That violent homophobia, and active persecution of gay men and lesbians in law and social practice, is widespread in many parts of Africa is well known. The extent of the problem is obvious, from the map below. Over much of the continent, any homosexual activity is illegal, subject to penalties ranging from moderate periods of imprisonment, to possible execution. Only in South Africa is there legal protection for LGBT rights – but even there, in some communities, the constitution and the law are not enough to provide adequate protection from violence. (Lesbians especially are at risk, from what is euphemistically described as “corrective rape”).
What can realistically be done about the problem, is far less clear.
An article by the Evangelical pastor Jean – Blaise Kenmogne (author of “Homosexualité, Église et Droits de l’Homme” – in English, Homosexuality, Church and Human Rights) has an article in Cameroon Link that is the best explanation of the causes of the problem, and a suitable response, that I have yet seen. The heart of the problem, he argues, lies in a sterile shouting match between those “for” or “against” homosexuality, with the two sides talking right past each other. But this simple binary division ignores the complexity of the issues, and both sides completely misunderstanding the nature of the other’s concerns. To make progress, we need to understand more clearly what it is that the our opponents are objecting to, and to articulate more precisely our own position.
Sadly for the Anglophone world, the article is in French, and I have not been able to find an English translation. Because I think it deserves careful attention, I offer one here (with a little bit of help from a friend), with limited commentary of my own.
A perspective on a subject that arouses passions.
Jean-Blaise Kenmogne
In recent years, the issue of homosexuality has become a major issue that split the Cameroonian nation against itself. In thunderous debates where emotion, prejudice, bias and virulent passions take precedence over reflection, rational analysis of the phenomenon, an understanding that is clear about what is at stake and with a sense of responsibility for managing it, minds are heated and agitated without trying to reflect on the problem on the basis of values that underlie our being together and should guide the destiny of Cameroonian men and women in a common vision for the present and the future.
Leave the field of useless passions
Today, to understand what it is really about and clarify the terms in which the problem should be posed, one must above remove the passions from the debates and look at reality in the face.
If one takes this requirement as a prerequisite, it becomes clear that we must break the sources of discourse that shape the vision of the problem in terms of a binary logic “for” and “against”, with arguments that are equally incendiary on both sides. Those who think that the issue is actually that of being “for” or “against” are deceived about the problem and falsify what is really at stake.
When one stipulates, as key arguments, that it is the duty of Cameroonians [men and women] to be “for” homosexuality, one refuses to see that the phenomenon itself is problematic in the popular imagination and that there is an urgent need to formulate the terms in which the problem arises. One just needs to take the time to talk with what might be called the average Cameroonian to realize that there is a profound ignorance of what we’re talking about in reality, especially an appalling ignorance of the functioning of human sexuality not only as a field of natural impulses, but as cultural configurations determined by history, by the foundational myths, by the collective consciousness, by purely human interests and highly complex worldviews. As long as it has not been explained what actually happens in the fields of natural impulses and cultural configurations that are actually experienced, we will find ourselves still facing individuals or collective trends that perceive homosexuality as pathological categories of “normal” and “abnormal”, the “permissible” and “non-permissible”, the “acceptable” and “non-acceptable”, the “tolerable” and “intolerable.” It is this categorization due to ignorance that makes the followers of the “yes to homosexuality” in Cameroon talk to a wall of opposition. A wall that justifies its opposition to homosexuality by what it believes to be the natural foundations of sexuality (a sexual division of man–woman) or what one thinks is the venerable and immutable tradition ancestral or religious ( the order of what has always been done).
Isn’t the fundamental work to be done that of information and education based on real knowledge of human sexuality in all its complexity, its lack of differentiation on the ground, in its modulations and historical interconnections and cross-fertilization of cultures and civilizations in the matter of relations between men and women? What is missing today in Cameroon is this work toward a scientific, historical and cultural approach to the phenomenon of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. What we now need is that this work be done on a large scale, so that the debates no longer take place in a sea of ignorance, where we often speak without having any knowledge of what is been talked about.
Ignorance about sexuality and homosexuality in particular, is of course not limited to Africa. Even in the richest and best – educated countries of the North, the arguments against are often couched in simplistic terms of biological plumbing, or of “human nature”, or procreation as the “purpose” of sex or marriage, with no consideration of the actual evidence from science, anthropology, or history. It could well be though, that the problems arising from ignorance are just that much more severe on a continent with much lower levels of education, widespread poverty, and more limited access to printed or electronic media.
