The union is abnormal. As an African and a church leader, I
am ashamed. We should advice others not to do the same,"
Anglican Archbishop
Eliud Wabukala, said. He was responding to the news of a wedding between two
Kenyan men held in London
recently. A wedding that, according to media reports, Kenyan religious leaders
have described as "unacceptable and unnatural".
The Archbishop's point of view I respect, it is his
conflation of Christianity and ‘Africanness' that I sneer upon. I desired to
respond to that, point out the irony in a casual call to ‘Africanness' by
someone whose job description begins with ‘Anglican' but I held back telling
myself that I, like him, would be missing the point. The point being: A
wedding.
People love weddings. Love weddings because they are a
celebratory rite of passage into that much revered social status of Married.
Weddings usher in marriage, the only state within which societal sanctions
allow you, nay, consider you respectable enough to have sex and to raise a
family. Ideally, weddings are seen as a celebration of love between two people.
A love so deep and special that those that share it declare it publicly and
make a commitment to love and care for each other until death parts them.
Weddings let the whole world know that X loves Y. Weddings
say: Charles Ngengi loves Daniel Chege Gichia and promises to do so, forever
after. Love and companionship are the dominant tropes weddings sell, with sex
remaining a subtext too subtle to be discerned by the youngling flower-girls
and pages whom these events are meant to and do inspire.
But when Njenga wed Gachie, the tables turned. Sex was
elevated from subtext to issue- the only issue. Worse still, it was as though a
sexual pervert had stood up in public and threatened: I, Charles Ngengi swear I
will bugger that Chege guy to death! And over the next few days our MSM (pun
intended) and online media spaces proceeded to work up and host what seems like
a national disgust at the idea of, not just any men but two Kenyan men having
sex with each other. For once an opportunity, to see and hopefully discuss
homosexuality as more than sexual intercourse between people of the same
biological sex, was ours to grab. Kenya, as a nation wasted that
chance, the Kenyan gay community- its so called activists, specifically-
squandered it.
The Kenyan gay community had a chance to say, look it is not
just about sex, it is about human relationships. If we must talk about sex,
then let us begin with the fact that two gay girls can meet, date and fall in
love without ever having had sex. You know, just like with ‘normal' people, if
one partner is not ready then she just is not ready. And if you really care
about that person and that relationship then you, well, wait. Sometimes a gay
boy sees another boy and is filled with lust for him -- you know, just the way a
straight boy would feel about a girl -- he propositions him and if the other is
good to go, then he is good to go. Bottom line is casual sex is simply that,
casual sex. If the issue is sex, then all sex is sex regardless of where your penis
ends up. Thank you very much for your questions but we must now move on to a
more important conversation: Sexuality.
Gay folks, in Kenya, did not do that. They
neither pre-empted public debate's, predictable, slide into how gross gay sex
is nor attempted to shift it back to sexuality and lifestyle choices when it
did. Right from the get go, the homophobes came out to play and for now the
ball remains in their court. Maybe until Moreno Ocampo arrives next week and
Kenyans can forget that small bit of gay silliness and get back to real issues:
politics. Get back to politics the deafening silence of the Kenyan gay
community having once again established the fact that there are no gay people
in Kenya.
That there are no gay Kenyans, just a few misguided youngsters who knowing no
better allow themselves to be fooled by mzungus and their money into allowing
themselves to be sexually abused. I mean, wasn't that Ngengi guy lured by a
mzungu guy to London?
Now he is recruiting for them and we do not know what to do but leave our
children to the grace of God.
Granted that, in truth, there exists a huge gay community in
Kenya, nobody is gay in Kenya. A
paradox it may seem until you consider that physical existence is never a
guarantee of social existence. In colonial Kenya,
the Africans it was said were to be seen but not heard, it is worse for gay
people in Kenya
today- they can neither be seen nor heard. In those days, the Africans lived at
the social periphery- their existence known but their presence ignored- but gay
people are living in social cemetery- unheard of and unknown. Gay people in Kenya are not
ignored, they do not exist.
Because gay people do not exist in Kenya is it not
preposterous to enshrine gay rights in our constitution; protect the interest
of homosexuals as a distinct category? As we speak the Committee of Experts on
Constitutional Review, charged with preparing a draft constitution soon to be
put to referendum, has stated that they will not include gay rights in the
draft. In a telling, if slightly ironic statement, the Nation reported a member
of the committee, Mr. Otiende Amolo, as saying that
"[t]he new constitution is supposed to cater for the
interests of both the majority and minorities, [...] but same-sex marriages had
been rejected by all religious groups.
