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.
Chimamanda Adichie is a very Sad episode for you that inspite of your educational exposure you still have to Champion issues that are anti- civilization. Chimamanda has chosen to chase cheap popularity at the expense of hard earn repute. answer this few questions African Lady; did your father marry a Man? Are you married to a Woman? If no why not? Were are the values that groomed you?. Finally,if you had a son as an only child will you encourage him to wed another guy? If no why? Adichie, western fame and academic exposure could be intoxicating we know,but I advise you to learn from the examples of Professor Chinuebe Achebe whose shoes you may not even fit in even in eternity; who stood Against sex same marriage even in the world conference of Anglican church. Finally western institution may lobby you into this campaign for some merit,but let the examples of michael Jackson who embraced western fame hook, lines and sinker be a reminder to you. African values are Africans Values an should remain Supreme. How Many of African Values have the Western Countries Copied???
MANY THANKS. THAT WAS GOOD.
I think this chiamanda girl or what did they called her is another agent from pit of hell as she forgotten that sodom was destroyed because of same sex marriage? Why would she compare men that plaited hair with same sex marriage? If we were all gay and lesbian how will she be born. I advise her to go and asked for forgiveness from God. God have mercy on her. Am suspecting her too.
stephen i believe you are educated try be reasonable. dont u think u sound like a hypocrite and a coward. yes hyppcrite because you also indulge in some unafrican acts, did your ancestor know anthing as education, suit, internet etc. it suprises me when it comes to the issue of gay we now realise that we are africans, meanwhile we spent more 80% of our lives living borrowed cultures. yes a coward because you can’t speakout against acts that is against your culture and religion eg divorce, adultary, fornication, marrying of multiple wives etc , because if you do your live will never be the same again. now you can confidently speakout against these innocent minorities. iI stand to be correct, it is a known fact that a hausa man can marry his cousin, but it is a horrible taboo with the igbos , in short it is considered an incest which i belive you consider it as worst. Yerima married a
thirteen years old girl and his still there in the house making laws for you. pls let’s be humans at least for once. i bet u in the nearest future we be seen with that same view that we see those that killed twins in the past
God! Why is my own different? Chimamanda, who did this to you? Cheei! Cheei! Cheei! Is this how our princess was destroyed? I thought we finally have a daughter to be proud of, but, alas!- the agents of darkness finally got to her.I am going to my village shrine to beg our ancestors (amadioha, anyanwu, etc) not to destroy her cos she doesn’t know what she is doing.
kudos bros
Chimamanda has a right to speak her mind, i am very sure that before the law was passed it was seriously deliberated on in the house and there were some who did not support until the majority took the vote, should you now condemn them for speaking against?, why are you condemning her for airing her opinion. on the issue, well this Gay law has not finished it course am sure more issues will arise based on it. Chimamanda i think you have your point, the likes of their Sochukwuma shd not be condemned rather if they become a crime to the society or began to be lawless, there should be other ways a punishment should melted out to them too.
My people we have a lot of crime in our society that we should actually be looking for ways to tackle it, like the constant killing of our fellow citizen by unknown gun men as the news always put it, the child abuse sexually, the in dept corruption in our government etc: Nigeria we really need to put our priority in other.
This is avsadvday for me. Chizua lost the Nobel prize because he dared the West and condemned their neo colonialist oppression of the developing nations. At that world conference were he lambasted them, one of the members of the Nobel Award Committee who was present was said to have told Achebebthat he did not know what he had missed by that outburst. Achebe replied that he did not care. He had an idea what the nan was talking about and he cared not he chuttered not.
