Every
time I see a white Nissan Altima, my palms go sweaty, and my knees get
weak. It's an involuntary reaction born of so many nights being driven
around Asokoro pinned to the floor of Tunji's white Nissan Altima,
barely able to breathe, the stench of weed stinging my eyes while I
choked on the joystick of whomever it pleased Mustapha to force me to
pleasure that day.
I can't have music playing while driving
around in a car either. Or just sitting around at home. I can't have
music playing period. Especially not Maroon5. If I get into your car,
please drive in bleeping silence or you will make it hard for me to
breathe.
Right
now there are thousands of people running wild with their “opinions”,
talking authoritatively about what Mustapha, Abdul, Tunji, and their
band of friends and brothers did to me, as if they were there. As if
they hovered around us unseen like evil spirits, listening to everything
that was said, seeing everything that happened, as if they know.
In
the beginning, Mustapha and I would go out for lunch, and I'd put gas
in his car, and we'd buy our own shawarmas, and eat out of each others. I
had a massive crush on him, and he told me he loved me, and called me
“his woman” which made me feel special. I was getting paid 20K a month,
which is nothing now, but it was my first real salary back then, and it
was nice to have more money of my own to spend, and spend on him I did.
I'm
no stranger to money. I've had a lot of it, and I've had very little,
and I've never been the type of person to be impressed by anyone's
wealth, so it wasn't cars, hotels, or fancy poo I cared about, I was
cool. I attended the best boarding school in the country, and Mustapha
didn't impress me, and I never asked him for anything or took anything
from him besides the comic books and novels we traded with each other.
What
I needed was a friend, and when I plunked down at my desk that first
day of work at Alteq, and bonded immediately over a shared love of books
and superhero comics, I thought I'd made one in the guy sitting next to
me.
Every day, I came to work, and he was right there. And at
the end of each work day, it had become normal to everyone for him to
drop me off at home, so when 6pm came, and he grabbed hold of my arm and
said “Let's go.” I had no idea how to justify refusing and making a
scene.
@bimbo_cash:
@gbemy01 @MizCazorla
@sugabelly let me chip in, I feel for her. At 17, she was taken
advantaged of - but why did she visit again and again?
Even
after he was fired in April of 2007, at the end of each work day, he
would show up outside our office on Amazon street to whisk me away. I
would step outside the gate, and he would be there in his red Mercedes,
waiting, demanding I get in.
@TheKingJhey:
This is the part that confuses me too. She KEPT going back
Even
after he was fired in April of 2007, at the end of each work day, he
would show up outside our office on Amazon street to whisk me away. I
would step outside the gate, and he would be there in his red Mercedes,
waiting, demanding I get in.
@Newton_Samson:
Gang rape happens once! When you walk there with your own legs its no longer gang rape. It's consensual
I
was terrified that my refusal would mean the exposure of the pictures
he had taken of me early in our relationship, photos I told him not to
take, but he did anyway, photos in which I was Unclad and vulnerable.
I
wanted to quit my job, but what reason could I possibly give my family
for quitting a job I obviously loved, especially when I needed the
internship to get into the honours program at the university I was to
attend that year?
I had so much to be fearful of. The thought of
the videos Abdul recorded of Mustapha and Tunji raping me seeing the
light of day filled me with sheer terror. The alternative was keeping it
all secret, and so I did.
Masking your emotions is not hard to
do, just exhausting, and so for eleven hours a day, from 7am to 6pm,
putting on my clothes, going to work, and sitting at my desk next to
Mustapha every day was easier than you think.
You'd have to be silly not to notice what kind of country Nigeria is, and I have never been silly.
At
17, I knew already that the Nigerian police is most definitely NOT your
friend, and that people who have police and army escorts in their homes
are generally the sort that can make you disappear (in many little
pieces preferably), and pay off the police to look the other way, or
failing all else, buy judges to make sure any court cases brought
against them never see the light of day.
@sugabelly:
Next
time I'll report to the police attaché with the AK47 that was standing
guard while we were being stripped & thrown Unclad into the pool
I
had disclosed already to my priest at confession, and to a doctor in
Maitama General Hospital where I got tested for HIV and other STDS, the
horrific things that were happening to me, and nothing had come of it.
At the time, I didn't know whether a rape crisis centre like the Mirabel
Rape Centre even existed in Nigeria, or that there were any resources
to help someone in my situation, or even what to do after I had been
raped to help me get justice.
I was scared, and I felt very
alone. Their parents were very powerful people, and I didn't have any
faith in the police, especially faced with attackers that seemed to have
both the police and the army in their pockets.
