When Vladimir Lenin claimed that there are decades in which nothing happens, and there are weeks in which decades happen, he was not familiar with our game because here, where I call home, everything happens everywhere all at once. There never is a dull fortnight in Tanzania.
We are constantly embroiled in controversy, elevating the insignificant to newsworthy, fabricating scenarios to fill in the gaps, and at times, as necessity dictates, conjuring laughter out of tragedy. One could summarize us by that “Sihami Bongo” phrase we like, as in, for us, life peaks at good gossip and a Mange Kimambi-endorsed internet beef.
Of all the things that get us buzzing—except for the Simba Yanga rivalry, the annual CAG report, and the latest WCB scandal—nothing churns our public discourse more than private intimate media of women, particularly women of prominence.
It’s one of those rare moments when our Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram align in goal. From politicians to celebrities, men and women alike, grownups and teenagers, not many of us can be absolved of the crime of perpetuating revenge porn.
Merriam-Webster defines revenge porn as sexually explicit images of a person posted online without that person’s consent, especially as a form of revenge or harassment. Whether, at the time, the material was made with the subject’s knowledge and support, it only serves to blackmail the issue into performing further sexual acts, coerce them into continuing a relationship, punish them for ending one, silence them, damage them, or for the perpetrators financial gain.
Beyond spiteful ex-lovers and predatory voyeurs, revenge porn includes hacking hard drives, under-skirting, and the use of deep fakes where a victim’s face is overlaid on someone engaging in sexual acts. The seamless nature of this technology can make it hard for victims to convince observers it is not them in the video.
Swahili is yet to find a word for revenge porn, so our toxic alpha male version of Twitter calls it connection. Proper etymology as to when and how the term came to be is also yet to be determined. Still, it’s not on the Tanzania trends page if #connection doesn’t make a cameo occasionally. Only God knows where they drew the parallel from.
Throughout history, the patriarchy has been obsessed with keeping women under control. Evidence is everywhere, from literature as old as scripture where women have been vilified, shamed, discredited, and reduced to baby-making machines to contemporary works where grownup males get massive platforms to tell women stories like they understand the complexities of womanhood at the expense of female storytellers. Revenge porn is merely the continuation of the trend, only this time it is cyber.
According to Wikipedia, in the 1980s, Hustler magazine ran prints of naked women accompanied by their hobbies, fantasies and sometimes names. Some of the images were published without the women’s approval. By the early 2000s, with the growth of social media, users could share pornographic content about women in Usenet groups. And because there was not much regulations for the internet at the time, revenge porn could only grow, which it did exponentially as commercial pornography.
Tanzania was not spared from this intersection of sexual violence and technology. How could we be? We are a patriarchy, after all. Our taste in this fetish is mostly bent towards famous women and university girls. We maintain a database of photos and videos of women consensually recorded, secretly recorded, or self-recording performing intimate acts.
READ Mental Health Matters: Empowering Tanzania’s Well-Being Revolution.
We are so invested that, at times, there are graphics depicting child pornography and sexual violence facilitated by force, narcotics, or alcohol, with not much backlash. Though most of us would rather pretend otherwise, we are not complex enough to have other reasons for loving revenge than:
Misogyny: There’s a certain vulnerability one possesses when in love—a trust they place in their significant other that lets them open up with their most dangerous secrets or be wild so they can be loved for who they are. That sprinkle of dopamine compels one to do things that please their lover, like send nudity or accept to be recorded when intimate—something that they wouldn’t normally do, or even if they would, they wouldn’t want them out in public.
When that love ends or is out of betrayal, the toxic lover—in our case, men—usually seeks control or revenge by leaking those secrets and nudes. Here is where the problems begin. As a society, out of religious belief or culture, we assert women shouldn’t send nudes or allow recording if they don’t want them to end up in public. That, however, doesn’t address the scope of the entire dilemma. Rather than embrace the backstory and humanity of love, we, on purpose, ignore these complexities as they give cover to who we are.
To hold on to our innocence from the crime of sharing revenge porn and women degradation, we pretend that the victim forced us to watch her naked, that she knew the allure of seeing her naked was hard to neglect, yet allowed her nudes even if they were made without her consent. Absurd is what it is, but we believe it. After all, it is easier to blame women, be it for their rapes or the failures of men.
Further, built into the patriarchy is the hunger to keep women under. When a woman becomes excellent, we sexualize, fantasize, and make a sex symbol out of her, all so we may not feel so little. And if the chance to see her naked arises—after savouring her—we rise to shame, to malign, and to remind her that behind all that greatness is someone who belongs in the kitchen. Alas, revenge porn borrows from that tradition as old as civilization, that of stripping women naked, giving them a walk of shame as we stone them, and then labelling them as sluts.
