Introduction
This essay uses the belligerence toward alternative sexualities in Nigeria as a point of departure for a critical appraisal of the terms of inclusion and exclusion in the country's body politic. This antagonism has thrown up a rare alliance of the state, Muslim and Christian religious leaders, and sections of the media. While the clerisy has been prominent in the denunciation of homosexuality as either ‘un-Christian’, ‘un-Islamic’ or ‘un-African’, the media, deploying religious tropes, has been involved in the public ‘outing’ and ‘shaming’ of those suspected to be homosexuals and their ‘representation’ as ‘abnormal’ citizens. Following Clark (2008), I attribute this alliance to the postcolonial crisis over the functions of masculinisation and power, and argue that homosexuality1 has become a default straw man for a ruling elite facing deepening socio-economic pressure at both local and global levels. Instructively, the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, 2013, was passed in January 2014 as criticism of the ruling People's Democratic Party's uncontrolled corruption and anti-poor, pro-rich policies intensified.
Although I insist that debates over homosexuality represent a foil for the misbehaviour of the political elite as well as male anxiety over threats to their political authority – both nationally and within households – I also take the terms of people's discourse very seriously, hence my insertion of the debates within the cauldron of socio-political struggles and the relations and power contestation among Nigeria's three dominant ethno-national groups.
For Ungar (2002, 48), ‘some of the biggest jumps in anti-gay violence … occur in countries undergoing the most traumatic economic change.’ This claim invites reflections on the possible linkages between economic restructuring and popular hostility towards homosexuals, with the not unreasonable conclusion that anti-gay mobilisation is a catharsis for frustrated economic development. Many African countries appear to be caught up in this logic. Against this background, the article provides an insertion into what, in a different context, Mills (2000, 189) saw as the connection between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’. It is suggested that the shunting-off of sexual ‘others’ from the legitimate terrain of public action has fundamental implications for the way modern Nigerian citizenship is understood. More precisely, discriminatory attacks on homosexuals and the prohibition of the registration of gay organisations put a dangerous bridle on sociability and constitute a brazen abrogation of gays' citizenship rights.
My overarching interest, then, is in the larger civic and political implications of general hostility toward homosexuality and other ‘deviant sexualities’ in Nigeria, as an example of what Calhoun (2007, 83) once captured as a ‘“democratic” public sphere marred by exclusionary tendencies’. I hypothesise that sexual struggles (or struggles over sexuality) of the type currently being witnessed in Nigeria (and across Africa) are nearly always a foil for other forms of contestations – social, economic, political. Nyanzi et al. (2008), Spronk (2009), Sadgrove et al. (2012) and Boyd (2013) have made a similar argument about Uganda and Kenya respectively. Sexuality is, in this view, a medium through which contending ethico-ideological claims are refracted, and a site for the definition and negotiation of the character of the nation itself.
The dilemma thereby ensues: What specific socio-economic and political struggle(s) does hostility directed at ‘aberrant’ sexualities in Nigeria disguise? A tentative answer is that both the legal penalisation of homosexuality, and the discursive and physical expulsion of those thought to be homosexuals from the public view (and the sphere of sociability), suggest that: (1) the question of who is/ought to be a citizen of Nigeria has not been rigorously and openly problematised; and: (2) there exist nonetheless deep assumptions about the meaning(s) and parameters of citizenship in the country. Historically, religious ideology has been implicated in the process through which these assumptions have been normalised.
This article is therefore not just about sexuality per se, but about sexuality in so far as it is seen to have important implications for political belonging. The struggle over homosexuality provides a useful template for my inquiry because of the passion it has generated in society at large, especially within religious groups. I ask: What does it mean for homosexuals as social actors to be ‘tarred with the brush of “pollution” and shunted off from the legitimate terrain of public action’ (Emirbayer and Sheller 1999, 171)? What are the implications of this discursive banishment for the way the idea of citizenship is defined and understood? Given that the current atmosphere in Nigeria suggests an arbitrary demarcation of the polity into ‘good’ citizen bodies and (apparently) ‘bad’ non-citizen bodies (Brandzel 2005, 179), what are the ensuing terms of inclusion and exclusion in a heteronormative body politic? Crucially, what roles do religion, religious agents and institutions play in this complex?
