April 10, 2014 —
In February, Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina earned a place at the centre of the emotionally fraught debate over homosexuality in Africa. In this far-ranging interview, Mr. Wainaina offers a provocative critique of some of the cultural objections to homosexuality.
In the wake – or anticipation – of stern anti-gay laws in Nigeria and Ugandan, Mr. Wainaina riveted global attention by publishing a lost chapter from his memoir. Titled “I am a homosexual, Mum,” the essay represented the author’s carefully orchestrated coming out.
Mr. Wainaina is working on another book, but also maintains a hectic schedule of speaking engagements in different parts of the world. He recently spoke to me from his base in Nairobi, Kenya. In a fascinating and far ranging interview, he offers a provocative critique of some of the cultural and religious objections to homosexuality in Africa, probes the historical roots of the anti-gay sentiment, and explains why he decided to come out. Excerpts:
So, how are things for you in Nairobi?
Actually, really good! Well, you know, last year was very depressing, generally, politically. It’s not that it’s less depressing [now], but I got tired of being depressed.
Let’s talk about your coming out essay. How has your life changed since it got published?
On the one hand it hasn’t. It’s a funny thing to say, but it hasn’t, really. I think, for Kenyans, I was already so way out there. The only thing that has been weird was this one TV interview where, clearly, the idea was to sort of gang up on me. Which I don’t mind.
This was in Kenya?
Yes, this was in Kenya. For K24 [a Kenyan TV network]. There’s this small group of people called Maendeleo Ya Wanawake, the oldest kind of women’s political organisation in Kenya. It’s called Progress for Women. And now these guys, these buffoons, started something called Progress for Men, because they feel men are being oppressed. So they had a protest about homosexuality. Only thirteen people attended. But then what happened was that they brought a bishop to that interview. I thought it would be one of the mainstream church bishops, because that’s what I had requested. They brought a very rich bishop—those people who talk about Leviticus, the old Redeemers Church—and a Member of Parliament, whom I think [the church people] are funding, because they’re trying to make noise. So I did like ten minutes of the live interview and then I just stood up and left. I realised that I was giving them an opportunity to get themselves broadcast, and give themselves a name, notoriety—which they have not earned. If you want notoriety, go and earn it yourself. Don’t use me. The TV people, of course because it was live, were now freaking out. So they were like, “We’ll chase them. We’ll chase them if you come back.” I said, No, you’re lying.
Nairobi is a strange and interesting place. Unlike Lagos or Kampala, it really doesn’t belong to anybody. That’s the worst and best thing about it. People may have very strong opinions about things, but they also inherently hate the idea of you saying, “This is African culture or this is whatever culture.” They say, No, no, no, me I just want to be anonymous in the city. I don’t need you imposing this weird thing. I do my thing. There isn’t the same sense you get in Kampala that everything is everybody’s business.
The common belief across the continent is that homosexuality is un-Christian, un-Islamic and “un-African”
You’ve mentioned this question about African culture, which is one of two planks driving the anti-gay movement in Africa—the other being the religious angle. How do you respond to the argument that acceptance of homosexuality is not part of Africa’s cultural practices or heritage?
Remember that much of the written history comes from the victory of the colony and the victory of the church
The first thing about it is, if you look at gay culture in any part of the world, there’s always been the movement from the hinterland into the cosmopolitan place. Gay people are a minority in pretty much any society they live in. And therefore, they are usually very much driven, as are many kinds of threatened minorities in general—including black people in rural England—to cities and cosmopolitan spaces. There is no difference in terms of what gay people are the clear light of this digital world. So it’s kind of difficult to talk about an exceptional Africanness when the phenomenon is widely documented in every human society, Africa included. The term African culture is one that I am quite eager to embrace, but it’s a mixture of ands, ors. We don’t have a f—–g constitution. And the argument itself has always been made under the banner of the church. They start the conversation with “it’s not African culture because it says XYZ in Leviticus.” But nobody has sought to document any arguments [besides what they read in the Bible]. I think it’s a church conversation; it’s a conversation that has come into the African space via the church.
