade one hunger, I had to leave the airport to spend my last five cedis on proper kenkey and fish. Did I tell you all of Africa is the same? I bought ‘pure water’ just like in Lagos – that story is for another day.

After several hours of craning our necks to see the name on every newly arriving plane, an Arik flight landed at about 2200hrs. Wasn’t my flight supposed to be for  0700hrs? After yelling serious warnings to those loading our bags into the plane to attend to morning passengers first, we proceeded to the boarding gate. Over two hundred people struggled in no particular pattern to pass through a door that could accommodate only one at a time.

I shall never forget the look on the face of one of the cabin crew of a Lufthansa flight as they passed by us to board their plane. The look of disdain followed by a shake of her head said, ‘Africans will always be barbarians.’ Because most of the Lagos bound passengers were Nigerians, Ghanaian airport staff easily got tired of enforcing decorum. They left us to our devices.

Struggling, pushing, shoving…tug of war, or better still, survival of the fittest. I joined the band wagon and I got a place on the plane. And when it was filled, yells of, ‘I will stand. I will sit on the floor’ were firmly rejected by the cabin crew. We arrived Lagos at about 2345hrs. My 0700hrs flight.

So Arik air can mess up Nigerians with impunity. They can conveniently choose to merge two flights into one knowing fully well that many would definitely lose out – of course, no refunds. What a cool way to make money! In today’s case, they deliberately overbooked a flight to unethically maximize profits, leaving faithful passengers to tear themselves apart.

Where is the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA)? Where is the Ministry of Transport? Why are Nigerians always a soft target for unethical business practices? Where is the defender of the defenseless? Why hasn’t the wind of change blown to this sector? Arik air is a Nigerian airliner. Let us treat ourselves right before expecting good treatment from others. Others are actually watching. I rest my rant…no, case.

                                                                                                                           

The Audacity of Being too much Woman: Yoruba Parties and other Indignities Surrounding being a Woman among women

Preamble:

You see, in my mother’s womb, I did not behave like a girl. My mother said I was so restless that she thought I was a boy, turning here, turning there, tumbling... She said it got to the point that whenever she was in the doctor's waiting room, she had to turn aside slightly to hide the “unbecoming” way her stomach appeared to be the only one performing acrobatics. Before the scan, she was convinced I was a boy but I was not a boy. When I started walking, I wanted to be dressed in nothing but my brother’s clothes. I had my way but I soon received a memo that I was a girl, not a boy. That has made all the difference. And because I am lovin’ it, bent on not allowing anyone to make it a cage, and that has been all the problem. It has always been tumbling around, finding that spot where I am not being taught how to be a woman.

Scenario 1:

I go on a date. I am seated opposite my date. A waitress strolls in and turns to my date: “What do you want?” You would think she would acknowledge me, but no, the message was clear. She was not going to. I really do not know what was going on in her mind but my date had to ask me what I wanted before relaying it to her.

Scenario 2:

Yoruba parties get to me. I use the word “Yoruba” here before I am accused of hasty generalisation. You are a woman, you are related to the celebrant and you are seen, for one minute, to seem to be enjoying the party. If you watch the other women’s faces, it is the grimace of a cat when it is feeling what I don’t know (who knows what goes on in the head of cats anyway?), it is the shock that is usually reserved for rampaging cows. How can you be a female relative and dare to look good, dress like you are not a house elf and not have a pinched face? You see, the average family, from the minor “shooking eye” that I have done here and there, believe that when it comes to cooking party food for the family (of which there are plenty in the average Yoruba family) it is the “wives” of the family that constitute the work-force. I heard of a woman the other wives came to pull away from the party where she sat all well dressed - (feeling uppity, as they deemed it) beside her husband to come and join the other wives. Her husband was livid...

Scenario 3:

I sat down last week, doing my own thing when a conversation about a woman claiming her property rights started around me. It did not interest me until the woman talking said, amazed and disgusted: Obinrin-birin, (in the tone of “common woman”) doing that to men.

Scenario 4

300level, I was at a bus-stop when a mad woman made for me aggressively, yelling: “ashewo” besides other obscenities. I do not know how this fits in but let it just sit there. Don't tell me she was mad, I know. If I was in the mood for mental acrobatics, I would go on and say why I think it all adds up. For me, it adds up.

 Scenario 5

I walk into a room. I see two tables. A man behind one, a woman behind one... Most often than not I approach the one with the man behind it because it is usually easier, not always, but usually.

I find that it is all about women picking on women. Women staying within a box and wondering who that brazen woman is... What makes her feel she is special? What does she take herself for, us lying here in the mud and taking it, why can she not take it?

You see, I have observed that women with the biggest sob-stories on their marriages are very vocal in telling other women to “find someone and marry quickly.” What is it sef? Is it something about misery loving company or what?

If there are men who love to cook party food and women who love to dust the chairs, why must the man be shooed and booed off the cooking like it’s an exclusive club or something? I have seen women drive men off cooking, hair dressing and other affairs even when they wanted so much to do it. At that point, cooking which I love so much loses meaning and I just step aside. FGM, it is an old woman at the other end of the blade. It is mothers teaching their daughters to be good girls: Shut up, conform, behave and swallow it. Look at Janie of Their Eyes were Watching God, see Shug of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, see Sula of Toni Morrison’s Sula. It was women hating on them. It is mothers making some men feel like all women are their footstools.

Some people will say it is not really women; that it is patriarchy pushing them but no, there is no mistaking the vibe, the venom you get from a woman who believes you aren’t staying in your place. No, I am not calling women together to come and be forming “sistahs”. And yes, I know women have each other’s backs sometimes like the legendary tap you are likely to get from any woman of any nationality, tribe or standing, the whisper in your ear: “Am I stained?” I know that.

 

What I question is why some women are content to wallow in the mud and hate any woman who is “full of herself, thinking she is better than us”... bhet why?

“Mommy, I am not a virgin anymore.”

Ayo stood by the door. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She tried to think of other things, other places, of being the one who led green house to victory. Everyone had concluded that green house was jinxed. Green house had only had red house as contender for the last position. She had been miserable at being in green house until she saw that Uduak was assigned green house for the session. Not even Uduak could really look fine in the pumpkin-leaf colour that passed for green.

And now, today, it did not matter that she had led green house to glory. That her report card was a uniform blue... This instance, she had shrunk to the size of her hymen. Her mother, the custodian of the passageway between her daughters’ legs held court in the master bedroom. When her sister came out and hurried to the room they both shared without looking at her eyes, she knew her sister had passed the most important exam.

That result was more important than the report card that was still on the table, unchecked. It was only after they lay with their legs splayed opened on their parents’ bed and passed the test that the homecoming could really happen. Before then, they were suspended halfway like vagabonds. Today, when Ayo went in, she didn’t know what came over her. She merely blurted out: “There is no need to check. I am not a virgin anymore.”

First, there was the shock, the slaps, the teeth and all. Not once did she feel the urge to say she lied. As she lay there, bruised and pained, she stood straight in her mind, proudly stripping off the straitjackets of the good daughter and there had never been greater joy in stripping than at that moment. Where she stood, she was happy knowing she would never be raped that way by her mother anymore. It had always felt the way she imagined rape would feel. At that moment, she basked in the joy of knowing that the next time she would strip, it would be of her own choosing.