‘The young people are not standing for homophobia’

Anti-gay attitudes in Africa and the Caribbean can be traced back to colonialism – but thankfully things are changing.

By Leah Mahon

ON A roadside in Eldoret, Kenya, the lifeless body of an LGBTQ activist lays stuffed inside a metal box with his eyes gouged out and sock stuff inside his mouth as a court case remains underway in the fight for justice over his brutal killing.

Edwin Chiloba, fashion designer and model, was living as an openly gay man in the east African country before being smothered to death.

Details around the motivation behind the killing remain unclear, but his tragic death sparked uproar from LGBTQ activist groups after a series of violent deaths have blighted their community and made many question whether they could live without fear of reprisal because of their sexual orientation. In Kenya, homosexuality is taboo and gay sex is punishable by up to 14 years in prison, although the law is rarely enforced.

Throughout 54 African countries, just 22 have thrown out anti-gay laws. Angola, Botswana and Mozambique were some of the most recent nations to decriminalise same-sex relationships.

In some countries, to be gay means a prison sentence, and in others, such as Mauritius, So- malia, South Sudan and parts of Nigeria where sharia law is practised, to be gay is punishable by death.

South Africa remains the one and only African country to legalise same-sex marriage.

Yvonne Muthoni, an LGBTQ rights activist based in Kenya, tells The Voice that the effect of constitutional change for gay people living in Africa was hard to gauge as the country grapples with ongoing homophobic violence.

Violence

“There are legal avenues now for issues like intimate partner violence or homophobic violence that you can actually approach,” she says. “The LGBTQ community can actually stand up and say I’ve been abused and my partner’s abusing me or this person is attacking me and it’s a homophobic attack –there’s legal recourse.”

Yvonne, pictured below right, who is based in the capital Nairobi, says she still has doubts as to whether “the lived realities of everyday citizens” has drastically altered because of the law, adding that society’s mindsets towards gay people firstly need to shift.

Across oceans, the Caribbean has arguably made more strides in the fight for gay rights than their African cousins. Some Bajans recently marked the death of Darcy Dear, a prominent LGBTQ activist and founder of the United Gays and Lesbians Association of Barbados.

In the east of the tropical region, Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis and Barbados have all made constitutional history by banishing their archaic laws around same-sex relations.

Belize and Trinidad and Tobago also ruled for anti-gay laws to be taken out of their constitution. Caribbean countries like Dominica, Grenada and Jamaica still continue to criminalise gay relations. However, these laws are hardly reinforced on the islands.

The passing of gay-marriage laws in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands were shot down by a UK court in 2022, and the British Virgin Islands government announced that they would be holding a referendum on whether to legalise same-sex marriage that would change the “social and religious fabric” of their society.

Donnya Piggot, an LGBTQ activist in Barbados and cofounder of LGBTQ charity B-

GLAD, says that recent constitutional change on the island and throughout the Caribbean “doesn’t change overnight” for the community.

“I heard some people just walking on the beach and there were some queer people. And then one of them said ‘we could hold hands now’,” she tells The Voice. “So there is this joke that we are now included. I don’t think it will happen overnight, because it takes some time to sink into the psyche of people.”

The increased exposure to technology during the Covid-19 pandemic and the influx of digital nomads, Donnya believes, is changing the landscape of Barbados and the kind of people that reside on the island. She says that an older generation of Caribbean people are the ones still holding on to traditional values.

“Our parents are holding onto a level of tradition. It’s the same thing with the monarchy,” the activist explains.

“It’s all mixed up and we’re holding on to these ideals with this identity of a Christian nation, the identity of the Commonwealth countries is identity. The younger millennials and Gen Z are saying ‘f**k that’.”

Differences

The traditional values make up a large part of the conservative Caribbean and Africa, which traces back to colonial rule. Despite rich cultural differences, the Black diaspora are forever linked because of the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the rule of the British Empire.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, colonists implemented Christian fundamentalism as the core belief system when once before ancient African spirituality and traditions like Voodoo, Pocomania and Orish were widely followed in African countries, and even survived the journey to the Caribbean. Many of these British colonial-era

SLOW PROCESS: Donnya Piggot, an LGBTQ activist in Barbados and co-founder of LGBTQ charity B-GLAD, admits that a change of attitude towards members of her community will not happen overnight laws and Christian fundamentalist beliefs are still widely practised across these two regions.

Countries in Africa or the Caribbean, dubbed commonly as “third-world countries” by the West, have historically only been viewed as an exotic holiday resort or as a mere flight stop-over, a no-go area entirely because of these very antiLGBTQ laws and economic hardship. By and large, these “thirdworld countries” are a direct result of colonial belief systems brought over by the British.

Donnya credits more people being openly and unapologetically gay across the media landscape is “moving the needle” against anti-gay tropes in the Caribbean.

“It’s 2023, there is a whole slew of innovation happening. And as soon as that happens, our ideas of ourselves have to change as well.

“There are still some people who are very homophobic and archaic, but these young people are not having it,” she says. “And so as time goes on we’re growing up, but we’re going to become the leader, and some of us are already.”