I am convinced that once we understand the deep sources of sexuality and homosexuality, one steps out of the logic of “normal” and “abnormal” to enter that of the “sexual majority” and “sexual minority” in the order of erotic orientation, without this posing either metaphysical problems or ethical issues, neither religious issues nor legal problems. One therefore understands that the real problem of homosexuality in Cameroonian society today is one of ignorance, nothing more and nothing less:
Ignorance about the complexity and indeterminacy of natural human sexuality in its impulses; ignorance of the cultural configurations and choices that are made in sexual matters as well as the profound changes that the meeting of cultures and civilizations have induced in the visions of sexuality throughout history; ignorance of the radical freedom of human beings in terms of their intimate options.
There is today an urgent need to fight against this ignorance, instead of trumpeting everywhere that one is “for” homosexuality in a society that does not even know exactly what human sexuality means. A society that tends to confuse sexuality in its human dynamics with the penetration of genitals, as if human sexuality rises only from the animal order pure and simple.
Those who argue vigorously that they are “against” homosexuality should also, in the Cameroonian society, clarify their speech and say publicly what they are talking about. It is sufficient at this level too, to avoid facile blurring of terms and to ask the average Cameroonian to realize that the “no” is not as simple as one thinks.
In the passage that follows, Kempogne makes a case that what is objected to, is not just homosexuality as we might understand it in the modern gay world, but as an expression of domination and submission. From this perspective, the opposition is not fighting against freedom and human rights, as LGBT activists naturally assume, but a fight for freedom – freedom from sexual exploitation.
More often than not one needs to realize that what is being rejected is homosexuality as a system of power and structure of domination. We do not accept the politics of homosexuality that popular imagination conceives as a ritual of power and submission, to co-opt people into the closed circles of the socially dominant. One does not accept economic and financial homosexuality, purely fuelling the need for sustenance, which links employment opportunities for young people or their academic achievements to erotic practices in which these young people do not even know in advance that such proposals are not required as a condition of employment or as systems of “sexually transmitted grades” in schools and universities. We do not accept mystical-erotic homosexuality, leading men and women into a world where their sense of freedom and responsibility is destroyed. One says “no” to all this precisely in the name of freedom and responsibility, so that the country is not engulfed by a “minority” that holds power using sexual orientation as a force of domination and submission.
In such an alternative, it is clear that what we are speaking about rises as an attack against a social logic where sexuality is nothing but an instrument which is unacceptable to the majority of citizens. It is necessary therefore that things are made clear and that one knows to the level that one is talking about. It is necessary that we distinguish well between ritual-homosexuality in politics, sustenance-linked homosexuality that we impose on unemployed youth, esoteric-mystical homosexuality linked to the cooption in lodges and metaphysical circles, and homosexuality where the common Cameroonian ignores the mechanisms and what is really at the heart qua sexual orientation. If we make these necessary distinctions clear, the issue of “no” to homosexuality will be clarified and we will show in the public square the Cameroonian’s confusion, where one believes that one is fighting against homosexuality while at the same time it, in perverse forms, invades political circles, businesses, schools and universities, the lodges and their mystical initiation rites, as is affirmed in the speech of a popular imagination that so often true, but also, often just fantasy.
Fighting against the perverse forms of homosexuality, as is the case in Cameroon, on behalf of freedom and dignity of a majority of the population, that does not mean that one is fighting against homosexuality simply as a sexual orientation freely assumed, even though it is difficult to live such a choice before a “sexual majority” often ill-informed, without any real knowledge of the natural and cultural mechanisms of human sexuality.
Kempogne does not state in his article the foundation of his claim that African opposition is based on a perception of domination / submission relationships, but it is plausible. Cross-cultural studies of (male) same – sex relationships often posit common patterns based on age differentials (as in classical Greece), or differentiated social status (as in classical China), or gender differentiation (in which one partner, although biologically male, takes on female roles and dress). The modern Western pattern of essentially egalitarian relationships, from a global perspective, is relatively uncommon.
None of these differentiated patterns of relationships are intrinsically exploitative. The Greek age – differentiated model was based on profound respect for the junior partner, for whom the relationship was a form of education and training. In the Japanese samurai model, it was a form of military training and apprenticeship, in which the junior partner learnt his trade from an older and more experienced. It is possible though that in conditions of severe poverty, a combination of coercion and material inducements (akin to the famed Hollywood casting couch) may have distorted traditional patterns of male relationships.