I never saw a pan-African conference on the subject. So people say what they say like received bullet points [from the church]. They use the same language and the same argument; utterly consistent. I think, though, that there is a certain place where there is a more visceral reaction to the idea of homosexuality and to the idea of male homosexuality. And you can clearly find those cliques in those countries where there was a colonial imposition on the idea of something that had already existed. Uganda is a prime example. There’s the idea that the colony was built upon a so-called homosexual King Mwanga who must have been deposed. And so people become Christianised. The majority of African martyrs in the church are Ugandan. And there are these twenty-two so-called martyrs who were killed by Mwanga. Remember that much of the written history comes from the victory of the colony and the victory of the church. The most important public holiday in Uganda is Martyrs Day, where people recount over and over again how the beastly, homosexual Mwanga wanted to impose his sexual will on his twenty-two [male pages]. It’s in every textbook in Uganda.
David Bahati (center), the architect of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill, is blessed by Pastor Martin Ssempa (R), Sheikh Badruh (L), and other religious leaders during an anti-gay church service at the Christianity Focus Centre (Photo © Bénédicte Desrus)
Do you believe this accounts for the particular virulence of the Ugandan response to the gay issue?
Yes. You also have a particular virulence in a certain cultural way in Senegal, even though they never had anti-sodomy laws. You had documented brothels where older pre-colonial Senegalese elite would have young boys and that sort of thing. Whatever evidence we have is sparse and that’s because, as Africans, we generally don’t self-document in that way. In Kenya, there’s a casual knowledge — as in many societies — that [homosexuality] has always been there. What it’s never had was legitimacy to marry. The question about what a man or a woman does in bed has never really been part of the platforms of people’s cultural values. Virginity, to some point, was valuable in some societies. But the questions of what else you were doing or this idea of fidelity or whatever—all those were things that came with the Christians. The questions about one’s duty to family did not necessarily overlap with the question of what, then, is sexual morality in the easy biblical way we like to speak of it. So, of course, you have all these questions of hindsight—a kind of hindsightisation of culture.
You’re arguing, then, that this invocation of a certain African cultural prohibition of homosexuality is a borrowed memory—and that the idea has its roots in Christianity?
Yes, I am. Now, of course, you have other problems. You can see this in Jamaica, for example, or places where homophobia is really crazy. Where it only would take [in Kenya] various settlers sleeping with young boys in a colonial situation and the idea of sex and dominance penetrating—for a certain fear to enter our society. There is no doubt that in different parts of the continent, there were certain things that happened like that. So you would expect to see a certain kind of homophobia in South Africa or in parts of Kenya that would be a response to such things. But I haven’t seen them documented really, except in the Caribbean, yes. [What Binyavanga is saying here is that the hostility towards gay people is received, and inspired by religious precepts. This hostility in places like Jamaica and Kenya has to do with a memory of white imperialists/colonists using homosexual sex as part of the broad tool for the subjugation of "natives." That's why he suggests that the memory of such colonialist predation lends a particular violence to the anti-gay cause in Jamaica, Kenya and elsewhere. He feels that Christianity lent African tradition a rhetoric based on Christian creed but also emphasises the role of colonialist deployment of homosexual sex as a tool of power.]
Gay rights laws in Africa
Since last year, there has been this violent phase of the anti-gay sentiment on the continent—in Uganda, Nigeria and elsewhere. Do you think this has to do with a corresponding liberalisation of attitudes in the West, hence this fear in parts of Africa that we need to shut the gates against this Western liberal ethos?
First, I think that this conversation, more than anything else, is a middle class conversation. By middle class I don’t mean anything other than people who are reasonably educated, who may or may not even be employed. Through my travels in Ghana and elsewhere, I [got to] know of the first gay man who was ever arrested for sleeping with Norwegians. The entire village welcomed him back with nine lorries when he came out of remand prison. This was because—according to them—anytime the state intervenes in their lives, you have to be cleansed of a curse. It’s part of the book I am writing. I thought it was fascinating because he was waiting for people to come and condemn him. And they were like, “You were just doing what you need to do.” His mom was there and they came—in nine lorries—with witch doctors to cleanse him with gin.
