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Ozioma Onyenwaku ([email protected])
Pardon me for not discussing, as promised, why a victim of child sexual abuse might not forgive her mother. I have deliberately (forgive me) pushed it over to next week. Please bear with me.
My heart is heavy over the gruesome murder of Baby Anorue in Imo State of Nigeria. You heard about it, right? The news on 4th May 2020 of how one 49-year-old Ezekiel Anorue from Imo State, Nigeria, smashed his new born baby on the ground. His reason? He was expecting the wife to give birth to a baby boy, only for the woman to come back with a baby girl!
According to Mr. Anorue, he had sent his wife three times for scan and each time the wife informed him it was a baby boy. Based on that, he renovated and furnished his house to welcome a baby boy. He was, however, disappointed when he saw a baby girl instead of a baby boy. So he smashed the innocent baby on the floor, and she died. She died, no, she was killed, for being a girl.
Yes, an innocent baby was murdered by the same man that caused her birth, simply because she was a girl. The innocent baby was deprived of her right to life simply because she was a girl. The baby died, no, not just died but was killed; not killed but murdered in a gruesome and agonizing way!
Mr. Anorue claimed that his anger was that the wife lied to him that it was a baby boy. The wife said she lied about the results of the scan because of the severe threat she received from Mr. Anorue after her 4th child (they have 4 girls). He had warned her that he was not going to tolerate her giving birth to a baby girl again. Ultimately, he has carried out his threat! If the wife had not lied about the scan results, possibly she would have been the one killed with her baby inside her.
Come to think of it, if anyone is to be blamed in this instance, is it not Mr. Anorue himself? What he gave his wife was what she produced. Do Mr. Anorue and his kind not know that the man is the sole carrier of the Y-chromosome which would pair with the woman’s X-chromosome to produce a baby boy? The man has XY chromosomes while the woman has XX chromosomes. It is only when the man donates his Ychromosome in the process of conception that a woman gives birth to a baby boy.
Mr. Ezekiel Anorue already had 4 children. That means that his wife’s fertility, as well as his, is not in doubt. His children are all girls, meaning that his system has been donating X-chromosome all along, and never a Y-chromosome. It, therefore, fell on him to boost his system to enhance the ability of the Ychromosome.
This, of course, is achievable. I blame the whole incident on the archaic African mentality of according supremacy to the male child over the girl child. To this day, in many African societies and cultures, (Igbo culture being one) a lot of benefits are denied a man because he has no male child; a man is considered a man only when he begets a male child; and the woman can only be seen as having a stay and a say in the family only when she has given birth to a male child.
All these put pressure on the men, and anxiety on the women. It baffles me that in this age and time some humans are still parading this archaic unrefined mentality.
So sad that at a time the world is celebrating the great strides women are making in all spheres of life, some humans are still so backward in their thinking.
This is a call to revisit some cultures and reassess them in terms of their values vis-a-vis modernization.
We don’t have to be this backward in this 21st Century for crying out loud!
Every child is a gift from God. Every child is precious. Every child deserves to live, to be loved and cherished. No child is superior to the other, male or female.