Society
The island where even ministers beat up their wives
Published 29 November 1999
According to the Mirror, the most popular weekly journal in Trinidad and Tobago, the prime minister of that country, Basdeo Panday, recently addressed a huge crowd at a gathering to celebrate the Diwali festival. (More than half of Trinidad's population originated in India.)
The PM chose domestic violence and sexual harassment as his theme. He boasted of his government's recent Domestic Violence Act, which allows a woman to take her husband (and vice versa, I suppose) before magistrates to get an order preventing him from visiting the marital home. Apparently the act has increased the number of murders carried out by men upon women. So the PM pleaded with the men in the audience to treat their women with love and care . . . and then warned the women that, at times, they bring violence upon themselves by their own behaviour.
Perhaps this was a flashback to four years ago, when, during the election campaign, Panday was summoned to appear before a magistrate for alleged indecent assault on two of his secretaries. Apparently the "Silver Fox", as he is affectionately called, would invite one or the other of his secretaries to climb a ladder to fetch this or that file or book way up the wall, and then the PM would take the opportunity to allow his hands to drift, roam and fondle.
The magistrate was so terrified that he would telephone my home from Trinidad and leave messages like, "Darcus, it is eight in the morning Trinidad time and I am alive". Eventually, he left the "not guilty" verdict in an envelope and bolted for England, where he currently lives. Laddermania became part of the lexicon of the island state.
In the same issue of the Mirror runs the front-page headline, "I am the real victim". Kelly Le Gendre, a transsexual, took young Kevin Vialva before the court, and asked the magistrate to place a restraining order on him. Kevin, it was alleged, was physically abusing him/her, a lover of nine months. The magistrate held that the Domestic Violence Act did not cover violence between two people of the same sex. The question arises: did Kevin know whether Kelly was or was not a girl? Kevin insisted, even after nine months as his/her lover, that he was ignorant. Kelly insisted she had told Kevin, whose response was "any port in a storm". The scandal goes further. Kevin is a relation to the maternal side of my family and the Princes Town Magistrates Court is a spit away from the cemetery where granny was buried. She must have flipped in her grave.
Another Mirror headline says that Indar Jagga, a sugar-cane worker, was so drunk he could not say how his wife had died. He explained to the reporter that they drank rum without limit every weekend and that he would always "beat her up". Finally, she died, but fortunately the postmortem revealed she had died of respiratory failure. Jagga complained he could not go to the funeral or the wake because his wife's family had promised him an early grave. The truth is that Jagga, too, was under a restraining order. When asked why his wife allowed him back in the house, he replied: "She like rum."
Take this for another headline: "Student, 9, escapes murder." Apparently, young Vashish Ramontar's father chopped his mother to death and visited the primary school to kill Vashish before committing suicide. He was being cuckolded, it seemed, and "could take no more", according to the Mirror.
All of this is in one issue of the weekly journal. Panday is finding this issue difficult to negotiate. It is common knowledge that a couple of his ministers are regular women-beaters. One of them says: "Ah mean ah only gi the girl a couple lash" ("I mean I only hit the girl twice"). When confronted with this, the PM said he needed concrete evidence before he could act. Two black eyes, apparently, were not enough.
I spoke to a reporter from the Mirror and asked whether this was a one-off issue. She replied that, any week of the year, they could run an entire issue of stories of domestic violence. They had included so many stories in one issue to illustrate the prime minister's speeches; at least ten others didn't make it. It's a helluva place.
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