Why Do African Men Go Home to Marry?
Within the last eighteen months I have attended nine welcoming parties. These are parties by friends and acquaintances who went to Africa, marry and successfully petitioned for their wives to come to the United States. These types of parties, whether big or small, are taking place all over the US. The immigration process can be lengthy and frustrating -- depending on the petitioner’s immigration status. In the US at least, one could petition for his future wife by way of the Fiancé Visa provision or through outright marriage which could take upward of twenty months. And lots of money, ingenuity and perseverance!
But why do African men go though this tortuous and circuitous immigration process? Why do African men go home to marry instead of marrying the women they’ve wined and dined and romanced right here in the US. Most of these women are well-educated, well-read and well-traveled; they are well mannered and have proven their reliability. They have demonstrated their abilities and capabilities in all matters marital. They are women of two worlds: they know Africa and also understand the West.
Why do African men go home to marry the “unknowns” instead of marrying the proven and the reliable here in the US? Well, it is because (1) they can; (2) most men are under the illusion that the women they knew back home are innocent, un-spoilt and virginal; (3) it is an ego boosting exercise in that it allows them to demonstrate to their people back in Africa that they too can bring one of their own to the US; (4) it allows some men to mask their "failures and shortcomings" since the women who are already in the US can tell where they are on the social and economic ladder. Additionally, some men want their women to look up to them since it makes them appear more than what and who they really are (at least in the initial stages).
And then there those who will tell you African girls in the US have all “gone bad…rotten…too exposed…too independent.” Ha, whatever that means!
The African male is perplexing. He can be enigmatic. He can be everything and sometimes, nothing. He can be sweet and loving and caring and benevolent and at the same time oppressive. His life is full of contradictions. In so many ways, he is a wounded animal as a result of his historical past. Once, he was the primary breadwinner. Once, he was the head of the household. Once, he was the man who moved mountains and parted the heavens so it rained. That was a time long gone. The modern times have not been exactly good to him because of the multiplying effects of globalization and modernity.
Even though the outside world is depriving him of his manhood, he has found a way to make part of his world his playground. His home has become his playground. And in this playground, he is the captain. He is the sole captain. No co-captains. His words and wishes are the law. Globalization and modernity may be creeping in on and chipping away at his manhood, he has found a way to protect his playground. Or so he thought! To make his thoughts a reality, he marries a greenhorn.
But you see life has a way of getting back at us. Sooner or later, Karma will come to play.
Life is dynamic. Ever changing. Never static. Therefore, yesterday’s greenhorns will become the “ever-present and ever-knowing” of tomorrow. The innocents will lose the mist in their eyes and become like all the women that came before them. Though the preceding assertion is not empirically grounded, one can not but notice that “greenhorn marriages” dissolve quicker -- mostly within five years with or without offspring.
More often than not most of these marriages are not based on love or affection. Most are not even like the marriages of yester-years: a contract and a union between two families. On the part of the greenhorns, it is mostly about the need to escape the prevailing abject poverty and hopelessness that has engulfed most African countries. Most of these women wanted a way out of the sorrow and the lack of opportunities in Kenya, Guinea, Botswana, Liberia, and Eritrea and elsewhere. In Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Madagascar and Mauritania, it is about running away from the fetid and stifling conditions that stunts dreams and kill optimism. For most women, that is. Therefore, when presented with the opportunity to hop, they pack and run!
As for the men who go in search of these women, well, their mindset has been discussed. What needs to be added is the fact that most are never happy because they got what they never bargained for: stunned, disappointed and underachieving wives who never knew about 40-60-hour work week; women who never knew there are no dollar minting factories down the street, that America is not what they saw in the movies and magazines, that America is not a world of instant riches and glamour. You toil and toil and toil!
The unfamiliar can be mind-sapping, you know. These women see ghosts and dream of “bad-bad-bad-things.” Depression and identity crisis then sets in. Those who can’t cope then leave their husbands and marriage and try to go it alone believing their lots would be better without the “extra baggage.” Big mistake, for most!
