An Igbo woman once reported me for hate speech for writing a post where I criticized Igbo men and women. But guess what? I stand by it 100%.
The whole drama started when Susan Coker attacked the Igbo members of her group, Rant HQ, called some of them senseless and invited them to leave the group. There was a revolt by the whole of the Igbo members, who instead left in mass and went on to create a multitude of copy cats of the group. The most popular one is Igbo Rant HQ with over a 100,000 members.
Now let's get to the juice of the matter on why I was reported. My opinion was that if Susan had directed her vitriol to just Igbo women alone, there wouldn't have been any collective outrage. It's a known fact that Nigerian men in general do not care about Nigerian women neither do they show solidarity when something happens to us.
A perfect example is the serial killing of 7 women that took place last year in Port Harcourt. Instead of condemning the murder and the murderer (a man), the majority of Nigerian men took to social media to tag the victims as prostitutes and use their pictures as cautionary tales, without knowing anything about the victims. Why? Because they were women and they were in a hotel.
"Women, stop doing runs."
"Women have no business being in a hotel."
What a nice way of telling women that they shouldn't travel, take on jobs that require them to travel or just take some me time to relax and enjoy a bit of luxury.
Another example was when the police force was harassing, beating up, and arresting women who dared to be outside their house after a certain time of the day. They also raped these women in some instances. Most Nigerian men never spoke up. One stupid actor, who goes by the name of Okon came on IG and ranted about how you cannot rape prostitutes since, according to him, prostitutes don't have dignity. Who decided that every woman who is found outside her house at night is a prostitute? Nigerian men.
These same men blame women when women are raped.
These same men blame women when women are battered by their partners.
We have not forgotten about how Yul Edochie took to Instagram to ask women to shut up during arguments as to avoid being beaten up.
That is the sad reality.
If Coker had attacked just the women among the Igbo members, there wouldn't have been any coup, and no Igbo man would have left the group to form another group. They would have remained there and they would have blamed their women for annoying the group owner. Just like Nigerian men never cared to protest against the harassment of Nigerian women by the police. The only reason why they started speaking up is because the police (and SARS) started harassing them too and accusing them of being fraudsters.
The majority of the original Rant HQ are all patriarchal royalties, and we all know that if there is something that patriarchal queens and princesses lack, they are initiative and the courage to stand up for themselves. Most of the times, they just follow their men or wait for them to bark out orders.
The Igbo women who exited the group only did so because their men had done so. They fought alongside their men, like women have always done throughout history. And how were they repaid?
With misogyny.
Imagine a post that questions whether or not a woman should get an education if it stands in her way of submitting to male authority. And this happened in a group where there are 9 admins and mods, and 7 of them are women. 7 women allowed such a disgusting post to be published in a group that they control. I dare not think of the comments. I dare not.
They can report me for hate speech all they want, but they cannot change the truth: Igbo men do not respect or care about Igbo women. The only time an Igbo man reacts to an attack against a woman, it's when that woman is his mother. One in 90 million.
My advice to these women is the same advice I'll give to any other woman out there: as long as patriarchy exists, your ethnicity and tribe can never be more important than your humanity.
Until a man clearly expresses that he is an ally of female emancipation, I'll always view him first of all as a member of the privileged group that wants to make sure that those privileges remain.
And I will not apologize for that.
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