Article written by award winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled 'Why can’t he just be like everyone else?'
I will call him Sochukwuma. A thin,
smiling boy who liked to play with us girls at the university primary
school in Nsukka. We were young. We knew he was different, we said,
‘he’s not like the other boys.’ But his was a benign and unquestioned
difference; it was simply what it was. We did not have a name for him.
We did not know the word ‘gay.’ He was Sochukwuma and he was friendly
and he played oga so well that his side always won.
In secondary school, some boys in his
class tried to throw Sochukwuma off a second floor balcony. They were
strapping teenagers who had learned to notice, and fear, difference.
They had a name for him. Homo. They mocked him because his hips swayed
when he walked and his hands fluttered when he spoke. He brushed away
their taunts, silently, sometimes grinning an uncomfortable grin. He
must have wished that he could be what they wanted him to be. I imagine
now how helplessly lonely he must have felt. The boys often asked, “Why
can’t he just be like everyone else?”
Possible answers to that question
include ‘because he is abnormal,’ ‘because he is a sinner, ‘because he
chose the lifestyle.’ But the truest answer is ‘We don’t know.’ There is
humility and humanity in accepting that there are things we simply
don’t know. At the age of 8, Sochukwuma was obviously different. It was
not about sex, because it could not possibly have been – his hormones
were of course not yet fully formed – but it was an awareness of
himself, and other children’s awareness of him, as different. He could
not have ‘chosen the lifestyle’ because he was too young to do so. And
why would he – or anybody – choose to be homosexual in a world that
makes life so difficult for homosexuals?
The new law that criminalizes
homosexuality is popular among Nigerians. But it shows a failure of our
democracy, because the mark of a true democracy is not in the rule of
its majority but in the protection of its minority – otherwise mob
justice would be considered democratic. The law is also
unconstitutional, ambiguous, and a strange priority in a country with so
many real problems. Above all else, however, it is unjust. Even if this
was not a country of abysmal electricity supply where university
graduates are barely literate and people die of easily-treatable causes
and Boko Haram commits casual mass murders, this law would still be
unjust. We cannot be a just society unless we are able to accommodate
benign difference, accept benign difference, live and let live. We may
not understand homosexuality, we may find it personally abhorrent but
our response cannot be to criminalize it.
A crime is a crime for a reason. A crime
has victims. A crime harms society. On what basis is homosexuality a
crime? Adults do no harm to society in how they love and whom they love.
This is a law that will not prevent crime, but will, instead, lead to
crimes of violence: there are already, in different parts of Nigeria,
attacks on people ‘suspected’ of being gay. Ours is a society where men
are openly affectionate with one another. Men hold hands. Men hug each
other. Shall we now arrest friends who share a hotel room, or who walk
side by side? How do we determine the clunky expressions in the law –
‘mutually beneficial,’ ‘directly or indirectly?’
Many Nigerians support the law because
they believe the Bible condemns homosexuality. The Bible can be a basis
for how we choose to live our personal lives, but it cannot be a basis
for the laws we pass, not only because the holy books of different
religions do not have equal significance for all Nigerians but also
because the holy books are read differently by different people. The
Bible, for example, also condemns fornication and adultery and divorce,
but they are not crimes.
For supporters of the law, there seems
to be something about homosexuality that sets it apart. A sense that it
is not ‘normal.’ If we are part of a majority group, we tend to think
others in minority groups are abnormal, not because they have done
anything wrong, but because we have defined normal to be what we are and
since they are not like us, then they are abnormal. Supporters of the
law want a certain semblance of human homogeneity. But we cannot
legislate into existence a world that does not exist: the truth of our
human condition is that we are a diverse, multi-faceted species. The
measure of our humanity lies, in part, in how we think of those
different from us. We cannot – should not – have empathy only for people
who are like us.
Some supporters of the law have asked –
what is next, a marriage between a man and a dog?’ Or ‘have you seen
animals being gay?’ (Actually, studies show that there is homosexual
behavior in many species of animals.) But, quite simply, people are not
dogs, and to accept the premise – that a homosexual is comparable to an
animal – is inhumane. We cannot reduce the humanity of our fellow men
and women because of how and who they love. Some animals eat their own
kind, others desert their young. Shall we follow those examples, too?
Other supporters suggest that gay men
sexually abuse little boys. But pedophilia and homosexuality are two
very different things. There are men who abuse little girls, and women
who abuse little boys, and we do not presume that they do it because
they are heterosexuals. Child molestation is an ugly crime that is
committed by both straight and gay adults (this is why it is a crime:
children, by virtue of being non-adults, require protection and are
unable to give sexual consent).
There has also been some nationalist
posturing among supporters of the law. Homosexuality is ‘unafrican,’
they say, and we will not become like the west. The west is not exactly a
homosexual haven; acts of discrimination against homosexuals are not
uncommon in the US and Europe. But it is the idea of ‘unafricanness’
that is truly insidious. Sochukwuma was born of Igbo parents and had
Igbo grandparents and Igbo great-grandparents. He was born a person who
would romantically love other men. Many Nigerians know somebody like
him. The boy who behaved like a girl. The girl who behaved like a boy.
The effeminate man. The unusual woman. These were people we knew, people
like us, born and raised on African soil. How then are they
‘unafrican?’
If anything, it is the passage of the
law itself that is ‘unafrican.’ It goes against the values of tolerance
and ‘live and let live’ that are part of many African cultures. (In
1970s Igboland, Area Scatter was a popular musician, a man who dressed
like a woman, wore makeup, plaited his hair. We don’t know if he was gay
– I think he was – but if he performed today, he could conceivably be
sentenced to fourteen years in prison. For being who he is.) And it is
informed not by a home-grown debate but by a cynically borrowed one: we
turned on CNN and heard western countries debating ‘same sex marriage’
and we decided that we, too, would pass a law banning same sex marriage.
Where, in Nigeria, whose constitution defines marriage as being between
a man and a woman, has any homosexual asked for same-sex marriage?
This is an unjust law. It should be
repealed. Throughout history, many inhumane laws have been passed, and
have subsequently been repealed. Barack Obama, for example, would not be
here today had his parents obeyed American laws that criminalized
marriage between blacks and whites.
An acquaintance recently asked me, ‘if
you support gays, how would you have been born?’ Of course, there were
gay Nigerians when I was conceived. Gay people have existed as long as
humans have existed. They have always been a small percentage of the
human population. We don’t know why. What matters is this: Sochukwuma is
a Nigerian and his existence is not a crime.
