HER KITO STORY (EDITION 2)

During the second week of lockdown in Lagos, I was added to a lesbian WhatsApp group by a friend. For awhile, there were discussions about healthcare and business going on in there, which I appreciated. During this period, I introduced a business idea to the conversation, and a few people indicated interest. Among these people was someone who called herself Blessing.

However, when porn was introduced and became a prominent topic conversed about in there, I left the group.

After I exited, Blessing sought me out in a private chat, wanting to know why I left the group. I told her that I wasn’t comfortable with the sex convo and she agreed, saying she wasn’t into that either. She said she wanted to talk to me some more about my business idea, and soon, we were chatting and exchanging information about the business.

The more we chatted, the more it seemed she wanted to steer our conversation toward more personal terrain. I very hesitantly obliged her; I wasn’t interested in a hookup, but at the same time, I felt like for us to potentially do business together, it was only right for us to be better acquainted with each other. So, I had to find the balance in my responses between getting too personal and letting her know just enough to establish trust.

She said she stays in Lekki, and I stay in Ikorodu. She suggested a meet, and I considered it. A face-to-face meet would be fine. Then she called, and told me that she would like to come see me at my place the next day. It not only seemed unfeasible for such a social call to happen during the quarantine period, but a visit to my house was a line into the personal that I wasn’t ready for a mere potential business acquaintance to cross. So, I declined.

But I told her that I’d be running an errand around a very popular bus stop not very far from my place. If she could make it to the bus stop at an agreed time, then we’d be able to see and talk. She said she would need time for us to see and get to know each other; I told her that wouldn’t be possible, that I would only have about ten minutes to spare for a meet with her.

On that Thursday morning, I was at the junction at the agreed time, intending to see Blessing briefly before heading on with my errand. After a few minutes of waiting, she called, wanting to know what I was wearing. I told her.

Some minutes later, a tall, heavily-set man emerged before me. He was clad in civilian clothes underneath the fatigues of an army jacket. He asked me what my name was. I was so startled by his sudden presence, that I found myself telling him my name in spite of myself.

He instantly turned belligerent as he began telling me that I was in trouble. That he knows about blessing and what I’ve been doing with her. That Blessing is a colonel’s daughter, and that her father knows she’s a lesbian and is cracking down on her lovers. That even as we were speaking, the colonel was on his way with other men from the barracks to apprehend me.

As he talked, fear exploded inside me. I wasn’t thinking straight any longer as panic began to shut down my mind. The army was coming for me? I didn’t want that. I desperately didn’t want to be in the hands of the army. In fact, if I was going to be in the hands of any uniform, I’d prefer it to be the police.

So I started protesting, telling the man, whose name I didn’t know, that he should take me to the police station then. That I would prefer to be taken into police custody instead of wait here for the army to come take me.

I was too panic-stricken to realize that I hadn’t committed any crime. I’d forgotten how not once had I even engaged this Blessing in any incriminating chat, how I was here to meet her for a purely business reason and not a hookup. The guilt over my identity caused the fear to grow, while extinguishing reason.

So this man (who I’m just going to call Mr. Scum) flagged down a bike, supposedly to take us to a nearest police station. We got on the bike, and on the way, I called a friend of mine. His name (for the purpose of this story) is Biodun. He was the first person I thought of as I cast mentally about for whom to call for help. I was crying as I told him I needed his help, and he said he would call me back.

Mr. Scum noticed that I was on the phone and told the bikeman to stop. He asked me who I was on the phone with and I told him. He dismissed the bike and demanded for my phone. I gave it to him, and that was when Biodun called back. He answered the call as he walked away from me, out of earshot. I didn’t know what they talked about, and when he came back to me, he said my friend said he’d call back in 30 minutes. He said that if Biodun doesn’t call back, he would call my father.

We were on this roadside that had scant pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Mr. Scum told me to relax and not draw attention to myself, otherwise it would end badly for me. He took my purse and began going through it, all the while reiterating his threats about how his boss, the colonel, would arrest me and have the army make me suffer for doing lesbian things with his daughter. His threats crowded my head, keeping me still very much afraid. I was shaking, miserable and letting him know that I’d do anything to get out of this situation. He said it would cost me nothing less than 500 thousand naira to secure my freedom; he now had my ATM cards in his hand as he asked if I had that amount in any of my bank accounts. There were two ATM cards, none of whose accounts had much money in them; the ATM card whose account had money in it was at home. I pleaded with him to be kinder with his demand, that I’d just finished youth service and had spent all of my government allowance in order to get started with life after NYSC.

I was afraid, shaking, trying not to cry, and cursing the day I decided to get involved with this Blessing.

Mr. Scum was still with my phone when another call came in. It was another friend, Jimmy, and Mr. Scum answered the phone before me, immediately responding to Jimmy with his talk about how I’d been arrested for “trafficking lesbianism” (those were his exact words, I kid you not). Jimmy must have asked to speak to me, because he handed me the phone. I began sobbing into the phone, asking Jimmy to help me. He asked me where we were. I glanced around, caught sight of the address of the nearest building and told him. Mr. Scum heard me and snatched the phone from me, disconnecting the call. He began to shout at me, berating me for telling my friend our location. Then he went back to my phone, located my father’s number and called him. Just as he did with Jimmy, he told my dad that I’d been arrested for trafficking lesbianism and that he needs to show up and bail me from the situation.

I stood there, helplessly watching as this man outed me to my father.