The paper is divided into five sections. First, I elaborate the overall context in which current struggles over intimacy in Nigeria are unfolding and suggest, following Ferguson (2006), that the sole vector of change is the crisis of manhood under conditions of neoliberal globalisation. Next, I explore the interfaces and connections among Islam, power and homosexuality in Nigeria. In the following section, I elaborate the citizenship problematic. The concluding section ponders the critical dilemmas raised by the discussion in the preceding sections.
The context
Two overlapping currents are pivotal. One is the global economic crisis of the 1980s, which exposed African states to the machinations of global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The second is the mass recourse to religiosity which has led to the production of a hugely influential clerisy with seemingly carte blanche to pontificate on a range of social and moral issues. The two processes are mutually reinforcing as the quest to make sense of the economic crisis produces a social hermeneutic which both emphasises its spiritual origins and heightens the social value of spiritual texts and authorities.
Second, consolidating their newfound authority, religious leaders construe a narrative in which moral decadence in the country, ostensibly epitomised by homosexuality and other forms of ‘sexual deviancy’, is used as a scapegoat for the country's economic and social problems. This seems to validate Jeremy Seabrook's contention that the rage against homosexuality is more often than not ‘[a] symbolic gesture against globalisation and the powerlessness of many African countries to withstand it’ (2008). Given this interpretation, anti-homosexuality becomes a site for the ventilation of legitimate grievances from other realms of modern social life, thus confirming Mbembe's insight (2006, 168) that ‘political struggles in the postcolony are nearly always fought in the guise of sexual struggles, and vice-versa.’
The upshot has been a situation in which homosexuality (and the moral degeneracy that it presumably epitomises) is held responsible for problems as varied as the destruction of African families, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, cultism and violence in the universities, female prostitution, increased divorce rates, the erosion of discipline in the military, moral decay in society and natural disasters. Because religious leaders are central to the construction of this discourse, it meshes with an eschatological imaginary which interprets global structural transformations as a sign of the imminence of ‘the second coming’. According to this thinking, homosexuality and associated sexual and moral ‘perversions’ are not just poignant evidence that we are in ‘the last days’, they vindicate a divine programme whose inexorable climax is the termination of human culture.
These trends are neither uniquely Nigerian – nor African. Rather, they are part of the emotional complex of globalisation, or what Svasek and Skrbis (2007) have analysed as the way in which people ‘cope with processes of rapid, or more gradual, political change, brought about by transnational forces’, or ‘react when global processes affect local economic conditions, creating opportunities for some and restriction for others’ (372). In other words, globalisation has, after a fashion, been a simultaneously cohering and fracturing force, orienting societies and cultures in terms of taste and patterns of consumption, to give a familiar example, while also triggering a sense of alienation among masses of the people who reasonably feel left behind by the train of modernity (Hoad 2004; Cole and Durham 2007; Puar 2007).
In effect, struggles over intimacy/sexuality reinforce two insights in the relevant literature. One, rather than ‘the expression of natural identity, which the “political” sets out to protect or control’, sexuality is ‘the product of a complex multiplicity of social and political practices. With respect to the state, this means sexualities and sexual identities are categorised and shaped at the same time as they are being policed through state policies’ (Carver and Mottier 1998, 2).
Second, to the extent that homosexuality continues to be seen (along with feminism and unruly female sexuality) as a crack in the foundation of, and direct challenge to, masculinist heterosexuality (Nagel 2000, 1), we may rightly expect such struggles – in the name of masculinity, patriarchy, male dominance, the state, nation, on the one hand, and difference, individuality, identity, gender equality etc. on the other – to intensify. Across Africa, these general patterns are enfolded in a specific historicity in which anxieties about authenticating postcolonial suzerainty are bound up with the elusive quest to nail down once and for all the meanings of ‘Africa’, ‘African-ness’ and ‘Africanity’ (Mudimbe 1988). Current apprehensions over (homo)sexuality are therefore most fruitfully analysed against this specific conjuncture of race, globalisation and new dimensions of eroticism (Hoad 2007).
