Chika Oduah, a journalist based in Abuja, shares an account of her sexual harassment in her former workplace. Find it below..
I got a job in New York City a few years
ago. I was new to the American North; I still reeked of the South.
Pillsbury biscuits, Georgian peaches and Jiffy cornbread with a dollop
of Daisy. Chick-Fil-A, Bojangles’ and Piggly Wiggly. I was a Southern
American, in many ways. Cheerful, trusting, polite, Bible-wielding,
slow-talkin’, Southern. South of the Potomac, East of the Mississippi.
Paisley print blouses, plastic sunflowers hot glued on Payless Shoes
open-toe rubber sandals. But I was all right, I guess. Perhaps a bit
wide-eyed, gap-tooth grinning, but I was all right.
The job was with a news media outfit
that covers Africa and the affairs of the black Diaspora. It was
fashionable, in every sense, that media company. Funded by big-name
multinationals, Third World saviors, it sought to tackle malfeasance and
corruption with heavy handed, not always credible citizen reportage.
The company had made its name among particular Westerners and
Fela-loving expatriate Africans, students of the school of thought that
says African governments need a total sociopolitical upheaval to weed
out the kleptocrats before anything substantial can be planted, plug in
the former student union grassroots activists who give a care about the
proletariat, slum dwellers, retired civil servants, and unemployed
twenty somethings. A single-handed crusade propelled by American dollars
and mercenary Africaphiles, this media company had recruited a handful
of passionate, impressionable youngsters with a compelling allegiance to
Africa. Aluta Continua! Help the motherland. We thought, or at least I
did.
So I went to work. My title was a new
one. Within that role, I initiated new projects, helped revive
slumbering ventures, planned and promoted the awesomeness of the company
— what we were doing and where we hoped to go. I tuned in, excited
about every single part of the job. Everything seemed fine in the
beginning.
I went out with the boss one evening to
hang out after work. I was still new to the North, still new to the
city. A Nigerian immigrant in his early 40s, the boss had a hip rugged
fashion aesthetic, quintessentially urban: distressed brown jackets and
boots, a hefty brown backpack. He was the rebel with a cause, a
card-carrying activist. Encrusted in the syrupy coos of his admirers, he
has fans on both sides of the Atlantic. He was charisma defined.
He’d been nice to me thus far, a
listening ear for my Southerner’s rants and observations on northern
culture. We walked around the street corner to a swanky new spot with a
shiny glass exterior and perfumed-scented, dimly lit interior. Good
living people in stiletto pumps and crisp blazers, leather and lace,
hung there. He led me to a couch in the corner where we sat down. I
don’t drink, so I didn’t order. We chit chatted pleasantly about school,
guys, Africa, Nigerians, our past, our future.
When we get up to leave, he grabs my
waist. He pulls me to his chest. He leans in for a kiss. My stunned mind
stops thinking. It shuts down; I hurry to turn it back on. Easy, Chika. Don’t embarrass the man. Take it easy.
I slide out of his arms with a surprising calm. I’m just not
interested. I say his name for effect. It works. He gets the point, yet
the perplexity in his eyes remains. I never bring it up. It’s like it
never happened. It never happened again.
As time goes on, I grew in confidence at
work as I befriended my fellow colleagues and further solidified my
commitment to “the Africa cause” and to excel in my job performance. I
began expressing my opinions about the way things were done, and
offering suggestions on how I thought we could improve in production
quality and efficiency. The boss welcomed the suggestions, in the
beginning, but only to a certain extent.
Time after time, I begin to notice a pattern: he seemed to have issues with women, especially expressive women with a backbone.
“She’s arrogant,” he would often say
with a sneer and a dismissive shrug whenever I would mention names of
high-profile successful women I admired. Whether it was author
Chimamanda Adichie, or a well-known female journalist, or a female
politician, it seemed all successful women were inherently arrogant to
him.
Eventually, my efforts at work never
seem good enough. The boss is known to be hot-tempered and I was often
on the receiving end of his sarcastic remarks, his angst, his
frustration, and disapproval. Any gaps from my colleagues, anything they
failed to do, it was usually my fault. I was the office scapegoat. Some
of my colleagues noticed this. They’d throw me sympathetic glances or
they’d simply try to ignore the situation and keep their eyes glued to
their computer screens. After such occurred not once or twice or thrice
but on multiple instances, I soon became aware of the hierarchy. My male
colleagues seldom received the boss’s butchering complaints. I’d arrive
to work and the boss would remain silent to my greetings. My male
colleagues would arrive and the boss would say hey what’s up man and
crack jokes with them and have a jolly good time. He had a propensity to
engage in sex jokes with my male colleagues, the kind of lewd comedy
high school boys often entertain.
My female colleagues usually fulfilled
the boss’s wishes without much objection, but on the whole, it looked to
me like the guys were coasting.
In my role at work, I was frequently
undermined. He’d constantly override decisions I had already made with
his prior authorization. He’d demean my work in the presence of others.
He’d sometimes shut down my attempts to join the staff in their
friendly, office banter. He rarely expressed gratitude about my
initiatives and strategies that were clearly having a positive effect on
the company.
“Do you really think you’re directing anything?” A colleague once asked me.
The situation deteriorated. I pushed
myself harder, completing massive amounts of work by staying late into
the night when everyone else had gone home. Graveyard shifting, early
mornings. He began shouting at me in the workplace in front of my
colleagues. My cheerful, trusting, polite, Bible-wielding, slow-talkin’,
Southern mannerisms were dissipating. The city was taking its toll on
me. I felt like discarded mush. I planned my exit. Looked for another
job.