Of great import too is the manner in which the issue of gay
rights was, allegedly, presented to the committee. Mr. Amolo, it is reported,
said:
On several occasions some British MPs have approached
us on the gay matter. They wanted us to include homosexual and lesbians' rights
in the draft. But we told them that such a thing cannot happen because if we
did so, a majority of Kenyans will reject the draft during the forthcoming
referendum.
Assuming the Mr. Amolo was not misquoted, then two things
become self-evident. First, that consensus amongst all religious groups (their
leaders to be precise) means consensus amongst all Kenyan minorities and majorities.
Second, that gay rights were only put on the committee's agenda (not by any
Kenyan or group of Kenyans) by foreigners. By British MPs, specifically, in
whose country two Kenyans have already found a safe haven for their ‘unnatural
and unacceptable' union. The two points together speak to the argument- proven
through deduction by the lack of any memoranda from gay Kenyans to the
committee- that there are no gay people in Kenya.
Big jump, maybe, from weddings to constitution making but
with it a significant reframing of the homosexuality debate. To begin with,
though the stance against homosexuality taken by the religious groups is based
on their moral and doctrinal perspectives, by arguing these points in a
political space, they politicise homosexuality. By not responding- in political
spaces- to the politicisation of their way of life the Kenyan gay community
cedes any political ground there is to be won. Importantly, by not being the
first to politicise their interests, the gay community becomes relegated to the
unfortunate place of second guessing the political agenda set by their
opponents.
It can be argued that their existence being, technically,
illegal in Kenya
means that homosexuals cannot publicly present memoranda. But truth is that
declaring oneself to be a homosexual in Kenya is not in and of itself
illegal. While Kenyan law criminalises acts- sodomy and the cryptic ‘acts
against the order of nature'- it is society that anathematises homosexuality as
a concept, identity and lifestyle. Thus, a public declaration of ones
homosexuality puts you in danger of social ostracism and mob justice rather
than criminal prosecution and jail. Therefore, if the written law and social
values were two cats, gay rights a mouse and we had only one bell, which one
ought we to bell first? The more vicious one of course; social stigmatisation
of homosexuality rather than the laws that purportedly criminalise it.
And the first steps towards fighting social stigma are a
broader public awareness of the stigmatised social reality coupled with,
hopefully, a level of acceptance or, at the very least, tolerance.
Unfortunately, acceptance or tolerance are processes rather
than events; fortunately, what is sought is not universal acceptance or
tolerance but a modicum of it. It is in this environment that changes in the
law begin to make sense. Laws in themselves do not change people, reason does.
If it were, by any wild chance, possible to enshrine the rights of sexual
minorities in the Kenyan constitution now, the only thing the gay community
would come out with is the lesson that constitutions do not make homophiles.
Just look at South Africa
and their much celebrated gay friendly constitution and then look at their
statistics on the ‘corrective rape' of lesbians.
But all is not lost. The rights that gay Kenyans deserve can
be achieved but they will have to be earned. They will have to fight for them
on two fronts, the social and the political. In the social, an intense public
awareness campaign around gay issues must be embarked on. One that begins with
the subtle and progresses towards the blatant. Think of a move from pamphlets,
stickers and other merchandise in not only English but also Kiswahili and other
languages. These can be dropped at market centres, people's doorsteps and such
places. Guerrilla social marketing, if there is such a thing. With time it will
even be possible to have a gay character in a local TV show. The key thing,
though, is to target rural areas more than the urban ones.
The political front is the hard part. The Kenyan gay
community will need martyrs for this. It must be borne in mind that all
significant political change in this country has been cut with blood. Why
should gay people hope to be any luckier? They must get out on the street and
march for their freedom, wipe off the spit and blood from their torn bodies and
souls and march again. History has taught that easy civil rights victories are
few and far in between. In the meantime gay Kenyans must ask themselves not
what laws are against them but what laws are for them.
What laws protect them not as homosexuals but as both
citizens of Kenya
and human beings? Does the Sexual Offences Act limit rape to actions against
heterosexuals? Does the penal code say, categorically, that the assault,
infliction of grievous bodily harm or the murder of a homosexual is not a
crime? Because lawyers, judges and policemen are products of our homophobic
environment, it means that crimes committed against homosexuals do not get
prosecuted, do not find their way into civil court and if they did the offender
could claim the victim's sexuality as a mitigating circumstance or cause for
extreme provocation. But for how long can a precedent setting prosecution
remain elusive? Haven't we seen one yet?