As for the men, well, some will plead with, cajole or trick their wives into going into the nursing or CNA profession assuming the women were not already one back home. The nursing profession, they believe, is a sure avenue for making money and living the good life. Be it in Houston, Seattle, Dallas, Miami, New York and every where in between, African nurses abound. They are everywhere working mostly the night and graveyard shifts, toiling day and night and away from their husbands and children just to make ends meet. With no time to smell the roses or to wonder at the beauties that surround them, they become strangers in the world they live in.
Why do we wine and dine and romance our women if we have no intention of marrying them? Why do we whine and complain when we see them lay their eggs in the nest of other races? Why do we sneer at them when they turn the “ideal age for marriage” and are unmarried? And why do we slap the culture book at them when they have children out of wedlock? It is a shame the way some African men in this country have treated and continues to treat some of our women. It is truly a shame!
Sabidde@yahoo.com
8 Comments:
At August 26, 2005 12:18 PM, Anonymous said…
I have a lot of ladies friend who are Nigerians. I talk and hang out with them. That is all I do. From my conversation with them they are looking for Mr Perfect: Tall, well-built, educated rich and falamboyant. I do not meet all this criteria, so I am(was) not even an option for this girls. One thing I notice is that when they see a guy( Nija and non-ninja) they like, they tend to force themsleves on the person. The person just uses them and run away. They will now come and tell me all guys are crazy.... as if I am not a guy.
Now some of them are now seeing reality, but it is too late. They are like tokunboh, as far as other people that know them are concerned.
It will not make any rational sense for me to marry any of this girls. They are only considering me as an after thought and as a result of desparation to marry.
Fortunately for me, most of classmates in Nigeria are in Medical School in Nigeria. So I can go and approach one(using my past knowledge and info from cousins also in Med school)
I do not own any obligation to any Nigeria in America. If they get deseparate let them turn in to lesbian.
At August 26, 2005 12:41 PM, Anonymous said…
Very naive.
There is more to a woman than dominating one. American men fall into some of the mistake you pointed out, not many Nigerians. Usually those who marry foreigners, remarry African women.
It is a contract between families, not just fancy.
As for the NA and nurses, you are right about Nigerians. Why marry someone that has been passed around among your friends, if you deserve respect?
At August 27, 2005 12:57 PM, Paul Adujie said…
Going Home To Marry?
What are the reasons? What are the risks and consequences to and for ALL concerned?
Here is one incident...
Published: Aug 21, 2005
Modified: Aug 21, 2005 5:34 AM
Victim savors freedom
A suspicious husband maims his wife with a machete; defying disability, she summons the will to recover and start a new life
By AMY GARDNER, Staff Writer
Ebele Achonu woke up in the intensive care unit at Duke University Hospital and immediately thought to call her boss. She tried reaching for the telephone but couldn't move. Thickly wrapped splints immobilized both arms. A brace enveloped a deep gash on the back of her neck. Bandages wrapped her fractured skull, and tubes snaked from her body to the wall behind.
Her right hand was gone.
So she tried something else.
"Please help me with the phone," she remembers asking the nurse at her side. "I need to call my job. I won't be in today."
"They already know," the nurse replied. "You don't need to worry about work right now."
"What do you mean I don't have to worry? It is Monday. I'm supposed to work today."
"It's not Monday," the nurse said. "It's Wednesday."
Ebele's mind raced, and she began to absorb what had happened.
She thought back to Sunday. She remembered the phone call with her best friend from Nigeria, the discussion about her failing marriage and deep unhappiness. She remembered hearing her husband, Victor, come up behind her in their home in Southeast Raleigh. She felt blows. She glimpsed the machete. She remembered lying on her carpeted bedroom floor, staring at her two hands, limp and nearly severed, and watching her blood spread around her.
She remembered thinking she was dying.
Instead, she had survived one of the most brutal acts of domestic violence possible shy of murder.
And she realized at that moment, in that hospital bed, that she was free. No one would ever take that from her again.
Always independent
Ebele's resolve to push forward, so evident when she regained consciousness at Duke that Wednesday in October 2003, is common among victims of domestic violence. As for so many women, that drive created conflict in Ebele's marriage to Victor Achonu -- then served an entirely different purpose after the marriage ended and Victor was safely in prison: It propelled her through her recovery.
Ebele's independence defined her even as a schoolgirl, when her mother had worried that Ebele was "wayward," says her best friend from childhood, Amarachi Chibundu. That label, Chibundu says, is less an accusation of misconduct than a warning that the potential is there.
