Games Women Play!

My dear mother was married to my late father at the virgin age of 15! She had visited a neighbouring village with her mom when my father sighted her and went for her without compromise. When during my last trip home late January this year I jocularly asked her if she had any regret for not ‘enjoying’ her spinsterhood before my father ‘grabbed’ her love she laughed heartily and told me eyeball to eyeball a loud ‘No’. She proudly posited that she never knew nor had any other man in her whole life except my late father bemoaning the present situation in vogue in which girls ‘taste’ many men before marriage.

A ‘Zouglou’ musical group here, “Espoir 2000” released a hit song earlier this year in which they subtly attacked the money-loving nature of women. To the ‘Zouglou’ boys what women want God wants but what God wants women do not want! “ce que femme veut Dieu veut mais ce que Dieu veut femme sont fou”. The music was an instant hit in a clime where love is on sale to the highest bidder. But months later another highly-rated pop musician here joined issues musically with ‘Espoir 2000’. Lato Crespino, popularly called “the women’s advocate” countered in a hit song where he criticised the ‘Zouglou’ boys defending women and painting them as victims of male chauvinism. He questioned why society allows men marry more than one woman but frowns at a woman marrying more than one man!

In Reality Satellite TV one of the programmes I love is called “Cheaters”. The American conjugal investigative programme advertises itself as studded with master investigators who trail cheating men or women. We have watched how some men and women were caught cheating on their wives, husbands or girlfriends or boyfriends. In one particularly interesting episode a certain woman abandoned her matrimonial home and eloped with a rival ‘husband’. When ‘Cheaters’ exposed her with her husband’s approval she decided to call it quits with the marriage damning any consequence! America is a wonder land where wonders happen.

The games women play in their ‘love’ exploits are many. Men play games too but this piece is centered more on the games Eves play on us, Adams. Where does one begin to tell tales of betrayals, back-stabbing, love-feigning and what have you? True love is hard to find in today’s promiscuous world where sexual morality has since taken flight to God-knows-where. Yet women remain a special breed, a special creature we cannot afford to ignore!

Some of my friends here, my compatriots that is, left their wives back home in Nigeria before travelling out. Sometimes one hears stories of how the wives were misbehaving and desecrating their marital vows. One particular friend after hearing tales of betrayal from his family against his wife decided to bring the lady here to live with him. Few weeks on the mother of two complained bitterly that she was missing Nigeria and friends she left behind. When my friend wanted to know why she was not happy in her new home outside home she told her husband point-blank that the kind of freedom she enjoyed in Nigeria had been cut off, freedom to associate with those she went to school with including boys!

The mobile phone phenomenon has added another dimension to the methods and tactics of smart girls to outsmart their boyfriends or husbands. With a handset a girl could book appointment with anybody without anyone knowing of her intentions. Whenever phone numbers change hands then friendship is struck and plots hatched by men on how to be good and stoop and conquer. The revolution of GSM has revolutionalised promiscuity in Africa giving it an audacious cover. With just a call put across sexual rendezvous is consumated!

Imagine this scenario: you buy a mobile phone for a girl. She pledges her love for you. But as time wears out you discover that you have unwittingly given her ‘license’ to prostitute at will without evidence. Whenever she is set to play on your intelligence she either puts it off and upon demand she would conveniently tell you the phone’s battery discharged or network was to blame. When you get her on line keeping an appointment with her other lover she would invent different ways of lying her licentiousness out by telling you she is on her way home or plead traffic congestion or even say she is in a woman friend’s house. How do you know she is lying if you are not a ‘mafian’ by reading her lips or voice or probing beneath the fairy tale?

The GSM phenomenon reminded me of the ‘hell’ a rich friend in France went through years back while courting a university undergraduate whom he sponsored in school. The girl was in Uniport whilst my friend picked the bill of her education with the two agreed to solidify their future marriage as soon as she graduated. Monthly Ese would head for Lagos and down to PH to see his future ‘heartthrob’. On arrival usually in MMA Lagos he would happily dial up her number informing her of his imminent arrival in PH Airport and she would be there waiting for him.

In the last visitation exercise Ese never announced his imminent return for obvious reasons — perhaps he had wanted to give the undergraduate a “surprise package”. At MMA he had put a call across to PH to happily announce his arrival when on the other end of the telephone a boy surprisingly picked up the call. The dialogue went thus: Ese: “Good day! who’s on the line? Please may I be on to Ada?” The boy: “Is that her uncle from Paris? oh welcome big brother! she is having her bath; she has explained to me about you being her uncle based in France” Ese: “And you, who are you? ” The boy: “Oh I’m the boyfriend; she would join you soonest, so please hold on!”

Ese’s mobile phone dropped off his trembling fingers as he was hit by the fact that his supposed would-be wife had been playing him all along; lying over his status and maintaining a serious boyfriend in school. The rest is history but the truth is that today Ese is happily married to a French girl with children! All efforts by the girl to explain herself out were rebuffed by Ese who saw in those explanations truthless damage-control after-thoughts.

In my street here the other day there was scary distress noise one early Sunday morning as neighbours were woken up by the ‘war’ in the next compound. The man living with his young wife was busy doing to the girl what Mike Tyson did to Robin Givens — pummelling sense into her. The enraged man, an international merchant had travelled out of town telling his wife whose extra-marital exploits outside matrimony has reached the man’s ears that he would be back in two weeks time. Before travelling out the man must have planted ‘spies’ around the girl without her knowing. Instead of returning in two weeks the man decided otherwise and hit home at wee hours of a Saturday, one week into his journey.

On reaching home he could not locate his wife. Wisely he decided not to call her to know where she was, so he slept quietly. In the morning his wife was brought back home in another man’s car! The girl was shocked beyond belief that her husband had arrived back without caring to call her on phone. She had exclaimed: “Oh cherrie, tu es

de retour? Bon arriveé! C’est a quel heure tu as arriveé?!” (Oh my dear, you are back? Welcome! When did you arrive?) The man did not utter a word until the blows started flying. The girl was beaten beyond recognition as our efforts to ‘invade’ their apartment to help resolve the problem were frustrated because the man had ‘imprisoned’ themselves within locking up the whole doors to prevent any outside intervention. The girl’s screams — “au secour, au secour, mon mari veut me tue!” (help, help, my husband wants to kill me) — attracted many people but no help came her way. By the time the man threw her away from his home her face had been ‘panel beaten’, swolen. Served her right?

Another friend here ‘impregnated’ a young girl in the college. When the girl had the baby the baby-girl was looking more like a half-cast, fair in complexion when the supposed father was black as charcoal and the mother equally of dark pigmentation. My friend did not have the courage to question the baby’s colour features but his friends like myself summoned enough courage to ask questions. In the end the girl ‘confessed’ to my friend that she was not very sure the baby belonged to him because when she was going out with him he had another boyfriend who dated her prior to my friend’s entreaty was accepted by her.

When my friend broke this news to me I had advised him to apply the King Solomon method or go for a DNA test before fully assuming paternity of another man’s baby. My friend was afraid to do anything having announced to his people back home that he had had a child.

I read in one of the Nigerian dailies online how a jilted loverboy stabbed mercilessly his girlfriend who had told him that their amorous relationship was up; the young man not only stabbed the girl to death but tried stabbing himself to death as well! He confessed that the late girl took an oath with him “for better for worse”! In a similar development courtesy of the Nigerian newspaper we were informed of how a lady from Delta state poured a hot boiling soup on her boyfriend accused of having sex with her younger sister.