By Okechukwu Nwanguma
On the same-sex practice debate: is same-sex a moral issue? Should the law bother about it? Is it culture-specific or a natural sexual orientation?
My friend Professor Olu Oguibe, told me that his introduction to the question was back in Nsukka in the 80s when he first read Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical classic, Go Tell It on The Mountain.
He said he knew Baldwin was gay, but hadn’t given it much thought. ‘I’d also known one or two people at home who were rumoured to be gay, including a former math teacher of mine in Ife who was rumoured to have been murdered for that reason.
And I knew back in secondary school that students at Amumara Girls, which is the most prominent all-women high school on our part were known to make out with each other, especially the seniors.
Oguibe continued: But reading Baldwin and seeing the great struggle he went through trying to deny, reject, and fight against what he felt, even to the point of getting engaged to a girl and trying to force himself to feel attracted to girls rather than boys and yet, failing ultimately, that got me thinking about two things.
First was: here was one of the greatest writers that ever lived, a close friend of Achebe, and, in fact, in my opinion then and still, one of the greatest men who ever lived. And he’d had this inclination—what today we call orientation—and he fought it tooth and nail given how dangerous it was in his time, which it still is in many places.
It would have been easier to be like everyone else. Yet Baldwin, this great man that I so admired, who had grown up a boy preacher in the church, could do nothing about this feeling, and eventually knew he had to accept who he was and only that way could he find happiness.
How could that be anything but a fact of nature? That, then, turned me to a second thought. Science. Biology, which had been my best subject in grammar school. In the rest of the animal kingdom—and as primates we are part of the animal kingdom, we’re not made in any god’s image, we’re simply primates—sex between males and sex between females is rather quite common, more common than people know or care to admit.
So, there are numerous different forms of sexual interaction in nature, which led me to conclude that sexual attraction occurs on a spectrum rather than in two purely exclusive and opposite forms. it’s also becoming more obvious now that gender is the same. Chromosome sets will only determine what genitalia a baby will develop, but they don’t determine the full spectrum of gender.
If you have a baby who is physiologically female but loaded with male testosterone hormones during gestation, they’ll most likely grow up with male characteristics: behaviour, orientation, sense of self, and maybe even some physical male characteristics such as hairiness, smaller breasts, a more prominent clitoris, more defined muscles, and more aggressiveness.
So, while they’re outwardly female, they’re more male than female in every respect. And vice versa. Sexual orientation follows that pattern where people fall along a full spectrum from absolute regular straight at one end of the spectrum to absolute regular homosexual at the other end of the spectrum, and then variations in between.
That happens to be Nature, and Nature creates and forms us, and the almost infinite diversity we find in it, it has developed and evolved for its purpose with its complex algorithms which sometimes seem random or arbitrary to us until we discover the logic behind it.
So, nothing in Nature is a moral question. Hurting people, or denying them the right to be who they are and find happiness; is a moral issue and it’s wrong to do so, not right. I have a strong sense that our people recognized and accepted that some people are attracted to others of their sex, much as they might have found it curious.
Sometimes, the practice of women getting their husbands to marry a sister’s wife, in some cases a friend, was also a ruse for lesbian accommodation. Since we didn’t have any scientific explanations for phenomena, I would think that men who were attracted to other men kept their sexual orientation to themselves but outwardly fully expressed themselves without sanction, even if it amused others.
So, yes, sexuality or sexual orientation is a fact of Nature. Trying to regulate it with the law or the use of force, violence, or unjust discrimination is immoral. Religion has something to do with that, and historically, religion has often fallen on the side of violence and repression.
I often bring up for people that we once threw twins away, right up till just over a hundred years ago, actually less than a hundred years ago, when the British nurse, Mary Slessor, who was then based in Calabar, noticed it and got the church and the colonial government to outlaw the Igbo throwing away twins at birth. Like sexual orientation today, our reasoning back then was that having more than one baby was “unnatural” among humans.
Among animals, yes, but for humans, no, in our thinking something had to be wrong. Meanwhile, just a few hundred miles across the river in Yoruba land, they celebrated twins and women who had twins. We just didn’t know. We thought it was a curse, a bad omen, something that occurred only in animals.
But that wasn’t the case. It was something that naturally occurs in humans, also. Out of lack of knowledge, and fear of something we couldn’t understand, we came up with a moral code that punished women who had twins, broke up their marriages and sent them back to their parents as dangerous, cursed damaged, and worse still, meted out inconceivable cruelty to infant babies by throwing them away in the forest to be bitten to death by ants or vermin.
Imagine that. Yet, once we were made to understand that a woman developing more than one baby in pregnancy is nature rather than animal behaviour or an abomination, we not only gave up the “moral” sanction but began to celebrate twins.
We realized there was no moral issue there. Nne Ejima became a term of honour and celebration instead of a curse and damnation. Nature is very complex and only by patience, open-mindedness, and constant study will we continue to understand and embrace its full diversity and richness.
Oguibe also recalled the great raconteur, Area Scatter, who was from Ihiteoha, Uratta (according to sources) and who cross-dressed for his performances. Was he secretly gay, perhaps? We don’t know. But he performed in what we call drag in the US (cross-dressing) and instead of being vilified or harassed, he was greatly respected among our people and deservedly so.
We the Igbo are constantly moving in reverse as a people, becoming less developed in mind and less civilised than our ancestors. We’re copying the very worst forms of Pentecostal Christianity, and what do we get for this increasing Christian fundamentalism? We’ve become more corrupt, more immoral, more self-centred rather than community-centred, and overall more intellectually incompetent and regressive.
We’re not getting on par with the industrial nations who now acknowledge and protect these differences in sexual orientation; the same people who brought us Christianity. Instead, we’re falling farther and farther behind them. Our money is worthless, our economy is in tatters, our politicians are all thieves, our schools, roads, hospitals and clinics are crumbling, and our university halls of residence are worse than prison cells.
And yet, we go on and on about people’s private business and sexual orientation. We all hail Nelson Mandela but seem to forget that Nelson Mandela made gay relationships and marriage a constitutional right in South Africa, a right which is inscribed in the nation’s constitution. We pride ourselves on our ignorance and backwardness.
Mr Okechukwu Nwanguma is the Executive Director of the Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre (RULAAC) in Nigeria.