Furthermore, there is the seemingly culturally specific gendered aversion to male homosexuality, one that has arisen out of its widespread equivalence with anality.2 Contending that ‘homosexuality and same-sex practices … belong to a very deep stratification of the sexual unconscious of African societies,’ Mbembe (2006, 167) has suggested that perhaps the most fundamental reason why Africans are uncomfortable (to put it mildly) with homosexuality is because of its connection to the anus. Although he goes on to clarify that homosexuality – or for that matter same-sex practices – ‘is not reducible to anality’, Mbembe concedes that ‘the degradation and disgust with which anality is made the object of public discourse goes hand in hand with the recurrent appearance of the anus on the scene of the symptom, in a variety of fantasmatic shapes’ (Ibid.). Because the anus is marked as dirty, men who get sexual pleasure from other men's anuses are therefore seen as an abomination. As an interviewee – a leading politician from the western part of Nigeria – once told me during an interview, the sole reason for his repulsion to gay people is that he cannot come to terms with people who engage in sexual intercourse through ‘Ile imi’, a Yoruba adjective for the anus which literally translates as ‘house of shit’.
To conclude the discussion in this section, I describe how agents within the Nigerian state and society (including the media and educational institutions) have responded to the perceived threat to moral and cultural integrity from homosexuality and other ostensibly Western values. This is significant because it illuminates the way in which these institutions collude in the ‘production of the nation’ (Olesky 2009), the determination of the ethics and fundaments of sociality, and the bases of inclusion and exclusion in the body politic. I have already mentioned the creation of a ‘theologising’ cum eschatological environment, the linking of homosexuality to demonic possession, and the labelling of homosexuality as anti-family, anti-nature, anti-culture, even anti-God. I have suggested that this is made effective by the fact that the rapid pentecostalisation of the zeitgeist in the country has given the new ‘theocratic class’ an influence it once lacked. This labelling is often backed up by different modes of ‘sexual policing’ carried out by groups and individuals within civil society. These include forced anal examination of perceived homosexuals, anti-lesbian rapes and public lashing of people thought to be gay. For example, the government of Kano state in the majority Muslim northern part of the country keeps on its payroll the ‘Hisbah’, a volunteer para-security organisation set up to police and enforce the Islamic law. Among Hisbah's advertised duties is the enforcement of sexual compliance.
This kind of sexual surveillance is itself part and parcel of what, in the Iranian context, Mahdavi (2009) captures as the attempt to formulate new ideological subjects. In the Nigerian context, it involves the establishment of religious (Islamic/Christian) colleges of higher education with high-minded moral mandates, the enactment of new and rigorous rules of personal conduct, sartorial regulation and the introduction of virginity testing for female students.
Finally, the media plays a key role with its unquestioning endorsement of the state and the religious elite's heteronormative project. The Nigerian print media has been heavily involved in the ‘outing’ and ‘shaming’ of individuals believed to be homosexuals, and in their continued construction as ‘noxious and outside the circle of humanity’ (Appadurai 2006, 117).
Thus the question: What are the implications of this collective hostility for the way in which citizenship is understood? If, historically, to be a citizen ‘is to exist inside a particular frame’ (Plummer 2003, 53), what does the struggle over homosexuality tell us about this frame? The current denigration of gays as ‘bad citizen bodies’, transgressors of an idealised ‘good’ citizenship, provides a timely opportunity to rethink the meaning and contents of social citizenship in Nigeria, and perhaps to ponder some of the big issues in the ‘new intimacy’ (Giddens 2002; Povinelli 2006) such as the contested and ever-shifting boundaries of public and private. Before doing that, I would like to examine the link between Islam and homosexuality in Nigeria, specifically how homosexuality is understood within the Nigerian Islamic community, non-Muslims' perception of the relationship between Islam and homosexuality, and how that perception feeds into discourses of power in Nigeria.
Islam, power and homosexuality in Nigeria
Both the Islamic religion and the largely Muslim northern part of the country are implicated in popular discourses of homosexuality in Nigeria. As Gaudio has observed, ‘Many southern Nigerians … who scoff at the suggestion that there might be men or women in their region who engage in homosexual behaviour claim it's only “those Muslims” up north (as well as decadent Westerners and Arabs) who do that sort of thing’ (1998, 115; see also Gaudio 2009a, 2009b). Homosexuality therefore remains a subtle, if persistent, component of the popular discourse and understanding of socio-economic and, in particular, political power in the country.
