By Celestine Mel
Dillibe Onyeama, was the first black student to finish his studies in Eton College. He wrote a controversial book titled “sex is a nigger’s game”, to highlight the racial abuses that he suffered while schooling overseas. The book upended the seams of the school and earned him a ban from visiting. In 1976.
The title of that book came to mind tonight as I opened and watched the horrifying children-sex-tape currently making the rounds.
Those kids did nothing extraordinary given the amount of sex that we are assaulted with everyday. Sex sells. Truth or dare became popular from BBNaija. That show is rated 18+ but parents allow their kids to watch and giggle away. Naira Marley uses pure raw sex videos in his songs and children cram all the lyrics. Fuck that shit. Fuck that fuck. Fuck o’ fuck. Do that thing. Fuck this, fuck that. What did we expect? They would naturally try it out themselves. Very simple.
When we were kids, some spoilt children inscribed all sorts of profane graffiti on the walls of our secondary school. “Toto is good”, “coitus is powerful”, etc. Our imaginations and curiosity ran wild regarding the sources of those graffiti and their meaning. I personally checked them out. When I did, I felt nothing than pity for those deranged children whose parents missed preaching the Holy Bible and the words of life embedded in there, to them. They would not have written those words if they did not live in that world – the world of sex.
In our Sunday school classes, they taught us that the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life. They listed sin to include fornication, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness against someone else, worshipping an idol or another God, etc. From the get go, I knew that anybody who engaged in fornication would die. So, I stayed away until a bad girl induced me to sex in the University. My very first time was horrible. I hate the memory. The rest is history.
If we had our way, we would have tried sex at the _tenderest_ of age. But we had parents who soaked us in the gospel of Jesus Christ and the many injunctions against sinful acts. Sex was one of those forbidden acts. And I could not imagine myself burning in hell. So, I stayed away.
Yet I know some others in my class back then who were already having sex. They were the backbenchers – the broken bottles of my school; the good-for-nothing children of the wayward. I used to think that they would burn in hell within a short while. I never went close to them so that their sin may not infect me. We loved our God and our parents and trusted them to guide us properly. And it paid off.
In today’s world, sex is normalized. Parents have sex in front of their children. TV and radio shows speak about sex with no care about the age of the listening audience. There is profanity everywhere. So why is everyone trying to feel that the children at Chrisland School did anything bad? Have we checked out our children and what they do? How many parents are living life worthy of emulation by their children? How many churches preach sin and hell fire any more? How many Mosques deliver these messages to the congregation without a tinge of political or ethnic bias? How many people out there regard sex as sinful immorality? If sex is no longer immoral, then what is wrong if the kids have it all?
For me, the biggest tragedy is not children having sex. No. Children are wired to be curious and to experimental. The biggest tragedy is the adult population who sickly and stupidly share the pornographic content of minors having sex on the internet and social media. Those who push the share button to mass-circulate a video containing children having sex are more depraved and godless than those skillful consensual sex kids who were totally living true to the instincts of the environment they were born into. An adult who is not repulsed enough by the video to the extent of broadcasting it on social media, is a more dangerous animal to the society than the little kids banging away in a hotel room in Dubai.
At the end, the boy in yellow cardigan was complaining that the rhythmic vibration of the bed was depriving him of his right to peaceful sleep. He also mentioned that the ages of the two truthful and daring children are eleven and thirteen. To him, what was happening in the room was unacceptable. And he voiced it out.
He represents the other side of the story. He is a properly groomed child who was smart enough to know where to draw the line. He is my hero in the sex tape. His helpless outcry to his _sexful_ bedmates shows that Chrisland School is not Sodom and Gomorrah after all. He stood out and spoke out.
- Celestine Mel is a chartered banker and IT Projects Specialist. He writes from Abuja, FCT. @08088188805 on WhatsApp