Illegal and Invisible: Sexuality, Identity and LGBT Rights in Liberia

Clearly, in times of chaos and anarchy, the vulnerable and powerless are always attacked. It’s a short step from there during a fragile peace to judgments like: “Who is causing the decay in society? Who is upsetting the social order?” The master narrative is, “If we can just get rid of those people, we can go back to achieve our ideal existence.”

In 2001, while insurgent gay voices were speaking out across the continent, Liberia’s then President Charles Taylor threatened heightened surveillance to flush out homosexuals. The deviant sodomite archetype served Taylor’s psychological drama, but he was inciting an internal conflict that hadn’t existed. Gay and lesbian Liberians generally did not disclose their identities in public. And though penal law forbids any act between individuals considered “deviant” by definition, overt discrimination in relation to sexual orientation wasn’t practiced. But Taylor the warlord could not invent himself as a moral leader, a statesman, without targeting an opposite. If you need to reconstruct yourself like Taylor had to, after so much killing, it serves you well to use a buffer. There’s always an absolute positive and negative extreme in identity politics. The gender binary — the idea of a split (you’re either this or that)—supported Taylor’s grandiose self-perception.

He was exceptional, Taylor claimed, not only in contrast to the other warlords he’d outsmarted to seize the presidency; he was also man enough to cleanse the land of walking, breathing abominations. The unspoken subtext was, “I may not be perfect, I may have committed massacres, unspeakable atrocities, but I’m not a pervert. At least everybody knows I’m not gay.”

Before Taylor’s sinister pronouncement, there was Tecumseh Roberts, Liberia’s own Michael Jackson, a beautiful songbird trapped during the war in territory controlled by warlord Prince Yormie Johnson (now a senator, the man who filmed, directed and starred in the infamous video of President Samuel Doe’s slow torture to death).

Tecumsey Roberts

 Charged a homosexual, Tecumseh was subjected to a voyeuristic anal examination, then murdered. A well-loved human being, an important and respected artist was butchered for no reason by inquisitors whose extremist ideology was predicated on fundamentalist ethnocentric politics. What Liberians remember most today is the obscene lie Johnson told about Tecumseh’s murder during his testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that Tecumseh had a “rotten” body cavity, conjuring an image that violated Tecumseh’s personal dignity and exploited his naked body even in death.

To declare yourself gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender in Liberia today you have to be willing to risk your life in daring to claim full citizenship. If not an actual death, you are condemned to suffer social death and religious alienation. Incendiary language will be used against you in God’s name. The constitution will not protect you. If you accept the premise that God has supremacy, the collective will also use your faith against you: not only will you be denied your humanity, you will also be denied access to God.

FrontPage Africa online reports that Presidential Press Secretary Jerolinmek Piah told journalists at a press briefing in mid-January that President Sirleaf would veto any legislation associated with gay rights or same-sex marriage. Writing from the epicenter, Liberian feminist poet, social critic and rights activist Korto Williams states, “The rights of sexual minorities are threatened by dutybearers, including the government of Liberia and the national parliament. Homosexuality is criminalized and religious institutions use their influence to marginalize the LGBT community, with the media (social media included), government and legislature taking defined, homophobic positions on the decriminalization of homosexuality.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted the first ever UN resolution on the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons in June of 2011. This resolution finally recognizes the human rights abuses and violations that LGBT people face around the world. Liberia is a founding member of the UN and has ratified major international instruments on women’s and people’s rights, including the African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Rights of Women in Africa, which is significant considering the current volatile homophobic climate in Liberia.

Hate speech in Liberia is, however, allowed to proliferate largely unimpeded, as the following excerpt culled from an online newspaper article shows: “Gays are abnormal sexual agents of obliteration that have been assigned by the kingdom of darkness to undermine and thwart the progressivity, productivity, and transformation of mankind. People who involve themselves in this harmful misdeed and transgression must be denied, exposed, disgraced, arrested, prosecuted, ostracized, ex-communicated and ridiculed by their non-gay colleagues, families and society at large. Our foreign partners must understand that same-sex marriage is an offense to our religious and cultural principles.”

Anything goes. And of course such people believe they are the keepers of ethics and morality, and with God on their side, they can do and say just about anything they want to.

