By Steve Osuji
THIS LONG INTRO…: Now this is trouble. Of course not from my good old long distance sis, Abike Dabiri, no. I fear sustained and unmitigated reprisals from the female folk… from far and NEAR!
I expect sneers and jeers from expected and expected quarters.
I am old enough to know that you don’t fool with the fair sex in matters concerning their vanity fair. A wise man knows to let well be. A wiser man learns beautiful terms of flattery and endearment.
But the crazy casanova learns how to apply such vacuous terms like a talented watercolourist: ‘oh, how gorgeous you are today, like a glorious rainbow,’ he would swoon.
‘Wow! It’s a goddess I am privileged to behold before me!’ This is the the kind of speech required and expected by our women folk and only he who could bring it on the best gets the cookies. Flattery is the main course of our sister gender one dares say.
WHERE’S OUR ABIKE? Now back to the delicate story of the day. Where’s our delectable Abike?
Upfront: one had known Abike Dabiri since the mid 80s. She had come to the UNILAG Mass Comm Department for postgraduate studies. She was already a rising star being a known face on national television even then.
Effusive, feisty and brilliant in a way work-study students are wont. She capped her fare with her Volkswagen Passat which she tried to upgrade into a jet by working a high tail to the poor car’s booth. She didn’t succeed much but she was distinct as she cruised about the hoity-toity Akoka campus of the time in her unique, white contraption.
We loved Abike. Everyone loved Abike – fellow students, teachers, workers! You couldn’t help but like her; she was uninhibited, personable and effervescent, seemingly to wear her heart all about her.
She didn’t have beauty of the classic type. Her visage had flared features – the nose, the lips, but she had those well compensated for by her lithe figure usually adorned with ‘bad’ Jean’s. To cut the story short, she was a denim queen!
Her image soared further after UNILAG when she became the chief reporter on FRANK OLIZE’S inimitable and highly successful NEWSLINE.
After her runaway performance at NEWSLINE, the sky was no longer her limit, she joined politics and won election into the federal house and now she heads the diaspora commission under the presidency, a portfolio she probably carved for herself having worked that niche as a legislator.
BACK TO THE BEGINNING: what wouldn’t a woman do for beauty? That thing has not been invented. It’s trite to say beauty is a woman’s fetish. It’s actually her goddess and object of worship. A woman who’s not into self-idolatry is one who has no mirror… ever seen a woman who has no mirror of any kind? Unless she cannot afford one but unfortunately, a mirror is a dozen a dime.
One also has a theory of one own to wit: the more more she has, the more she deploys to adorn her body. And there’s nothing a woman cannot do to reinvent, recreate and romanticize her body. Call it woman nature.
We recall a former first lady who met her Waterloo trying to redo or rather undo her tummy. She had sneaked abroad and had gone under the knife and never returned.
And age is no barrier. In fact, the older she is the more conscious she becomes about her body… it’s a lifetime obsession. It also has nothing to do with colour or creed or language, she is one universal being with her body… from age to age and season to season.
Modern medicine has recently given her a leeway, albeit a dangerous one, to remake herself in any manner she desires. No, in any manner she can afford.
Call it casanova medicine! Or what manner of man would specialize is remaking a woman’s boobs?! Or her bumbum!? You graft plastic and chips into the cleavages or the buttock to make them defy gravity!
You carve up the nose and allow a bit of bridge where there was none; you undo the lips and recast the eyes to make yourself better than God had designed. God creates, modern medicine recreates!
It is a subject of relentless intellectual enquiry to determine whether it is a matter of self-esteem, self-immolation, folly or sheer manic obsession that drives what seems like a jolly stroll into perdition. That’s beyond this column. Suffice to say that every woman is given to idolising her body…
Let’s close by saying that the inordinate quest for beauty by the women folk is the beginning of UNWISDOM! We love you the way you are… there’s indeed no ugly woman (or man), there’s only an ugly heart because beauty radiates and shines forth through the heart!
Having said all this, I ask again: WHERE’S OUR ABIKE?
▪︎Osuji is a columnist.