fagg*t face, democratic tyranny: how the nigerian government’s homophobic laws normalize hate

By Nele Anju, AFROPUNK contributor

“The conclusion one is forced to draw, after this brief summary of the laws affecting the LGBT community in Nigeria is that the law does not understand the meaning of human sexuality,” –  A Summary Of The Anti-LGBT Criminal Laws Of Nigeria, by Legal Koboko. (Kito Diaries, March 2018).

“We all have our different areas and spheres of influence and we must utilize them effectively,” – Peter Okeugo, Human Rights Activist.

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Towards the end of summer last year I witnessed my first assault, or more aptly the fresh outcome of a merciless homophobia related attack carried out on someone else aside from me.

He lived in the cozy tenement building next to mine, was in an undefined, but emotionally wrecking relationship with me due to his self – cultured hate, a fetishistic outlook on his sexuality, and my many fragments of insecurities, typical of most Nigerian gay relationships.

At that time, I’d taken a hiatus from whatever amoebic cohabitation we shared, as I couldn’t stand his covetous and almost manic need to sleep with as many men as he could as though running out of a set time, one whose tocks he dare reveal to no one but himself.

And so they rang only in his ears, which isn’t something not hard to figure out because he was well at that point of intense pressure and scrutiny by family members and seemingly unconcerned spectators looking about for his female companion, at least if not yet a wife.

While the pressure mightn’t seem as serious when spoken or written about, having experienced this unfairness through him, I know what it feels like to constantly have to shear, tuck, alter, fix, refix, recheck, and spend most of the time getting society off your back.

The assault happened at night, by an alleged group of street boys (one out of his exotic, and daring tastes), who with one boy as a bait had lured many others. There was no actual number of boys who carried out this injustice, apparently because eyewitnesses had been too busy putting ahead to the issue while trying to be absolved of blame and association, as well as playing judge.

I first saw E, running out of his gate; bloody, bare-chested, dazed, unsettled, and screaming for help just as he had while he was being plummeted to the active attention of none in his flat.

I stepped out of his way, after managing to look past his eyes of the hugest pomegranate, and a chest bearing a dismal Matisse of bodily fluids let out without permission. I couldn’t stand it. His pain instantly seemed congruous, not that I was instantly reminded of those nights my brothers ganged up over me with belts and sturdy feet, it just felt familiar, it felt like I’d lived through it because in my way I actually have.

But in a way that cuts deeply because it was taken out by people who I was to feel safe with.

My body reformed itself in curlicues. Blood, rushed in quicksilver up and down in my head, while I felt two kinds of fears: one for him, in obvious ways and even beyond, and another for me that I’d possibly share from his cake because we-we have been seen together a time not too few.

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When my sister, and E’s co-tenants, who he had taken as friends began to talk about it, detail by detail, missing nothing out, emphasising his screams, the shuffle, the ways by which the perpetrators gained entry not just under their nostrils but before their eyes, the way he kept spelling out his pain to ears too concerned about their perception of ‘what’ he is, to have helped him out for who he is, which is a human being at the very least.

I wasn’t thinking about why nobody had gone to save him, maybe it crossed my sector without announcement, I really was too concerned trying to extricate myself, to say as many incriminating things as well, and find ways to renounce every memory anyone might have had of us together.

I wanted to know everything, yet keep to my space, but the former was what I found myself doing, and so I heard his friend-neighbor while dissecting E with the admirable passion of roadside motorcyclists analysing football and it’s related matters, I heard him when he said he’d always known E to be homosexual recounting with a spooky suggestion at espionage, the number of boys E brought to his flat, and my heart took idiosyncratic flips when he mentioned my name, but filed amongst those he said E tries to ‘seduce’ in the street.

I heard this man, with such authority, inspire a chain of slander.

Did you not notice he uses bleaching cream?

How he walks sef! (Although there wasn’t anything effete about E’s strides which has always been a lazy credential for identifying a gay person)

How he talks, with some sort of impudence, like he is bigger than he is…

Everyone had a thing to say, and although I hadn’t been planked, and booted, their hypocrisy cut in the most integral places, despite my temporary adoption of the said dissimulation.

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When a secular government concocts a malevolent law for something too innocuous to cause anybody harm, while leaning on religion and a culture we know only by precept and by a mostly heteronomative mode of existence, it points greatly to a morally shifty institution, one that clearly is yet to finish its necessary homework, and is also too sentimental to be decently objective.

In a fairly ideal Democratic system, the minorities have the right to protection, convergence, advocacy, opinions, and most importantly; existence. It is not enough to disregard the active existence of people relegated to the lowest rung of the moral, social, economic, and provisions of human basic rights ladder, just because the majority have an unanimous, and unfounded opinion of how such social flotsam should live their lives.

A life that when rationally examined doesn’t, and wouldn’t affect the majority of the Non-LGBT in any realistically vile sense.

This resistance tells on a conservatism that has been on a spree of corrosive damage, in which the larger number of society stymies any form of progress that might rouse them from an unquestioned, yet shabbily formed modus operandi of living.

It is exhilarating to know that Nigerian LGBT visibility has risen a great deal since the introduction of the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, in January 18, 2006, and its endorsement by the higher cabinet powers in January 18, 2007, which fell through due to series of factors springing from not just the politicisation of everything in the country, or the opposition by international Human Rights movements and activists such as David Mac-Allaya, but the utterly totalitarian implications therein.

