Nigerian human rights activists have failed queer Nigerians. They have undermined the fight for queer liberation in their quest to hold on to the position that being cisgender and heterosexual affords them in our society. They have committed to and advanced a definition of human rights that does not actually mean rights for human beings, not really. When they say human rights, do not be confused. They mean rights for cisgender heterosexual human beings. Emphasis on cisgender and heterosexual.
They have streamlined themselves into a backward, reactionary class, characterized by their middle-class opportunism, by their quest to be seen as crusaders for human wellbeing when their individual politics encompass only single issues and leave out the most marginalized sectors of society. Such politics is close-minded one; it has no regard for class oppression and is openly hostile to activists who are queer and poor.
The story of the Nigerian human rights activist is that of a middle-class Christian or Muslim. They are regularly invited to speak on Channels Television or BBC Africa or AIT or Arise TV. They have big social media following and even bigger ego complexes. They adorn themselves with a pristine sense of their own morality, one that forces them to attack each time the people they marginalize call this morality into question.
To this end, they are especially hostile to LGBTQ people. They do not want to talk about us because their fight does not envision us as part of human society. They do not want to consider the unique ways in which Nigeria oppresses us because they do not see the question of our oppression as being worthwhile or socially rewarding.
If they are ever forced to engage with the fight for queer liberation, they pay lip service. They, after all, need all those donors in fancy fundraisers at the Nigerian high commission to be comfortable, to have plausible deniability, to see the bigger picture, the things that really matter, and, more importantly, to keep writing cheques.
The Nigerian human rights activist is invested in homophobic myth. There are four common ones:
- That Queer Nigerians are inherently hostile. That our combativeness is a problem. That our tone is a problem. That our insistence on our own humanities is rude and intrusive.
- That Queer Nigerians are a negligible part of the population. That we are a fraction of a percentage. A number. Statistically insignificant. Conservative estimates put the queer demographic at 5-10%. Some estimates go up to 20%, but stick with the lower percentile. 5-10% is 10 million to 20 million people. 20 million human lives. But the Nigerian human rights activist in their pseudo rationality would rather dehumanize us. Because if we are mere statistics, it is easier to justify their violence.
- That, as a result of number 2 above, queer liberation is not important. We are, after all, a very small demographic.
This isn’t the pressing issue in Nigeria.
Let’s talk about Buhari.
Let’s talk about police violence.
Let’s talk about poverty.
No, let’s not talk about how all these issues disproportionately affect queer people who exist at the intersection of class, gender, and homophobic oppression. Let’s only care about these issues to the extent they affect Nigerians who are cisgender and heterosexual.
- Finally, and most bizarrely, they are invested in the myth that we are not actually opposed, that Nigeria is not homophobic and that the homophobic laws in our legal systems aren’t discriminatory to queer people.
It is a feat how they manage to believe all these. It is not a logically consistent belief, nor does it augur with the lived documented reality of queer Nigerians. Because of this, Nigerian human rights activists twist themselves into pretzels, defy rationality, wade through the murky gutters of intellectual dishonesty, to deny the pain of queer people.
They insist we are not oppressed. That we do not face violence and that if we do, it is somehow our own fault. They do not want us in their mentions questioning their motives or calling them homophobic. They tell us to shut up, to stop playing victim, to stop harassing people just for not liking us, as though homophobia is as innocent as a mere difference of taste. As though our bones don’t litter the streets. As though we do not get attacked in our schools for being queer, only to be expelled by the school authorities instead of being protected. As though police officers do not stand arms akimbo as crowds check to see how much bashing queer bodies can take.
If I were to give this essay another name, it would be, “The Politics of Bending Backwards to Erase the Pain of QueerNigerians.”
They write epistles about how they’re not homophobic. About how the “truth” is there is no issue.
What exactly is the issue? Who is targeting queer people? Nobody. Not them, and not their friends or anyone they know. As long as we queer people keep it to themselves.
