Last month, it was all over the news that the Lagos State government in collusion with the Nigerian Police, raided a hotel where 80 people were attending a HIV/AIDS sensitisation event and arrested all of them on charges of homosexuality.
We reported how half of the people arrested and charged were said to be minors and the 28 adults charged were publicly paraded and their identities revealed to the public even though it put them at risk of being targets of hate crimes. The Lagos state government which already has a terrible track record with human rights in the last two years neither apologised nor took down its post naming and shaming these innocent persons.
But it seems that this kind of knee jerk of government power isn’t just specific to Nigeria.African News has just reported that the Tanzanian police have announced that they arrested twelve women and eight men on Tanzania’s semi-autonomous archipelago Zanzibar for alleged homosexuality. These twenty persons who are certified volunteers and aid workers were undergoing training from an NGO that works on HIV/AIDS education programmes when the police raided the hotel and arrested them. It turns out that the Tanzanian government recently banned privately run health centres from providing AIDS related services on the frankly ridiculous grounds that these centres ‘promote’ homosexuality by providing health care for LGBT persons and refusing to discriminate against them.
“They are implicated in homosexuality. We arrested them and are busy interrogating them. The police cannot turn a blind eye to this practice,” said regional police commander Hassan Ali Nasri on state television.
In Tanzania, the laws discriminate against gay male sex, offering a minimum of 30 years imprisonment as punishment – a punishment that goes all the way up to life imprisonment. There are however no laws punishing lesbian sex, because you know, patriarchy.
Apart from banning lubricants (because apparentlyonly gay men use them) and threatening to deport foreign aid workers and human rights advocates who ‘promote’ homosexuality, the government in Tanzania also detains men suspected of homosexuality and forces them to undergo ‘anal exams’ to find ‘proof’ of their homosexuality. Health Minister Ummy Mwalimu who is behind many of these policies has already supported the arrest of the 20 aid workers and threatens to punish them.
How does one even begin to phrase what is going on in Tanzania. Why does Africa continue to pretend that sexuality can be punished away?
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