One day he called me to meet him in the
office. In the meeting, he said the company is losing money, said he had
to let me go. Though I was the one who was suddenly unemployed, it was
his emotions and composure that began to unravel as I fought to keep the
work I had produced – works that were mine. The payment I was promised
because I was not given notice of my termination in advance, he didn’t
pay me anywhere near half of it. He lied and said I was never even
employed, said I was just a contractor, a freelancer or something like
that. My work agreement had conveniently disappeared from where I had
placed it inside my work desk months ago. The intervention meeting we
were supposed to have where we were supposed to present our cases before
two or three mediators, well, that was conveniently cancelled. A male
colleague and a prominent columnist with the company intervened, but
nothing much came out of it. Perhaps, they – both guys – ended up siding
with the boss.
Because the boss had already depicted me
as “one of those” power-hungry, erratic, opinionated, overly assertive,
selfish girls, one who eagerly challenged his authority. That false
image suited his chauvinistic motives.
“You like attention,” he once told me.
Wrong. I’m actually as shy as a kiwi bird.
“You’re a career woman,” he once told
me. It came out as a judgmental scoff. He’s a career man himself, but
because it’s more socially acceptable for men to devote much time and
energy to their professional lives, the term “career man” is seldom
used.
In the workplace, women often work twice
as hard as their male colleagues, yet still face the brunt of
disapproval when things don’t go right, while male colleagues seem to
get by. We put in overtime – a 2013 study from the Ponemon Institute
revealed that women employees “work harder and longer” than men do.
Another 2013 study from Edith Cowan University and the University of New
England found that “women experience more rude and disrespectful
behavior in the workplace, but they tolerated it more.” We continuously
strive to be on the good side of the boss. Women seem to always be
compensating for something. Their womanhood?
Most of the women who worked at that
company hardly objected or posed a challenge to my former boss’s
sugarcoated slurs and sly insolence. But I had an opinion and I voiced
it. My opinions, my free-willed spirit and intolerance for nonsense cost
me my job… for that I am grateful.
My former boss’s attitude toward women is not unique.
I had a conversation with a gentleman
here in Nigeria who said women in positions of power always become
over-bearing, whereas men know how to handle leadership and success with
humility.
“It gets to their heads,” he said of women in management roles.
Looking back, I realize that my
experience at that New York City-based media company was not atypical. I
wrote this piece “It Happened To Me” bolstered by the courage I
summoned immediately after reading a blog post a few days ago
(read here)
entitled “The White Savior Industrial Complex & Sexual Harassment
of African Female Aid Workers” by Lesley Agams. Agams vividly describes
an assault by a male colleague while working as the Nigeria country
director for the renown Oxfam GB. After the assault, the man in question
handed her a contract termination letter. Many of my fellow women have
confided in me, sharing harrowing real-life tales of near-rape incidents
in the workplace, cases where they were told to sleep with the boss to
get a promotion, and aggressive intimidation by male supervisors.
And it’s not only the overtly patriarchal, “man-is-the-head” types who are committing this abuse.
It’s also the hash-tagging, progressive,
left-winged liberals garbed in trendy activist attire: thick soled
boots and dashikis, plaid button-downs and worn blue jeans with worn
sneakers, or cropped blazers over cotton shirts without neckties. These
activists are too often propped up in a righteous spotlight. They march
on as darlings of the revolution, unexamined. Their act-ivism is
unstoppable… their acts, unstoppable.
I met one of these young self-titled
human rights activist types. He was among those arrested for protesting
during the 2012 Occupy Nigeria rallies. This guy picks and chooses his
causes and apparently the advancement of women is not one of them. In
his mind, women’s rights are not important enough. After I voiced my
opposition to his foul groping and leering sexual advances on me, he
told me “women’s rights are not human rights.”
Even the Pan-African activist revolutionary himself, Fela Kuti once sang, “When I say woman na mattress I no lie.”
Confiding in others about incidents of
workplace harassment and intimidation often backfires. Some employees
get terminated. Others stay in those toxic work environments after they
are made to doubt their own perceptions.
Relax, calm down, maybe it’s your
imagination, it’s no big deal, maybe you’re just stressed out, well you
know you’re very pretty, he didn’t mean it that way, dress more
conservatively, forget about it, maybe you led him on, well… ignore it,
just pray about it, you can be very emotional, you’re being dramatic,
um…stop working late hours in the office, say no next time, these things
happen, you’re overreacting, are you sure?
Yes, I am sure.
Harassment is still harassment whether
in the form of intimidation in the workplace, sexual propositions or
subtle or obvious oppression.
In his 1,621-word editorial, (
which you can read here) Los Angeles-based social commentator Yashar Ali compares the emotional manipulation and harassment of women to
gaslighting,
a coined term referencing the 1944 feature movie in which Charles
Boyer’s character employs wily strategies to make his wife, played by
Ingrid Bergman, believe she is crazy. Off the Hollywood production sets,
real life is full of cases where women, distressed in the workplace,
keep quiet for fear of being labeled troublesome. Or crazy. They allow
perpetrators to go free, especially when the perpetrator is a popular
man.
If we share our experiences collectively, we can break down the wall of silence.
It’s time to tell our stories.
Source: Lindaikeji
