Bright Okpocha, popularly known as Basket Mouth posted the joke below on his Facebook page recently and the comedian got more than he bargained for as the joke sent ripples far beyond the borders of Nigeria. The Comedian has since deleted the tweet with an apology but reactions continue to pour in.
A Zimbabwean writer/blogger, Barbara Mhangami. Barbara, who currently resides in the US with her husband and four daughters, lashes at the comedian in a piece she titled, “Mister Basketmouth, molest is NOT a Joke!”
“Dear Mr. Basketmouth.
I write in peace, because war does not solve anything. Moreover I am desperate to communicate in a way that will get you to understand the gravity of what you did by sharing a horrible joke, whose punchline is molest.
Mr. Basketmouth I am hoping that by the time I am done talking with you and the 5000+ people who liked and commented on your “joke”, you will have learned something about molest and why molest is a sick, vile and criminal act and why making light of this scourge that has everyone of us who has a womanliness living with fear, is cruel and hateful.
We are not safe Mr. Basketmouth because men take our bodies and they rip us apart without a thought to the life-long trauma that we suffer as a result of such a violation. Mr. Basket mouth have you ever had anyone violate you by doing as they pleased with your body? Have you ever had someone grab you, throw you on the ground slapping you and telling you to shut up, then proceed to tear your legs apart and force his joystick into your anus? Have you? I think not because let me tell you Mr. Basketmouth, because if it were so, you could never make molest an issue for comedy. I know comedians like to poke fun at all things and the irreverence is often what draws laughs. However molest is not funny and if it elicits laughter, which it did in some of your fans, then this is a sign of depravity and a warning to all women that we are not safe among men, even the ones who purport to love us.
Would your joke be funny if your mother your sister, your aunt, your daughter had been Molested? If you daughter or your sister had come home with blood running down her legs because some brute had seen her, not as a human being with feelings and a physical body that hurts and bleeds, but as a vessel for his lust, his rage, his disrespect and his misogyny?
Would your joke be funny to you if you came home to find your 6 month old daughter barely alive because 5 men had broken into your home and decided that a baby’s tiny womanliness was big enough to contain their five manlinesses one after the other, muffling her cries with her burp cloth until she passed out?”
“…the fact that you think that you posted a funny joke means that you are also part of a huge problem that we face in this world, a problem that affects more than half the population. It also means that these statistics mean nothing to you and therefore African women and women in general mean very little to you.”
What do you think ?
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