Ebele (eh-BELL-ay) befriended boys -- a taboo in Nigerian culture, even in the large, modern city of Enugu where she lived. She sneaked off to wear Western clothes and makeup, changing and washing her face before going home.
Ebele was also fiercely willful, says Chibundu, who lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, with her husband and young son. And so Ebele's mother, hoping to calm her down, pushed her to marry an older man.
"Where we come from, at that time, parents told you what school you could go to, what time you could be out, who you could see," Chibundu recalls. "It was not easy to put your foot down and stand up to your parents and say, 'This is the life I want to lead.' We don't have the independence that you have in America."
Ebele's mother encouraged her to marry Victor. So did a great-uncle who, because Ebele's father had left her mother when she was very young, was a father figure to Ebele. Despite her own misgivings, Ebele married Victor in Nigeria in 1992. He was 40, she 22.
"You have these dreams when you're young to marry the husband that you want to marry," Ebele, now 35, says. "And I had that dream, too. I said I wasn't going to marry someone more than five years older than me. But you know, this wasn't the case. A lot of family opinions were involved."
The Achonus' marriage was troubled from the beginning. Like many abusers, Victor took an obsessive interest in his wife's behavior. He accused her of sleeping with dozens of men. Ebele says she never did so.
Victor had moved to the United States in the early 1980s. He attended Shaw University, became a citizen, and married, then divorced. After marrying Ebele in Nigeria, he quickly returned to the United States with plans for her to join him when her visa came through. In the meantime, even from across the ocean, he sought to control her.
Ebele wanted an apartment of her own -- a flagrant violation of custom. Victor insisted that she live with his parents and forbade her to bring friends home.
Even now, Victor willingly rattles off detail after detail of what he considers evidence that Ebele was not faithful. At Lanesboro Correctional Institution in Anson County, where he is serving nearly 20 years for attempted first-degree murder, Victor maintains that Ebele began straying just months after their marriage.
"One of my cousins saw Ebele with a man walking down the street," Victor says, recalling an incident back in Nigeria. "My cousin immediately called my mother."
Though he insists Ebele was unfaithful, Victor, who sat for a three-hour interview in prison, does not dispute the facts in this article. These details come from Ebele, her family and friends, and court documents.
In 1996, when Ebele's visa came through, Victor demanded that she leave Nigeria immediately -- even though their 2-year-old son, Brian, would have to stay behind until his visa was ready. When Ebele protested, Victor and his family accused her of wanting to stay for dishonorable reasons.
"They said, 'Why are you not gone? All of a sudden you don't want to go to America,' " Ebele remembers. "I said, 'My son!' I mean is that not a reason not to want to go? And they said, 'There is a skeleton in your cupboard.' I said, 'There is no skeleton in my cupboard,' and I went [to the United States] just to prove that."
Rising frustration
Victor acknowledges that his preoccupation with Ebele developed as failures mounted in his life. He struggled to earn a living. And he found his shortcomings that much harder to bear as he watched Ebele take to her new home.
"She was dragging me down," he says. "I was working so much and Ebele was going about enjoying herself. She goes to parties by herself, talks with men, having sex with all these men."
The Achonus lived in an apartment for a few years, then bought a modest home in the Chastain subdivision near Garner. After Brian, the Achonus had two little girls -- Amarachi, now 7, and Chinwendu, 5.
In 1987, Victor had earned a bachelor of science degree in computer information systems. Yet he was earning a living the way hundreds of educated Africans in the Triangle do: by driving a cab.
Victor often talked about returning to school for another degree. Yet he did little beyond driving the cab. His credit was bad and he rarely had cash. He had defaulted on his tuition payments to Shaw, and he could not obtain a copy of his transcript until he made good on the debt.
Ebele embraced life in North Carolina. She entered nursing school, made friends, took a job as a nursing assistant at Rex Hospital. She bought a cell phone and wore stylish clothes.
Ebele managed the household finances, and she kept her own savings account. She used her credit rating to obtain a mortgage and paid cash for the Isuzu Trooper that became the family car.
Victor's economic plight depressed him, and so did Ebele's independence. It's a common marital struggle, domestic abuse counselors say. And it is heightened among immigrants who come from more male-dominated societies and arrive in the United States culturally isolated and economically disadvantaged.
Victor rarely ventured beyond his world of African acquaintances. The Achonus' friends were Victor's friends, and his only social outlets were work, where virtually all his associates were fellow Africans, and a Nigerian association that he belonged to.
Ebele says she tried to enjoy life with Victor. He didn't like going to restaurants. When she finally saw her first movie, in 2003 -- "Daddy Day Care," starring Eddie Murphy -- she went by herself. She took the children to the park alone or with friends. Victor showed no interest in such activities, she says.
Ebele grew increasingly unhappy with Victor's lack of motivation. And Victor grew more and more consumed by feelings of inadequacy and fear that he would lose his wife. He slept poorly and was responsible for several car accidents in his taxi, he says. About a year before the attack, he stopped driving the cab and took a shipping and receiving job at Sears.
And he grew more jealous and controlling. He began searching Ebele's receipts. He fiddled with her cell phone, checking incoming calls and dialed numbers to see whom Ebele was talking to. He would call her when he knew she was leaving class and keep her on the line until the next one started. Victor and Ebele both acknowledge that he was particularly suspicious of a male friend of Ebele's, a married man with children whom she had befriended and who, in a written note, had professed a deep fondness for her.
Victor believes they were lovers. Ebele says they were not.
Victor would also make strange comments about violence, Ebele recalls. Whenever news broke of a man harming his wife, he would take note and later remind Ebele of the story when they argued.
"This is the kind of thing that would push a man to do that," Ebele remembers him saying.
These are classic warning signs of battering, says Laura Hilton of Interact, an agency that serves victims of domestic violence. But the signs are commonly ignored, she says -- particularly in a culture that values stoicism and discretion within a marriage.
"In our tribe, you're not supposed to talk about your marriage," says Chinelo Azuka, 39, a friend of Ebele's in Raleigh. "It's almost like airing your dirty laundry." Like Ebele, Azuka belongs to the Ibo ethnic group of Nigeria.
Ebele kept her worries to herself until a few weeks before the attack. Finally, despairing that her marriage would ever work, she approached her mother, Miriam Chukwuka, 64, who had moved from Nigeria two years earlier to help with the children while Ebele attended school.
Speaking out about her marriage was a huge step for Ebele, but she was desperate. She felt that she had tried for years to make an unhappy marriage work. She couldn't do it any longer.
But Miriam, who had urged Ebele to marry Victor all those years ago, had little to say. "My child," Ebele recalls her mother saying, "you must make it work."
Ebele then turned to her best friend from Nigeria, Chibundu, pouring her unhappiness into the telephone at moments when Victor wasn't around. It pained her friend to hear Ebele's hopelessness so many miles away.
"I could not understand for the life of me why she ended up with this guy," Chibundu says. "We were so disappointed, her friends. We were supportive, of course. I couldn't have told her what I felt."
It became clear to Ebele that the marriage was ending. She told Victor she was unhappy.
On Oct. 5, 2003, he exploded.
Dark suspicions erupt
Victor behaved strangely from the start of that Sunday, when the family headed to services at First Baptist Church on Salisbury Street in downtown Raleigh. Ebele and Victor were both raised Anglican, but Victor did not attend services regularly before Ebele moved here in 1996.
When Victor attended church with the family, Ebele often elbowed him to keep him awake. But on this Sunday, Victor was agitated. He hadn't slept the night before.
When the family returned home, Ebele went upstairs to the bedroom. Victor followed her. Her cell phone rang. He looked at the number. It was the male friend, the one Victor believed she was having an affair with. He snatched the phone away and began shouting: "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
But the man couldn't speak quickly enough for Victor. He threw the phone across the room and shouted: "These are one of those people I told you not to talk to anymore! You see, they know it's me so they don't want to talk!"
Victor picked up the phone and threw it again, this time into the toilet. Again he picked it up and threw it. It broke into pieces.
Victor then left the room without saying a word.
On the bedroom phone, Ebele called her friend Chibundu from Nigeria, who was in France on business at the time.
"I was already in bed because of the time difference," Chibundu recalls. "It was late afternoon her time. She wanted to go off the line when she found out I was in bed. I said no."
