Changes Read Free Page B

marital rape? No. The society could not possible have an indigenous word or phrase for it. Sex is something a husband claims from his wife as his right. Any time. And at his convenience. Besides, any ‘sane’ person, especially sane women, would consider any other woman lucky or talented or both, who can make her husband lose his head like that.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  What does she use? Some well-known stuff?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  It must be a new product from Europe or America …
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  You know how often she travels.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ‘Ei, Esi Sekyi … and she always looks so busily professional … and so booklong!’
    And here she was, not feeling academic or intellectual at all, but angry, and sore … And even after a good bath before and after, still dirty … Dirty! … Ah-h-h-h, the word was out.
    She put her head on her desk. She must have dozed off for a minute or two. She woke up with a start, and somewhat disorientated. When her mind cleared, she realised that she had made a decision.

        3
    Compared to Esi, Opokuya was definitely fat. Not that she cared. She moved like lightning, and laughed through the days of the year. Any time the question of her obesity cropped up, she made it quite clear that the fact that she was fat had nothing to do with not knowing what to do about it. She had been a state registered nurse and a qualified midwife for nearly fifteen years. In those years, she had concluded that those who are interested in women, especially African women, losing so much weight must be the same ones who are interested in women, especially African women, cutting down their birth rate.
    â€˜You Opokuya. As for you Opokuya,’ her listeners would protest.
    â€˜I could be wrong,’ she would make an attempt to concede, and then move straight on, ‘otherwise how is it that no matter how remote and hidden a rural clinic is, two items you are bound to find in great amounts are pamphlets and samples for losing weight and contraception? Eh?’ she would ask her bemused listeners, her hands akimbo. ‘... And as for hospitals like this one, you know we would never run out of the routine drugs if they were also contraceptive and we gave them to all patients, including men and children, and asked them to take them three times a day before meals.’ She would glare around, her eyes blazing in a most unnatural way. When she got into such deep areas, people normally kept quiet and listened to her.
    â€˜Meanwhile, our governments are behaving like all professional beggars. They have learned the rules of effective begging, one of them being that you never object to anything the giver likes. And they know the givers like one thing very much now: that there should not be too many of us. Under such circumstances, how does the beggar tell the giver to go and stuff his dangerous and experimental contraceptive pills, capsules and injections? Yes, injections. And they call their murderous programmes such beautiful names: “family planning” and “mother health”... all to cover up …’
    Her listeners were nearly always hospital personnel. Some thought they recognised the truth of what she was saying. Others simply felt embarrassed, wondering what a decently married woman was doingwith such mad ideas in her head. Some of them would turn away when she was carrying on. Some would keep quiet. But there were always others who stayed and continued to argue with her in an effort to get her to see modern and civilised reason.
    Opokuya had thought quite hard about the politics of population and fat. She had concluded that the way population, especially, was being handled in relation to Africans left her frightened. It seemed to her that any time someone