Vocal activist Archie Ponpon of the Movement for the Defense of Lesbians and Gays Rights sent out this message in a recent press release: “We have gone into hiding because of public outrage and threats of attacks on our lives.” A member of his group was stoned the week before on the University of Liberia campus.

There is a new group called the National Movement Against Same Sex Marriage in Liberia (NAMASSEM). A spokesperson for another group, the Indigenous Movement of Liberia, said in a statement to the press: “Homosexuality is ungodly and against Liberia’s cultural tradition. Gay right advocates, including Archie Ponpon, must not take their campaign to the indigenous people who strongly believe in their tradition, the Holy Bible and Holy Koran. The Indigenous Movement is about to launch a nationwide anti-gay campaign to avoid what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, during the days of Old.”

According to a reporter, Legislator George Blamoh Wesseh said:  “It is demonic and evil. It actually beats my imagination for any young man and woman to think of same-sex marriage. Are they real human beings or what?”

Speaker of the House of Representatives Alex Tyler, Representative Prince Tokpah, and Representative Edward Karfiah have all assured their constituents, according to news reports, that no LGBT rights bill will ever pass on their watch.

The Masses Against Gay Activity in Liberia (MAGAL) openly urges the government to “relentlessly wage war against homosexuality and lesbianism.” They propose that the “government establishes a rigorous Task Force or Special Unit to expose and arrest Gays and lesbians who are operating underground”; that “The views and opinions of so-called gay-advocates be barred and banished totally from the Liberia society”; that “Anyone caught in the act of homosexuality be arrested and prosecuted” and “imprisoned for twenty years with hard labor.”; that “Anyone caught promoting gayism and lesbianism through any medium be arrested and prosecuted; and if found guilty be imprisoned for ten years with treatment of hard labor.”: that “Anti-gay lessons be embedded in Health Sciences of our National Curriculum for our students in primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions.”

It is urgent that those of us truly committed to a new political imagination act now to ensure that the human rights debate currently taking shape in Liberia respects the rights of all citizens regardless of sexual orientation. As New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker insists, “We should not be putting civil rights issues to a popular vote.  No minority should have their rights subject to the passions, the sentiments, of the majority.” These rights should be guaranteed, rather than their withholding used as political leverage in debates divorced from the reality of LGBT peoples’ daily struggles.

It is the duty of the government to serve and protect its entire constituency. I call on you to sign the petition asking the Executive Mansion to end discrimination against LGBT Liberians.

May this storm be brief and our unity strong when the skies clear.

Sign the petition:

Petition the Government of Liberia to End Discrimination Against Gay and Lesbian Liberians

On Friday, 13 January 2012, a University of Liberia gay rights student activist and his supporters were stoned by other students on campus. Among countless other acts of violence against gays, this is one of the most recent based solely on an individual’s sexual orientation and claim to full citizenship.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ‘gay rights are human rights’ speech before the United Nation’s human rights group in Geneva on 6 December 2011 is what seems to have ignited this bitter and sometimes sadistic public debate in Liberia. The impression that the US will use foreign aid to promote gay and lesbian rights has unleashed a vicious torrent of homophobia. Thundering from their pulpits, some Christian ministers have equated homosexuality with immorality. Lawmakers allegedly have aggressively been threatened on the streets for so much as whispering about gay rights.

At the weekly press briefing on Thursday, 19 January 2012, Presidential Press Secretary Jerolinmek Piah told journalists that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf would veto any legislation associated with gay rights or same sex marriage. A headline that day in a leading online Liberian newspaper read: ‘No Gay Right’: Ellen Vows to Veto Any Would-Be Legislation, Government Says.

President Sirleaf won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize and should know that the oppression and exclusion of any group is anathema to Alfred Nobel’s vision of an equalitarian society. If President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is to truly cut her cloth to the measurement of a King or Mahatma, now is the time for her to take that turn at this crossroads.

The urgency for Liberian lesbians and gays is a liberation movement for equal rights, not special treatment. We should not forget that Liberia has always been in the forefront of liberation movements on the continent. During the apartheid era, anti-racist South African activists found refuge in Liberia. Successive Liberian governments provided financial and legal support for anti-colonial movements including South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) at a time when western governments called Mandela a terrorist. Now with the ANC in power, South Africa’s constitution secures gay rights for her citizens, including same-sex marriage, while Liberians are still stuck in their adoption and internalization of a vitriolic conservative, right-wing hypocritical 16th century interpretation of Christianity that projects a monolithic view of sexual identity, denying human diversity and human complexity. The irony here is, the majority of Liberians are not Christians (nor for that matter Moslem)!