As Ebele cried to Chibundu, she heard Victor return. Her mother and children were downstairs.
Victor looked into the bedroom. He assumed she was talking to the man he believed was her lover. He left, but quickly returned. Ebele continued to talk to Chibundu. She heard Victor lock the door behind him.
That's when her friend, 4,000 miles away, heard the screaming begin.
Chibundu didn't know what she was listening to. She heard no voices, no words, only the screaming. It seemed to go on forever.
"I didn't know it was a human being screaming," Chibundu says, her voice choked with sobs. "It was so awful."
Ebele thought Victor was hitting her with his hands. Then she guessed it was a stick, because the blows were so hard. Finally, she saw the blood -- and the gleam of the machete.
"Mom! Mom!" she cried out. "I'm dying."
Victor aimed for Ebele's head, first fracturing her skull and then slicing the back of her neck. But she raised her arms over her head, absorbing blows on her hands and arms. She fell to a fetal position on the carpet, prompting Victor to strike deeply into her knees.
Miriam and the children heard the screaming, too. They ran up the stairs and broke down the door.
"Oh Victor, oh Victor," both Ebele and her friend remember her mother saying. "What did I do to give my daughter to you?"
It was only when Chibundu heard Ebele and her mother speak that she began to fathom what was happening.
Victor finally stopped striking Ebele when the family came in. He left a trail of bloody footprints on his way out of the house, carrying with him the machete, which the Achonus used to butcher goat meat. The police never found it.
Miriam and the three children stood in the doorway, stunned at the sight of Ebele on her blood-soaked bedroom floor.
"They saw everything," Miriam says sadly of the children. "All of us went inside that room."
Ebele was alert. She told Brian, then 9, the eldest child, to dial 911. Brian did, not knowing his mom's friend was still on the line.
Chibundu remembers Brian's words exactly.
"Is this the police?" he asked. "You've got to come. My dad got mad at my mom and he hit her with a knife."
Chibundu hung up to free the line. It would be days before she learned that Ebele had survived.
Will-powered recovery
Ebele's will to push forward surged in those first moments after she regained consciousness three days later. It was equally evident at her first post-operative visit just 10 days after surgery.
Ebele was right-handed before the attack, but Victor's blows left the hand attached by little more than a flap of skin. Her orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Diane Allen of Duke, reattached the hand in surgery, but it never regained the blood flow to survive. Allen was forced to amputate.
"She came in walking, even though both knees had been damaged," Allen remembers of the post-op appointment. "She had a mild limp, no crutches. Her spirits were high. She's never shown any self-pity of any kind. And then the poor thing didn't want any pain medication."
Ebele's left hand was severely damaged, too, yet she has learned to adapt. Deep cuts around the wrist left her thumb, pinkie and ring finger useless. She cannot bend her wrist up or down. When she types, pushes an elevator button or strokes her children's hair, it is with a stiff, stabbing motion.
She wears a sophisticated electronic prosthesis that fits over her right forearm like a glove. Its fist can close with the flexing of forearm muscles. The hand is lifelike, but lighter in color than Ebele's own skin. And its fingers are stubby, no match for the long, graceful fingers of her left hand. Ebele uses it for little more than carrying light bags with big straps, or for propping up her head while she studies or talks. Aesthetically, she finds it inadequate; it may eliminate gaping from those at a distance but does little to reduce stares up close.
Ebele resumed her studies in January, a year and three months after the attack. She is an honor student and has made the dean's list at Johnston Community College and Wake Tech, where she is working toward a degree in health information management. She can no longer be a nurse.
Each day, with her left hand, Ebele reaches across the wheel of her SUV to start the ignition. This summer, she has been leaving the house by 7 a.m. to drop Chinwendu at preschool and the older children at day camps in downtown Raleigh. She has arrived at Wake Tech by 8, either for class or to study for the day.
Ebele's prosthesis is obvious, and so are the multitude of scars peeking out from her floppy dress sleeves, her skirt and her hair. The limitations of her left hand are no less so. In computer class, where she cannot use the voice-activated software she has at home, she pecks away at the keyboard with her two working fingers. During a philosophy exam, her left arm aches from grasping a pen with her paralyzed thumb.
