¶By Richard DABLAH
Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com
Some mornings arrive without sunlight, even when the sky looks clear. The day begins like any other, yet something in the air feels heavy, as if the world is holding its breath. I saw the video of Harriet Amuzu in one of those mornings. It came without warning, threaded through timelines, stripped of context, stripped of mercy. Her face was swollen, her voice trembling, and her eyes dim in a way that reveals a person who has learned to live with pain the way others live with routine.
I watched the short clip twice, then a third time, as if repetition would make it less unbearable. It did not. Each viewing revealed another detail: the restrained panic in her pause, the brief flicker of hope that society might listen this time, and the unmistakable fatigue of someone who has told her story before and been told to stay quiet. When a woman speaks of harm, the world often tells her to whisper.
Many will say her husband is the problem. A single, cruel man. A domestic dispute. A private matter.
But Harriet’s face holds more than the story of one man’s violence. It portrays a country that has trained itself to overlook pain. A country where screams filter through bedroom walls, and windows are quietly shut. A country where neighbours hear the thud of bodies meeting concrete and choose silence because trouble is inconvenient. A country where people repeat comforting lines about marriage being a battlefield and advise the woman to pray harder, submit further, and endure longer.
We often speak as if domestic violence erupts suddenly, as if it appears from nowhere. Yet Harriet was already trapped long before the first blow landed. She was ensnared in the invisible net of expectations that follow girls from childhood. The lessons are introduced early. A girl must hold a home together. A girl must protect the family name. A girl must endure what her mother endured. These lessons become a mental cage that women are praised for surviving inside.
There is also the painful truth that many men were raised in a drought of tenderness. Boys are taught to swallow fear. Boys are shamed into silence when they cry. Boys are instructed that authority is forged through dominance. They grow into men who believe love is a form of control, not compassion. When cruelty becomes a language, violence becomes a sentence.
Yet these men do not act alone. The state stands behind them with its own quiet complicity. Harriet was not confronting a man. She was confronting a structure. A system where police officers turn women away with the familiar instruction to settle things at home. A system where courtrooms have calendars so clogged that cases involving battered women drag on until hope dissolves. A system where social welfare offices operate without vehicles, without personnel, and without funding, yet are expected to perform miracles.
Politicians will talk about gender policy in their speeches, but they do not build shelters. They do not create rescue centers. They do not push for stiffer punitive measures. They wait for tragedies to ignite public outrage before taking action, then wait for that outrage to cool. And the cycle resumes.
Faith communities often echo this same cycle. People of the cloth speak of forgiveness in ways that fall heavily on the wounded. They encourage women to protect the unity of the home, but never apply the same gospel of endurance to their own daughters. Scripture becomes a restraint instead of a refuge. Harriet’s wounds are not simply flesh and bone. They are the marks of teachings that shaped her silence.
And then there is the moment the video ends. The clip stops, but life continues. A child learns fear by watching its mother live with terror. A workplace sees the quiet shifts in her behavior. Friends hold her carefully, uncertain whether a wrong word might break something inside her. The violence begins to seep into other corners of the world, leaving stains that cannot be scrubbed out. This is the kind of harm that grows long roots.
The nation has spoken about Harriet with shock, disgust, and sympathy. Yet beneath these emotions lies another truth, one that is much harder to face. A single man may have raised his hand, but a society raised the conditions that allowed him to believe he could. A culture that avoids the screams, that distrusts the voices of women, that praises endurance, that deprives boys of tenderness, that treats justice as a luxury.
I watched the video again in the quiet of the afternoon. The sorrow did not lessen. It deepened. Harriet’s face had become a mirror, reflecting all the ways this country has turned away from its own people. Her suffering is not a story that should fade after a news cycle. It is a reminder that violence thrives in the spaces where everyone looks away.
There is a Latin saying that lingers in my mind as I think of her:
*Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.*
All the hours wound; the last one kills.
The clock keeps moving for many women. Some are living in their wounded hours. Some are stepping toward their final one.
And the nation must decide whether it will keep watching in silence or finally intervene before another last hour arrives.