This is recklessly ill advised. We condemn adultery. We condemn fornication. We condemn bestiality. We condemn armed robbery, we condemn pen robbery, we condemn kidnapping. We condemn carnival ism. We condemn ritual murders. We condemn kleptomania. We condemn vaulting ambition that leads to impunity in evilness and society unacceptable behaviors. All the main 3 religions practiced in Africa – ATR, Christianity, Islam in their scriptures and pristine traditions and culture and acceptable human practice condemn all the above and also condemn gay lifestyle. Some people were born kleptomaniac, some people were born with tendencies to rebellious and perverted thinking. Some were not born with such twisted habits but learned them like you learn to love classical music or eating grass like grass cutter as in salads or drinking bitter drinks like beer. These are learned and adopted and acquired from acculturation. The idea of social mores and acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is to help any misguided or perverted mind to apply personal restraint to live within acceptable behaviour patterns. This is not very hard or difficult to do if you try. Over the years and ages, matters of s*x have been privatized and kept out of the public glare. This new boldness to force s*xual exhibitionism and unrestrained perverted behaviour to become human rights is the reason for this debacle. If all persons throw restraint to the winds and fo whatever they like because they claim they were born that way, we will be left with a world of un censored corporate and personal indiscipline. Keleptomaniacs will get away with shop lifting. Rapist will get away with rape. Murderers will get away with momentary insanity. Any an or woman on heat will look for the nearest person, man or woman to ease the heat because that is an inherent natural appetite and hunger. But over time, the human race has for the sake of sustained safety and health and survival of the human race have worked out acceptable behaviour for individuals to learn and keep to for the greater good of society. Paul summed up the temptations all may feel to do as they please no natter whose ox is gored. He wisely adviced, All (maybe) lawful for me BUT not all is expedient. We all struggle with these perversions and we must learn to conquer them. Paul again confessed, The good I want to do I find difficult because the dark side of me wants to do that which I do not want because of my superior reasonable knowledge of the demands of my faith and my society. My sister Chimamanda, this is a sad day for me. Whatever Agwu go you this far has not done well. Think through again. The world is most at risk today because we have thrown overboard the dictum that had sustained our corporate existence. The ultra post modern philosophy propelling us to a quicker decay of society is that the society can go to blazes while the individual can enjoy himself whichever way andvahatever way. From pristine times what kept us was let one man be sacrificed than for the whole nation or society perish. Please look at the two sides of the coin and the edge before you decide whether you have a genuine currency or a fake one. This is a weighty matter beyond shallow sentiments and unproven scientific facts of quirks in mental constitutions that can be amenable to learning and moral teachings.
U seem 2 know everything about the law as it has 2 do with the issue at stake. D only truth in ur submission is clear. U are an agent of d devil.
We should always analyse situations from all angles before passing judgement on people and am speaking from a psychologist’s point of view.homosexuality is genetic and we have absolutely no right to discriminate. Chimamanda is right and I support.literacy has nothing to do with it!
Just like those who are genetical born to steal they should be allowed to steal or they are discriminate ko?
i am so dissapointed chimamanda. you have become a stooge for the whites. i am so dussappinted.
What is she called self? She had better face her career than promote evil. Being gay isn’t natural. Anybody who finds himself or herself in such should seek deliverance. I’m so disappointed in her, there are some issues people like her shouldn’t be discussing knowing that they have kids looking up to them. I don’t hate these group of people instead I pity them because I know its a form of affliction.
The article makes a wrong assumption. The law does not criminalize homosexuality, which is by no means a crime. No. It rather criminalizes same sex marriage, the same way western laws criminalize polygamy.
I can only proffer three reasons for Chinamanda’s treatise: many years of sojourn in the white man’s land has beclouded her sense of reasoning which has become warped and perverted like them. Secondly, her recent success in literary feats has gotten into her head which makes her to think highly of her self and engage in self delusion. She also think lowly of Africans as less intelligent, and feels that any idea put forward by the white can only be superior. Thirdly she may have been playing the script of her white host and benefactor in anticipation for more filthy awards and recognition.
What she fails to know is that it is the unrestricted freedom that will herald the fall of this white people; it is unrestricted gun control that makes an insane person to start killing innocent children.; it is uncontrolled freedom that make scores of white people moving about unclad and debased like wild animals.
To the Chinamandas of this world it would be better to allow murderers a free rein just because we want to be tolerant of the minority; we should also demonstrate our tolerance by allowing people to rub feaces on their body and be roaming about; the world’s majority would be protective of the minority when we allow people to have be having sex in the public glare with dogs, cats, horses cow and all sorts of animals.
