Love Falls On Us

A Story of American Ideas and African LGBT Lives

Robbie Corey-Boulet

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786995193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios LGBT

In 2009 Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill became a top global news story. Two years later Hillary Clinton declared "Gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights, " but still today there is little consensus on how to advance those rights beyond the U.S. and Europe. The fact is that international LGBT activism and allies have created winners and losers. In Africa those who easily identify with the identities of the global movement find support, funding and care. Those whose sexualities don't align so neatly don't. In this faithful and moving investigation, award winning journalist Robbie Corey-Boulet shows that LGBT liberation does not look the same in Africa as it does in the United States or Europe. At a time when there is a groundswell of interest in LGBT life in Africa and attempts at reversing LGBT rights across much of the 'developed' world Corey-Boulet lays bare past failures. To the extent that there exists a right way to engage on LGBT issues in Africa-and, indeed, worldwide- Love Falls on Us is for those looking to learn what it is.

PART 1

CAMEROON

1

Indomitable lions

On the third Sunday in May 2005, in the early evening, Stéphane hurried his boyfriend out the door so they would arrive before the tables filled up at Victoire Bar, a roadside dive in the Essos neighborhood of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon.

Sunday nights at the Victoire offered one of the few regular meeting points for the city’s secretive but closely knit community of men who identified as gay or bisexual—or who, regardless of how they identified, had sex with other men. Stéphane, a twenty-two-year-old waiter, had been a fixture of that community for several years, and he tried not to miss a Sunday at the Victoire if he could help it. “It became like a custom,” he says. “If you weren’t there on a Sunday night, it meant you were sick.”

The crowd this particular evening, as was typical, cut across age and class lines. There were college students and fashion designers; boys in their teens and men in their fifties; Yaoundé natives and out-of-towners who’d driven from hundreds of miles away. “There were always new people you’d never seen,” Stéphane says.

Those who arrived early enough, Stéphane among them, claimed space on benches and chairs positioned around tables just outside the front door. The rest of the crowd, which numbered in the dozens, stood around the tables or inside, passing around cigarettes and dancing to the French and American pop songs that came through the bar’s weak speakers.

When the first police truck pulled up, many of the men assumed it was an ordinary raid, the kind they had witnessed countless times. The officers would enter, demand to speak to the owner, inspect the bar’s permits and, after identifying some kind of problem, some minor violation of some little-known rule, demand a bribe before leaving. “They do it a lot in this country,” says Didier, a graduate student who’d arrived with a friend about an hour after sundown.

But this time, instead of asking patrons to leave, as would normally happen, the police locked the men inside and began interrogating them, forcing many to lie on the bar’s dirt floor. In the confusion, Didier thought for a moment that the officers were going to rob everyone at gunpoint. Instead, they started going from person to person, checking IDs.

Two police vans appeared outside. Lambert, a thirty-year-old IT technician who had been calmly sipping his second beer of the evening when the raid began, asked one of the officers what was happening. The officer said they were looking for someone, without specifying who or why. Then, without explanation, the officers instructed everyone who hadn’t managed to flee—about thirty men in total—to board the vans. Only when the men arrived at a nearby police station were they told they were being arrested on suspicion of committing “homosexual acts.”

Stéphane, Didier, Lambert and the others could have been excused for their surprise. Cameroon’s penal code has criminalized same-sex sexual acts since 1972; Article 347 bis stipulates that such acts are punishable with fines of between 20,000 and 200,000 CFA francs (between roughly $40 and $400), and prison terms of between six months and five years. Yet until 2005, the law was hardly ever enforced.

To this day, Cameroonians argue about the motivations for the Victoire raid. Court documents have since revealed that, a month earlier, a local official had reported concerns about “the existence of homes where young homosexuals and lesbians don’t hesitate to indulge in their activities at night, in open air, in front of people including children younger than 15.”¹ This report was forwarded to the head of the military police in the neighborhood, who ordered a raid on a house where several gay men lived. It’s possible the police learned about the Sunday gatherings at the Victoire while questioning the house’s inhabitants.

Another theory centers on an alleged affair between a gay Cameroonian chef and his employer, a judge on the High Court of Justice. Either the judge’s wife or the judge himself ordered the chef’s arrest so he wouldn’t be in a position to blackmail the family, the story goes, and the police came to the Victoire hoping to find him. This theory has not been proven, however, and the chef himself disavows any link to the raid, which would quickly come to represent a grim turning point for the position of sexual minorities in Cameroonian society.