This section aims to illuminate this further by explicating the socio-historical context that makes the above allusion to ‘those Muslims’ intelligible. That context is the ethno-religious struggle among the three dominant ethno-religious formations in Nigeria: the Yoruba in the west, the Igbo in the east and the Hausa-Fulani in the north. In terms of religious affiliation, Islam and Christianity claim almost an equal number of adherents among the Yoruba; the Igbo are predominantly Christian; while the north is predominantly Muslim, though with strong and historically assertive Christian populations in the middle belt and Kaduna, Kano and Zamfara states respectively. Since the attainment of political independence from Britain in 1960, Nigerian politics and political contestation have been charged by the jostle for power, influence and resources among these groups, and between them and numerous minorities. Southerners generally bemoan the presumed northern grip on political power, and in the southern part of the country, including within Yoruba Muslim circles, this has given rise to a particular economy of blame in which northern Muslims are seen as hoarders of political power (with which, it is implied, they leverage economic gains) who will not readily acquiesce in its ‘sharing’ unless one is willing to partake in their quaint ways, often implying homosexual sex and other examples of ‘sexual depravity’.
This particular discourse meshes with the traditional understanding of material wealth as something that is accumulated, almost always through some ‘shady’ means in which the seeker after stupendous wealth has to make serious moral and spiritual compromises. The popular Yoruba proverb ‘Isale oro l'egbin’ (translation: Wealth is, at bottom, a sordid business) seems to encapsulate this mentality, and is an apt reflection of Ellis and Haar's (2004) observation, first, with respect to Africans, that ‘prosperity has a mystical aspect’ (180); and second, that specifically ‘among Nigerians, the modern state and its associated businesses are run by people whose massive wealth and power is [sic] connected with the manipulation of spiritual forces’ (126–127. See also Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) and Smith (2001a, 2001b).
At work here is the widespread presumption of a certain connection between power and sex, specifically homosexual sex. Presumably, this is what Major Gideon Gwarzo Orkar had in mind in his aborted coup speech of 22 April 1990, with his allusion to ‘the dictatorial, corrupt, drug baronish, evil man [sic], deceitful, homo-sexually-centered, prodigalistic, un-patriotic administration of General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida’ (Nairaland Forum 2013, italics added). Major Debo Bashorun, press secretary to General Babangida in the early days of his administration, also recalled the same trope when he told a national newsmagazine that:
Frankly, it is not in my place to comment on anybody's sexual preference [but] to the extent that this has had an adverse impact on governance in the past 10 years, it is worth commenting on. While I don't want to confirm or deny anything, with one's inside knowledge of the level of rapport in the Babangida era, even IBB cannot deny his bi-sexuality. It was common knowledge in military circles and many officers who were propositioned became powerful this way. (Major Debo Bashorun, interview with The News (Lagos), January 1994, italics added)
Homosexuality is, in this view, not just a route to power and its rewards.3 It is also what ‘those in high positions’ (meaning the cream of the military establishment, the political elite and wealthy businessmen) do. This is not to deny that politicians believe this sincerely, though trotting it out publicly is a handy way of besmirching an opponent's reputation (Currier 2010).
The attitude of northern Hausa toward homosexuality seems to be more ambiguous. On the one hand, they ‘are less inclined to deny the existence of homosexuality in their society than they are to gossip about it, usually in disparaging terms’ (Gaudio 1998, 115–116). In fact, ‘homosexuality is not seen to be incompatible with heterosexuality, marriage, or parenthood, which constitute strong normative values in Hausa Muslim society’ and at some point in their lives, ‘most of the men … marry women and have children, even as they maintain their more covert identity as men who have sex with men’ (118). Yet, although the general culture appears to be tolerant of the yan daudu (as Hausa men who have sex with other men are called), ‘Conservative religious and political leaders periodically condemn yan daudu as purveyors of immorality, and actively or tacitly encourage the abusive treatment, including arrest, extortion, and physical violence, that yan daudu often face at the hands of police and young hooligans’ (122). The following are examples of such condemnation by conservative Islamic religious leaders:
Prophet Mohammed (SAW) it was, who said, ‘After me, there will be no more message of Allah, just as there will not be total annihilation or phasing out of nations, but because of man's atrocities on earth, there will be sent to man Allah's wraths like earthquake, torrential storms, epidemics, wars and disasters which shall affect not only the culprit but also the innocent.’ So, to any learned Muslim, the prophet of Islam is being vindicated … As for our lawmakers, I would advise them not only to pass the bill but also raise the penalty to death sentence. (Mallam Ibrahim Abubakar Dambatta, Imam, Zone 6 Mosque, Abuja4)
This is the first time this government [the Obasanjo regime, 1999–2007] has introduced a universal, popular and nationally acceptable policy which is also completely acceptable to Islamic codes. I must stress here that our brothers in the Christian religion are not helping matters by tolerating most of the moral decadence in this country. For example, women's mode of dressing, open commercial sex, free mingling of females and males, alcoholism and several social vices including sodomy which has given birth to AIDS that started from the people they so much respect and copy even against biblical instructions. (Alhaji Shehu Usman Mohammed, Assistant Chief Imam, National Mosque, Abuja, italics added5)
Part of what makes these statements, made in the immediate context of a legislative proposal to criminalise homosexuality, interesting is the way in which they serve as a reminder of how homosexuality, already the stuff of southern urban legend, can also be an instrument of moral demonisation in what, fundamentally, is a political struggle. We see an example of this in the statement by Alhaji Shehu Usman Mohammed, who, without any irony, points accusing fingers at ‘our brothers in the Christian religion’ for their apparent tolerance of ‘most of the moral decadence in this country’. At all events, both religious groups, whether through their affirmations or their denunciations, contribute to the ‘policing of the national body’ (Silliman and Bhattacharjee 2002) and the reification of the heteronormative basis of the state.
