People wishing to find excuse for their weakness before women blame Biblical Adam and his girl friend, Eve. But the story of Adam is a story of humanity with its strength and weakness. Glancing through the pages of history, it is difficult to find any subject that has puzzled the intelligence of mankind more than the subject of women and the mystery of their bottom power.
Women have destroyed the integrity, happiness and the vocation of a normal personality, yet most of us are absorbed by it, maybe in the hope that we have learnt from others’ mistakes, but more likely from a perverse positivism to hear of others’ misfortunes and comfort ourselves with the thought that they could never happen to us.
Women have triumphed over emperors and Caesars, brought White Houses on their knees and decorated celibate beds with illegitimate children. Power propels people to the centre but women decide how long one remains at that juicy stair. Women have made and marred heroes. A hero is great to the extent his sexual life remains unknown. With Sampson, David, and Solomon, we know that the best of us are not immune.
In the fifth century, one man brought terror and destruction to millions across the plains of Europe. Attila the Hun led thousands of bloodthirsty barbarians to torture, rape, and kill all who stood in his way. To acquire a vast empire he pillaged churches and monasteries, slew monks and virgins, and desecrated the graves of saints. Legend has it that Attila dipped his arrows in the juice of boiled embryos, drank women’s blood and ate his own sons, Erp and Eitil, after his wife served them to him in roasted honey.
But Attila was weak with voracious sexual appetite. He is said to have fathered over a hundred children with a vast number of wives. In Germany, Attila encountered St Ursula, the perpetual virgin and was smitten. He put his mission for another girl, Honoria, to one side- and proposed to the chaste pilgrim. When she refused, he killed her with an arrow and slaughtered 11, 000 of her pilgrim companions. On March 15, AD 453, he married a young beautiful German noblewoman, IIdrico who had vowed to make Attila pay for the murder of so many of her countrymen. What is known after a wedding of great feasting and drinking was that he retired to bed. By the morning, he was dead-an artery had burst and Attila had drowned in his own blood.
Though Adolf Hitler presented himself as hermit-like, celibate figure who devoted all his energies to the good of Germany, he had flair for teenage sex. He was involved with number of teenage mistresses, beginning with Maria Reiter who was 16 years when Hitler was 37. The 16-year old Geli Raubal, a daughter of Adolf’s half-sister, Angela made biggest impression on Hitler. Forced into an incestuous relationship, Geli could not contain it and later took her life. Geli wouldn’t be the last to be driven into violent death. The actress Rennate Muller threw herself to her death from a window in 1937 and Eva Braun attempted suicide at least once before her final pact with Hitler. However, it was Geli’s picture that Hitler kept in his bedroom in Munich and in Berlin until his death in 1945.
Mobutu Sese Seko was a cruel politician. But he was sexually helpless before beautiful twins, Bobi and Kossia, whom he later forced their hands in marriage. Financially, the twins might have benefited from the arrangement; but it is difficult to know how they felt psychologically as women, sisters and rivals, a rivalry that saw Mobutu’s downfall.
In the Central African Republic, Catherine – who was to become an empress as Jean–Bedel Bokassa’s Consort – was kidnapped on her way to school and forced into marriage at the age of 14 by almighty Bokassa. When she gathered the will and means to reject her fate, Catherine Bokassa left the country with her children, money and jewellery creating space for her husband’s overthrow in 1979. She never came back to the ex-emperor as he died a destitute.
Former President Francisco Nguema Obiang of Equatorial Guinea in spite himself was helpless before Monica Bindang after forcing her into marriage. A year after she fled, Nguema was killed in 1979.
In 1997, Bill Clinton’s presidency in US was marred by sexual scandal with Monica Lewinsky after Linda Tripp exposed them to the media. Clinton after denials admitted to be responsible but not guilty because to be sinful is to be human.
Islamic extremists cannot deny sexual urge. Osama bin Laden pleasured to the full at the time Lebanese capital was full of nightclubs, bars and prostitutes forgetting his strict Islamic upbringing. He was killed by US Navy SEALS surrounded by women in his hide out in Pakistan. Islamist suicide bombers are comforted with a promise of a handful of virgins in Allah’s paradise.
In Nigeria, the story is not different. General T. Y Danjuma was rumored to have dated the wife of slain General Aguiyi Ironsi and later Gen Ojukwu’s life prompting the Biafran Warlord to divorce her wife. Gen IBB‘s sexual life even went political. Asaba was given the capital of Delta state because of Mariam Babangida who hailed from there. The celebrated tyrant, Sani Abacha, died in the arms of mysterious Apple Ladies. President Obasanjo was accused by his own son of having an affair with his wife and fathering a child through the incestuous relationship.
Recently, the Biafra warlord, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu posthumously enlisted himself among sexually fallen heroes. In the will presented to Ojukwu’s family on Friday, November 30, 2012, the late Ojukwu identified one Tenny Haman as one of his children listing the children as Tenny Haman, Chukwuemeka Jnr, Mmegha, Okigbo, Ebele, Chineme, Afam and Nwachukwu. He allocated the newly mentioned daughter, the Jubilee Hotel located in Zaria, Kaduna State.
Reactions have thrilled the revelation. Ojukwu’s widow, Bianca, expressed shock at the disclosure of a new daughter in the family, whom she said had never been mentioned by her husband. Others have even questioned the genuineness of the will. The question is: is the will false because of discovery of Tenny Haman or the property allocated to Bianca. Twist it the way you like: Before Every Woman, No Man is Hero.