Can I live an honest life as an open gay man? It just seems to me that these are not times to be fearful
That particular village, called Christian Village, is next to Achimota Golf Club. It’s where colonial white men used to sleep with caddies in the fifties. So the entire village grew up to service this need. The Scandinavian aid workers came at the time of Nkrumah’s socialism. So this subculture developed—with the Norwegians in particular—where a man would marry, have his [male] lover, would go back to Norway and come [to Ghana] on holiday—and stay in his room. He had a room built for him. And he was this interactive supporting uncle whom the children knew, the whole village knew. So the entire village was built around this idea. Now, when this young Christian Village man gets arrested—he had been partying with some Norwegians—and he’s in the newspapers, the Ghanaian authorities are like, “Look at the moral collapse of our country. Arrest him; finish him.” And then, after two months, the moral fervour got tired. Then they said, “Oh, why are we putting our boys in jail? Why don’t we blame the white man?” His own people at Christian Village organised all these lorries when he came out. It was a three-day party. They took a convoy from the remand prison all the way to Christian Village to celebrate, first his heroism for surviving, and to cleanse him of the curse of the state—a state that, of course, does nothing for you.
So my point about the question of the middle class idea is this. In societies where the state is weak—and Uganda is one—the kingdoms are relatively strong. Which is to say: there are still functional, traditional systems that govern people’s lives together with the church. And [this is] where families—at times when the state has been extremely corrupted or in war—become very conservative and reactionary, wanting to control the fate of their own futures. So it’s easy to understand the fear that these people are going out into the world to become individuals, to take all these risks. And the family cannot govern its economy as well as it wants to. These problems are probably global problems. We’re in the age of this kind of neo-liberalism. Some people use it to acquire certain freedoms—women in particular, for example. But it brings all kinds of threats. You have societies like Kenya where your traditional systems are completely destroyed. So they have no real force and power. And so the idea of a person as an individual in the world is stronger in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya than it is in different parts of Africa. It’s also pretty strong in Cote d’Ivoire, which I realised when I went there. But part of the problem is that there are all kinds of fragilities embedded in that idea too.
Binyavanga Wainaina signing a reader’s book during the Nairobi launch of his memoir, “One Day I Will Write About This Place” in June 2012. © Jerry Riley Photography
You’ve mentioned that there’s a book you’re working on and you’re examining some of these questions. Did you decide on the book since coming out as a gay man or was the project on your table even before then?
It sounds very selfish to say that part of the reason for coming out was I needed to clear my brain [in order] to attack the issues. I had been feeling—after a couple of friends died last year—a certain kind of hypocrisy in my situation, needing to write this book, which I had already started writing. I was stuck. And writing that chapter [about his sexual identity] has released the writing for the book. The book is not really about homosexuality per se. Over the last two years, you look at your Twitter feed and you read of oil wells and railways popping up every ten seconds in different parts of the continent. And at the same time there are the huge, huge sorts of social collapses. And then there’s the explosion of Nollywood, the explosion of Boko Haram. There are these spaces, especially spaces outside very laid-back state systems. Like the Nigerian music industry decides to move and make a space for themselves—and they create a giant territory. Boko Haram decides to do the same, and al Shabab in Kenya. And Al Shabab can decide to go into Westgate [the upscale Nairobi mall that was bombed last November)—just some kids—and humiliate [the state]. We’ve reached this kind of season where the past, the present and the possible future are just sort of operating on a very fast moving thing running downhill very quickly. All kinds of openings for possibilities of change exist, and equally every kind of threat you can imagine also exists inside this space. I find that quite fascinating, and I have been trying to use a language to experience that as opposed to comment upon it. So even coming out was like coming back home. Can I live an honest life as an open gay man? It just seems to me that these are not times to be fearful.
