Some might call it a story of impertinence. The story of rebellion. A legislative equivalent of a gang rape. A penile tale. A servile tale. No one can dispute that it is the story of beauty. A woman, fair, imperious, intelligent, daring, against a powerful man.
It is understandable that many thought she was suspended because of her sexual harassment charge. That is the power of sex, and beauty. Beauty is a dazzle, an obfuscation. The imagination of the public was entranced into a one-sided verdict, charmed by beauty into a foreordained fable. Steamrolled, henpecked. Beauty will save the world. Dostoyevsky might mean it in other lights. Not in the context of Natasha. Maybe Austrian Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, garlands the right sentiment. Says he: “Beauty is the beginning of terror.” In another place he writes, “an angel is terrible.”
Senator Godswill Akpabio is a lover of humour who says he would be a comedian, if he comes to this world again. It’s no time for humour.
First, the people say the Senate “gang-raped” the woman by not giving her fair hearing. Fair hearing? She sat on the wrong seat, against the rule. She wanted a better chair so she could be seen and preen, her vanity toppling the law? She wanted to stand up in the majesty of her resplendence, sash over her dainty locks and head, her eyes bold and her skin aglow. Camera as witness.
Her accusation was about a public fantasy about a man and a beauty, Soyinka’s Lion and the Jewel, a beauty and a beast. That sort of fantasy can invoke rage. The rage about justice, a powerful man oppressing a fragile creature, a man exploiting patriarchy in a legislature full of red-blooded souls. Also, about envy, about why a man should amass such powers, and not them, why a woman should have such beauty, and not them. It is about opportunity. Time to nail Akpabio, the man who said things they did not like. Like “we are eating.”
But the issue is the issue. Did Natasha have proof of her case? Was it because she had been shunted out of the limelight? So, she decided to behead the man at the top? She was given an opportunity to appear before the panel, but she scorned them. She said she has concrete evidence, but no one has seen it. Shall we crucify Akpabio because he is a man, because he is her “boss,” because he can tease and make sexual advances? All men can make sexual advances. It does not mean when a man does it, it is true.
Beauty is a magnet. It is a snare both for the woman and the man. This is not the first time beauty will subdue headlines. When it erupts, we forget everything. We forget bad governance, tribe and faith. We forget education policy, the slum of Mushin, the billions stolen yesterday, the foibles of tyranny.
In the military era, a certain beauty known as Jennifer Madueke rocked the nation, a svelte, fair, benumbing vision, captured the imagination. It was a different kind of story. It was during the IBB years. Names plopped down into the public ears. From army generals to inspector general of police Oyakhilome to, can you imagine, Beko Ransome-Kuti. Civil rights took back seats to the blights of the flesh. A journalist, now famous, pointed her neck as the centre of her power. Neck like a cake, ramrod like a snake. She was the day’s Delilah. A beauty knocking down the mighty. It was a story of drugs and lust, penis and penance.
Nor is it new. Even the only man God called his friend in the Bible was in thrall of a beauty naked in the wash, Bathsheba, who birthed a child that birthed many who birthed the holy Jesus. How could we have the Anglican Church today without a beauty. Anne Boleyn captured Henry the Eighth, who admired “her pretty duckies,” who must marry her first and upturn divorce history, and cut off the Catholic Church and form the Anglican. If beauty is the beginning of terror, as Rilke asserts, the king beheaded Boleyn, because of another beauty. Recently IMF chief failed to be French president because of a bubble of perversion with a West Arican immigrant and hotel maid, a tale retold with gusto and bravura in Chimamanda Adiche’s new novel, Dream Count.
In ancient times, we learned of Cleopatra, who entrapped Antony and slaughtered her brother. Theodora was so beautiful that emperor Justinian of Rome changed the law to marry her , though a whore, a whore who fired male senses more than any seraph. If beauty formed a church and broke another, it touched off the greatest war in the ancient world. It was because Jason married Helen of Troy. Shaka the Zulu fell because of Noliwe, and Thomas Mofolo retells this tale but not as succinctly as Poet Senghor who wrote “the weakness of the heart is holly…” and he killed the beauty in order to “escape doubt.”
But it is doubt that Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan leaves in the trail of her petition. For two reasons, though. One, she accused the man in his house, and the husband did not hear, and the space between them and the man? We need geographic illumination. It is interesting that the man did not say he heard to buttress his wife. Two, Reno Omokri she accused has proven her wrong in public. Her past has tainted her credibility until she has “concrete evidence.” Many may be enthralled with the witchcraft of her beauty, to paraphrase Shakespeare, but her claim must be proved. As Virginia Woolf writes, “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”