My project, as already stated, is neither to establish nor deny the objective existence of homosexuality or homosexual (including lesbian) practices in any part of modern Nigeria. That ground has been adequately covered (Amadiume 1987; Aina 1991; Gaudio 1998, 2009a, 2009b; Pincheon 2000; Arnfred 2004; Hoad 2007). I am interested instead in what the struggle over homosexuality, as an example of tensions over the meaning and ramifications of intimacy, tells us about the nature and travails of modern citizenship in the country. As M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) has astutely observed, citizenship often tends to be ‘premised in heterosexual terms’ while ‘lesbian and gay bodies are made to bear the brunt of the charge of undermining national sovereignty, while the neocolonial state masks its own role in forfeiting sovereignty’ (11). My basic assumption therefore is that struggles over sexuality are in themselves a foil for other forms of contestations – social, economic, political – and the intensity of the rhetoric employed by various social agents is often a clue to the seriousness with which such issues are regarded. Thus, state and (religious) elite discourse on sexuality may not be about homosexuality per se, but collective nervousness about creating what Evelyn Blackwood (2005) describes as ‘normalised, reproductive citizens’ (227). In the next section, I engage with this problem by inserting the issues raised in the specific Nigerian context into a wider critique of citizenship.
Before doing that, however, it is important to underscore some critical points about Islam and homosexuality in Nigeria. I said earlier that leading Islamic authorities in Nigeria regularly castigate homosexuality and homosexuals and lesbians as both un-Islamic and/or satanic. For such authorities, the injunction in Surah 7, verses 80 and 81 of the Holy Quran (‘We also [sent] Lut: He said to his people: ‘Do ye commit lewdness such as no people in creation [ever] committed before you? For ye practise your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds.’) is clear enough evidence that homosexuality is a sin. Other leaders, while not necessarily rejecting this injunction or its explanation, prefer to adduce a more sociological explanation for homosexual attraction and practices. This includes ‘copying the wrong [meaning foreign] values’ and ‘the barbaric conditions in our prisons’ whose crowded conditions ‘make body contacts that stir up lust as their [inmates'] emotions, sentiments and sensibilities go hay-wire’.6
This does not imply that there is a unified ‘Islamic position’ on homosexuality in Nigeria. Indeed, if the situation in the predominantly Islamic northern parts of the country, where a vibrant gay sub-culture subsists amid muscular doctrinal denunciation, teaches anything at all, it is that the situation on the ground is far more complex than the angry rhetoric from particular Islamic leaders would tend to suggest. Although it may be difficult to identify ‘moderates’ such as Indonesia's Siti Musdah Mulia, who argues that: ‘There is no difference between lesbians and nonlesbians’ because ‘In the eyes of God, people are valued based on their piety’ (Jakarta Post 2008), it is instructive that even for the most passionate denouncers, such as Dr Is-haq of the Department of Islamic Studies, Lagos State University, Nigeria, there is always a way back into the fold of ‘normality’ for homosexuals who are mere victims of ‘abnormal’, though human, sensations.