It is alongside laws that rights and responsibilities exist.
One great argument proposed by sexual rights activists, and one that I have
used often in other writings, frames sexual orientation within the language of
rights. That sexual (orientation) rights are human rights. Unfortunately rights
are a moral issue that can only become legally relevant when they are
politicised. And as we have seen, the Kenyan gay community has lost both the
moral and the political argument. They have lost by default merely by not being
seen and heard, in any significant way, enough to count as a constituent
demographic group in Kenya.
They have lost the advantage of having drawn first blood; stepping up and
stepping out to frame the public discourse on homosexuality in their favour.
They have refused to exist validating the myth of their non-existence through
inaction.
It is this lack of political action and a refusal to engage
the public on their issues that irks me the most about gay activists in Kenya. If they
are involved in any activism at all then it plays out in formal spaces socially
and intellectually distant from the broader publics they need win over. They
play safe- talking heads at conferences that preach to the converted- while the
world out there is living in the blissful heathenism of homophobia. "We are
here, we are gay," they whisper to each other inside their closet and then
wonder, at the next exclusive conference, why no one knows they exist.
dont legalise in the soil that our anscestors laid their blessings written by catherine , November 04, 2009
our forefathers were never fools when they blessed marriages of two people of different sex so with due respect lets follow our roots,,, why should we bring back the ancient days of sodom and gommorah yet it had been forgotten when jesus died? to some extend some hospitals have been setup for the gay surgery surely where are we heading have we tried to overcome what GOD made in the first place people with understanding lets respect what the creator put in place and leave in his accordance
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Our ancestors loved polygamy, too, Catherine written by Our Man in America , November 06, 2009
dont legalise in the soil that our anscestors laid their blessings written by catherine , November 04, 2009 our forefathers were never fools when they blessed marriages of two people of different sex so with due respect lets follow our roots,,, why should we bring back the ancient days of sodom and gommorah yet it had been forgotten when jesus died? to some extend some hospitals have been setup for the gay surgery surely where are we heading have we tried to overcome what GOD made in the first place people with understanding lets respect what the creator put in place and leave in his accordance
Catherine, Did you miss the author's point about "the irony in a casual call to ‘Africanness' by someone whose job description begins with ‘Anglican'?"
Our ancestors, my dear, did not embrace the God of Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, most of them resisted him and were killed. Those of us who finally accepted Anglicanism and such did so to preserve our race. (Perhaps we had learned the consequences of resistance from the annihilation of American Indian).
It puzzles me that we would zealously use the book that was used to conquer us to persecute others. Even more disgusting is the apparent use of "Africanness" to oppress others.
Might you, who in the name of our ancestors condemns gays, accept your husband's -- if you had one -- contention that he has an ancestor-given right to take a second, or even third, wife? Would you give your 13-year-old daughter -- if you had one -- to be some old guy's wife because that's what some of our ancestors did? Would, dear Catherine, let your son -- if you had one -- share the same knife at circumcision, because that was the way of our forefathers?
You and I know the answers to those questions, so don't bother. But, please, tell me: Why do the rules of "Africanness"change when it's personal?
Ha! The CoE DID do something for gays! written by Denis Nzioka , December 15, 2009
The CoE are not fools. They may not have specifically mentioned gay rights or sexual minorities but they did a give ('us' meaning LGBTI/Sexual minorities) a leeway for us to argue it out in court because they realized the best place to do so, is not in a referendum where Kenyans are most likely to reject it if such a clause or provision were there, but a place where the ruling (in favor) of LGBTI is binding (to all) and which will have a far greater repercussion, nationally and internationally.
Yes, they have the clause on marginalized groups and what have you and so, if you are clever enough like me, they indeed did give us something to work on. Its all about argument, and good argument at that. You have seen how a single word in our laws (I can only remember jurisprudence when argued out in Parliament by our MPs) can be interpreted either in favor or not. Chances are, if we get a good argument and a good lawyer to argue this in court, chances we might succeed as compared to a referendum.
After all, a cup is either half full or half empty. I think that the CoE poured us a glass. Half measure, of course.
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Get real written by wanyeki , December 17, 2009
Some discussions are just stupid.This is one of them.Even animals knows better.Matathia sometimes you write so well on some serious thing but on this one ,you have just disappointed me,unless of course you were trying to make Kenya imagine a guy meeting point,or worse Guy dating page
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