I have had a growing frustration with the preciousness of our own progressive upper middle classes who—it’s not even just that they don’t vote—who fear Africa like a white man fears Africa. All these little gated communities and precious conversations that just go on and on, but people don’t take jobs in the public service, not even for duty. Not even for career advancement, which, if you’re in your thirties or whatever, is when you’re in desperate need of good skills. And they’re not hiding that they are in desperate need of good skills. It surprises me how [often] people tell me that the public service is not good enough for them. But at the same time they want to be back from the Diaspora. Today we were having this conversation about why they don’t pay tax [to Kenya] in the Diaspora. Because you keep complaining, you want all these services, you want to vote abroad. If [each of] you were to work three hours a day and you pay $500 a year, that’s half a billion dollars to Kenya’s exchequer. Then you can demand first-rate civil services. But now you want us [in Kenya] to pay taxes, but when you want your passport renewed, you moan on Twitter that they didn’t do it in one week. Actually the Kenyan embassy does it in a day.
The shape of how things look is hard to see, but the shape has arrived. That’s really what’s fascinating me. So one of the things I wanted to ask myself is: am I scared to say that it’s actually happening? Am I supposed to be scared to say that it may be that the state called Kenya really has ceased to exist, that the regions in the new constitution are probably what’s likely to be valid, together with larger regional contracts? Things are tumbling off their own energies and steam.
Kenyan gays, lesbians and others wear masks to preserve their anonymity as they stage a protest against Uganda’s stance against homosexuality and in solidarity with their counterparts there, outside the Uganda High Commission in Nairobi, Feb. 10, 2014
The Binyavanga Wainaina interview, part 2
April 10, 2014 — Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina is the most high profile person to come out as gay in Africa, earning a place at the centre of the emotionally fraught debate over homosexuality. This is Part II of a far-ranging interview with Mr. Wainaina.
In the wake – or anticipation – of stern anti-gay laws in Nigeria and Ugandan, Mr. Wainaina riveted global attention by publishing a lost chapter from his memoir. Titled “I am a homosexual, Mum,” the essay represented the author’s carefully orchestrated coming out.
Mr. Wainaina is working on another book, but also maintains a hectic schedule of speaking engagements in different parts of the world. He recently spoke to me from his base in Nairobi, Kenya. In a fascinating and far ranging interview, he offers a provocative critique of some of the cultural and religious objections to homosexuality in Africa, probes the historical roots of the anti-gay sentiment, and explains why he decided to come out.
This is the second part of the interview. Part IHERE
You give creative writing workshops and other events almost every summer in Nigeria with Chimamanda Adichie. The Nigerian state has stipulated a 14-year sentence for anybody who engages in homosexual activity. Is this going to change at all your creative engagement with the Nigerian space? Or with the Ugandan space?
Initially I thought to myself, do I register a protest and say that I’m not going? The moral place of that law in the annals of laws goes even far beyond the idea of taming homosexuals. It talks about larger freedoms to do with Nigeria. But in the last few weeks, my instinct has been more the opposite. I just feel like I should continue. It just feels to me that we must test the openness of our spaces. The interesting thing to me was, are people now nervous? But the other day, Lola [Shoneyin] sent me an invitation to come to the Ake Book Festival for a second time. So I was like, ain’t you nervous? And she said, no, we’ll figure it out. It’s the same thing with the Port Harcourt Book Festival actually. So the conversation hasn’t really come up that it would be a problem. Of course the assumption coming from there—as it would be from Uganda—is that the state is not that keen to enforce it [the anti-gay law]. It’s an electoral game or something. But I don’t want to test it in that sort of, I’m standing and saying, “Come, come, come, shoot me.” That would be silly. But I think the idea is of being able to continue working. It’s important for me to live honestly, and it’s important for my name, my reputation to stand on its own two feet. Are people saying, I can’t work with you? Not a single person has. So that conversation hasn’t even taken off. Three priests in Kenya have returned a copy of my book—and that’s it. There are people griping somewhere.
Also, nobody with any intellectual stature out of the church or the conservatives here in Kenya has agreed to come and stand up and discuss. One well-known pastor was supposed to come. We were supposed to do this with Kenya’s leading interviewer, Jeff Koinange, but [the pastor] cancelled at the last minute. It’s not a question of fear or no fear. I feel like you have to have a society with conservatives, and you have to live with them. And they have to live with us. When you genuinely challenge stale institutions or institutional spaces, you start to know whether they’re working.
