Flour Mill

Sex in a prude city

Fade in

Only eight years ago, just a little stroll from the highway, a brothel stood in this prude little city like a poisonous mushroom. It made all kinds of men—underaged & overaged, married & single; curious secondary school students & regular undergrads—converge at the same point. The only other thing with such power is wedding party jollof rice; an honorary mention, at least among the younger demographic back then, was PS2. Anyway, back to the brothel and the brothers who ran it.

From what I gathered, it was run by three brothers who, after the death of their father, expanded the business beyond its previous scope by erecting new inlets to accommodate more guests. There was money to be made, sex to be sold, and police to be bribed. 

This place was known after the establishment opposite it, which also doubled as a checkpoint: Flour Mill. 

There was nothing spectacular about the dilapidated building from the outside. Yes, sex workers lined the pavements, cajoling men to patronize them. But, so what? There were no kekes back then, so the streets stayed dark—the only noise being popular songs being played from the speakers in the building, where drinks and drugs circulated in hands first, and systems, second.

In earnest, it was a drinking parlour. But we know that men love sex more than they love women and would gladly pay for sex without any form commitment. So, things morphed; business changed and the street came alive, a low-slung Sodom and Gomorrah, if you will.

I mostly heard stories from my classmates in secondary school who’d scaled the fence at night, a condom in their back pocket, to go and pay for an hour or two with these women. What does it mean when teenagers are slipping out of boarding houses to patronize sex workers?

In no time, the government, troubled by the incessant indecent complaints or to make an iron fist move as second-hand substitute for social justice, demolished the building, and some of the women set up shop at Atekong.

It might seem relevant at this point to talk about the laws governing sex work in the state. The police, far from their job description as always, sometimes accost the women for levies—which is illegal; everything about buying and selling sex is illegal in Nigeria—in the absence of which they suggest payment in kind. It’s evident the role of the police in Nigeria is not to fight crime, but to assist it, and assault those who get in the way of the police being criminals themselves. But I digress.

In Calabar no one is upfront about sex or they pretend to be offended when the matter is brought up. Maybe “no one” is too large an umbrella; so let me say, people are either vulgar or prude and the prude outnumber the vulgar.

Of course sex is rampant. That’s not up for contention—motel staffs can attest to this fact. Funny enough, prostitution was even more prestigious back then than it is now. It was one way for women to attain freedom and be the way she wanted, not according to the state’s or her husband’s dictates.

If the city is rife with sex, what then prompts the scorn from the people and action from a government that’s often dormant concerning public complaints?

Questions, questions, questions.

Fade out.