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.
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