In summary, the bill called for five years imprisonment for anoyone who ‘performs, witnesses, aids, or abets’ a same-sex union ( which may just be a relationship and not marriage). The bill also called for five years imprisonment for involvement in ‘public advocacy or associations’ supporting the rights of lesbian and gay people.

Considering this, it is safe to say that the government actually understood the existence of our rights, but were, and still are staunch in their insistence of ‘ridding’ the country of people who have never been given the time of day, or the right to pragmatic discourse, and defense to the subjugation of our natural prerogatives.

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With the effective auspices of social media, online blogs, websites, literature, film, and infinite conversations, washed, rinsed, dried, and re-soaked, the Nigerian LGBT community has in many ways grown from a largely formless fragment of aberrations, to -although yet to be defined-  gathering of flotsams off the Nigerian society’s unquestioned moral crookedness. Leaving our space from the precipitous margin of activities to breaking the ice of slipshod every da, young men and women sick to porousness fight back in the most constructive, blatant, witty, satirical, misconstrued and often controversial ways, all raising the ‘we are queer, we are here’ chant.

From everyday effeminate men making bold statements with pictures of themselves in ways contrary to society’s edicts on their Facebook timelines to irreverent tweets by incognito gay men about the homophobia induced corruption in the gay relationship circle, filled with assaults by fake MSMs, and intolerant perverts.

Every time I come on social media, there is someone who with a post talking about their homophobic ordeals and victories, subtly fights back at society’s incohate perceptions of the country’s gay population.

And while this is all in good stead, there is still the need to put ourselves together, it is imperative that we not only go about seeking the liberty to lead our private lives without violating the rights of other people but much more effective when done en bloc.

For most of the subtle and full-blown advocates both on the virtual and physical spaces, there always is a level of awareness informed by extreme experience(s), which being in itself a good reason, is one that should work well in urging the average gay person into an umbrella; a home, a place of safety, where a single message and propaganda will take a stand, and thereby give us a more dire representation. Whereby with our diverse weapons, we fight one enemy.

Why is this important? Because the country is ridden with people without important preoccupations that drive them to vent the abounding frustrations in the country on innocent people (I am not trying to justify homophobia here, just stating an observation).

Why do we need to erect an umbrella? Would we not seem like a sect or worse still-the yet again the crooked perception of everyday non-LGBT folks- a cult of dangerous humans, whose potential destruction eludes me, no matter how hard I try, (trust me I have).

And to the average queer person, being on an unfair part of the national table, it is important that we utilize that obscurity to learn the designs of our confinements. It would do us good, to grow above the average homophobe’s argument that homosexuality isn’t part of our culture, to dismantle the supposed un-Africaness of this natural endowment, as supported by this convincing essay by Bisi Alimi, because in truth it is part of who we are, but as with most colonial narrative, we have been made to disband our very sense of brother/sisterhood. And while some knowledge about this, most don’t.

Some have an idea of the Igbo’s practice of a woman marrying another woman so as to bear children for her, but would choose to obfuscate that due to an unwillingness to accept any change they feel they are not a complete part of.

From many comes this power, and confidence we need, I believe once we begin to have this conversation of broad inclusion, of empowering members of the LGBT community, educating persons with, organic, unquestioned homophobia, our plights would most likely sound more imperative to the government and all persons in power.

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When on January 7, of 2014 the former President Goodluck Jonathan signed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act into law, basically criminalising love, it also endorsed a lot of crimes against humanity, ones like E, like I, like the boys of Gishuri Village in Abuja, a month after the signing of the heinous bill, and many others unheard of, and most recently the case of perpetrators lurking around our dating spaces, where heinous crimes against humanity are being carried out without sanctions.

And if it wasn’t enough that to pragmatically examine this bill, will be upturning the most deplorable kinds of spite from the guardians of our home, who inadvertently encourage us to try out lives outside of our borders, but the sad truth remains that: to leave doesn’t always mean, to live.

The bill is not much different from the 2006 proposal, in line with colonial anti-LGBT laws, from section 214, 215, and 217 of the constitution, but without pertinent constraints on activism, and added to it are restrictions on any form of association, any form of being ones true self.

The bill is better dissected, and paraphrased for better understanding here, by Legal Koboko, one of Kito Diaries’ writers, which is one of the country’s foremost queer spaces.

From the meeting with former U.S president Barack Obama in June 2015, as part of a four-day visit, President Buhari’s stance has long since been clear, when his spoke person said,

“The issue of gay marriage came up here yesterday. PMB was point blank. Sodomy is against the law in Nigeria, and abhorrent to our culture.”

This not only tells of how little the president and a handful of politically equipped persons know of our true, non white-washed culture, but reinforces the flawed free and fair political system we claim to practice in the country, when issues that actually cost people their lives, emotional stability, health, and pursuit of happiness, are swatted off like a noxious fly.

I believe the government has a lot to do in changing the minds of Nigerians concerning the humanity of tolerance and acceptance, and the inhumane interpretation of homophobia, which with its list of perpetrations, should be made illegal.

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A few months after E moved somewhere else, I would see him in one of Lagos’ most popular markets, a bag behind him on one shoulder, his strides sure and unmistakable. While I’d feel hurt from our brief, raunchy union, I think about it now and wonder how many in his shoes have the wherewithal to survive another day, in our ever delicate, so delicate existence.