It is ludicrous to say, like a prominent lawyer did recently, echoed and amplified on the listservs, that homosexuality was brought to Africa by Westerners. Non-colonized Africans (who still exist removed from this debate!) are known for rejecting fixed binaries and absolutes of good vs. evil, black vs. white, normal vs. abnormal, crooked vs. straight. Cultural historians have documented fluid gender identities/sexualities in pre-colonial Africa, as well as the differences between African and European notions of normative and normal.

Dagara author Malidoma Somé from Burkina Faso (an initiated Zoe with a PhD from the Sorbonne) writes about the absence of any word in his culture that describes gays in the Western sense: ‘The reason why I’m saying there are no such people is because the gay person is very well integrated into the community, with the functions that delete this whole sexual differentiation of him or her.’ Here we see an African belief system that dynamically embraces difference as an inviolable mystery in human nature. ‘[G]ender,’ Somé says, ‘has very little to do with anatomy [. . .] So to then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person. That all he or she is a sexual person’.

Historians reveal that homophobia in Africa spread with Christian, colonial and imperialist expansion. The Western notion of sexual normativity during this period coincided with the rape and objectification of the African female body (breeder, Venus Hottentot) and the subjugation and desecration of the African male body (lynching, castration). The same jeremiad biblical interpretation used to enslave Africans and demonize African cultures and spirituality (the curse of Ham), is the same rhetoric used today to subordinate and bludgeon people of diverse sexual backgrounds and ‘transgressive’ sexualities.

Men courting men and marriages between women in Africa were documented in writing and corroborated by oral accounts as early as 1591. Vivid pictorial narratives of same-sex couplings appear in the legendary San rock paintings in Zimbabwe dating back more than 30,000 years. And up until today, certain West African peoples consider homoerotic behavior between boys before marriage perfectly normal and natural. It’s absurd to believe homosexuality existed everywhere else on earth since antiquity but Africa!

Our ignorance of our own histories and cultures fuels our continued exploitation and the ways we turn upon each other with class privilege, bullets, machetes, razor tongues, using even the penis as a weapon to punish, maim and wound. Shouldn’t the statistics on heterosexual rape instead be the subject of a national debate? How is it that we have normalized rape perpetrated by men — merely shrugging at the rapes of female babies and little girls by rabid pedophiles — only venting outrage against a man who freely chooses to love and copulate with another man, or a woman whose choice it is to make love to a woman? How do same-sex relationships between non-violent consenting partners compare to the violent sex crime of rape?

Hillary Clinton’s gay human rights speech last December came on the eve of the 63rd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – adopted on 10 December 1948 by the UN General Assembly. That declaration followed what is called World War II, though Africans, under colonial rule, were not included in the definition of ‘universal’ enshrined in those rights, and arguably still aren’t, nor were Africans involved in that war between the world’s military powers except to save their skins when used by the colonizers as human shields on the frontlines.

That savage war was fought by eight countries, not the whole world: Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, the Soviet Union (now Russia), and China, six of them today permanent members of the UN Security Council, and still the world’s biggest arms dealers. How is it that we have normalized wars perpetrated by ‘the global powers,’ wars in which millions of Africans have been and are still being slaughtered, displaced, plunged into poverty, starvation, extreme suffering, and all our outrage is spent against peaceful homosexuals? What about the economic war in Liberia – privatization, land grabbing, corruption scandals, predatory NGOs, multinational monopolies, joblessness?

No fury?

It is past time for us to treat each other with tenderness, dignity, gentleness and kindness. For far too long gay and lesbian Liberians have been subjected with impunity to scorn, malice, taunting, ridicule and violence. The physical, psychological, emotional persecution must end! So too must we not allow the fear of being called gay to arrest us from speaking out in the name of oppressed humanity against this inhumane injustice! To further victimize traumatized people already living hand to mouth whose only solace is love, to deny them even that, is heartless! Because of course we know that elite Liberian gays and lesbians live far removed from raw emotions spit in their faces.

