Kenya is within the throes of a full-blown existential ethical panic. If the nation’s politicians, clergy, self-anointed defenders of “conventional tradition” and media are to be believed, the long-dreaded “homosexual zombie apocalypse” is upon us, bringing hordes of “insatiable homosexuals” hungry for our kids’s impressionable brains.
A February ruling by the Supreme Courtroom that the structure barred discrimination on the idea of sexual orientation has sparked weeks of hysterical breast-beating throughout the nation, with many fearful that it might open Pandora’s closet and precipitate the tip of civilization as we all know it.
Egged on by information anchors and editors eager to serve up drama and gore in an effort to retain audiences, everybody from President William Ruto to political pundits has been lining as much as condemn the court docket for upholding verdicts by decrease courts that the federal government couldn’t lawfully refuse to register a company calling itself the Nationwide Homosexual and Lesbian Human Rights Fee (NGLHRC).
The jeremiads dominating the airwaves and social media proclaim this as the start of the tip.
In an interview with one of many most-watched native TV stations, Citizen TV, Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit of the Anglican Church of Kenya speculated – to approving noises from the anchors – that this was a sinister ploy by environmentalists to depopulate the globe in an efforts to deal with local weather change. The Ministry of Training has additionally introduced that it’s deploying chaplains to colleges to forestall “infiltration” by the nefarious Western-backed LGBTQ brigade.
In the meantime, throughout a parliamentary session, MP Joshua Kimilu condemned the court docket’s resolution as violating Kenyan regulation and warned that Kenyan tradition might “be ruined by the West”.
On the coronary heart of the nationwide hatefest is the growing visibility and assertiveness of the nation’s sexual minorities. Lengthy suppressed by colonial-era edicts that criminalized intercourse “in opposition to the order of nature” and Western concepts about “African tradition” that engendered vicious homophobia, in current many years, queer Kenyans have been pushing again, refusing to be compelled again into the nationwide closet.
This has included a push to have the British-imposed native variations of the Nineteenth-century Indian Penal Code outlawing sexual acts “in opposition to the order of nature” – the colonial code for homosexuality – struck out as opposite to Kenya’s 2010 structure, the nation’s first supreme Legal guidelines to be absolutely drafted, negotiated and adopted by Kenyans.
The registration of the NGLHRC was one in every of two instances regarding LGBTQ rights which were making their manner by way of the courts. The response to the February ruling may very well be an try to affect the second case, which extra instantly challenges the constitutionality of the sections of the penal code banning intercourse “in opposition to the order of nature”.
You will need to observe, as upheld by each the Excessive Courtroom and the Supreme Courtroom, and opposite to the assertions of some, that the arcane textual content of those legal guidelines doesn’t really criminalize homosexuality or gay relationships and even gay orientation.
Fairly it sanctions sure undisclosed sexual acts deemed to be “in opposition to the order of nature” whatever the sexual orientation of the individual committing them. Underneath the identical legal guidelines, for instance, heterosexual {couples} might conceivably be prosecuted for working towards oral or anal intercourse. Nevertheless, the legal guidelines are nearly completely used to focus on homosexual folks.
In Might 2019, a excessive court docket uphold the regulation in a convoluted judgment by which judges equated intercourse to marriage. They insisted that the structure’s definition of marriage as a union between folks of the alternative intercourse required the criminalization of same-sex relationships whereas arguing that the legal guidelines didn’t particularly goal LGBTQ folks however folks normally and subsequently should not discriminatory.
The case is on the Courtroom of Attraction, and all indications are that it’ll find yourself on the Supreme Courtroom. Thus, the response to the NGLHRC verdict may be seen as an try to intimidate the judges, to stress them into sustaining the established order.
Apparently, the February ruling by the Supreme Courtroom solely echoes what the nation’s lawyer basic argued overtly in court docket in 2017. Whereas defending the constitutionality of the colonial intercourse legal guidelines, he nonetheless admitted that the “Structure protects people in opposition to all types of discrimination, together with on the idea of sexual orientation”.
The loud calls for for the reversal of the Supreme Courtroom judgment additionally ignore its position as the final word arbiter over what the structure says. In truth, most of the similar voices have been calling on the opposition to just accept one other declaration by the Supreme Courtroom: that the president was validly elected in 2022.
In that occasion, they’re blissful to insist that the choice of the court docket, and its interpretation of what the structure requires, is last. Nevertheless, on the subject of addressing the risk posed by “gayism” to the “African values” taught to us by Victorian colonialists, each side of the political divide are united in rejecting the Supreme Courtroom’s prerogatives.
So what comes subsequent? Even previous to the ruling, MP Peter Kaluma had declared his intention to introduce a regulation explicitly criminalising homosexuality with penalties, together with life imprisonment. He stays undeterred by the court docket’s upholding of the structure’s prohibition on discrimination.
Just like the younger Roper in Robert Bolt’s two-act play, A Man For All Seasons, it appears the Kenyan elite are blissful to “lower an excellent street by way of the regulation to get after the [gay] Satan”. Church buildings are already proposing that Parliament enact legal guidelines additional limiting Kenyans’ freedom of affiliation, singling out teams that promote unlawful practices.
Clearly, the churchmen are blissful to pull the nation again to the times when Kenya’s authorities might criminalize stuff like dissent after which lock up individuals who dared to come back collectively to problem it. They might do effectively to contemplate the query Thomas Extra requested Roper: “This nation’s planted thick with legal guidelines from coast to coast – man’s legal guidelines, not God’s! And for those who lower them down – and also you’re simply the person to do it – do you actually suppose you can stand upright within the winds that will blow then?”
The irony of utilizing colonial legal guidelines to defend “African tradition” in opposition to the specter of corruption by whites is evidently misplaced on the anti-gay brigade, who mistakenly insist that LGBTQ rights are a uniquely Western invention. But manufactured panics about European threats to African sexuality are nothing new – they have been invented by the whites themselves.
In her PhD thesis, gender research scholar Elizabeth Williams argues that “in an effort to preserve their political dominance within the colony, Kenyan settlers wanted to discover a strategy to current white supremacy as a boon to African welfare. The answer to this drawback lay within the manufacturing of a imaginative and prescient of African sexuality that wanted to be protected against contamination by extra deviant settler populations.”
That imaginative and prescient of African sexuality was born of Victorian imaginings of noble savagery. “The common native is solely an immoral creature, and as a basic rule, he turns into immoral solely after contact with sure types of civilization, both Japanese or Western,” one settler wrote in 1920.
Right now’s African elites, who inherited the colonial kingdom, are replicating the identical bare assertion of energy. They too declare themselves, and their thievery and brutality, as justified by the necessity to defend “African” mores from Western decadence.
Nonetheless, whereas it might be tempting to dismiss these because the rantings of ignorant and power-hungry bigots, which they’re, we should not neglect that they’ve real-life penalties.
They supply justification for the oppression of 1000’s of Kenyans who discover themselves the victims of violence, rape and imprisonment by the hands of the state and native communities. Between 2013 and 2017, greater than 500 folks have been prosecuted underneath colonial legal guidelines and creative works have been banned for displaying gay relationships.
We should additionally remember that by undermining the protections within the structure, the self-appointed defenders of “African tradition” are endangering all of us, no matter sexual orientation.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
