Disillusioned, Furious, Amused?

If you live in a city for long enough, you’re bound to experience a little reconfiguration.

People come and go. Places that were once the centre of your universe, board up, stick up the “for rent” sign and become something else and that’s just the way of things.

The growing up or apart and the ever-changing scenes are all pretty natural processes but, lately, there seems to be a deeper, more ominous shift in the energy of the city. Windhoek looks different but it feels different, too.

I’m hurrying down the street during a demonstration against sexual and gender-based violence when this thought that I’ve been rolling around in my mind truly hits home.

People, mostly women, are out again, protesting the ceaseless, nightmarish cycle of Namibia’s dystopian rape culture when I notice the prevailing expression of the people who stop and stare.

As a writer, a professional spectator, if you will, I’ve almost mastered the art of being invisible. I wear black. I blend in and I watch the people who are watching. At first, I think the older man I see observing the protesters with an expression of white-hot fury is an isolated incident.

But as I make my way past furniture stores in a grittier part of Independence Avenue, speed walking ahead of the march to take photographs for the newspaper, I see the expression over and over again until a middle-aged woman confirms my observation in an enraged inquiry.

“Where were you when it happened to me? F*#k off!”

Her scolding cuts me to the core and, for a fleeting moment, I feel irrationally ashamed.

I have no insight into her violation but the trauma, anger and despair prompted by the event has clearly stayed with her. I feel momentarily chagrined because I know the chants, the marches, the protests and the think pieces strike her as futile.

So much so that the very existence of these comparably small, feeble efforts towards awareness and change offend her because the fact of rape, the experience and horror of it, is so much bigger than many people will ever know and very little has changed to curtail it.

I leave the woman seething on the street and hurry on.

The protesters observe a moment of silence for victims and survivors of rape and gender based violence on the corner of Independence Avenue. As I’m nearing Avani hotel, a man asks me what it’s all about with another expression that I see often as I go.

Amusement.

“Is it about rape or what?” he says, laughing.

Annoyed, I ask him if he can hear and if he can read.

The man says yes.

“Then listen to the chants, read the posters, open a newspaper,” I say with a growing anger pushing me on. The man responds to my obvious irritation as if I’ve told him a joke. With a giggle.

A furious woman near a furniture store and a giggling man near a hotel.

When the aftermath of rape, victim blaming and sexual and gender based violence is reduced to its elements, that seems the spectrum of it – the anger of women and the indifference of men. And that is to say nothing of the children and sexual and gender minorities whose rapes often go unreported or are dismissed as invalid.

There are fewer marches protesting sexual and gender-based violence in Namibia than in recent years. As Windhoek changes and reconfigures, so does the spirit of the place, including its spirit of protest against what is so awfully rampant.

Perhaps this is a result of the disillusionment prompted by Namibia’s continued culture of victim blaming and silencing, inadequate comprehensive sexuality education and the slow road to often insufficient justice for rape survivors.

Protests cannot adequately reflect or soothe the terrible thing that happens in homes, at schools and anywhere you can imagine, but they do offer a gauge of how a nation is feeling.

Disillusioned, furious, amused?

– martha@namibian.com.na;
Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and
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