Both of your parents died before you came out. Did either parent ever pressure you to take a wife? Was there ever any inkling on the part of your parents that you were homosexual? How do you think they would have taken your coming out were they alive?
It just feels to me that we must test the openness of our spaces
That, of course, is hard. Because one of the reasons to come out is that you’re dying to have that conversation, and you can’t. My mother died in 2000 and never once asked me, where is your girlfriend. I manufactured a girlfriend once. But she never seemed to pick up on any enthusiasm for the idea. And my mother was a very intuitive person—maybe all mothers are. The way I see it is that she allowed me a lot of freedom because she felt herself to be a stifled creative. She felt she married too young; but she loved her family and whatever. I was a mommy’s boy from when I was young. Everyone had their special relationship with her: she was very close to my sisters, my brother too. After she died, my dad said to my sister, make sure you don’t do to your son what your mom did to Kenneth—that’s me. I found that really interesting. Sometimes second-borns are half ignored and protected. I was the second, so I could not be noticed. I’m pretty sure that my mother would not have had a sophisticated idea of what a homosexual is—in fact, that’s why I used the term rather than gay. So hindsight is hard.
My dad never asked either. And just before he died, I’d gone to visit him with my boyfriend. I had just had a stroke. [Binyavanga suffered a stroke a few years ago.] I had booked a hotel room for us but he was like, oh, but I made up a room for the both of you. And that was a very specific thing; it was not just normal. Because the room has one bed; it’s my bedroom, in fact. I was leaving for Ghana the next day—that’s in my second chapter. I was like, this guy has just opened a file for me to have that discussion with him—which I had been waiting to do. When I get back, Ill have that discussion; I was scared to enter the discussion then. But he never asked. He really, really hated as a child that Anglican Church-sanctioned violence, the idea of parents enforcing…[beating their children] he hated it. He hated it and, I found out he even dropped out of school in Form 2 and nearly killed a teacher. And when he was six, he ran away from home for a year out of fear of his own mom. After that, she never touched him. Among his own siblings, he was the super person, the very do-your-job kind of person. Compared to [the parents of] my friends at school, he was very tough about drinking, but he never ever came to say to any of us, this is what you must do as a career.
A protester wears a rainbow-coloured wig and glasses as people protest in Nairobi against Uganda’s stance on homosexuality. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
How do you view the response of the African elite to the series of anti-gay laws coming out from various countries?
The Kenyan elite is always very difficult to read. They were of course people who were proud that there is this writer called Binyavanga Wainaina who’s out there representing us with Lupita Nyong’o and other people in the world. [These people] don’t read, except Men Are From Mars, and they earn a lot of money. Of course, a lot of them expressed disappointment and shock. You are going to shame us, you know. The upper middle class and the artist communities could at least skip all that. So you can see that that’s kind of a disjuncture. I think also, that here in Nairobi, there is an age split. None of this is anything younger people like my cousins really bother about that much anymore. They know that this thing is there. Now, in Uganda, there is pretty much unanimity about the law. And with the exception of a very educated commentariat, who have come out strongly against it as individuals rather than as groups, there has been a lot of doubt. With part of the commentariat, part of the problem is not just the anti-gay law, but there is an anti-pornography law as well as a wire-tapping law. So their resentment often is simply how the West decided to pick out one set of problems at a time when Ugandans in general are unified by the idea that they have been going through very repressive times for the last six, seven years. So there was an overreaction based on the idea that the West decided to use just this one. And that’s a fair overreaction. Nigeria, of course, is much harder to read because the elite is so broad, big, complicated, Diaspora, home. One of the most disappointing things was…I think it was the musicians who came out with a statement saying they support the law. I thought that was shocking. I expect the elite to be hypocritical in the sense that we know that half of the gay elite is in Parliament and so on and so forth, and they would be the making the loudest noises. But I thought that people from the music and film industries where, inevitably, you find a very large percentage of gay people— coming out to speak like that was extremely hypocritical.