It
was even more difficult to come to terms with the enormous betrayal of
the man who told me he loved me, whom I loved as well, doing unspeakable
things to me, and forcing me to do them with others. Even after I
escaped from him by moving to the United States for college, I remained
torn, and the part of me that loved him could not reconcile with the
horror that he had put me through, and we stayed in contact because the
mental hold he had over me was still so strong. It took me an additional
three years to fully break free of him, and though I don't live in
daily terror of Mustapha Audu as I once did, anything that bears even so
much as the memory of him is enough to break me down.
In
December of 2008, I ran into Bashir in a mall in Maryland, and suffered
a complete panic attack. I broke away from the people I had come
shopping with, and ran and ran to the other end of the mall.
In
2012 and 2013, while out with Nyimbi, I ran into Ema and Tunji at
Vanilla in Maitama. Tunji was sitting in low seats opposite the bar in
the company of my classmate, Kachi whom I'd attended Loyola with.
They
didn't recognize me, but it was all I could do not to break a bottle of
whiskey on Ema's revoltingly globular head, and the night ended with
Nyimbi dragging me out of Vanilla in tears of anger and frustration at
my lost opportunity to kill them both.
Looking back, I can see
how so much fear and shame prevented me from exposing what these animals
were doing to me, and I question why I let them rob me of so many years
of my life.
Still, the child I was at 17 was very different from
the adult I am today at 26, and my 26 year old self would have damned
the consequences, told, and raised hell.
As terrifying as it was
to come to work every day and have to sit next to Mustapha, I'm saddened
by the realisation that in the same place that held such terror and
anxiety for me, I had people who loved me, cared about me, and would
have done their best to protect me if I could have overcome my fear and
shame and cried out for help.
My
adult self sees what my child self could not back then – that had I
told my mentor, boss, and friend, Nyimbi what was happening to me right
under his nose, he would have stopped at nothing to rescue me from my
private hell.
What
baffles me, is how so many people who know absolutely nothing about
what did happen, can speak with such confidence, the most absurd
speculations, about the facts of my life. If this all were not so
incredibly sad, it would be quite amusing to me, that there are
thousands of people who think I am (by my count so far) – an agent of
PDP, a gold digger, a woman scorned, or politically motivated because
they personally have never heard of my rape before now.
@eosemeka:
@sugabelly you are a disgrace to women. The narrative I just reads shows you are a slut and you enjoyed every bit of it.
@SupremeKing007:
@sugabelly u wait all this year's. Waited for him to finish campaigning ,Won an election then died. U came up with a rape case?
Never mind, that I have been talking about this FOR EIGHT bleeping YEARS.
@arin_mm:
Sugabelly
blogged on the rape issue with names as far back as 2008. Anyone who
used to read her blogs can attest. Posts still in he archives
Never mind that FOUR YEARS AGO I referred to this same ordeal in this article I wrote for The African Report in 2011 –
http://www.theafricareport.com/Soapbox/online-communities-give-us-power.html Or that
ALMOST EVERY SINGLE POST on this blog in 2007 was about what was happening to me, and my anguish, confusion, fear, hopelessness, and powerlessness to put a stop to it.
Or that the
SOLE REASON this entire blog even exists
is because I started it to document my year at my first real job; a job
that would bring me into sustained contact with the man who,
accompanied by his friends and siblings, abused, raped, and tormented me
on an almost daily basis for the better part of six months.
@sugabelly:
When I was 17, my first full time job was Executive Assistant to the CEO, CFO, CTO, and VP of an important tech company in Abuja
It’s
a travesty that it wasn’t until a private conversation between myself
and my close friend was posted on Twitter, that people began to take
what I had been saying forever seriously.
Mustapha was a monster like you cannot even begin to imagine.
His
brother Bashir, was the same age as me, and Mustapha decided, that one
way or the other, it was his duty as big brother to rid Bashir of his
virginity. At what was supposed to be a casual get together for suya and
drinks at Tunji’s house, he dragged Bashir and me into the bedroom, and
pushed us inside, saying to Bashir “Bleep her!” before locking the
door, and leaving me alone in the darkness with his brother.
All
my pleas to Mustapha were in vain, and the only thing we heard from
Mustapha from the other side of the door was “Don’t let me come back and
find out you’re still a virgin.”
On a different date, his
cousin, Jibril raped me in that same room. I screamed, and screamed, and
fought, and struggled, eventually sticking my fingers into his nose,
and biting his hands. In retaliation, he bit me hard on the nose, and
later that night, I explained away the swelling on my nose I came home
with as an unfortunate meeting with the edge of a swimming pool.
All
the while I was screaming, Tunji and Mohammed were discussing business,
and when my screams interrupted their conversation, Tunji came by to
look at me, Unclad and pinned beneath Jibril, only to laugh and shut the
door firmly behind him.
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