During their first hours in custody, some of the men began paying bribes for their release. The asking price was as high as 250,000 CFA francs, or around $500, an enormous sum in Cameroon. Though he believed he could have called in favors to come up with the money, Lambert says he never seriously considered doing so; he would continue playing by the rules and cooperating with the police, as he had from the moment the raid began. After all, he reasoned, Cameroon’s penal code criminalizes same-sex sexual acts, and all he had done was go out for drinks. None of the men, to his mind, was actually guilty of anything.

The first sign this might have been a miscalculation came the following day, when police instructed the remaining detainees to remove their shirts before marching them out into the police station’s courtyard. There it became apparent that local authorities would use the case to try and send a larger message. Journalists from two broadcast stations had been summoned, and the cameras began rolling. While some of the journalists attempted to conduct interviews, it was clear they had already accepted police claims that the men were part of “a homosexual gang.”

Didier, who had not disclosed his attraction to men to anyone outside of a small circle of friends, many of whom were rounded up at the Victoire along with him, recalls trying to cover his face as the cameramen approached. His efforts were in vain. His family would have no trouble spotting him later on the evening news.

Even for those who, like Lambert, were open with their families about their sexual orientations, the coverage jeopardized their reputations in the city at large. “We were pariahs,” Lambert says. “We were the ones who were ruining the country. They called us every bad thing.”

* * *

The decision to broadcast the men’s arrest so publicly—to make a national scandal out of what would otherwise have been an unseemly but private affair—marked a profound shift for a culture that had previously made no space for discussions of alternative sexualities. This silence was exactly what had enabled the men, up until the day of the raid, to hide in plain view, settling into a social rhythm organized around the few bars where they could come together.

Lambert had been instrumental in building up this scene for Yaoundé’s population of men who have sex with men, willing into existence something that, as far as he knew, had never before been attempted. A stocky man with a sloping forehead and charged, arresting eyes, Lambert seemed capable at any given moment of erupting in either laughter or anger. The fact that it was almost always the former explained why people were drawn to him. The fact that the latter was a constant possibility made them appreciate the laughter even more.

In 2000, he founded Cameroon’s first gay and lesbian rights organization, the Association for Gays and Lesbians and Supporters, or AGALES. Unlike the advocacy groups of today, AGALES had no funding and little by way of programming. Its main achievement, according to Lambert and other AGALES members, was to provide a ready-made network for people eager to learn about the Victoire and the men’s other meeting spots. These bars were not strictly gay bars, but Lambert and his friends viewed them as safe. If the more effeminate among them became too effusive in their greetings or demonstrative in their dancing, they risked a beating, perhaps, but that was the worst of it.

The mass arrests in May 2005 marked the first serious attack on this scene, signaling that gay men, and sexual minorities in general, had become subjects of interest to the police and other agents of the state.

The initial hostility Lambert and his fellow detainees encountered from the police was matched, if not exceeded, by court officials. During their first court appearance, several days after the raid, these officials made clear to the eleven men who remained in custody that they were already guilty in the eyes of the law. One prosecutor said homosexuality was unjustifiable because there were “more women than men” in Cameroon. She accused the suspects of driving women to prostitution and wrecking other people’s marriages. She told them they would need to go to Europe if they wanted to continue being pédés. Then she ordered them jailed as they awaited trial.

And so, ten days after the raid, the men were escorted two-by-two, in chains, through the entrance of the city’s central prison, known as Kondengui, a facility whose forbidding, earth-stained walls have long symbolized a criminal justice system that emphasizes cruelty and suffering over any kind of rehabilitation. Built in the 1960s, during the first decade of Cameroon’s independence, Kondengui, like many prisons in the region, is poorly maintained and overcrowded, and has been this way for as long as anyone can remember. Three years before the Victoire raid, a local human rights group reported that there were 9,530 detainees housed there, despite the fact that it was built for 2,500 (US Department of State 2003).

Thanks to the media coverage their case had received, the men’s reputations preceded them. When they came in view of the other prisoners, Didier says, “It was like we were the stars.” The shouts of “Here come the pédés” and “Here come the women” caused Stéphane to break down in tears almost immediately. “It was a horror,” he says. Didier remembers that the oldest of the Victoire detainees, a fifty-year-old clothing designer named Pascal, was singled out in taunts that reflected the widespread belief in Cameroon that gay men prey on young boys. “Look at the old guy. You don’t have anything better to do?” the prisoners shouted. “You’re spoiling everyone’s children.”

Because they totaled eleven—the same number as a side in a soccer match—the men were mockingly referred to as the “Indomitable Lions,” the name of Cameroon’s national team. The prisoners even gave the men positions; Didier recalls that he was referred to as the center midfielder, while Lambert, walking in front, was nicknamed “captain.”

Following this welcome, officials began assigning the men to different sections of the prison. The men were presented with a choice. If they confessed to violating Article 347 bis, they would be kept in sections reserved for elite prisoners, including former government ministers who had run afoul of the law. These areas were less populated than the rest of the prison, and were vigilantly policed by guards.