In 2019, The Guardian NG wrote a glowing profile of popular human rights activist Aisha Yesufu. The article was elaborately titled, Aisha Yesufu: The Voice of Humanity.
In it, Aisha Yesufu’s advocacy for feminism, religious tolerance, and her role as co-convener of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign was spotlighted.
But Aisha Yesufu is also one of the most openly homophobic Nigerian human rights activists. She doesn’t even shy away from the topic; she wades into it unprovoked.
On the 20th of June 2019, she claimed that homosexuality and same-sex marriage used to be visible in Northern society and that no one bothered about it. She followed it up by saying:
“Islam is categorical in its stance on homosexuality. It is a sin! There are no two ways about it. It is a sin against God and not a sin against me. The punishment in my ignorant reading (I know nothing, just what I read) is God flips the land such happens. When God wants it is! The increase in homosexuality is not due to LGBTQ influence from the West. It is the sexual molestation of boys & girls which makes them become homosexuals and they go on to molest others and the vicious cycle continues. So when you hear #ArewaMeToo know it is a fight against all.”
It was, again, left to queer activists to deconstruct and deal with the harm which comments like those dredge up. But Aisha Yesufu was not deterred by the criticisms she received from queer Nigerians online. Two days later, she doubled down on her stance:
“This toxic one that infringes on other people’s beliefs [is] extremely intolerant,” she tweeted. “I can’t deal with [it]. I have known better one! The LGBTQ community we had and still have, did their own thing. They didn’t push it down people’s throat nor did anyone push anything down their throat. Do your thing let us do our thing was the keyword. When I got married to my heterosexual partner I didn’t go to Nigerian authority and insist they recognize my marriage. I saw the man I like. We got imam and we did our thing.”
The insinuation here is that if two gay men just decided to marry each other in Nigeria, that they’ll be just fine. No problem. So long as they didn’t want to force it on everyone else (and what does this even mean), they can just live happily ever after. The level of mental gymnastics it takes to make such a bad faith argument is only quantifiable by her commitment to the position.
It is not that Aisha Yesufu doesn’t possess an understanding of oppression and how it works. It is not that she doesn’t understand societal prejudice and institutional violence. If you listen to her speak about the targeting of sex workers by the police, if you watch her speak about the policing of women’s dress codes, or of early marriage, you would know that she does understand all these things.
But Nigerian human rights activists, though normally known for their human rights advocacy, do not stand opposed to this legal system that discriminates against queer people. In fact, they justify and prop it up by crafting a reality where the pain of queer Nigerians is imaginary, a product of us wanting too much. They create an alternative narrative where WE are the aggressors. Where the problem is because of us, because of our apparent agenda to force everyone into attendance at our weddings and our parties, where we initiate unsuspecting people and force same-sex marriage down the throat of unwilling cisgender heterosexual people.
They fuel the embers of homophobic violence and then get outraged when they are called homophobic.
“I am not homophobic,” they say. They say those words like it is a magic phrase. As though it is they, who have never for a day in their lives suffered the pain of homophobia, who get to decide what is homophobic and what is not. It is not a magic phrase. If you say, “I’m not homophobic” or “I personally am not anti-LGBT…” it doesn’t make it true. The character of their words and actions are there for queer people to see, and it is we who suffer the impact that get to decide what is homophobic and what is not.
Another peculiar case would be that of Segun Awosanya, popularly known as Segalink, a man popular for his activism against police brutality. Because of his work against police brutality, men take every criticism of him as an unfair smear. The idea that someone who has helped men that were unjustly arrested by the Special Anti Robbery Squad (SARS) isn’t beyond reproach eludes them. So used are they to centring their own lives and their own well-being, and unless Segalink does something that jeopardizes that, he’s without blemish.
Well, here’s a little story. Someone messaged Segalink for help after his brother was picked up by the police for being at a party. So Segalink came back with an update that the man’s brother is gay and it was actually a gay party. And then it went south from there as his thread devolved into conspiracies about how gay men in Nigeria attack the police. Extort them even. Gay men? In Nigeria? Extort the police?