All praise to Adichie for logging her informed opinion in the public record. I just read that the law passed against homosexuality is more draconian than that implemented by Hitler in Nazi Germany. It is absolutely despicable and a shameful not only that it was passed but also that it is supported by the majority of our people. Here we sit scratching our heads over menaces like Boko Haram, and yet people are blind to the irrational fanaticism in their own heads. How can people say that homosexuality is ‘Western’ when at the time that Westerners came to our continent homosexuality was a gross crime in their own societies? At the beginning of the 20th century, less than 5% of the population of now-Nigeria was even Christian; in conversations about what is un-African, let us be honest. At the turn of the previous millennium, no one in now-Nigeria was a Muslim. Are the Quran and Bible so sacrosanct? Was it not people who wrote them? Did not God, did not Allah give each and every one of us a brain to analyze, critique and create our own opinions? Sometimes I throw my head back and scream, so disgusted am I with the nonsense that passes for religious zeal and public discourse in this country.
And let us be frank. The very same sexual acts that men do with men, men do with women. What two individuals do in their bedroom is their business, not the business of the state and not the business of any body! And, homosexuality delineates an orientation. It does not necessary entail sex. What is the harm in a man loving another man, or a woman another woman? I have seen grown men essentially kiss their dogs. Is it that a crime? I cannot walk from my house to the local market without almost dislocating my knee, falling into a sewer or getting hit by okada – and yet people are up in arms over homosexuality? I barely have enough money to survive let alone invest in my future. And two men kissing is a crime? If I could but gain audience with those vultures in Abuja who passed and signed this bill, then they would know what crime is. People blame the West and, yet, in everything so many people would give their souls to emulate so many aspects of Western culture. So afraid are we of what other people might think, that we have lost our own sense of self in this country. A heavy cloud of fear, loss and frustration hangs over our heads. We breathe and we forget to cough.
To all the movers and shakers in Lagos and Abuja; we are happy you are doing well. We are happy that you are middle class. We do not begrudge you your cars or your functioning airports or the small pockets of employment you have available. But the vast majority of us in this country, we suffer and we suffer greatly. It is the voices on the fringes of our society that will change it. We should not be criminalizing difference but attempting to understand and accept it. How can we advocate for fundamental changes in our society, political and otherwise, when we attempt to squash or demonize anything we don’t understand. Have some of you of the South stopped to consider how disparagingly you speak about your Muslim brethrens in the North? I’ve no more energy to say any more! Every day I see cesspool upon cesspool upon cesspool of intolerance and hate among some of what must be the most religious people in the world. What is that? If we suffer in this country, much more of it comes back to our blindness than we would comfortably admit. We are up in arms over Boko Haram kidnapping and bombing and yet we would whip or stone a man in the law court because he has kissed another man. Who then are we to preach to Boko Haram about human rights? In supporting a law that criminalized homosexuality, do you not realize that you tacitly support the beatings, lynching and killings of homosexuals, sexually active and not?
Who knows the number of people like the boy Adichie speaks about are suffering, alone, abused or dead because of their God-given attributes? I witnessed from a distance 7 years ago a man attacked by a mob of young men, pushed into the bush on the side of the road, confined in a tower of old tires and then horrifically set alight all the while screaming with abandon. So charred were the remains that only bits of bone stuck out the blackened pile. I, a grown man, wept when I thought of the pain that young man must have experienced. They say being burned alive is the most painful way to die because every single nerve ending in the body is triggered. What kind of society is this? Come to later find out he was found having sex in the back of a car nearby. The other man escaped. The other paid with his life. Where is God or Allah in that? That event reminds me that we walk a fine a line between intolerance and inhumanity. I shiver when I hear people like Adichie speak publicly, so rare is it to hear lucidity and fair-mindedness expressed so openly. The reasonable people in this society need to speak up and stop hiding in the shadows.
A poll stated that 98% of Nigerians did not support homosexuality. Surely more than 2% of our own citizens are homosexuals. So oppressed must they feel that surely some could not even be honest answering a poll? Everything we have from the clothes on our backs to the air we breathe come from God. Leave other people alone! And be thankful to God for every speck of pleasure or joy in your life, in the fact that you have a life at all. Do to others what you want done to you.