Still, at Wake Tech on a recent weekday, Ebele was engaging and attentive, sitting in the front row of her philosophy class and speaking often during discussions.
Between classes she studies. She stays on campus at least until 5 p.m., when she must leave to pick up the children. When she can arrange for a friend to retrieve the kids, she stays into the night.
The dance of freedom
As spaghetti warmed on the stove top on a recent evening, Ebele's mother, Miriam, pulled a plastic bag of homegrown green beans from the refrigerator. Miriam doesn't drive, and she rarely leaves the house other than for church. Most of her mornings she spends watering her garden, which fills Ebele's postage-stamp-sized back yard. She grows carrots, squash, tomatoes and more.
Ebele put on some music -- a festive recording of Nigerian gospel songs. Instantly, she and Miriam began moving to the song. Still dancing, Ebele reached into a kitchen cabinet for cold medicine for Amarachi, who had a runny nose. Still dancing, Ebele struggled to tear the foil envelope with her teeth. She sang out: "I believe. Yes Lord, I believe."
Miriam smiled. "He is a great healer," she said to no one in particular.
Ebele's music and her mother are among her few remaining connections to Nigeria. Miriam feels deep guilt for what happened. Her sad, liquid eyes project the grief that Ebele never shows. She wants desperately to return to her native land but will not while Ebele finishes school.
"I won't leave her here with these three children alone," Miriam says. "She can't make it."
Ebele and Victor are still married. Ebele says the marriage is over, but she has neither the money nor the time to worry about seeking a divorce now.
Ebele has stayed in touch with three Nigerian friends in the United States, including Chinelo Azuka, one of the few to visit after the attack. Victor's Nigerian friends have avoided her. His family has made no contact. Azuka says they have shunned Ebele because they believe she is to blame for the attack.
"A lot of Nigerians feel like she is just flitting around with different men doing whatever she likes," Azuka says. "They felt like her husband has been an especially wonderful man, a quiet man, a very nice man that did everything to provide for her. They believe that he bought a house for her. They believe that he bought the car she's driving. They believe he is doing everything for her. And look at the way she treats him. So that is their belief."
Ebele has a new circle of support. She is not working, so she has little income. Charitable donations have helped her keep up with her mortgage payments. Her children qualify for scholarships and subsidies for preschool and summer camp. The family takes food stamps, and Ebele, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, draws a small disability check from the federal government.
She is not comfortable receiving these handouts, which is one reason she is finishing her studies so quickly.
Ebele also draws strength -- and financial help -- from her former co-workers and church friends, who brought the family months of meals and groceries, repainted the bedroom and replaced the carpet after the attack.
Throughout her ordeal, Ebele has complained rarely. The little stuff frustrates her, such as trying to open the cold medicine. She is weary at the end of most days.
But mostly, she is too busy putting one foot in front of the other to think about her sorrows. She also claims to have few. She smiles widely and giggles a lot. She dances every night with her children and mother. She relishes the freedom that she felt she never had during her marriage.
"If losing my hands is the price I must pay for happiness," she says, "it is a price I am willing to pay."
These days for Ebele, happiness is in the routine. She arrives home exhausted, takes off her prosthesis, snuggles her children, eats a quick salad for dinner.
As the kids head off to bed, she takes a seat at the computer to start her homework, donning the headset she uses with the voice-activated software. It doesn't always understand her soft, Nigerian-laced words. But that doesn't faze Ebele for long. She sighs wearily every time the computer goofs. Then she laughs.
And then she carries on, free.
Staff writer Amy Gardner can be reached at 829-8902 or agardner@newsobserver.com.
At August 30, 2005 3:16 PM, Anonymous said…
[quote]"A lot of Nigerians feel like she is just flitting around with different men doing whatever she likes," Azuka says. "They felt like her husband has been an especially wonderful man, a quiet man, a very nice man that did everything to provide for her. They believe that he bought a house for her. They believe that he bought the car she's driving. They believe he is doing everything for her. And look at the way she treats him. So that is their belief." [/quote]
The sad part is when divorce happens among Nigerians the woman is usually believed to be at fault…. My goodness! He just maimed the poor woman for life and they still blame her!!! It is incredible. Plus the assumption is always it is the man that owns the home, the car and everything, even when it makes no logical sense. This women must endure mentality.....God save us women from it.
