A Must Read: Boys Are Not Stones (III) – John Chizoba Vincent


I will relate this with my childhood experience.. I grew up in a ghetto town of Aba where survival was by who you are, how brave you are to defend your sister’s body from being defile by men and boys. mother always told us to protect our sisters. That was the ultimate role of a boy at that age.  There were boys around.  Boys that could take advantage of her.  Boys that could harm her.  Boys that could teach her bad things. So, She taught us how to defend our sisters not ourselves because she believed that our sisters are weaker emotionally and so therefore,  they can not protect themselves but we boys can. We planted those belief in our mind.  We fought harder so that we would not disappoint mother and father. We have to make them proud.

I fought too even though I was  not that very strong. But I needed to prove to my parents that I could protect my sister even though I was so weak to defend myself as of then.

There was a day a friend of mine was beaten by a girl in the school.  He came back home and told his parents what happened. The whole house broken into elegies. It torn into pieces and its  fragments shattered into dust. The spiders went into hiding, the lizards were afraid too.  Every where was calm and silence ruled our mind.

His father got angry. He shouted, danced here and there to his ability.  He asked my friend where his hands were when the girl beat him up.  I was there. I was afraid to explain what really happened to them. My friend was too afraid to speak.  The father went into his room.  Got a rope and tie his hands and legs.  He began to beat him.  His mother did not help matter also.  She was supportive of his father.  They beat the hell out of him.  I helped him escape.  As I grew older, I tried to relate this issue with being inhuman and those things that has to do with boys and girls but failed.  I tried to relate it within me as a man but I could not get a reasonable answer to those questions bothering my mind.  They were not abstract things.  They were things we see day by day.  A wife beating her husband and people laugh it out, a man beating his wife, it becomes a violence against women, it makes the headlines for the dailies. Then, what is the name giving to the former?

 Is it a sin for a girl to beat up a boy of her age or the one she is older than? Are we that strong emotionally and physically that nothing can defeat us?  Or is it culture or tradition that made it to be so?  Why do boys have to suffer this much and the society care not about them?

Majority of these things happen everywhere. We think there is no way a boy can show his weakness to the world. They look up to you as first born of the family so,  you have to bury your father when he dies.  Boys are not stones, they are flesh and blood just like their counterpart.
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Read Part (I) >> Here

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