Mother Jones
Around midnight on February 13, a young Nigerian man named Femi* was jolted out of his evening prayer by shouting outside his window. A crowd of some 40 people had gathered around his house. “No more homosexuals in Gishiri!” they yelled, referring to Femi’s neighborhood within Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. The mob broke down his door and dragged him outside in his boxers. They beat him and about 13 other gay men that night with broken furniture, machete handles, sticks, and a garden rake, vowing to kill them if they didn’t clear out of the neighborhood.
The attack, and other acts of vigilante violence targeting gays and lesbians around the country, was motivated by a new anti-gay law that Nigeria’s president signed on January 7. The measure, modeled off the one that Uganda enacted in late February, levies harsh prison sentences on anyone who makes a “public show” of a “direct” or “indirect” same-sex relationship or supports an LGBT organization (10 years), and anyone who attempts to enter into a same-sex marriage (14 years), even though this would be virtually impossible in Nigeria. The anti-gay backlash the law has provoked in Nigeria has led not just to violence, but to homelessness, unemployment, harassment, and a steep drop-off in HIV/AIDS treatment.
John Adeniyi narrowly escaped the attack in Gishiri and has been recording accounts of the violence that night. He’s a human rights program officer at the International Center for Advocacy on Rights to Health (ICARH), an HIV intervention organization based in Abuja. To find out what life is like for Nigeria’s gay community under the country’s new law—and what gay Ugandans are starting to face—I visited with Adeniyi during a recent trip to Nigeria.
Link:
You Thought It Was Tough Being Gay in Uganda. “It’s Hell in Nigeria.”