Nigerian cleric Peter Akinola (R) led the campaign against gay rights in the Anglican communion
Is there a danger that you have become a poster figure in the West for the homosexual cause in Africa? And how do you respond to this new visibility and attention around you, in the West especially?
Its [the church’s] job is not to judge, condemn, influence law or such—it’s to give that sanctuary
Well, that’s a problem. Let’s put it this way. It took me a long time to figure out how I wanted to approach doing this. And once I did, it was clear to me how to do it. Those first two chapters would come out on African platforms and generate an African discussion. Also the six videos would do the same. It was very deliberate, for example, to speak in Kenyan, not just our pidgin or our Kenyan way—to the camera in that documentary. And I think the viewership is nearly 100,000 of those six parts now. And the vast majority [of viewers] are not Western people. A few scholars of African studies, but that was an African moment. So we waited forty-eight hours before responding to any media. I did not communicate with any media because I wanted those things to generate conversation. So what I have felt is my struggle is to keep the conversation burning.
Soon, I release Chapter Two. And maybe in a couple of months I will do a video on cynicism and talk about some of these acts of imagination and that sort of thing. So those are my priorities. In terms of dealing with the media, the storm was passed, as they do. And the storm itself was carried by the fact of the Ugandan law. When I came out it didn’t even look like it was going to get signed. So you had all these kinds of noises. I really kept away from commenting in the Western media around the Ugandan law. I did a lot about the Nigerian law because that was part of the reaction. So, even among the gay people with whom we think and talk, we are very much interested in an African movement that is part and parcel of larger movements for not just human rights—not in the reaction of just the suffering African body—but even in the questions of freedom of the mind. So those are the platforms that I look to. What has happened is that I have not responded to a lot of requests to go and speak. I am picking and choosing things that advance the idea, and that’s been all the way through. I said I am going to do “Hard Talk.” I turned down the BBC and Al Jazeera on all kinds of things for no reason other than the question of how is this taking it any further? I am very cognisant of the fact that in every Western interview I have done they just ask me three questions [which boil down to]: “Look at those Africans suffering from homophobia.” So you know it’s a reflexive conversation that really doesn’t go anywhere because it does not add value to what’s going on here.
In Uganda, clerics were vocal in their support of harsher penalties
Is there any religious objection to homosexuality that you are willing to respect?
The question around the religious responses to the idea of homosexuality, whatever they are—in Christianity for example—are always predicated on four or five lines in the Bible. The question of exceptional sin, for example; I documented, just in the African media since January, 335 cases of gross misbehaviour by Pentecostal pastors. 335. You have documented cases where, in London, there’s research showing that the spike in HIV transmission among African women is due to pastors. It’s crazy! So I don’t understand why we are having a religious, moral conversation around people who harm nobody when, as a continent, are in a grip of something so insanely self-serving, a sin against everybody’s moral platform and against everybody’s code of goodness. It’s very difficult for me to understand where you can start to have the moral conversation that talks about hounding people. We are all sinners. That’s the contract I know from every church I have ever heard of. We are all sinners, and we all seek sanctuary in the eyes of the Lord. And the sanctuary is a right given to all human beings. And that sanctuary is the sanctuary that the church gives. Its job is not to judge, condemn, influence law or such—it’s to give that sanctuary. There is zero noise from any of those churches, even on the back of that law, to just stand up in the media and say, if you are homosexual and you are going through stress, love is in my parish. Come and speak. Not one. I haven’t heard one. I think it’s extraordinary. So the question becomes: where did the crazy rightwing-ness come from? I don’t know whether I am an atheist or a lapsed believer. But I know that after a really bad time in the 80s and 90s in many kinds of ways in the continent, we are beginning to have rational platforms that allow people to make predictable decisions—for example, in six months, this is what I am going to do. It’s still very far from normal, but that’s an opportunity for healthy scepticism to mix with faith, for doubt and self-criticism. I think all these societies are ready to resume what was already resident. For now, I think it’s something good to expect there are enough people who can do that. And I think they are there.
Thank you very much.
Unidentified participants attend a workshop during the World Social Forum in Nairobi, January 23, 2007. Photo: Reuters/Antony Njuguna
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