Vicki Chalmers was on the fence when it came to female genital circumcision. On the one hand it was a miserable thing to do to girls, a barbaric practice designed to keep women as chattel, depriving them of their womanhood, their female identity, their pleasure, and their integrity. On the other it was a centuries old tradition practiced throughout much of the Islamic world, and therefore worthy of consideration as a legitimate cultural expression.
Of course the thought of it for herself or her daughters was unthinkable, but that was the challenge of diversity. One had to be open to all expressions of culture even though they may be inappropriate or even distasteful here in America.
The burqa, chador, and veil aroused similar doubts in Vicki's mind. On the one hand the practice reeked of male patriarchy, sexual obsession, and virulent misogyny; but on the other many women in the Middle East and Turkey had voluntarily opted to cover themselves for reasons of modesty, protection, and fidelity to Islam.
Where did she stand? What were principles of they could not be put into practice and observed; but what would be the point of putting on a burqa or wearing a veil if her heart and soul were not into it? Perhaps a trip to a Muslim country where both female circumcision and wearing the veil were practiced.
She decided on Ibadan, in the Muslim north of Nigeria. The trip would give her two important cultural perspectives - first and foremost a look into fundamentalist Islam and the role of women within it; and second a view of black, sub-Saharan Africa, the historical and cultural home of the black American.
For most of her professional life as a white professor at a Historically Black College, she had been able to sit on the edge of the two worlds, trending black when it came to empathy and understanding her students' background, and returning white after 5pm and on weekends in her Maryland suburban home. She saw no irony or privilege in her double life, for she was faithful both to the traditions of an upper middle class Ivy League graduate and sincere love of the black community.
At the same time she felt that this love and this empathy were only granted to her from a distance. She could never really know what the reality of the inner city was like. She had never lived in the projects, sold her body on MLK Avenue, smoked dope and drank malt liquor on the stoop, or had grandparents still living in North Carolina tar paper shacks.
Going to Africa would be jumping a step, over the ghetto to the mother lode, but she felt that this would both deepen her understanding of the black experience and foray into a cultural world only imagined. And imagined she had often done, picturing a romantic semi-desert land of mosques and minarets, the call to prayer by muezzins, a land of piety and grace yet still tribal and essential. Islam there would not be the harsh, male-centric, lock-and-key Saudi variety, but a much more temperate, spiritual, and accommodating one.
A colleague of hers warned her against Nigeria. Most World Bank project officers had No Nigeria clauses in their contracts. The country was exactly as advertised - a land of endemic corruption, scams, cons, fleeces, thievery, and abuse. Yes, the north was more....well, civilized in a comparative way, in comparison at least to the chaotic incivility of Lagos and the south, but don't go expecting any Muslim Eden.
Vicki's imaginings might at one time have been true, and that the Islamic north of Nigeria might have at one time been a patient, respectful, even spiritual society; but it had become radically Islamicist under the unofficial regime of Boko Haram, a sect as determined as ISIS to establish an Islamic caliphate and as bloody in its acts as ISIS ever was. Boko Haram combined the Taliban's medieval treatment of women, Wahabi Sharia justice, ISIS' fanatical murderous pogroms, and al-Shabab's political militancy.
Whether she knew it or not, her stay in the north would not only give her a perspective on female circumcision, the black African experience, and the currency of Islam but would expose her to what Islam was really like - a Koranic nightmare of brutality, intolerance, and inhumanity.
She would not be able to walk the streets without a full burqa covering her from head to toe, socks covering her ankles, and gloves covering her hands. If she ever showed her face in public, she would be abducted by Boko Haram's morality police, incarcerated, and because she was a white woman, raped and sodomized a hundred times over.
It couldn't be this bad, Vicki thought, dismissing the warnings of her colleagues. Islam had been unfairly stereotyped and vilified; and she still clung to the belief that it was a peaceful religion like all others, there to provide support and spiritual solace, if not enlightenment. And Africans, men and women of the forest, veldt, and Sahel, were primary beings - sentient, aware, attuned to nature and the environment like no other race - and would share that experience with her.
