₦airaland Forum

A Letter to my Unborn
Daughter
Sweetheart,
This letter is a betrayal of my
previous convictions, and an
apology for actually allowing a
society of chauvinists to train my
mind into agreeing that the
womenfolk are indeed inferior,
merely created from our ribs to
be chained to marital slavery. This
diseased mindset was the reason I
addressed a letter to your brother
about two years ago without even
a reference to you, or even
expressing a concern over your
wellbeing in the pre-mortality
world. I felt sorry for you
afterwards, Sweetheart. Recent
experiences have shown me the
complexes of this ancient crime
against ‘womanity’—a crime
perpetrated by a species of
insecure men for whom the
freedom of the woman is seen as
the collapse of decency. The
woman, in their inverted wisdom,
is a metaphor of gullibility—a
slowpoke who cannot think or
survive in the absence of the
almighty man; an slowpoke whose
knowledge of right and wrong
must be stirred up by the ever
“holy” male; a pet that must, as
needs be, be treated as an
accessory.
My heart is heavy, Sweetheart, as I
brush away my shame to write
this. I had unfairly antagonised
feminists whose misery I now
understand. I had dismissed their
Gender Equality campaigns as
attention-seeking wolf-cries done
either for publicity or to enjoy a
piece of the Whiteman’s dollars.
The misery and frustration of
woman can be understood when
we study the history of their
subjugations, the cultural and
religious conspiracies perfected to
make the position of the woman
as subordinate a design of
God. Give religion to an idiot, and
you have created a monster. The
sheer inability to check the border
between devotion to God and
obsession with insanity is the root
of our present societal chaos. The
borderline between adherence to
religion and fanaticism is thin,
people don’t seem to know it
when they cross it. But a fanatic is
an intellectual fraud who
highlights aspects of religion that
celebrates the man, while he finds
bliss in disregarding portions that
emphasise the rights of the
woman.
This letter is actually written from
a will to give you the hint of latest
happenings here. Ahmed Yarima,
that man who ought to be in jail
for establishing a political space
that serves as greenhouse for this
new breed of extremists, has
again attempted to play on our
intelligence and anger when he
rallied his fellows together to
agree that an underage girl is a
constitutional adult simply
because she’s married. They tried
to cite the Prophet as role model,
defending that present context
shouldn’t invalidate the practice.
Do you know what that means,
Sweetheart? The challenges of
21st Century are issues that
require painstaking application of
wisdom, and not these outright
insensitivities of the literalists. My
provocation is an expression of
many disgusts over this
perpetration of an old conspiracy
by a cult that still sees an
empowered or independent
woman as a puncture to their
inflated egos! This deliberate
destruction of the woman remains
why every poverty-stricken idiot
quotes Allah and the Prophet to
marry more than one woman,
even when their income is not
enough to feed a camel. Has any
lawmaker ever moved a motion to
stop low-income earners from this
going against Allah, which is what
they do by going into polygamy
with empty pockets? I can’t let
these conspiracies and hypocrisies
be dressed in the garments of
religion. I can’t watch a little girl
not only denied privileges but
constitutionally dehumanised.
And when we are trying to
highlight where commonsense
ought to be applied in engaging
the socio-politics of religion in
modern Nigeria, some self-
appointed litigators of God
declared us as “liberals” or even
“apostates”? One even warned that
my geography and name are
proofs of my infidelity. They
argued that you must bear Arabic
names and even be from the core
north, perhaps Dan Fodio’s
lineage, to pass for their own
Muslim. These litigators were
possibly going from house to
house, market to market, as
destitute “Almajirai” conveniently
abandoned by their parents to
begging in the name of Qur’anic
education when some of us were
in decent classrooms studying the
ideal Islamic literatures under
scholars of piety and repute.
These litigators can’t tell cultural
Arabism apart from Islam, yet
where they counter that
commonsense must never be
applied in interpreting Islam, they
refuse to ride on camels for
pilgrimage to the holy land. Like
the Prophet did. You see,
Sweetheart? Fanaticism is a
disability in thinking. There is
nothing sacred about Arabic
language or names or culture
outside the context of religion, but
they don’t know this. And Islamic
texts are preserved in their
original Arabic forms to avoid
distortions. I approve that,
Sweetheart. You may learn Arabic
to perfect your faith, so that you
won’t end up like the clowns who
initiate an aggression when they
see, say, a Christian cuddling a
Bible written in Arabic. You see,
these litigators are so pious they
can mistake porn magazines
written in Arabic for Islamic
literatures!
Our people’s cultural and religious
ignorance is that complicated. To
understand them, you must study
the history of their evolution
either from Darwin’s contested
apes perspective or from the
Adam of the Qur’an and the Bible
on to the invasions and missions
of Arabs and Europeans who
exploited our primitivity and
introduced dazzling concepts of
monotheism in which the
inferiority complex-stricken
Blackman becomes an example of
spiritual confusion. Sweetheart,
this holier-than-thou gra-gra over
imported ideologies is one reason
I wish we had a leader like old
Turkey’s Mustafa Ataturk—to
restore our lost self-esteem. Our
esteem has been grounded in the
mud by the slaveries and racisms
we’ve been subjected to and which
we still come across overseas
today, which seem not to upset us
enough to return home and
demand for an ideal Black Africa
of our father’s dreams. The
frightful danger with pseudo-
religious politicians here is their
acute understanding of our
gullibility, their understanding of
our submission to their frauds
when couched in the name of
God. They sponsor sectarian crises
in the name of God, they waste
our resources on sponsorship of
pilgrims to holy lands just to
render our budgets unanalysable.
Could you believe that they
invested billions of taxpayers’
money in feeding destitute
subjects this Ramadan, when that
money could have built an
industry to engage the hopeless
people? Theirs are not the ways of
Allah.
But don’t be afraid of showing up
whenever Mum and I are ready to
have you. Come, just come and be
our delight. I promise to train you
into that woman the society
cannot but idolise, that woman of
whom the chauvinists shiver… I
hate the fact that Muslim women
are under-represented in the
Labour Market. A society whose
women are powerless has done a
disservice to Islam because it’s
the same women, and not men,
that shape the earliest education
of every child. A woman deserves
her freedom to rightly decide who
her man is, and also be as
empowered as her male
counterpart. Don’t be afraid of any
man, just be sure you mark the
identity of whoever harasses you
on your way to Junior Secondary
School. I’ll definitely take care of
his funeral. May God save us from
us!
Dad.
By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)
Blueprint Newspapers (26/012013)