If, on the other hand, they maintained their innocence, they would be sent to a section of the prison known, for its violence, as Kosovo. “Kosovo was the jungle. It was a bit like Soweto, like Vietnam,” Didier says. “It really was a disaster.” In Kosovo, cells were severely overcrowded and inmates, not guards, were appointed by prison officials to keep the peace. In exchange, they were given carte blanche to demand small payments for nearly every service; prisoners even had to pay to leave their cells and walk around.

To underscore the dangers the men might face there, prison officials displayed weapons, including knives, they said had been recovered from Kosovo inmates. Peter Kumche, director of Trauma Centre, an NGO based in Yaoundé that provides support to inmates at Kondengui, says such intimidatory tactics are standard practice. “Normally, they use very unorthodox methods to get a confession. They can beat you, they can use all kinds of methods—strategies that are unconventional,” he says. “And so when you stand on your position and you refuse to confess, it is possible that they can think that you are very hardened, that you are hard-hearted, and that you are a very dangerous person.”

It would be difficult, Kumche adds, to overstate the risks posed by incarceration in Kosovo. “Kosovo is a section of the prison which is reserved for hardened criminals,” he says. “These are people whom the government thinks need to receive the worst treatment to compensate for the crime that has been committed.”

Ultimately, eight of the eleven men heeded the prison officials’ warnings and agreed to sign a confession so they could be housed in the more secure sections. The three who did not were Didier, Lambert and Alim Mongoche, a twenty-nine-year-old clothing designer from a Muslim family in Cameroon’s Far North Region.

* * *

Lambert had never met Alim prior to their arrest. He was physically small, more timid than Lambert and Didier and, quite clearly, terrified, at times even trembling with fear. This made him an easy target. According to Lambert and lawyer Alice Nkom, who would eventually represent the group at trial, Alim was raped multiple times soon after they arrived at Kondengui, with other inmates sometimes using drugs to render him defenseless. “They would use pills, drugs, put tranquilizers in your food,” Lambert later told the French documentary filmmaker Céline Metzger (2009). “After you ate, you’d feel tired and they’d drag you to their beds.” When Lambert complained to prison authorities on Alim’s behalf, they refused to step in and do anything. One time, when Alim tried to resist his attackers, they responded with a beating that left Alim in the infirmary for a week.

Violence touched the lives of the others, too. Lambert fought off a rape attempt one time in the bathroom. And Didier, though he was not attacked himself, says he became accustomed to witnessing fights that involved large numbers of prisoners, some of whom had access to weapons including razor blades and machetes. With inmates policing Kosovo themselves, these fights were rarely broken up. Didier estimates that he witnessed twenty deaths, as well as a number of gruesome injuries; once, he watched as a prisoner had his face cut open and his eye stabbed out. Kosovo, Didier says, was governed by “the law of the strongest.”

Despite these incidents, Didier sympathized with his fellow inmates, many of whom he suspected were driven to violence because of the conditions in Kondengui. His own cell had sixty-three inmates assigned to it, while Lambert’s had forty-five for just eighteen bunks. The constant bribe requests forced prisoners to come up with money either from visitors or by performing cleaning and maintenance tasks, and fights could break out over as little as 5 CFA francs—not even a penny. “The prisoners were working,” Didier says. “They woke up at 5 a.m. and organized themselves so they didn’t waste the day.”

They also had to find ways to supplement their diets. The prison-issued meals, which came once a day, were simply not enough to live on. Two days a week, Lambert says, inmates received a spoonful of “rice soup” with peanut sauce poured into their cupped hands. The rest of the time they were offered boiled corn. Lambert was luckier than most: His mother owned a restaurant in Yaoundé, and she regularly came by with fish and other meals. Even so, his weight fell and his health faltered.

Those who couldn’t hustle for money or a place to sleep—because they were too old, say, or too ill—were slowly worn down by the place. Didier remembers watching two men in their sixties who slept on a plastic tarp in an open courtyard each night, even when rain had turned the red earth to mud. “They weren’t even young men, with the strength to bear certain things,” he says. “They were old men. Why did the government need to put them in jail? Does the government not understand that they are old? I asked myself this question, and I understood then that the law is the law. It strikes everyone.”

* * *

Even in this setting, the Victoire detainees settled into something of a routine, making the most of their situation while awaiting word on how long it might last. It would be months before they received a trial date.

Didier took his incarceration as an opportunity for self-reflection; Kondengui, he says, was a kind of personal univers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Cameroon
• Part 2: Côte d’Ivoire
• Part 3: Liberia
• Selected Interviews
• References
• Notes
• Index