Nafissatou Diallo aka Ophelia and lawyer Kenneth Thompson
New York City, Monday, August 22, 2011
She told lies "great and small" (prosecutors)
Photo: Seth Venig/AP
Wait a New York minute! Between the long midnight of Gaddafi and the Republican outrage over Jon Huntsman’s “smackdown”(Michael Steele), newscasts made the time and the space to squeeze in packages on Nafissatou Diallo aka Ophelia?
This is an outrage that warrants a rant! And, by the way, "outrage" is a word that will often recur below...
I got no choice… I have to interrupt reading the gripping bursts of confusing and confused tweets streaming from Tripoli—one moment Saif al-Islam is nabbed; the next moment he’s flashing the damning V of victory at a Gaddafi-controlled hotel!—in order to jolt down these few lines about the debacle of the rape allegations Diallo made against DSK...
Well, let me back up a bit…
DSK scandal broke out to us in Kinshasa in mid-May via FM—Radio France Internationale (RFI), BBC, VOA, and their local echo chambers. Thanks to the constant rolling electricity blackouts in Kin, we were spared in my neighborhood, for a few days at least, the images of the indignities of DSK—manacled, manhandled, and paraded for all global television viewership to see.
As the saying goes, shit happens. And it was bound to hit the fan sooner or later for DSK. Sarko had already a full dossier compiled on his putative rival in the 2012 election. It is publicly rumored that a few years ago, when Sarko was Interior Minister, the Parisian “police des moeurs” (vice squad) had caught DSK "shagging" a sex worker in the backseat of his car in the Bois de Boulogne. The vice cops didn’t make a hoo-ha about the incident; they are alleged to have gone all hush-hush on the spot, but later on, transmitted the particulars to their chain of command, up to Sarko!
The man has a “reputation,” all right… but rape?
As I said, I didn’t see the actual footage of the infamy for a few days… Then one fateful night… around May 20 or 21, I think… Let me describe what transpired.
I’m sitting in the living room—slumped on the sofa. Taking full advantage of the 15-minute window of the erratic electricity in the capital to watch television. Stifling heat. The derisory fan whirling at full blast is useless—but its purring works as a placebo to mentally crank a few notches down the oppressive gluiness of the air. But the fan as a placebo isn’t working when it comes to the swarm of malaria-borne mosquitoes that buzz around in the tiny living room. I’m sweating profusely—though I just took a shower, a crime in itself as water is at times a precious commodity here. “Skeeters” vying for our blood. I wouldn’t mind being bitten, but the noise, the invasive attempts to get into my eyes, my mouth, my ears, are unbearable… Even if I had a mosquito net bubble around my body, the noise would still be torture…
I should be sitting outside. Though the air is still and muggy outside too, there could be a sporadic short breeze. In a short while though, I tell myself, when electricity would have vanished into the darkness where it came from...
Five women ranging in age from 18 to 45 are sitting with me in the living room. My cousin Anna, 25, is breading plants onto the hair of Suzie, 18, a neighbor; my niece Nadège, 18, is brooding because she’s missing her favorite Nigerian soap opera narrated in Lingala: I appropriated the only TV in the house to watch Euronews (I don’t care, I got to watch the news!); Suzie, 45, a neighbor, is telling Philo, 17, another cousin, for the zillionth time, the modus operandi of thieves of the central market.
All the while I was crossing my fingers for the electricity to last till the top of the hour so that I could watch the news.
And it was getting there. Two minutes before the top of the hour. The usual theme tune for the weather section preceding the news is playing while the Google map is flickering on the screen…
Then it happened, just after the weather—still breaking news after four or five days…
The chattering women in the living room go all of a sudden silent. We were all spellbound. Riveted to the small screen.
DSK suddenly pops up on the screen like a living nightmare.
DSK! Africa’s last chance at the IMF, according to the propaganda bombarding us ever since he landed the top job in one of the “Bretton institutions,” as the local media are want to call the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
DSK! Disheveled. Hands cuffed behind his back. Flanked by two beefy plainclothes detectives, all dressed up to the nines: these guys knew it was their 15 New York minutes!...
DSK… Fighting hard not to squint under the probing lights of TV cameras and the staccatos of flashes blasting all around him. DSK. Being eased into an unmarked police car by one of the suited detectives who unceremoniously puts the cup of his hand on the head of DSK. The detectives cram him in the backseat. Then, jump cut to DSK’s back as he’s pushed—quite gently, I must admit, but firmly—into a seedy police precinct. Then a loop, back to the beginning of the footage. The impersonal voice of the newscaster hasn’t finished with him yet. He continues to narrate the sordid affair over the same images he’d begun with!...
Chilling. The horror! The infamy! Rape! I was outraged!
Rape, DSK? In the United States of all places? Have you lost your marbles? You could spend a lifetime behind bars for that! That is, if you survive in the general population of an American penitentiary! Didn’t you watch Oz? (DSK is way too refined for Oz!)