One should not jump to criticize her for such black idolatry, cultural and historical ignorance, and progressive beliefs. She had, after all, taught at an all-black college for decades and had given her life to the black man and to the belief that the dysfunction of the inner city was simply an anomaly, and that he was passing through a period of adjustment on his way to the top of the human pyramid. As an academic, she was insulated and hermetically sealed from anything but liberal thought, and felt that criticisms of Africa were racist in origin, and the continent would soon join the commonwealth of rich, progressive nations.
Whatever the variables and antecedents which formed her beliefs, she went innocent, fragile, and unarmed into one of the worst places in the world.
Stunned, suffocated, accosted, and threatened from the minute she walked into the airport terminal in Lagos, Vicki felt lost and afraid. No one had told her it would be this bad, shaken down at immigration, health, customs, and baggage claim; robbed, intimidated, and dismissed. As she stood outside the terminal, bags broken open, dress torn, and mosquito bitten, thanks only to the kindness of strangers - in this case a consul of the British Embassy - did she make it to her hotel, and there, after further shakedowns and threats spent the worst night of her life in an airless, foul-smelling, rat-infested room.
'God help me', she said, but vowed to continue her journey. Somehow she negotiated the touts, beggars, thieves, and hustlers at the airport, managed to catch her flight and a few hours later landed in the North.
If she was expecting the Arabian Nights, she saw only visions from a Dantean hell - balaclava, keffiyeh dressed men in military fatigues, brandishing automatic weapons, civilian guards pulling 'improperly' dressed women from the immigration lines and dragging them into dark quarters, burqa-clad women milling about, children in tow, and the loud, tinny, intrusive cries of Muslim prayer from loudspeakers on every wall.
Her chador was insufficient for the north, for its covering was incomplete. She was given to leeway as a Christian woman. However, the very presence of an infidel was grounds for severe punishment. A complete covering dress would at least hide the fact that she was a white Christian woman.
The representative from the local NGO who was to meet her and introduce her to the staff of the city's reproductive health clinic never showed up, more than likely intimidated by his overtures to this foreign woman who could be there only to spread rumor, sedition, and hate.
The call to prayer came suddenly, and immediately everyone on the streets fell to their knees in abject obedience, men and women separated but equally observant. The city was quiet except for the intonation of the imam. It was far from an interesting cultural diversion. It was a frightening, intimidating, horrific display of emotional brutality.
Terrified, horrified, and fearful of her life, she somehow managed to escape, to leave the north, to suffer through a day of transit in Lagos, and arrive safely home in Washington. The Iranian demonstrations were all over the news as the theocratic regime of the ayatollah and the mullahs was coming to an end.
For the first time in her political life, she was unhesitatingly and unabashedly for the downfall of the government, revolutionary blood in the streets, and American marines leading the rout. Radical Islam was an inhuman, satanic, hateful, and impossibly brutal philosophy, and the fact that Iranian women had to suffer under its influence for more than forty years was unconscionable
And when she heard that the dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro had been captured and taken to the US she was delighted. Gone were any liberal sentiment that remained in her - the bloody, secular, socialist, authoritarian regime brutalized Venezuelan citizens in a manner no less punitive and harsh than the Iranian mullahs or Nigeria's Boko Haram. Donald Trump was not the scourge of the earth as she had formerly thought, and the United States was not the hateful, misanthropic, corrupt, inhospitable place she had believed it to be.
Where had she been? On what rub-a-dub-dub boat had she been sailing? In what childlike fantasy of puffy clouds and sun-drenched gardens had she wandered? All it took was that one benighted, awful week in Africa to bring her to her senses. Nevermore, and with that she changed her way of walking, was no longer demented and hysterical over faux issues, and thanked God for rescuing her from Hell.
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