Should i call this obsession or a crave that paves a way for a drive i find soo uncoventional,soo subduing;that flickers my heart in blisters of filament.Oh i didn't say,that my head rustles at the thought of you;my heart pounds in clusters of musicology when enmased in my creative imagination trying to discern the fore-bearing of this aesthetics of life you splash pass my ears...oh no! your beauty...how do i tell it? should i emerge from your glistening conspicuous chocolatic Nigerian skin or should i tell of how stretchly perfect your body make up stand unmoving...no, no, no...it will be an aberration from the ethics of your beauty if i treat its descriptive analysis with levity as if it is another trivial issue;however,i shall make room for another day to write a dossier on the exquisiteness and unconvetional feature of your beauty.But for now,i just can't keep my feeling to myself;you all must let her know of how i feel about her...you all must find Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and tell her,that her work,her talk,her disperity in idelogical essence has influenced me a great deal...ilovechimamandangoziadichie.com

ibkaye: some promising work here, and your grasp on english is impressive

Thanks dear.

princesa: My dear, its nice oh

but English too much!

ahn ahn, you want kill person

I was able to construct these sentences readiing the works of Larry sun and other writers on nairaland...sha wil take note.

part 2 updated...

Mynd_44: Fixed

Tnk u sir.

Mynd_44: Please provide a link to your profile. The one you tried to update with

This is the link www.nairaland.com/dospix

Moderator help!!! I tried updating my short story some days back,only to be banned. My problem now is that my story is still hidden and i seem not to find it among my created topics.

Mynd_44: Next time, use the complaint thread. But this is an alternate ID right? What's your original moniker?

NO...i don't have any moniker. This is my original id.

Please moderator why am i unable to see my post? In the course of updating my story i was faced with a ban and my story has been hidden. Please sir i really need you to resolve this issue am continuously faced with.

Part 2 updated...love to know your view on this one...