Not Oz yet though. We are still at the level of Law & Order Special Victims Unit. For real! I can hear in my head the music that opens the episode and the ominous narrated intro: “In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad, known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.” (I recently heard that the producers of Law & Order have already slated the DSK case for the opening of the new season.)
What were you thinking, DSK? Are you “subconsciously” afraid of success, you, who are systematically trouncing Sarko in opinion polls? My indignation grows all the more intense as he is alleged to have raped a “pious African immigrant woman.” Then, all of a sudden, the electricity is cut off—accompanied by the usual collective rumor of impotent outrage coming from the entire neighborhood, which now fuels mine at DSK as well. “This government, really!,” someone screams from the adjoining compound...
I grope in the dark for the small Chinese contraption that passes for a transistor radio in this part of the world, and fumble with the dial to get BBC. It’s the same spiel, though here I get on top of the sordid facts the pontifications of the BBC Paris reporter who has now turned into a Pierre Bourdieu, psychoanalyzing the French elite, scolding the deleterious sociocultural milieu of the Parisian upper class! Is this reporting or punditry in psychobabble? Another strand of outrage is now stirring inside me…
By now, the 5 women had rejoined me outside. I’m so intent on listening to the BBC that I was unaware of the growing racket around me.
It turns out that the women are outraged. Who can blame them? Who, in her own right mind, can defend a rapist? A devil’s advocate maybe? But I’m mystified by the uncontrollable giggle of Nadège.
Wait a minute! What am I hearing?
Suzie: “I swear to God, she’s a sorceress! A shameless sorceress!"
Nadège (still giggling): “Had I been her I’d have told him, ‘Mister, the 500 hundred bucks you gave me ain’t enough, you got to cough up 500 hundred dollars more!’”
Suzie: “No… They should bring that Miss Goody Two-Shoes here. I’d throw her right into the raging nests of FDLR rapists in the Kivu. Then she’ll know what being raped is all about!”
Anna (aping Euronews report): “A pious African immigrant woman! These guys are all suckers! They bought her story!”
I was baffled… and that’s an understatement…
Now, fast forward to early July. I had just returned to the US when I discovered the YouTube interview of Mrs. Sanou Doussou Condé, a Guinean and a New Yorker too. I was shocked to find out that she had the same reading of Diallo's narrative just like my family and friends in Kinshasa. She didn’t—and had no need to—utilize the heavy Cartesian artillery of Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) to see through the whole caboodle of half-truths and outright lies of her fellow citizen. She felt it in her bones—again, it bears repeating here, just like my family and friends did in Kinshasa. I felt compelled to write a post on the subject on July 5, laying down my doubts about her, when almost everyone had already made up their mind about DSK: guilty as charged! BHL attempted to defend his friend and he was "electronically lynched," to use the famous phrase of Justice Clarence Thomas.
Why did I so completely misread Diallo while I had everything there in front of me, like an open book?
In that July 5 post I was quite furious at Diallo. I understand her now. And my anger has abated. Though I don’t think that understanding translates into forgiving her for ruining the life of DSK, and for bamboozling Kenneth Thompson, who looks and sounds like a good man, into believing her, and risking in the process his good name and his reputation. And thank God Rev Al Sharpton stood clear of this storm, as he’s hunkering down these days at MSNBC; otherwise, the good man of God would have jumped with both feet into this murky business too…
Thompson thinks that AG Cyrus Vance has no sympathy for his client. And hence, a special prosecutor should be appointed! A special prosecutor? Is Ken Thompson joking? In this economy? Wasting taxpayers’ money in lengthy frivolous investigations and lawsuits? Maybe Thompson is making all this noise because he knows that the more vocal and outraged he acts, the more certain a juicy settlement might be coming his way, via his client! Who knows? Maybe the judge would dismiss "the motion for dismissal on recommendation" filed by Cyrus Vance and either singlehandedly prosecute DSK or appoint a special prosecutor. In a million years…
I just said that I now understand Diallo. This is her story in a nutshell. According to the UN, in 2010, the total population of Africa was more than 1 billion people. If I posit that half of that population lived in indescribable squalor, I wouldn’t be terribly way off the mark. To put it mildly, such poverty necessarily begets desperate people. Or to put it bluntly, and still according to my estimation, you'd have half a billion sociopaths ready to suck anybody down to the marrowbones and the marrow inside to survive. Why have we spawned millions of internet fraudsters? As long as we have extremely hungry people in Africa—Oh God! the creepy Somali toddler I recently saw in a photograph screaming without a sound (according to the legend of the picture), who was like the living embodiment of Edvard Munch’s The Scream!—many more Nafissatou Diallos are bound to crawl out of the woodwork. In other words, just like those losers who blame their parents for their shortcomings, Nafissatou Diallo, "I submit to you," is a politico-cultural victim of African leaders’ malgovernance…
Our "tiny living room" in Kinshasa
Photo: Alex Engwete
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