At September 02, 2005 10:00 AM, Anonymous said…
This murder also happened in America, and the two were not married.
Any marriage of any kind can be happy or tragic. It depends on the persons in it.
Murder Conviction Caps 'Waste of 2 Talented Lives'
By Ruben Castaneda
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 9, 2005; B04
Abere Karibi-Ikiriko's present appeared sterling, and her future seemed limitless.
She had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average at the Howard University College of Medicine, where she was a fourth-year medical student. She was well on her way to earning a combined medical degree and PhD. On Jan. 15, she was in her Capitol Heights home, preparing for a flight to Austria to attend a Nobel Prize conference.
A few hours later, Karibi-Ikiriko was locked up in the Prince George's County Detention Center, accused of fatally shooting her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Okechukwu "Will" Ohiri, 26, a fellow medical student. She had called 911 and reported, "I shot him."
During a three-day trial last week, prosecutors alleged that Karibi-Ikiriko, 27, fatally shot Ohiri because she believed that he was seeing prostitutes. Karibi-Ikiriko testified that the gun went off accidentally when Ohiri grabbed it from her.
A Prince George's jury convicted Karibi-Ikiriko yesterday of second-degree murder and using a handgun during a felony. The jury, which deliberated for about four hours over two days, acquitted her of premeditated first-degree murder.
Karibi-Ikiriko laid her head on the defense table moments after the verdict was announced, a prosecutor said.
She faces a possible sentence of 50 years in prison. Circuit Court Judge Richard H. Sothoron Jr. scheduled sentencing for Sept. 9.
"It's a waste of two talented lives," said Prince George's Assistant State's Attorney I. DeAndrei Drummond. "Two lives were ruined in a second, in the time it takes to pull a trigger."
Simon Ohiri, the father of Will Ohiri, traveled with his wife from their home in Chicago to attend the trial, which ended Friday.
"Even though we are happy that she is found guilty, it still doesn't bring my son back," Ohiri said.
James N. Papirmeister, one of Karibi-Ikiriko's attorneys, said: "I think she should have been 100 percent acquitted. She doesn't have a violent bone or nerve in her body."
Karibi-Ikiriko, born in New York of Nigerian descent, was an unlikely murder defendant.
During two hours of tearful testimony, she described her academic achievements and her tumultuous romance with Ohiri, also of Nigerian descent.
In 1995, she enrolled at the University of Missouri as a biological sciences major.
In 1997, she founded the Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation to educate Nigerian women about the perils of female circumcision.
Two years later, Karibi-Ikiriko was named one of the top 10 undergraduate women students in the country by Glamour magazine. In the magazine, Karibi-Ikiriko said her goals were to obtain her medical degree, then to work as an anesthesiologist in poor, rural areas. "I feel like I'm on a journey toward improving the world," she said.
After working for a pharmaceutical company, she bought a house in the 5100 block of Heath Street in Capitol Heights, and in 2001 enrolled in Howard University's medical school.
She met Ohiri during her first year of medical school, and the two started dating the following year. Karibi-Ikiriko testified that she fell in love with him.
"He was a very nice guy. He was always there for me. We had some problems in our relationship," she testified. Karibi-Ikiriko testified that Ohiri sometimes forced her to have sex.
The two began a cycle in which she would break up with him, then he would write her love letters, and they would reconcile until the next breakup, Karibi-Ikiriko testified.
In July 2004, while they were broken up, Ohiri rented her basement, Karibi-Ikiriko said. Ohiri insisted on signing a lease so she wouldn't be able to kick him out, she told jurors.
About 7 p.m. the day of the shooting, Karibi-Ikiriko went to the basement to do laundry, in preparation for her trip the next day to Austria, she testified.
Ohiri arrived and tried to talk to her about reuniting, and she angrily rebuffed him, Karibi-Ikiriko testified. Ohiri went upstairs and returned holding her handgun, she said. She said she had bought the gun for protection because she often heard gunshots in her neighborhood.
Ohiri directed her to a couch, sat next to her and pulled up the long nightgown she was wearing, Karibi-Ikiriko testified. He put the gun on a cushion, and she grabbed it, she said.
