SORO SOKE · BUTTERFLIES IN THE STORM

SORO SOKE

Sọrọ Sókè

Speak Up. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard.

There is a phrase in Yoruba that has been living rent-free in my chest for years. Sọrọ Sókè. Speak loudly. Raise your voice. Don't swallow it.

It became the rallying cry of the End SARS protests ,young Nigerians standing in the streets, refusing to be quiet about a system that had spent decades brutalising them. But what struck me most wasn't just the politics of it. It was how personal that phrase felt. How many of us have needed someone to look us in the eye and say: your silence is not dignity. Your silence is not peace. Your silence is feeding the very thing that is consuming you.

I want to talk about financial abuse. And I want to talk about why so many women stay silent about it — and what that silence is costing us.

The Lies We Were Taught About Silence

We were raised on a diet of silence. Not the peaceful kind , the kind that sits in your stomach like a stone.

"Don't air your dirty laundry in public." "Leave it for God." "A real woman is patient." "You'll embarrass the family." "Be the bigger person."

These phrases were handed to us by the very people who were supposed to protect us — mothers, aunties, grandmothers who themselves had swallowed too much. They didn't teach us silence because they were evil. They taught us silence because they were afraid. Afraid of what speaking would cost them. And so the pattern repeated. Generation to generation, woman to woman, the inheritance of keeping quiet.

But here is the truth they didn't tell us: silence is not neutral. Silence is a choice with consequences. And in the hands of an abuser, your silence is one of their most powerful tools.

What Financial Abuse Actually Looks Like

Financial abuse doesn't always look like a man refusing to feed his family. Sometimes it is subtle. Sometimes it is so woven into normal life that you don't even have a name for it until years later.

It looks like a husband who controls every naira that enters the house, giving his wife an "allowance" like she is a child ,even when she is educated, capable, and contributes to the home in ways that money cannot measure.

It looks like being prevented from working, or having your earnings taken and "managed" for you, or being told that a woman who earns her own money is proud and unsubmissive.

It looks like debt accumulated in your name without your knowledge. It looks like being denied access to bank accounts. It looks like a man spending household money on himself while his wife begs relatives for the children's school fees.

And perhaps most insidious of all ,it looks like being made to feel grateful for the little you are given. Like financial dependence is love. Like a woman who cannot survive without a man is a good woman.

This is not love. This is a cage.

Why She Doesn't Just Leave

When you ask a woman why she doesn't just leave, you are asking someone standing inside a cage why she doesn't open the door ,without realising that the cage was built specifically to make that door impossible to find.

Financial abuse is designed to trap. When a woman has no access to money, no bank account in her name, no employment history, no savings ,where exactly is she leaving to? Back to parents who may tell her to go back and manage? To relatives who will shame her for "destroying her home"? To a society that still asks what she did wrong?

The system that was supposed to be her safety net is the same system that kept her trapped. This is why financial abuse is so devastatingly effective. It doesn't just control what she spends. It controls whether she can imagine a different life at all.

The Angry Young Women They Call "Woke"

There is a generation of young women today who are angry. And instead of asking why , instead of sitting with the discomfort of that question , we have chosen to dismiss them. We call them the "woke generation." We say they have been corrupted by the internet. We say they don't respect tradition.

But what if their anger is not a personality flaw? What if their anger is information?

Many of these women watched their mothers live in quiet suffering. They watched brilliant women shrink themselves, apologise for their ambitions, hand over their salaries, ask permission to exist. They watched fathers who were praised for providing nothing but presence while mothers laboured invisibly. They went looking for answers their elders could not give them ,because the elders were too busy surviving to ask questions.

Their anger is not disrespect. It is disappointment. There is a difference.

Sọrọ Sókè ,Speak It Out Loud

The End SARS protest taught us something beyond politics. It reminded us that silence in the face of injustice is not peace , it is complicity. Those young people took to the streets and said: the thing our parents could not say, we will say. The thing they swallowed, we will speak aloud. Not because we are not afraid ,but because we have decided that our fear is no longer more important than the truth.

Women who speak about financial abuse are not troublemakers. They are not disgracing their families. They are not "too much." They are doing what should have been done long ago , naming the thing so it can no longer hide in plain sight.

Speaking up may not change things overnight. The abuser may not suddenly transform. The community may not immediately understand. But when one woman speaks, she reaches the woman sitting in silence who thought she was alone. She reaches the daughter watching from the corner. She plants a seed in soil that has been dry for generations.

You don't have to wait until you are completely free to speak. You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to begin.

Emotional abuse, physical abuse, financial abuse — none of it should be swept under any carpet.

We raise our voices collectively. Even if we don't see the change today,

let it be known that we stood against injustice.

Sọrọ Sókè.

0 comments