Lack of freedom: Amidst all the chaos we enjoy, we lack the autonomy to question power entirely. We can only talk as far as the state allows, so we fill the remaining void with the simple medicine of gossip. Unproductive as it is, it works as a diversion from how hard life is as time passes. The story, in essence, gives us not only a distraction from our messy economy but also a scapegoat we can criticize with no fear of retribution.
I mean, why call out a minister for power outages, which is consequential, when you could blame it on low rainfall due to public indecency by women, which is inconsequential? Why protest police brutality, which is consequential, when you could talk about the anatomy a college girl displayed in a video she sent to her boyfriend, which is inconsequential?
Also, we cannot police what one does with their lover, provided it’s legal. Our job is not to take the joy out of love but to cherish and respect it because, for one, we have all done some crazy things for love, and two wrongs do not make a right.
Unsurprisingly, we know precisely what we want to achieve with revenge porn and are nevertheless proud. Primarily, we are just addicted, but most importantly and centrally, we are a misogynistic society, so caught up in her ways that rehab is not an option. What it does to our community is breed more misogyny and widen the gender gap, which, of course, is to the liking of men. For women, however, the stakes are different and higher. They need to be stressed.
At its core, Tanzania holds a backward view of sex, one that favours men. Here, sex empowers a man, makes one look macho, and, to an extent, accomplished. But a woman would be vilified for doing the same thing. She’s seen as impure, her worth decreasing with each new encounter from virginity, only to increase when she’s married.
Such a cycle constrains women within the expectations of men, setting standards for them to meet, and provided they deviate, how much stone they should be stoned with before redemption—if that’s even possible.
With revenge porn, the double standards become well-highlighted. A depicted woman usually faces public shame and humiliation, which often leads to powerlessness and mental problems, with the latter serving as grounds for suicidal thoughts, anxiety and long-term psychological social negative stigma, given that the explicit content disseminated may continue to disturb them throughout their lives.
Some victims report having difficulty forming new relationships and withholding back when in one as a defence mechanism. And if that is not enough torment, society makes it harder for them to keep or find a job whilst stalking and harassing them.
Most of us also may not know this, but some reports backed by speculation and needing more tests indicate that revenge porn has the same effects as ‘face-to-face’ sexual violence. However, what is drastically different about online abuse is the duration of the violation. Except for domestic violence, kidnapping, and torture, ‘face to face’ sexual assault commonly takes place in hours, whereas revenge porn often entails the ongoing re-victimization as images spread across the digital landscape to new audiences and are viewed multiple times by the same audiences for months or even years.
Many victims report having their image taken off one online platform, only to have it reappear on another. For some survivors of revenge porn, they never succeed at removing their appearance and have to endure the long-term effects of knowing someone is looking at their naked picture at any moment in the day.
The length of time that a person endures this kind of trauma has a significant effect on how mental health symptoms like PTSD will take hold, suggesting revenge porn victims might also have more extended trauma recovery periods than survivors of what therapists call single-incident trauma.
Our glimpse of hope against revenge porn that is the 2016 law has only gotten us so far. In typical Tanzania fashion, it meanders that it fails to address the actual cause. Any sort of image, video or other form of things of a pornographic nature is both physically and electronically prohibited, is what it says; however, trends.
Fundamentally, that law is there for moral guidance so we can pretend we are modest in our build and not wholly lost to the extreme theatrics of Western democracy. A closer look at the semantics used in the law shows that the executive curved it, thinking it could control what two lovers send to each other from the comfort of their rooms in the dark of night when they sext. It could try, but it would have to hack its entire population.
Again, you can try, but you can’t police who and how people choose to love one another because love always finds a way. Whether you’re bound by religion or tradition or just personal preference to stand against sexting and nudes, that doesn’t mean others won’t do it.
There’s comfort in loving someone how they want to be loved, or better yet, in the way you want; if grown adults consent to it, they will find a way to do it no matter what the old generation says. Modern love is made of such wildness and compromise, so the law should understand the changes of the times and who the real enemy is.
In a way, this is me indoctrinating you, saying it’s okay to send nudes if you’re comfortable. You can be vulnerable with your lover and love them whichever way you best can, in their love language or on your agreed-upon common ground. Now, I can’t promise you that they will be discreet and faithful to your love, but if they ever betray you and leak your nudes or dirty laundry to the public, I want you to know that it is not your fault, even if society blames you.
I want you to remember that wide acceptance of an idea does not prove its validity. I want you to remember that the real enemy here is patriarchy, so as opposed to change, it’s blaming you. You are a victim, and you deserve justice.
This is me telling society that you’re not in control of what raging hormones and the intricacies of love will make lovers do in their safe spaces. You do not possess the power to dictate how people choose to love their passion. The only control you and I have is that collective action of dealing with one that leaks another’s nudes, that punch we give to one that violates the privacy of others, the power to do damage control only. So enough with the mind games, let’s address the feasible.