Let President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf know that homosexuality is normal and natural for people who are born homosexual or bisexual and does not equal immorality. Tell the Government of Liberia to End Discrimination Against Gay and Lesbian Liberians and Legalize Equality for ALL Liberians!

Sign the petition:

Gynocentric Women, Androcentric Men: The Liberian Self Divided

After the recent October elections, a self-identified Liberian feminist woman said in an interview, “They say a vote is a secret but I am openly saying here that I voted for every woman that was on the ballot, because I believe that if you say you are a feminist there should be no if and no but. I voted across the line for women.”

Ovaries in political ascendency. I think of Condoleezza Rice. African American woman. Point person and defender of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld triumvirate: the U.S. regime most analogous to a fascist power structure than any other in American history. At abbreviated speed think heightened surveillance and wiretapping. Stripping civil liberties. Wall Street deregulation.  Torture. Military occupation worldwide. And the original “Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, so dubbed for her steely coldness, her ruthless decimation of economic safety nets, implicated in corruption scandal after scandal enriching the rich, openly defending cruelties of the empire faulted for some of the greatest suffering and domination of majority world peoples from the Americas to the Caribbean to Asia to bloodstained carved Africa.

Vote for women for political office solely on gender? "[N]o if and no but"? Support full gender dominance – when the yes man for nefarious designs is a yes woman? 

The view that women are Übermensch (over-human, above-human, superhuman) is no less extremist than the belief that women are inferior creatures compared to men.

Definitions.

Gynocentrism (gyno, "woman, female"): “a belief system whereby the perceptions, needs and desires of women have primacy.”

Androcentrism (andro-, "man, male"): “the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history.”

Distinctions.

Womanism (noun); Womanist (adjective): “A black feminist or feminist of color; someone who is committed to the wholeness and well-being of all of humanity, male and female.” To which I must add: and to the wholeness and well-being of the natural world, the environment, and all living creatures.

I remember the roaring abuse when while confronting sexual violence, sexism and misogyny, a handful of us dared to use the word feminism and call ourselves feminists in the 80s. Redefining ourselves as womanists in the 90s, we sought to harmonize womanity and masculinity in political struggle and discourse to articulate our condition and effect social transformation. That movement has since been co-opted, overrun by powerful front women indistinguishable from the powerful “mimic men” they’ve replaced.  This is Haitian writer-scholar Roger Dorsinville’s brilliant term for the elite collusionists with rapacious global power whose “mimicry” produces disastrous effects that permeate throughout the body politic and economy to stain the social consciousness.

PR coup or psych ops (PSYOP), there’s essentially no difference: we are at war within ourselves/against us.

Come to me in a vivid daytime dream, here’s a story I've written derived from a well-known wisdom folktale of the Kwa.

Once upon a time in the wild eastern forests of Liberia, a powerful healer gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. To her children the wise healer patiently passed on the curative knowledge of certain leaves, herbs, roots, bark, grasses, seeds and hidden plants. Their father, too, was a learned man; a master hunter steeped in the ways of the natural world. He taught the children how to read the signs of nature with reverence for earth, sky, water, fire and all living creatures. But the boy was born with the gift of the arrow, the girl with the gift of smoke. The boy could fly soaring through the air over any obstacle to trace the flight of his arrow. So, too, could the girl travel airborne, weightless on a trail of smoke blown from her mouth in any direction of the moving wind. These unearned gifts the children valued highly and delighted in far above their parents’ teachings.

Time came when slave raiders shadowed the land. These soulless, vile zombies stalked the children, who had begun wandering further and further away from familiar territory through the vast green expanse to test their gifts. It was not that the children were craftily hunted for their birthright gifts to be exploited, which the gleaming-eyed slave raiders thought to be no more than acrobatics; it was rather the sheen of their skins, the strength of their limbs that drew the slave raiders. These evildoers sniffed profit and believed that the healthy children could survive the manifold tortures of capture.

The slave raiders’ net was thrown, the children ensnared like wild beasts. Each clutched to their breast the deerskin bags they carried around their waists with their gifts inside. The boy, his bow and arrows. The girl, her smoldering coals.  Also in their bags were calabash gourds of water, strips of dried deer meat from their father’s hunt, and various medicines from their mother’s dispensary.

Beaten into submission, the children were carried inside the net between two poles with a man on each end, like animals for slaughter. The group of six men took turns to fast cover the distance to their camp where other captives were. Then began the long march to the coast and the slavers’ ships.

I will let the reader speculate how this retelling of an age-old story ends. Using their gifts and the knowledge passed down by their parents, do boy and girl together, as in their mother’s womb, find their way home to freedom? Will the boy or the girl or both collaborate with the slavers to save their skins and betray the other(s)? Will the boy or the girl decide that even enslavement is far better than the home and life they were forced to leave behind? There are other endings and other possibilities . . .

Of Sheroes & The Fire Dance

Of sheroes, I may have found one in a political leader. Is such a thing at all possible?  Do politicians today without painted halos exist? Politicians? They are scary for true. Their plasticity. Their shape-shifting toothy lies. Their cold, stern, power-driven philosophies. I'm wondering.  We in Africa have known and seen great freedom fighters, great thinkers, great human beings. Most lived embattled lives until their early deaths (usually by murder). Thinking tonight about this could-be-a-shero and her dance of fire.

Since ancient times, dance in Africa has been a rigorous discipline, artistry indivisible from life’s rhythm. Instruction to learn a dance is a long, long process over years and years of study. A dance draws on the elements; the natural world; the spiritual world; the dancer’s soul divinity. To see a dancer glide is to witness craft honed through arduous dedication.

My could-be-a-shero's name is Manjerngie Cecelia Ndebe. During a peaceful protest vigil Monday last, tear gassed by the new US-trained special security police, she was arrested, dragged to jail, incarcerated without charges for hours. Her dance of fire was in the streets, baptized in the blood of those murdered by the police:  The bony hungry protesters weakened by malnutrition, outraged at their condition. Her dance of fire was in a filthy jail cell.

Said Martin Luther King, Jr., "I am not afraid to go to jail for justice." This is the dance of fire Manjerngie Ndebe danced. She knew the costs. Regardless, she danced to the elements dodging bullets. Sheroic. There may be other deeper reasons, too, why she, the Standard Bearer of a registered political party (the Liberia Reconstruction Party) was manhandled and snatched off the streets. In an open letter, she boldly challenged Ellen Loj, the head of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). 

Her burning words (excerpted): 

Through the war and now in the name of peacekeeping, the international community has created jobs for its member country citizens in various capacities like experts, GEMAP, UNMIL, UNDPD, USAID, International Contact Group, EU, and many others without paying income taxes to Liberia while many Liberians are unemployed.

The international community brought in GEMAP September 2006 and under its continual monitoring and control, Liberia has been rated among the top corrupt countries of the world. The oil wells on the coastlines of Liberia have been given to companies of member countries of GEMAP through corrupt legislative bills written and forced on the Liberian Legislature for passage by the international community that came in to protect us from corruption.

Through the Diamonds for Development bill of 2006, the international community also gained unlawful access to our diamonds, gold, precious metals, precious wood, and other natural resources by corrupt means that the elections has been rigged to protect.

The expenditure on the salaries, benefits, and logistics of UN and other international organizations’ staff in Liberia could carry out domestic agenda development in Liberia for 50 years. It is time you all leave Liberia so we can manage our resources and develop our land. If there is peace for eight years while are you still here while UN in the Ivory Coast is leaving already? Is it not because of our oil, diamonds, and other natural resources that you are expanding your stay in Liberia to exploit?

With your recommendation and control Liberia’s security is under foreign command against our constitution and armed robberies in Monrovia are high while our borders, sea, and resources are exploited by all of you. We are the only democracy in the world without our army defending our cause and a foreign chief of staff against our constitution is in place that Madam Loj has never condemned.

UNMIL continues to be here not for the protection of Liberians or Liberian peace but for the protection of foreign exploitation of our resources and to suppress justice and the rule of law. UNMTL Headquarters are not accessible to Liberians and to enter there, security checks are worse than at international airports.

 Who is this woman, this fire dancer, this modern day Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti? We will see. May the dance not be too arduous. May she not crack a rib, or  lose her life. May her halo prove to be unpainted.

Painted Halos

Today I'm thinking of painted halos. A metaphor, see? How the crowned are throned and made into angels . . . people with halos painted by other people without.