Because such a thing is simply untrue, he said the information was from his “sources”. His sources told him that gay men were attacking policemen.
Gay men in Nigeria live under the constant oppressive boots of the State. We have the police always on our case, always. If we’re effeminate, we’ve been publicly humiliated by police officers. We’ve had our phones and belongings forcibly searched. And if they found something, we’ve been subjected to extortion and physical violence.
Gay dating apps are crawling with undercover police officers. No one can say for certain who wants to hook up and who is a police officer looking for another victim to extort. But we have to live that life and coming online to find a human rights activist with the respect of millions of Nigerians, someone whose activism centres police violence, rewriting that reality. Telling people that actually it is us who attacks policemen, us who go out of our way to disrupt their day.
Each day we wake to another privileged so-called human rights activist trying their most possible best to recast us as the villain in a story that is all about us trying to survive. And then prefixing it with, “I’m not homophobic. But…”
Gaslight: [verb] To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own sanity, particularly by leading them to doubt their own experiences or perceptions of reality.
So normally when the response is anger, when there is a backlash from queer voices, we are suddenly the villains. Because why are we so angry? Why are we so combative? Why can’t we ever engage in discourse without emotion? It’s just an opinion, after all.
We are saddled with dispelling these things with intelligent, respectful words. And yet when I or other queer activists try, our voices are ignored.
In much of Nigeria’s human rights activist circles, homophobia and transphobia remain pervasive and their advocacy remains exclusionary.
Part of it is their own ignorance and/or prejudice. And the other is their outrage at being called out for their exclusionary politics. Because they cannot stomach this criticism, because it is incompatible with their idealized views of their activism and its impact, they utilize their platforms to rewrite the oppression of queer people, recast the narrative and recreate queer people as the villains.
We are stuck in a society that doesn’t see us, that doesn’t recognize us, that doesn’t tolerate our very existence. With every fibre of its being, the Nigerian state has gone after queer people. Both the criminal and penal codes are stacked with statutes that criminalize our every action. The last legislative move against the queer community was to outlaw even the advocacy for a shift from this discrimination.
The police, always eager to exploit and brutalize the masses, is perhaps the number one enemy of queer people in this country. It is they who go out of their way to set traps to ensnare us. It is they who harass us and doxx us. It is they who blackmail us with things as mundane as our WhatsApp chat history, things cisgender heterosexuals take for granted.
Yet the narrative that there is nothing to complain about is pushed because someone witnessed a secret gay wedding when she was 10. Whether or not she even realizes that the fact that she witnessed that and didn’t report it is now punishable by 10 years in prison, is unclear.
It is a constant onslaught of gaslighting, and the normalization of violence against the LGBTQ+ community, by people with a track record of organizing to uphold human rights. They have helped homophobia flourish and grow by normalizing it in human rights circles. They have used the social capital they have garnered through their activism to validate and reinforce the homophobia of general society. And they have made this historical injustice the fault of the oppressed.
To care about human rights is to see it holistically. It is to care about everyone, including those who exist in the margins.
To take human rights seriously is to understand that it must be comprehensive. Because the fight against oppression must be total.
It is unconscionable to further marginalize a section because they possess a lower position in society’s oppressive hierarchy of identity. There is no justification for oppression whatsoever, be it economic or social. Opposition to oppression must be based on the principles of freedom, equality, and human dignity. And the goal must be, always, the realization of a society where these are guaranteed to everyone, without exception.
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU IS A SHORT STORY WRITER AND POET. HIS WORK HAS APPEARED IN TUCK MAGAZINE, ENKARE REVIEW, GERTRUDE AND AFTER THE PAUSE. HIS FLASH FICTION, “DOPE DELIVERY” WAS A FINALIST FOR THE DUBLIN BRILLIANT FLASH FICTION CONTEST, AND HIS POEMS WERE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 ERBACCE POETRY PRIZE. YOU CAN FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER @KAYODE_ANI
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this Op-Ed by the Writer are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Rustin Times.
