A CONTINENT DARKENED by PREJUDICE

I caught up with a recent contribution to the Channel 4 documentary strand, Dispatches. The film was called Africa’s Last Taboo and it may still be accessed, but not for much longer, at www.channel4.com/program#374C56 so do not delay. In the programme, which was filmed, produced and directed by Robin Barnwell for Insight News TV, African-born Sorious Samura visited several countries on the African continent, seeking evidence of the new militancy against gay people. It was clearly not hard to find.

In four African countries, Sudan, Somalia, Mauritania and Nigeria, male homosexuality can attract the death penalty. In two thirds of countries on the continent, homosexual acts are illegal. World attention has lately been attracted by the fundamentalist stance of many of the African bishops towards moves to liberalise the position of the Anglican church on homosexuality; by the proposal to introduce swingeing anti-gay laws in Uganda (including penalties for failing to report gay people to the police, a recipe for a culture of smear, slander, vengeance and vindictiveness); and by the case of two gay men in Malawi imprisoned for fourteen years and then pardoned after personal representations by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon.

Anti-gay rally in Mbale, Uganda

Barnwell and Samura were filming before the Malawian case came to court and they covered the men’s release. A condition of the pardon was that the pair live a considerable distance apart. One took to the bottle, reckoned he had found a woman friend and, refusing an interview, was last seen weaving pathetically into the bush. The other was luxuriating in his unexpected freedom but the prospects are no better in Malawi than elsewhere in god-fearing Africa.

It is clear that religious bigotry is fuelling this cruel outbreak of witch-hunting. Prominent in the campaign to bring greater oppression to Uganda is Bishop Julius Oyet, the Vice President of the Born Again Federation of Churches, which claims four million adherents in Uganda. Oyet’s preaching style makes Elmer Gantry look like a wimp. “Now listen to me” he bawled. “The sodomy people, the homosexuals are even more foolish than dogs. There’s no female dog that mates with a female dog. There’s no male dog that lusts after a male dog. Even animals are wiser than homosexuals. Do you hear me?”

Oyet knows as little about dogs and other animals as he knows about people. Anybody idly watching dogs in the street will soon see that he is an ignoramus. The preacherman continued: “We do not condemn homosexuality just because we are Africans. We condemn homosexuality because it is written in the holy book. The Bible tells us, according to Leviticus chapter 18 verse 22, ‘You shall not lie with a male as a man lies with a woman. It is an abomination’. I want to invite you to declare no to sodomy, every one of you, I want us to say today ‘Uganda says no to sodomy, Uganda says …’ …” and so on endlessly.

There are a number of matters I would have liked Samura to raise with Oyet. For instance, homophobes routinely quote Leviticus, and selective quotation from scripture has been an easy crutch for bigots since the texts gathered in the Old Testament were first circulated. It’s actually Leviticus 21:13 that really puts the boot in, including the death sentence for men who “lie with” other men. But in fact almost the whole of Leviticus 18 is concerned with rulings against “uncovering the nakedness” of various classes of person and then, in verse 20, against “lying carnally with thy neighbour’s wife”. I would venture that such sins are far more frequently committed among Oyet’s flock than the one that preoccupies him.

Sorious Samura

Elsewhere in the Old Testament, we are instructed that “every man child among you shall be circumcised” [Genesis 17:10] and that "whosoever doeth any work on the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” [Exodus 31:15; not my italics], which could certainly tie up a few courts all around the planet in trying to determine what exactly constitutes “work”.

And then there is the matter of sodomy. This is not exactly the only sexual act that men can and do commit together, nor is it the sole prerogative of same-sex couples. Indeed, Bishop Oyet must very well know that sodomy is by far the most widely favoured method of “contraception” practised by men on women right across Africa. Anal penetration is also much the most common route by which the HI virus travels. And this is precisely why Aids is pandemic on that continent, though not among gay men. Samura might have pointed this out.

If Oyet has an aversion to sodomy, he should turn his attention to heterosexual sodomy, about which education on safe practice is desperately needed. Samura, interviewing a gay sex worker who is HIV positive, might usefully have made that point too, rather than half-heartedly excusing the guy because he is the sole supporter of his six year-old sister.

I would also have asked Oyet what I always ask the supernaturally deluded when they invoke scripture against anal intercourse. “If your god did not intend penetration of the anus,” I should have enquired politely, “why did he in his infinite wisdom make the anus an erogenous zone?”

At a rally, Oyet literally blew his own trumpet and then bellowed: “Our children today are being deceived by the West to buy them, to give them school fees, so that they can be homosexuals”. What in god’s name does that mean? Oyet is so obsessed with his mission that coherence goes out of his mind. Later, he told Samura that homosexuality is “an external economic manipulation, economic colonialism”. It’s an old trick to blame foreigners for what you dislike but if Oyet took the trouble to read history he would soon discover that homosexuality has been endemic in every culture and every community and every recorded age of humanity. As Gerald, a smart, articulate gay activist in Uganda, observed drily, it’s homophobia that has been imported from the west, not homosexuality.


Bishop Julius Oyet

But of course this tide of homophobia is not fuelled by reason among any of the population, let alone the clerics. Declared a Kenyan described by Samura as “well-respected locally”: “I don’t care if it’s my own brother, my own son, I will burn him”. This is a mindset in which murder is less troubling a notion than whatever sexual insecurity or fear of loss of control informs him. The leader of a women’s group cried, to noisy approval from her sisters: “Where are women going to go if men are marrying men?” Well, think about it, dear. Are all men marrying men? Is this really as big a problem as you make it seem? And anyway, where are men going to go if women are as ugly as you? I don’t think that’s a more offensive question than your own.

Gay people in Africa inevitably talk of going underground. Here is another quotation: “There comes a time, as it came in my life, when a man is denied the right to live a normal life, when he can only live the life of an outlaw because the government has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry upon him. I was driven to this situation, and I do not regret having taken the decisions that I did take. Other people will be driven in the same way in this country, by this very same force of police persecution and of administrative action by the government, to follow my course, of that I am certain”.

Those lines are not from the Africa’s Last Taboo programme. They were spoken on the same continent but a long time ago, almost fifty years. They come from the plea in mitigation offered at his trial by Nelson Mandela before he was jailed in 1962, initially for five years. I could have quoted almost anything from Mandela’s hour-long address; all of it pertains to a person’s right to lead a free life by his own lights and according to his own nature in the country of his birth. The superstitious confusion and brutal oppression meted out to gay people by authorities across Africa is no more nor less enlightened or moral than the arguments used by colonialists and racists to oppress Africans under apartheid. Today, South Africa grants freedoms to gay people that set a standard for the whole continent and are more progressive than in almost any country anywhere in the world, including Britain. South African gays have full rights including those of marriage, adoption and the option to serve openly in the military and they are statutorily protected from discrimination in all and any circumstance. This is one of the greatest legacies of Mandela’s presidency. Every African government should be obliged to justify itself against the record of their land’s most beloved figure.