MANTALK: Encounter with a wife batterer

You are driving home, it’s shortly after 1am on a Friday.

You are wearing your suit, no tie. Your feet hurt because you have been dancing in the shoes meant for boardrooms.

You are from a wedding reception. As you near a petrol station you see a lady and a man tussling near a car with both doors open.

It’s a Ford Ranger and in the light of the deserted petrol station, it looks like a shipwrecked spaceship.

It seems to absorb all the light, like a sponge. You decide to drive into the petrol station and pull over near them. They are drunk. The man is slapping her, and she’s fighting back viciously, tearing at his face and shirt and thrashing at him with both hands as if she is swimming.

He’s trying to hold her hands together with one hand like you would a child when you want to spank them the way our mothers did to us in the 80s.

'WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?'

You roll down your window and ask, “Hey, what’s going on here?” as if what’s going on there looks like they are harvesting maize.

Because this is Nairobi you are not sure if this is staged, a trap.

You once heard of someone who had stopped to help a “pregnant” woman who was clutching her stomach, blood dripping down her legs, and once he moved closer, she withdrew a gun and two men came from nowhere and bundled him into the boot, and he ended up having a very long and eventful night in a forest, stripped off all his clothes and money.

“He’s trying to kill me!” the woman screamed as they tussled and grappled like two Sumo wrestlers.

“John you will kill me today, I swear. You have to kill me today and take my body to my mother!” She screamed. He’s a short stumpy man, the size of a tube of toothpaste. She’s bare foot, her toenails painted the colour of the fresh blood that comes out of a goat’s neck.

There are two watchmen in big trench coats standing in the periphery of this arena, watching rather morosely as if this happens all the time. You quickly figure that this can’t be a set-up and if it is then these two are damned good actors.

You come out of your car and move towards the wrestling duo, saying, “hey, hey, come on guys, easy, easy now,” and the man growls, “mind your own business!” and you hesitate for a minute as he holds her neck and her hair — a weave — moves to the back of her head like a hairy cap. She’s punching away.

HEAVY BREATHING

There is a lot of heavy breathing. You step closer and put a non-threatening hand on the man’s shoulder and he turns furiously and thrusts a finger the size of a sausage an inch from your face and growls, “mind your own bloody business, this is my wife!” To mean that’s a private affair. As if violence in private is permissible especially if that is his wife.

That’s not even the saddest bit of this story, the saddest bit is that his words actually make you step back. Those words immediately create a boundary, a line, making it a “domestic matter” albeit one playing it at a petrol station. Those words come with some sort of jurisdiction, an ownership.

So you stand there helpless, wondering what Jesus would have done in that situation.

“I’m not his wife! You are an animal! An animal!” She screams in tears. He says, “get back in the car!” and she screams, “I would rather walk home! I’m not going anywhere with you. You are nothing but a dog!” (Why do dogs get the flak for everything bad? I think people should start using cats as a reference because cats think the world revolved around them.)

Anyway, the man turns and walks back to the car and because nowadays there are a lot of apes carrying firearms, you think, OK, he’s a gun owner, he’s going to fetch his gun and shoot her then shoot me. Then he’s going to try and escape but he will be caught along Malaba border and the next day social media pundits and online busybodies will read about what happened here and have many theories, some of them will say that it must have been a love-triangle gone bad or that you should have just minded your own business and not got involved in a “domestic matter,” and now you are dead, and he’s not. Because he has powerful friends. he will get out of prison in two years on some rubbish legal loophole, but your children will grow up without a father because his daddy was trying to do the right thing.

Thankfully, the man didn’t fetch a gun. He drove away. He left his wife there, in the cold — bare feet, busted lips, swollen face — and he went home or wherever it is the devil goes to sleep.

I told my friends this story and asked them what they would have done in that scenario. When a drunk man beating his wife says, “this is my wife, damn it. Mind your own business!” Do you take him on? How do you stop him? What does the law say about crime of passion and does that include if he shoots you? Also what if all these is happening in their home and you are a neighbour? Is it trespassing if you broke down their door to save her because she’s screaming for help and you can hear she will be killed for sure?

What do the wise men and women out there think?