I didn’t hear my father’s response, but Mr. Scum hung up and told me he’d told him to take me to Ojota. We went back to the major road, where he stopped a truck and got the driver to agree to drop us at Ojota. I got in and he got in, and we were off.

During the drive, I began to calm down, and I began to think about my morning so far. I began to walk my mind back through everything that had happened, and that was when I started realizing how none of this made any sense. For instance, didn’t this man say, back at the junction where he met me, that his boss, the colonel, was on his way there to apprehend me with his men? Why then were we on the move? Why hadn’t he called the colonel to let him know that we were no longer at the junction? For that matter, why wasn’t his phone blowing up with phone calls from his comrades in connection with my arrest?

The more I thought about this, the more I realized how inconsistent everything this man had told me was. And that was when I started chuckling. Small bursts of incredulous laughter were coming from me as I contemplated how stupid I’d been. He noticed me laughing and turned an irritated look to me, wanting to know what was amusing. I asked him why he hadn’t called his boss to tell him we were now going to Ojota, and he told me to shut up.

We eventually got to Ojota and alighted at a park that didn’t have much people in it; just some touts and a woman selling food. Feeling emboldened by my realization that this man was a liar and this whole thing a setup, I asked him to call my dad and let him know where we were. He said he would. However, when I asked him to also call his boss and tell him where we were, he lost his temper and began to hit me, lashing out at my face and head with his palms. He was a big man and I couldn’t fight him back, but his slaps didn’t have the effect he hoped they’d have on me. I wasn’t cowed; instead, while blocking off his blows, I kept shouting at him to prove that he was army man and call the colonel.

Our altercation quickly drew the attention of a small crowd, and people gathered, telling the man to stop hitting me. They were clearly intimidated by the army fatigues he was wearing, but they protested the violence nonetheless. Mr. Scum, no doubt realizing that he was starting to look like the bad guy to these people, then took out his phone and began playing to them a video of two women having sex, showing it around to the small crowd and telling them that was me in the video with another woman.

The reaction from the crowd was predictable. They were all men, touts and layabouts, and they began making ribald jokes about how I deserved to be dicked in order to be cured of my lesbianism. Some of them were making lewd gestures with their crotches, suggesting that they’d like the opportunity to rape me.

The only woman amongst them, after seeing the video, looked at me and voiced the only dissenting opinion in the crowd. She said that she didn’t recognize me in the video, that I didn’t look like any of the women in the video. This angered Mr. Scum and he shouted at her to shut up.

As all this was going on, even as I was fighting back with loud protests that this man was a liar, that he should show these people my phone – if that was my sex video, then surely it should also be in my phone – I was checking out his army jacket, trying to see if I could see and memorize his identification or something. But he had nothing on him. No name tag, nothing.

Then my phone rang. It was Biodun calling again. As he took the call, the crowd dispersed. Moments later, he hung up in anger, telling me that my friend had offered to pay 100 thousand naira. That it would seem as though my friend doesn’t understand the seriousness of my situation. I ignored him. Then he called my dad, letting him know where we were, and he said he’d be there soon.

Eventually, my dad arrived. The relief I felt upon seeing him was quickly turned to irritation; I tried to talk to him, but he waved me curtly aside, instead walking with Mr. Scum some distance away from me. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I hoped my dad would at least call me over to present my side of the story.

He never did.

In fact, till now, I have no idea what they talked about, what Mr. Scum told him, if my dad paid him off, how much Mr. Scum might have gotten from him. Nothing! I knew nothing.

All I know is that both men finished talking or whatever, and then Mr. Scum walked away, while my father returned to me, waving my phone at me and telling me he was seizing it. The phone I bought with my own money! I didn’t know whether to be mad about that, or about the fact that he let my assailant go without calling me to hear what I had to say. In fact, he didn’t speak to me throughout the drive home.

He dropped me at home and then left. It was my mother, who’d been clued in on the situation earlier by him, who sat me down and listened to all I had to say. And she was outraged. Later in the evening, when my father came home, she couldn’t wait to let him have it. To point out to him how his determination to not listen to me had set him up to be taken advantage of by a crook.

“If you had called your daughter over to say her piece, you would have realized that this man, whoever he is, isn’t an army person, that his claims about our daughter trafficking lesbianism is a lie, that he is a scammer who attacked her – and then you might have had him arrested on the spot!” my mother seethed. “Just look at how you rewarded a criminal because you refused to talk to your own daughter!”

I wanted to know how much was given to this man, but no one would tell me.

But I did get my phone back – to discover that during the time Mr. Scum had been with it, he’d managed to do a device reset, wiping the phone clean. Clearly, he was attempting to erase any traces of his setup on my phone, including his number and our WhatsApp chats. The first thing I did was to call my friend, the one who added me to the WhatsApp group where I met Blessing, and she was shocked by my story, even more shocked because, according to her, the group admin herself had been talking to “Blessing” and was going to meet her that same day by 3 PM. But she was stood up.

Except she wasn’t stood up, not intentionally at least. Obviously, this gang had intended to be done with me in the morning before moving on to the other girl in the afternoon. A busy payday that didn’t work out how they’d intended because my case didn’t go smoothly.

I have come to learn that fear is our greatest enemy in our community. Fear is crippling. Fear takes away our ability to think and realize that we have rights even in the face of adversity. I never knew something like this, kito targeted at lesbians, was possible. But now I know, I will no longer let fear take charge.

Written by Sandra