Karibi-Ikiriko told jurors that Ohiri grabbed it back and that the gun went off, fatally wounding Ohiri in the chest.
During cross-examination, Assistant State's Attorney Leslie Andrews Booker suggested that Karibi-Ikiriko was angry about an incident in Puerto Rico in which she and Ohiri hired a prostitute for a threesome but the prostitute had sex only with Ohiri. Karibi-Ikiriko initially denied the incident, then said it upset her.
At September 02, 2005 11:11 AM, Anonymous said…
I read the article pasted by Mr. Adujie and it was heart wrenching. One of the things that I had done in my spare time was provide legal conseling to African Women living in the Southeastern USA.
Story after story-- I was aghast at the subculture of violence in our communities here in the USA
While I was too emotionally drained and gave up that volunteer role after a while.. The statistics we kept were alarming....
It was amazing that the women who were brought in from Nigeria by Nigerian men ended up being the majority who got very abused in the process and surprisingly used the system better than women who were long time residents in the USA.
They were more apt to seek legal help and assistance from our teams and always sought to sever ties completely from the abuser.
In stark contrast the long term residents did not use the system and we recorded a few deaths from domestic violence including two shootings in one year alone!!
The statistics are startling and we determined there is a subculture of violence in the African community here in the USA.
The other Attorneys and myself were at a loss as to explain why?
The only other group with such high numbers were the puerto Ricans and Dominicans...
My colleague and I were in divorce court with a Nigerian woman who could not hear (her husband had literarily beaten her deaf) and this had been going on for years.
She had not told anyone and even sought to keep the evidence out of court. She was an engineer and worked for the state but did not have access to her own funds and only sought help after her daughter's school reported bruises on her and the erratic behavior of her child to the authorities.
This ex-husband has since promptly remarried (a young woman from Nigeria) and I am told that this new wife is walking around masked by a shawl.. no doubt trying to hide her own bruises)...
I am still at sea as to why this abuse persists in Nigerian/African families here in the USA and why majority of women and men condone it?
Is there some cultural link between abuse and Africa?
If anyone has any insights I would really appreciate it.
By the way, I quit counseling after a client was taken to Nigeria and killed by her husband.. he called and told my colleague.. but there was insufficient evidence to prosecute here and no cooperation from the Nigerian authorities. She was a delightful, kind woman.. and it seemed that even though she was brought to the USA by him.. her only crime was that she embraced the country and was trying to better herself. She had also refused to join some Nigerian groups in the state because she said they were little fifedoms that wore herself and her children out with trying to keep up with the imagined financial successes of members of this group).
She was 42 and is survived by 2 children.
At September 03, 2005 4:03 PM, Anonymous said…
Another useless, muckracking article seeking to generate controversy. Shame on u, Naija Diplomat.
At September 09, 2005 5:13 PM, Anonymous said…
It’s high time the tribes who still practice this ridiculous act understood it can't work. I mean, marrying s'one for your kids. Comm'on now! If the parent(s) love the person so much, let them either adopt him/her or even marry him/her. As for guys who go home to marry, I have always believed it's only men who are not where they wish to be that do that. I can understand if y'all were dating before he/she left (women do it too) and it just never faded...even that can only work if y'all were apart for like a year or so. It took me a while before I started dating Naija men just because a lot that I knew(ow), friends and uncle's friends, stated they could not marry Naija women here but could date them while some said they could not date them but would "have" to marry them. I asked one once why he "has" to marry them and he looked at me like an idiot that he is. Stating that, "that's what I'm supposed to do, I can't take an "Akata" to my mother" I tell guys like that, I pray you never see a Naija lady to marry you. And to the guys who go home to marry, I tell those I wish no Naija girl here would marry them.
I know one, he had this Naija girl that he stringed along for 3 years because "she throws down in the kitchen with her efo and egusi and goat meat and amala" Lo and Behold! This dude went to Naija to bring a lady he knew back in his Polytechnic days. Believe you me, he would not let his friends see this lady for like 2 months because "she is still skinny" and not classy enough for him. How can he not know that he is the one with major issues? He is the one with major insecurities and unaccomplished loser's syndrome?
Anike B
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