Inasmuch as this paper privileges the Islamic attitude toward homosexuality and lesbianism in Nigeria, it is necessary to bear in mind that this in no way presumes any reference to something that might be called ‘Nigerian Islam’. Attitudes toward homosexuality appear to vary between Muslim communities in the northern and southern parts of the country respectively, and the discursive essentialising of homosexuality as ‘northern Islamic’ must itself be seen in the context of inter-ethnic rivalries and/or hostility. At the same time, there is no suggesting that there is complete acceptance of homosexuality in the northern part of the country. For instance, for all their visibility, yan daudu have not been spared the ‘periodically enacted morality campaigns’ which have swept the northern part of the country as part of the ‘movement to construct a Northern Nigerian public – a kind of nation, often termed simply Arewa {‘the North’} – supposedly unified by its adherence to orthodox Islam’ (Gaudio 2009a, 243; 2009b) (curly brackets and emphasis in original).
Citizenship and sexual struggles
The cultural struggles over citizenship, the deployment of nationalisms, and the exigencies of an international system of states have not been fully analyzed from a race/sexuality/gender perspective. (Kim-Puri 2005, 137)
Unfortunately, in the Nigerian case … it has been taken for granted that the issues of who is a citizen and what citizenship involves in terms of rights, duties, immunities, privileges, and forbearances for its bearers, are neither problematic nor controversial … . (Taiwo 2004, 57)
These excerpts suggest two levels at which the subject of citizenship, engendered by tensions over homosexuality in Nigeria, can be addressed. The first statement is a straightforward admission that, generally, sexuality has not been sufficiently integrated into analyses of struggles over citizenship. The second is a lament that the idea of citizenship itself has not been adequately problematised in the Nigerian context. There are at least two obstacles on the path to any scrutiny of the Nigerian situation.
A first impediment is how to bring sexuality into the field of public debate and make it count as a component in the analysis of citizenship. For example, how do we account for sexualities of women in the context of rape, whether within or without marriage, which has not been fully problematised within African scholarship or properly criminalised or penalised within African society? What kinds of bodies are fundamental to citizenship status? What proper (sexual) performative limits can be imposed on citizens' bodies? How much oversight can society/law/morality exercise over the private body and its different forms of sexualities, and perhaps also, what are the sexual prescriptions that validate citizenship? A second challenge is to integrate one's perspective in such a way as to make it speak to the original problem that Olufemi Taiwo (2004) identifies above, which is that little or no attention has been paid to the idea of citizenship or the problems and challenges that it entails.
The defects and infirmities in the idea of citizenship which I reference here are not in fact exclusive to Nigeria or Africa. For Jeffrey Weeks (1995), globally ‘[t]he problem is that historically the aspiration to citizenship has encoded a particular version of sexual behaviour and private life into its central discourses’ (117) and though ‘[d]uring the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the ideal of citizenship has been progressively broadened to include social as well as civic and political rights … its subject has remained conventionally familial and heterosexual’ (117).
Weeks's observations are a reminder that the story of citizenship is one of unremitting struggle, in which new arguments and new discourses are evolved, partly to assail some previously sacrosanct cultural boundaries, and, paradoxically, often to legislate new ones. This dialectic is especially true of
the struggles around citizenship, such as the demands for full inclusion in the citizenry and nation. These demands are constrained by the liberal politics of inclusion and belonging. Social class, race, gender, and sexuality are central nodes for challenging cultural and political exclusions but also are sites where inequalities are created anew within the framework of national states. (Kim-Puri 2005, 153)
Additionally, they are a reminder of the elusiveness and elasticity of the meaning of citizenship. Although it is true that from earlier times, citizenship as a concept has connoted ‘membership and involvement, which brings entitlements and duties’ (Weeks 1995, 117), the central dilemma at the heart of the theoretical literature perdures, namely ‘what draws a body of citizens together into a coherent and stably organised political community, and keeps that allegiance durable’ (Beiner 1995, 1). Though the problem is generic, as an extensive literature has made clear (Kymlicka 1996; Young 2002), it nonetheless has special resonance, and has arguably attained a unique degree of complexity, in postcolonial societies.
For these societies, the origins of the contemporary crisis of citizenship are to be found in the administrative arbitrariness of colonial governmentality, especially its sad legacy of the inherent exclusionary potential of the idea of citizenship. Mamdani's (1996) contribution to scholarship in this area is his engaging analysis of how modern citizenship in Africa was effectively forged on the anvil of despotic colonialism and its rough demarcations between ‘rural subjects’ and ‘urban citizens’. In the postcolonial era, this foundation has been further weakened by the shenanigans of ruling elites, leading to the current ