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: