Clearwater

By James Obi

The author was born and raised in a traditional rural village in the most violently homophobic country on earth – Nigeria. His memoir tells a harrowing story – how he negotiated ostracism, imprisonment, homelessness, violence, extortion and intense persecution. But he is never a victim – drawing on his own spiritual and emotional resources, he overcomes. He seeks to understand the root causes of homophobia, providing fascinating insights into Igbo culture, history, spirituality and cosmology. Moving rapidly from one hair-raising experience to the next, the tight prose and action-packed narrative will keep the reader engaged until the end. At the same time the author provides hope to those facing persecution and violence, and who find themselves in similar situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398482746

James Obi

James Obi is from Anambra, in South East Nigeria. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mass communication from Abia State University. He moved to South Africa in 2015. He holds qualifications in HIV counselling from Wits University, Substance Abuse Disorder and Addictions counselling from SANCA, psychology from the University of Toronto, sociology from the University of South Wales, and Child Counselling from College SA. He worked for the Wits Health Consortium as an HIV/AIDS counsellor, and with Jesuit Refugee Services as a trauma counsellor, focusing on LGBTI refugees and on women refugee victims of sexual violence. He provided end-of-life accompaniment to the terminally ill, and bereavement counselling to the family members and loved ones left behind.

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About the Author

James Obi is from Anambra, in South East Nigeria. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mass communication from Abia State University. He moved to South Africa in 2015. He holds qualifications in HIV counselling from Wits University, Substance Abuse Disorder and Addictions counselling from SANCA, psychology from the University of Toronto, sociology from the University of South Wales, and Child Counselling from College SA. He worked for the Wits Health Consortium as an HIV/AIDS counsellor, and with Jesuit Refugee Services as a trauma counsellor, focusing on LGBTI refugees and on women refugee victims of sexual violence. He provided end-of-life accompaniment to the terminally ill, and bereavement counselling to the family members and loved ones left behind.

Dedication

Dedicated to all refugees and forced migrants who lost their lives in search of greener pastures. May you find comfort and rest in the arms of God.

Copyright Information ©

James Obi 2022

The right of James Obi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398482739 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398482746 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgements

Helen Epstein, without whom the work would not have been possible. And Tanja Kleibl, who is always an inspiration.

Prologue

September is my favourite month in Johannesburg. The cold, rainy winter finally subsides, and the Jacaranda trees erupt like purple smoke along the streets. It’s also Gay Pride Month, celebrated with parties, film screenings, art exhibitions and other events by citizens of every colour.

At the first Pride March in 1990, participants wore brown paper bags over their heads. Now it’s launched by the Mayor of Johannesburg himself. South Africa was one of the first countries in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation in its Constitution, and the third to legalise same-sex marriage. When I arrived here in 2015, I couldn’t believe it was on the same planet, let alone continent, where I was born. In my home country Nigeria, the law mandates 14-year prison sentences for LGBT+ people simply for being themselves. And if the state fails to enforce the law, we are hounded out of our families, schools, churches and jobs. In northern Nigeria, I witnessed a lesbian friend being stoned to death in an ancient city that was once a cosmopolitan trading post on the trans-Sahara spice route. Had I tried to stop it, the mob would have killed me too. When I told my parents I was gay, they called the police and had me jailed.

My feminine side flowered early. As a child, I grew my hair long, loved wearing pink, disliked football and enjoyed reading, dress shopping with my mother and gossiping with girls in my elementary school about hairstyles and Nollywood film stars. I was just a kid and somehow hoped people would understand and even celebrate my flourishing identity.

What I didn’t know is that an anti-gay maelstrom was gathering force across Nigeria. It reached our village when I was away at boarding school, and by the time I returned from university in 2012, my unusual behaviour had come to be seen as an abomination, the worst possible sin and an existential threat to my family and community. Today, homosexuality is seen by many Nigerians as an even greater calamity than political corruption, gangland violence and poverty. If I’d told my parents I was a Boko Haram terrorist, they might have forgiven me, but they could never forgive me for being gay.

I love Nigerian people. They are, for the most part, hardworking and generous, even to strangers. We possess that openness to others for which our continent is famous, and that sense of human solidarity without which our species would never have survived. In the US, Nigerian-Americans are twice as likely to hold graduate degrees compared to the national average, and we flourish globally in business, sports and the arts.

But decades of dictatorship, corruption and poverty have hardened us into a nation better known for thieving civil servants, terrorist insurgents, violent gangs and paramilitary mobsters. I suppose it’s inevitable that gay people, like everyone else, would be treated more harshly than in the past. Still, there is something strange about the new homophobia. It wasn’t always like this. Some say that homosexuality is alien to Africa – a Western import brought by foreign NGOs, but that’s not true. In Uganda, anthropologists have found that homosexuality was tolerated in virtually every ethnic group in pre-colonial times. Zimbabwean cave paintings created thousands of years ago depict two men having sex, and there are words for ‘gay’ in Shangaan, Sesotho and many other African languages.

Among my own Igbo people, homosexuality used to be considered a venial offense. Some of our women even married each other. The ‘female husband’ paid a bride price and had the status of a male household head. A male relative of the ‘female husband’ impregnated the ‘wife’, to ensure continuation of the family lineage. Nigerian commentators go to extraordinary lengths to argue that this was all about the establishment of dynasties and ensuring inheritance rights and had nothing to do with homosexuality. But how could two women share their lives and sleep in the same bed without having feelings for each other?

Igbo tradition was less accepting of male same sex relationships, but the sanctions were nowhere near as harsh as they are now. If two men had sex, it was said that one could steal the destiny – or Akaraka – of the other. He and his clan would prosper, while his partners would become poor. To appease the deities, the offending couple had to slaughter a cow. No doubt the special sanctions on same sex male relationships derived from the fact that they were necessarily infertile, unlike same sex female relationships. Igbo religion, like many African faiths, places consummate emphasis on fertility and continuation of the lineage. When I was young, we always knew of three or four men in the village who never married or had children. They were ‘okokporo’ – bachelors. I realise now that they were probably gay. They were looked down upon, and their words and opinions were never solicited at village gatherings; to be a real man, you had to have a wife and children. But they were generally left alone. Today, there would be furious gossip and speculation behind their backs. They’d be spied upon, lured into ambushes by attractive young men, and if they showed any sign of unconventional sexuality, beaten, arrested or even killed.

There’s no question that the new homophobia has something to do with the rise of new forms of fundamentalist religion, both Christian and Muslim. I am a devout Christian. When I was growing up, I attended church regularly and cannot remember hearing anything about homosexuality from the pulpit. All I knew was that in the Book of Matthew, Jesus told the faithful to, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and Love your neighbour as yourself.

Then, shortly before I entered secondary school in 2002, a Pentecostal Pastor arrived in our village and built a large, austere, windowless church on the edge of town. My mother was attracted to his fire and brimstone charisma, and along with many others, switched over to his congregation, soon rising to become a deaconess. I’d often accompany her to Sunday services. One day, it must have been in my senior year in high school, the pastor, looking straight at me, told the congregation that homosexuality was an abomination, and those practicing it should be put to death. I had never had sex and didn’t really know what homosexuality was, but his words terrified me nevertheless.

At university, I made friends with other gay students and learned to search for information on the internet. This is how I found out who I was. At the time, increasing numbers of young Nigerians, were beginning to accept and proclaim their individuality. In the past, a young man with my inclinations might have married and had children, in line with traditional notions of male virtue. My problems began when I found it impossible to suppress my identity and refused to follow this path.

The decision nearly proved fatal. This is the story of my flight from Nigeria, but it is also an investigation into an epidemic of hatred. I believe that Nigerians are genuinely and deeply spiritual people, who’ve been corrupted by greed and materialism and lost touch with the true spirit of the Gospel.

When the first Christian missionaries arrived in Nigeria, we already had our own religious traditions, so most early converts were freed slaves, the disabled and other outcasts. Later, the missionaries built schools and hospitals which drew in more people. But our own traditional belief systems remained alive within us, and Christianity failed to address lingering metaphysical questions about the nature of witchcraft, demon possession and sorcery, which the priests dismissed as primitive superstitions. Then, during the 1960s, Oral Roberts, Reverend Ike and other American pastors ignited the Pentecostal movement, and fire soon reached Nigeria. The Pentecostals differed from the old school Christians in their interpretation of what happened after Jesus died. In the Book of Acts, we find the 12 disciples hiding out in the upper room of a house. The Holy Spirit comes down like a flame and settles above the head of each one. They then begin speaking a language they don’t understand. For traditional Christians, the scene symbolises Jesus’s hope that they will spread his faith to people everywhere, in every world language; to Pentecostals, the angels were actually speaking through the disciples, enabling them to communicate directly with Jesus.

When the disciples and other apostles set out to convert others, they’d perform miracles now and then, curing the sick, raising the dead, and so on. Like most traditional Christians, I’d always assumed that the miracles and speaking in tongues were symbols meant to convey the power of faith, but the Pentecostals took them literally. They believed that anyone could communicate Jesus if she prayed hard enough, and that some gifted pastors could even perform miracles, just like Peter and Paul in the Bible.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the new Pentecostal churches attracted millions of Nigerians seeking spiritual ballast amid the whiplash of the nation’s explosive oil booms and busts. Vast fortunes were made and lost overnight; desperate poverty lived side by side with fantastic luxury; in the Niger Delta, not far from where I live, choking oil flares killed crops and livestock and poisoned the air; when people protested, oil company-backed militias gunned them down. Thieves tapped the pipelines and even held entire oil tankers for ransom. A succession of brutal and corrupt dictators seized power promising to crack down on the mayhem and stabilise the economy, only to deliver more corruption and repression.

