In July 2004 a badly decomposed body, described by the media as that of “a black non-national woman”, was discovered in a black plastic bag on a riverbank in Co Kilkenny. Because she arrived as an asylum seeker in 2000 and – like all asylum seekers – had been fingerprinted, she was identified through the Garda National Immigration Bureau’s database as 25-year-old married mother of two Paiche Onyemaechi.
She turned out to be the daughter of the Malawian chief justice, and a lap dancer and prostitute. Because her body was found without a head by a local Kilkenny woman walking her dog, it did not take long for media representations to describe her as a “headless hooker”.
Writing in 2006, I described the tale of Onyemaechi’s murder and representation as a typical story of 21st century Ireland, standing at the crossroads between Ireland’s then globalised economy and its migratory realities.
As the daughter of an elite Malawi family, she escaped a state whose president has built a 300-room palace worth $100m while 11 million Malawians lived and still live on less than $1 a day. And as the mother of children born in Ireland before the citizenship referendum, she had leave to remain as the mother of Irish citizens.
Thirdly, working in Ireland’s thriving sex industry, she was most probably living in a twilight zone of exploitation and danger. Garda sources tell me that a lot of energy was spent on investigating her murder, though not much was reported in the press. Ultimately, her murderer could not be brought to justice, because he left Ireland.
I was thinking of Paiche Onyemaechi two weeks ago when the body of another Malawian woman, Rudo Mawere, was found in a suitcase on a Dublin city street – quickly to be described by the gutter press as a “body in a bag”. Like Onyemaechi, she was denuded of any humanity, becoming an object, a thing.
Mawere came to Ireland as a student; she studied human resources, worked as a care assistant in St Luke’s Hospital and was looking for a job as an au pair. She had apparently loaned money to Zimbabwean Jasper Taruvinga, and when she went to his city centre apartment to talk about the money, it’s believed that strangled her and dumped her body in a suitcase in a residential street. Again, the body was identified through her fingerprints.
I was distressed to learn that Mawere was my neighbour, living a few houses down from me on a busy street where many of the houses are divided into flats. She was a young woman like any other, studying, working and looking for work, apparently decent and honest and fun to be with. In this case, too, there will be no trial, as only five days after the murder, the main suspect Jasper Taruvinga fled to England and hanged himself.
I find it hard to forget Paiche Onyemaechi and Rudo Mawere. The former, however, has been long forgotten as yet another shadowy figure whose life, as former Irish Times editor Conor Brady wrote at the time, was removed from the experience of contemporary Irish life. “Living in the darkened world that touches on illegality, whatever happened to her had nothing to do with us,” he wrote.
I fear Mawere, too, will be forgotten, as are other victims of our patchy but strict immigration regime, which often abandons migrant women to their dreaded fate.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
