IF ANYONE SLAPS YOU....

Hello hi,

Got a little story in my head so I wrote it down. Don't forget to leave your comments below please and share and like the post. Enjoy:-

The little boy untied his shoe lace, “Stop doing that!” his mother, the ‘white’ woman, said as she tried to tie the laces back. The boy continued, as if to punish his mother for something she may have done earlier. A ‘black’ lady sat next to them, trying hard to focus on the altar as the Pastor preached. The pastor was reading from the Holy Bible...”So in the olden days, it was an eye for an eye but now, if anyone hits you, turn the other side of your face so that they hit you again, He said ”. The congregation nodded with accordance. The cycle continued, with both mother and child frustrating one another. The black lady turned and smiled at them; it was her way of telling them that they had been noticed and so they should stop the disturbance. She wondered how the woman could tolerate such unnecessary stubbornness from the boy; in her time, she would not dare because her mother would spank her. Looking at the little boy, she could guess that he was at least up to seven years old. To her that was old enough for a little spanking but it was not in her place for her to teach his mother how to raise her children. Besides, they were in a country where such acts were deemed barbaric and the ‘culprit’ was wanted by the social workers.

The woman and her son were growing louder and becoming more distracting while the lady was getting exasperated. She could barely concentrate on the preaching, so she turned and shushed them with her index finger on her mouth. It was a reflex action and when she realised what she had done, she smiled again in a friendly way to cover up what may have been perceived as ‘rude’. The woman and her son went quiet for a while but being the little boy he was, he resumed the annoying activity once he felt that there was less pressure. His mother started threatening to punish him when they got home but that did not seem to work.  So she tried something different; this time she whispered to the boy “If you don’t stop, I will tell the black girl to strike you.” before turning to wink at the lady. The lady did not find the sentence funny but she smiled back anyway.  The boy seeing what had happened continued his act, with his mother whispering to him “You’re lucky that she probably does not understand English.”  The lady heard it but decided to ignore the statement again; anger beginning to fuel inside her.  As the little boy did not stop; his mother took it to the next level by tapping the lady and saying “Will you spank him please?” The lady obliged but in a different way; she slapped the woman.  

The slap was a resounding one, such that the pastor stopped the sermon for a moment and everybody turned to stare at them. The woman stumbled, from both the shock and pressure of the slap. When she had regained her balance, the lady whispered to her “I’m sorry if I misunderstood you. You know, my English is quite poor”. After minutes of silence and everything else seemed fine, the church resumed its order. The woman whispered to the lady angrily, “I will sue you for this, you won’t get away” and the lady replied “I’ll contest, for racist abuse.” This left the woman confused and in another state of shock.

This was the sort of attitude that Afaafa, the ‘black’ lady, encountered usually; so often that she wondered why people were so ignorant. Her mother had always warned her about her temper, telling her to endure people’s behaviour. Afaafa tried hard to control her temper but this time, she had to react. It was not just about this ‘white’ woman; last time, it was the Chinese woman who had accused her of stealing her phone. Afaafa had been taken by surprise especially as they were both in the changing room for equivalent time periods before going into the sauna and they also left the sauna room at the same time.  There had been many other ladies in the changing room but somehow, Afaafa must have looked like a thief to her. The moment the Chinese woman could not find her phone, she started pulling Afaafa and asking her to bring back the phone she had stolen. Embarrassed, Afaafa told her that she did not take it and after arguing with each other for half an hour, the administrator in charge was called in to settle the case.  It took him only a phone call, dialling the woman’s number, for them to realise that the woman had never brought it to the gym, after her husband had picked up the call from home. The Chinese woman had apologised to her but Afaafa refused to accept her apology.

The time before that, it was the British man who was amazed by her beauty and brain. He went on and on about how he had been to Africa and had never met anyone as gorgeous as she was.  At first, Afaafa took it as a compliment but the continuous flattering whenever she dressed up to go out with him for dinner, the constant look of awe on his face whenever she wrote and read from her stories, the regular reminder from him that she was not his usual type of girl but that he dated her because he was impressed with her level of education; she began to lose interest in him. Eventually, she broke up with him but not before asking him what part of Africa he had travelled to and his response was that he had visited Barbados once. Of course, she shook her head and left him in the restaurant.

Last summer, it had been the custom’s officer at the airport in her home country, Kenya. The man had flipped through her travel passport and asked her what she did in the USA. She told him that she was doing her post-doctoral research in English and Literature. It was then that the officer laughed long and hard and said it was a waste of time for anyone to study such a course, especially abroad. Afaafa retorted, telling him that his life was the ‘waste’, not her highly earned degree from King’s College, London. The officer would have locked her up if not for the intervention of her Uncle who was a top lawyer in the country and the apology letter that her mother had forced her to write to the officer.

So today, even though the pastor had been preaching about not retaliating, she had still slapped the woman.  In her defence, she was too distracted by them to have understood and digested his preaching.  For Afaafa, the slap was not just for the woman’s sin but for every ignorant person she had encountered recently, including her fellow Africans; unfortunately, the ‘white’ woman had been the Scape goat.

Have a beautiful week ahead :). Cheers! (IG - ugochiukah, twitter: @vivio_gogo)