By the end of the 1990s, Nigeria’s biggest earners were oil, narcotics trafficking and 419 scams and other confidence tricks. Reality now had had multiple layers; nothing was what it seemed. Nollywood films about vulture cults and bewitched children who vomited money were widely assumed to be documentaries; secret occult gangs terrorised faculty and students on university campuses, extorting money and grades and burning down buildings; seventeen people were lynched for allegedly stealing other people’s genitals through black magic. The centre of government itself seemed to be possessed by the devil. After the ruthless dictator Sani Abacha was found dead in the company of three prostitutes in 1998, rumours emerged of his juju shrine, where he supposedly sacrificed human beings and fed them to crocodiles.

The Pentecostals promised respite from this sin-soaked world. At first, they emphasised holiness and humility. They dressed simply, helped the poor and didn’t take bribes. Then, in May 1973, Benson Idahosa, a Pentecostal pastor in Benin City claimed to have received the following message from God:

I have asked the cashiers of heaven to be on duty as long as you have a need for my own honour and glory… If only [your people] will honour me with their wealth, I shall make them to be prosperous in all areas of their lives… Wake up, go to the church in the morning, and tell them poverty died last night.

Pastor Idahosa, a former shoe factory employee, had recently returned from a Bible study course in Texas where he’d been introduced the Prosperity Gospel. Nowhere does the Bible mention anything about cashiers in heaven, but Idahosa’s message that God wanted us all to prosper, and would repay our tithes 1000-fold, took Nigeria by storm. Our people had always poured libations and made sacrifices to the ancestral spirits in exchange for rain, a good harvest, fertile livestock and healthy children. These old rituals linked us to the clan and strengthened community solidarity and respect for nature. But beyond the abstract similarity between the libations and tithing, the materialism of the new churches seemed all about personal gain. It appealed particularly to the new wealthy class of managers and businesspeople who sought a new form of spirituality that celebrated wealth and freed them from the moral constraints of our traditional African sense of obligation to those less fortunate. Poverty, once a sign of godliness, now signified moral taint, transgression and sin.

Thousands of Pentecostal Prosperity churches sprang up across the country. By continually reminding their flocks to ‘sow the seed’ via the collection basket, some pastors became fabulously wealthy. They bought their own airplanes, held fellowship breakfasts in five-star hotels, presided over 50,000 seat mega-church compounds with their own universities, hospitals and banks and might rake in $100,000 during a single Sunday service. When Pastor Idahosa died, his wife rode to the funeral in a six-door gold-plated limousine.

Most of the new bling and glitz mega-preachers also launched their own TV stations, which beamed sermons and other religious programs into living rooms and offices across the country. In order to justify their vast wealth, the pastors had to claim they possessed supernatural powers, and for years, faith healing was a staple of these shows. Nigerians watched with amazement as HIV positive people were cured before their eyes, the blind saw, the lame walked and so on. Pastor Idahosa even claimed to have raised his own wife from the dead. These so-called miracles were obviously staged, and in 2004, the Nigerian Broadcasting Council finally banned televised faith healing because it was misleading the public.

There was an exception, however. Being gay was seen not as a health problem, but as a spiritual affliction caused by demon possession. Casting out gay demons on TV remained legal, and gay exorcisms soon took over the airwaves. Typically, a wild-eyed young man wearing slightly too tight trousers, a pink shirt or some other giveaway item of clothing, would be hauled spitting, writhing and swearing to the dais during the alter call by two ushers. The pastor would place his hands on the miscreant’s head, clench his eyes shut and utter a prayer, at which point the supplicant would collapse on the floor. He’d lie there for some minutes while the silent congregation bore witness, and then slowly, blinking and subdued, and profess to be cured. Then he’d appear on a split screen, presumably filmed several days later. Wearing a grey or brown masculine suit, he’d testify to the awful deeds he’d committed while gay, including male rape, paedophilia and sneaking into people’s houses to corrupt unsuspecting husbands while their wives and children slept. Some Nigerians dismissed these spectacles as frauds, others debated whether they might be real; but far too many, including my own parents, came to believe that all gender non-conforming people must be possessed by the devil.

I don’t blame the pastors alone. We Nigerians are a macho people, and the anti-homosexuality panic resonated strongly with anxieties about masculinity common to peoples the world over who suffered colonisation. When the Europeans took over our societies, they seized far more than territory. Our souls were also conquered. Frederick Lugard, the first British governor of Nigeria had strong ideas about how Africans should be ruled. He armed one group to pulverise and conquer others, sowing the seeds of ethnic strife that flourish to this day. When we rose to protest taxes and land-seizures, British officers bludgeoned us into submission and then planted spies everywhere to enforce their dictates. If an individual was suspected of an offense against the authorities, the police would punish his entire community, burning houses and crops, destroying shrines and markets and murdering and raping innocent villagers.

For Lugard and his British masters, civilisation correlated with masculinity, primitiveness, with femininity.