Survivor of domestic violence now teaches girls how to be self-reliant

Sasha Mbote got into an abusive marriage at the tender age of 18.

She escaped death by a whisker. Neighbours rescued her from her husband, who was nearly killing her after beating her for over two hours.

A survivor of gender-based violence, she is now an activist who speaks out against the vice while training and empowering women and girls all over Africa. She has touched the lives of over 10,000 girls in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa.

Sasha says she got into marriage due to peer pressure.

 “Everybody had a boyfriend, apart from me, because I grew up with very strict parents. So, at the age of 18, I got my first boyfriend.  I was so much in love, but I didn’t know he had narcissistic traits,” she says.

“Narcissists first isolate you. He would always put me down. Whatever I wore, he would always say something negative to say,” she says.

Her self-esteem took such a downturn that, whenever she looked at herself in the mirror, she would see an ugly face.

In public, her husband would pretend to love her; in private, things were very different.

No turning back

“Something I thank God; I don’t even have a picture with him. He would never even accept to take a picture with me. So I thank God because he was saving me, but he didn’t know that he was saving me. I would not even want to associate with him right now. He tries to text me, he tries to reach out, but once I am done, I am done and there is no turning back,” says Sasha.

“Once I was done, I would not allow him to touch me and it had been like two months. I was helping take care of his sick mother who was admitted to the hospital and was to be discharged the following day. She told me to go to sleep in his house.”

However, she was scared, but her mother-in-law persuaded her till she accepted.

“So I went and when he came, he got angry because I wouldn’t allow him to touch me. He bragged that he had a very beautiful girl and she was rich. I just kept quiet. He demanded that I cook for him and I refused.”

“I told him ‘you and I are no longer together, it’s only that your mother is a good person and she is sick and she sent for me to come; that’s why I came’. I think that was my biggest mistake,” she says, adding that her husband beat her for over two hours.

“I was embarrassed, I didn’t want the neighbours to know what was going on, so I persevered. I remember he tore his shirt and all the buttons fell on me. As he beat me, he was yelling ‘nobody will ever look at your face again’. I covered my face with my hands. He kicked my ear and I went down and he continued stomping on my head. At some point, he pulled me to the balcony and tried to throw me over.”

Knife

“I held on to the rails, all the while screaming for help. The house was on the second floor of the apartment building.”

“When he failed to succeed, he went back into the house and came out wielding a knife. ‘I told you today I am going to finish you’ said as he came towards me,” she recalls.

“I always tell everyone that I have never known how God saved me. I was standing, trying to strategise how to run away from the house. He came with a knife and it was pointed directly at my heart.”

“If he had managed to stab me like he wanted, definitely, I would have died, but I don’t know what God did. I think he was also drunk, so he missed and the knife struck the door jamb and got stuck there.”

‘Made it out alive’

As he was struggling to wiggle the blade out of the wooden frame, I managed to slip away and open the door, which he had, luckily, not locked with the key, because I would not have made it out alive.”

“And when I was opening the door, he came now and held my hand and the knife was pointing straight at my right eye and I just dropped a scream and neighbours came, and that is how I was saved,” narrates Sasha.

Some women took her to the hospital.

“My tongue was filling my mouth, I can’t even explain how swollen I was, and that was the end of that relationship; no man has ever touched me again. I decided to educate myself about these narcissists. I have been undergoing psychological counselling for the trauma.”

“So when I came to Tanzania and started to see young girls who are pregnant, and most of them didn’t have proper education, and I saw in Paris that blind people can become masseuses, I told myself, ‘why not?’ So I started to train them [to perform massages professionally].”

“I have more than 10,000 girls now, working all over Tanzania. I have some who have gone to Comoros, I have a few in Kenya that I have trained and who are working in three, four and five-star hotels.”

“It is the same in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Wherever I go, I try to empower girls, because I want our young girls to get married because they want to, not because they are running away from problems,” says Sasha, who, apart from her gender violence activism, runs businesses like Sasha Spices and Maridadi Tours in Zanzibar.

Empower girls

“That man regrets. Everybody in his family used to know me, but I can never go back to him. Never.

“After that, I stayed like two years and dated another man for five years. After that, I dated another man for more than seven years who, eventually, went to the US. As we were planning on how I was supposed to join him there, I realised that he had impregnated someone there.”

“It’s not like I have given up on love. I hate it when people tell me that I am still bitter from the abusive marriage and that I have not forgiven him.”

“I have forgiven him. But I am so happy that I do not want to compromise this peace,” she says.

“I empower girls and I tell them each one touch one; so each girl has to train like ten other girls from the village.”

“That is how the number grew. It’s not like I trained all of them. I train the ones I train and tell them ‘I need you to train girls from your village’ and I get them jobs,” she adds.

[email protected]