Confront the real problem
By posing the real problem in this way, the “sexual minority” whose sexual practice is not yet publicly understood, should now live without molestation its sexual orientation in Cameroon. To the extent that the war which is currently made on behalf of nature, history or law is based only on ignorance, it would be disastrous if the current Cameroonian “sexual majority” bases the foundation of law upon ignorance. It is time to address the criminalization of homosexuality in Cameroon by showing that this penalty is a breach of minority rights and a denial of a fundamental right of human beings: the right to be different.
Here, Kempogne continues with a theme that is familiar to queer Christians elsewhere: that it is entirely inappropriate to base homophobia on religious texts, when these have been so freely used in the past to justify actions and attitudes that are entirely discredited today.
It is also time to stop resorting to religious texts culturally situated in history and written in other contexts dealing with specific problems of specific communities to justify anti-homosexual religious positions that are purely obscurantist. It is not honest to make God out to be an anti-homosexual just to cling to human customs whereof we now know the original context and the cultural issues at root. God has already been used in the terrifying campaigns of the Crusades, ostensibly to liberate the Holy Land, while the real geostrategic issues of the Middle Ages lay elsewhere, in the conflicts of power and civilization where God had nothing to do with the violence of men. It has also, through disastrous readings of Sacred Scripture, based on God the foundation of the system of apartheid in South Africa, with the figure of Ham, cursed by Noah. It has likewise made of God, as always through disastrous readings of Scripture, the basis of the male domination of the feminine gender, as if women were inferior in the substance of their being, beings that have brought the sin in the world with Eve in the Garden of Eden. Should we today, still manipulate the biblical texts to base an inhuman attitude toward people whose only crime is to have a sexual orientation different from the majority? To the extent that, throughout the sacred texts, God is manifested as love and that Christ reveals to us as the perfection of love that does not discriminate nor crushes persons, would it not be urgent today to start from this central core of biblical revelation to look at the problem of homosexuality in the dynamics of love? In this dynamic, and not in the considerations that disparage God within human quarrels, all too human.
He closes by warning against the temptation to LGBT activists to simply shut down all opposition by simply labelling it as bigotry. Instead, we need to identify the areas where we can make common cause with those we see as our opponents, agreeing with them on the need for laws and social opposition to relationships based on domination by the powerful of the weak, or financial exploitation of the vulnerable. By moving away from mere emotional rhetoric, he suggests that both sides could conceivably move towards a society based on mutual respect, and genuine human rights.
At the same time, we must affirm that it is the duty of homosexuals not to swing to a proselytizing that seeks to impose their choice in a dynamic conversion of heterosexuals as if they were “infidels”, according to the logic of religious cruelty. We understand that homosexuals publicly hold citizenship in Cameroon, but it is unacceptable that they become an aggressive army against the prevailing heterosexual order. The rights of the homosexual minority impose duties of respect for other sexual orientations.
It is obvious. But in Cameroon, this evidence is misleading to the extent the political-homosexuality, sustenance-based homosexuality, mafia-criminal homosexuality and mystic-esoteric homosexuality proselytize and make use of political power, economic and mafia-spiritual power to impose their worldview. Today we need new laws to be passed against such practices. We also need to organize educational campaigns to protect young people against these practices. One should also teach Cameroonians the values of solidarity, unity, respect for minorities and guarantee of human rights for all. We must discover the richness and strengths of the values of the Republic in such manner as to ask what are the place and the presence of homosexuals in Cameroon.
It is in this direction that it will be possible to understand what to do with the issue of homosexuality in our country, away from emotional uproar and the hostility of a logic based on ignorance or bad faith. What needs to be done is to guarantee human rights to all Cameroonians as members of the one social and historical community. This is to allow all Cameroonians to assume their duties towards national cohesion and social peace. This is to make all Cameroonians, regardless of sexual orientation, feel Cameroonian in Cameroon and it frees in them the powers to build his country as a nation that respects the human person.
Books:
Related posts at Queering the Church:
Some of Southwark diocese’s conservative evangelicals plan to syphon off much of the money from their wealthy, largely suburban and middle class parishes, into a charitable trust that’s been set up. The Trust would then only hand this money to parishes that reject homosexuality and liberalism and have signed the orthodox worldwide Anglican Jerusalem Declaration.They want to keep their cash so it cannot go to the diocese and be used to support any liberal parishes or activities.
