Written
by
Tambu Kahari.
Uncle Paul tried to rape me. I was ten years old. He got my friend Pamela to invite me to her house. I went, but not before I invited Barbara, our other friend to join us. Little did I know that that spur of the moment decision would save me from a violent rape. I got to the house first. Pamela immediately led me to the slaughter by shoving me into Uncle Paul’s bedroom and closing the door behind her.
Uncle Paul grabbed me and pushed me towards the bed. I was ten years old. I had no idea what sex was about, but I knew what violence upon my person was. So, I fought to save myself from harm. I scrambled onto the bed and out of the window. There were no burglar bars in those days. As I wriggled myself out of the ground floor bedroom, he grabbed my legs and tried to pull me back by my ankles.
He was telling me to calm down and that I should not panic. I kicked him hard with one of my legs. He was shocked because he had been holding onto that ankle but somehow I broke free of his hold and kicked. He let go of both my legs for a moment and I fell into the garden. As I ran for the gate, Pamela and her uncle gave chase. I managed to open the gate before he caught up with me. He dragged me into the ditch and threw me in there. He blocked my path of escape as I managed to get up and he held me by my elbows tightly. It hurt like crazy, but at the time I was afraid more pain would follow. I could smell the violence emanating from him.
He was literally shaking. I was frightened to the core. I twisted to the left and he shoved me onto my back in the ditch. I was not one to give up. I crawled to the right and almost made it if Pamela had not been standing there. In a haze I could hear Pamela giggling. It was all so funny to her. I wondered why she wasn’t helping me. But there was no time for thought. There was only time for survival. He grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. I screamed in pain. Pamela laughed and he groaned in satisfaction. He could tell that I was running out of steam.
He talked to me as if he was training an animal. “Easy, easy. It will be over very soon and you might even like it. Why are you fighting me? What sort of a girl are you? Stop struggling.”
He pushed me in the direction of their house. I was not going without a fight. I was exhausted. I was hot. I was afraid. I wanted to cry, but I knew that if I did, I would be lost. I was outnumbered. He was bigger than me. Stronger than me. And he had Pamela on his side. I knew that he would win. But I wasn’t going to make it easy.
I was confused. What did he want with me? Why was he doing this to me? He’d always seemed so nice. What had I done to him?
I was saved by my angel. Barbara came riding her bike. It took her a minute to see that I was in a fight for my life. She rode her bike straight into Uncle Paul. As he yelped and screamed at her, I ran for dear life. She caught up with me moments later and we tried to giggle the trauma out of my life.
My biggest question was, “what had he wanted to do with me?”
That night, Pamela’s father called me. He said I was a whore and I was to stay away from his house. I was ten years old, survived an attempted rape, only to be called a whore. It was a word I heard some of the neighborhood women repeat to me a few days later. I was ten years old. How stupid are Zimbabweans?
A few months later I got my answer to the question. Pamela came to school giggling and told us that Uncle Paul had made an eleven year old girl pregnant in the rural areas. The girl had been brought to their house the night before. Pamela went on and on about the stupidity of this young girl. She blamed her. She laughed at her sorrow and bewilderment.
That was when I realized what her father’s brother; a 36 year old had tried to do to me. In my heart, I believe he raped Pamela too and that was why she was so callous. I read in a magazine that pedophiles usually use their victims to get them more victims.
Every day a Zimbabwean girl is raped. Everyday. The culture tells us that a female must be seen and not heard. So, we don’t tell when we are violated. If we do survive and tell, we are called ugly names that further ruin our futures.
That is why when I saw Betty Makoni’s story on CNN I had to write this. It is not only orphans and village girls who suffer sexual abuse. I lived in an upper middle class neighborhood and I was still molested. Betty Makoni is such a rare breed. She is a strong woman who fights for our very lives.
According to CNN she has saved more than 35 000 of our daughters and sisters from the effects of rape. That is such a small drop in the bucket considering the amount of abuse victims walking the streets of Zimbabwe. I am one of them. I was raped at five years of age. Uncle Paul tried to rape me at ten.
When I was 12, Pamela and I were ambushed by two men while we were walking from school and they tried to drag us into the houses under construction in our neighborhood. We survived them by stripping out of the sweaters they were dragging us with. When we got away we discovered that they were Pamela’s neighbors. When I was 16 two men tried to rape me. The first attempt was by a boy who claimed to love me at my part time job and the second attempt was a man who saw me walking to school. As an adult female in Zimbabwe I went through situations that were worse than rape. I had some dark and scary moments that have scarred me for life. Sexual violence is everywhere in Zimbabwe.
It is almost a right for Zimbabwean men to rape little girls. It is a privilege they are willing to kill you for. A fourteen year old daughter of a Supreme Court judge walked into the Borrowdale police station and reported her father for sexually abusing her. The police drove her back home and told her they would not take her report. She was accusing a Supreme Court judge. They asked how she could dare to do that.
She came to school the next day and told us all about it. A couple of years later she had a baby with her father.
A prominent doctor raped his 15 year old patient. She screamed and the police were called. The case never went to trial because she was a “whore”. But when she came to class the next day and told us about it, we, her peers, believed her. I believed her so much that doctors’ visits became a scary thing for me.
A government minister was thrown out of a South African hotel by staff for having locked himself in the suite with his 16 year old daughter for days. They were suspicious of his activities with his daughter. They asked him to leave.
Years later, my friend told us at a dinner party that her father had been sleeping with her since she was eleven years old. He would take her to exotic places around the world and “do her” all week. It was on one of those occasions that he disappeared. My girlfriend was sure he was dead.
Florence became the mistress of a military Colonel at nine years of age. He had sex with her at nine. He continued to sleep with her until she was nineteen. During that time, he made her join the army. Her only duty was to sit in his office and cater to his needs. He replaced her with another little girl, but not before he passed her onto another Colonel.
Military generals forced women and girls into liaisons with them. I know. I was one of them. At the “getaways” the girlfriends of military personnel would discuss how they were “caught” and brought into the fold. Some of the stories were pretty gruesome and do make another story on its own.
We should vote for Betty. We should log onto the CNN Heroes website and vote for her. We should lift her high so that she can lift more girls. The Saladmag blog endorses Betty Makoni as a CNN hero.
I am not surprised that Betty ran into the political powers that be when she tried to fight child abuse. I ran into it when I tried to fight the sex for jobs business. There is nothing a Zimbabwean man won’t do to keep women unprotected from his sexual violence. The powers that be are guilty of raping little girls and women. They don’t want to be told that they are committing a crime. They see it as their right. They have power over our bodies and they want to keep it that way. Women like Betty say “NO” and the power that is doesn’t like it.
It is difficult to understand how Uncle Paul’s attempted rape on me could affect the government. It is hard to fathom how my talking about it and demanding justice could change the status quo. But, the fear of strong women is so overwhelming in our region that they drive us out.
Let us lift Betty at this time. We can make history and tell the world what happens to us at the same time. Log onto CNN’s Heroes pages and vote for one of our own. Betty is not the only one who sees herself in the faces of all those young girls. So do I. Everyday.
Tambu Kahari is the author of Broken Pillars, The Price of Life, In the Bedroom (co authored with Sally Spencer) and Borrowdale Wives. She is also an award winning journalist and lives in North America. She can be reached at Tapilicious@yahoo.com
