I know a few girls who have been raped.

I know them from my childhood days of eavesdropping to neighbours’ evening gossip, which is usually themed around different matters- infidelity, unemployment, immorality- before settling at the last bus stop of rape.

I know them from the counsel my mother offered my sister when she wore skirts that held too tightly and fell before her knees.

I know them from the placards carried by the NGO’s, which read: SAY NO TO RAPE or RAPISTS DESERVE TO DIE.

It was not difficult even then to perceive when the conversations between my neighbours drifted to rape.

Unlike when they talked about infidelity and unemployment-i n raucous tones, almost an argument- with rape, the discussion became solemn.

They talked about the victim with reverence, like a prayer, as if by their plastic pity they could perhaps cajole God and prevent such fate from befalling them.

They talked about the rapist too, they called him a man overrun by testosterone that he could not manage to keep his “thing” between his legs.

I had imagined that because testosterone was it was capable of overrunning a man, it’d be as versatile as the members of the white garment church I see barefooted at Ijesha on Sundays dancing vigorously.

A few days ago, the first lady of Zimbabwe, Mrs Grace Mugabe while addressing thousands of Zanu PF supporters at a rally in Mberengwa, quite sadly said, “Blame yourself for being raped if you walk around in miniskirts” and with this statement, I have a problem.

I agree particularly that I have no experience of the frequent version of rape, for I have been neither the victim nor the perpetrator. But, I know too that blaming these happenings on the gullibility of the victim and not the intent of the offender is like blaming Nigerians for being religious, in a country like Nigeria.

In this ambience, let’s meet the regular rape victim.

Her name is something but people call her Baby and she has just clocked thirteen. She recently started to powder her face to mass, line her lips with cocoa eye pencil and the men at the market have started to tap her plenteous behind.

They have increased interest in her and they always want to owe her change when she comes to the market, always want to seize her scarf and engage in those “one kind” plays where they have body contact with her.

But she is thirteen, what does she know?

Her aunts now call her fine girl, they pretend to not notice that she is around when they talk of the rich man they met at one five star hotel-because they are approaching thirty and no man is asking how much they are selling.

They pretend not to notice that the clothes they say, “Baby come and take” about, are too revealing and when they visit on special occasions, they bring mature DVD’s-FIFTY SHADES OF GREY or THE BOY NEXT DOOR and dump them on the living room table.

Baby, like every normal girl wants to look pretty. She wants men to long after her but as everything that concerns her, she feels sex is something that cannot be given without her consent and she is saving herself. She is saving herself for the new boy in her class, whose father they said owned three factories in Onitsha, saving herself with the hope that when they first do it, he would dazzle her with the lines of the Pablo Neruda poem he reads to her during recess.

I do not love you except because I love you

I go from loving to not loving you

From waiting to not waiting for you

My heart moves from cold to fire

I love you only because it’s you the one I love

When Baby is raped one night in the market, Mrs Grace Mugabe tells her it is her fault.

She has grown into a world that chooses to judge the victim and ignore the offender, to sniff for fault rather than reckon with the obvious.

Therefore, when as a child, the man who bought a new Volvo and built a big house with glazed windows was robbed or nabbed, she was told “he is a stupid man, why should he live so extravagantly and not expect thieves to come”. And she was thereafter admonished to enclose her wealth with frugality, like a parcel when she has it.

She wishes she can tell Mrs Mugabe about the many well clout girls who have been raped in Onitsha, about how her rapist had torn through her denim trousers. In her diary that night, she writes an entry titled “Is it wrong to look however I want?”

See, for all the other girls out there, Baby has something to tell you. Dress however, you want, show whatever skin and if any man has the nerve to rip your clothes off, his hyperactive testosterone is to blame, not you, No, not you.

She says you should tell this to Mrs Grace Mugabe too and append a “Disappointing woman” to the message.

I am a man, and trust me, I would rape you only if I want to, irrespective of how you dress, biko!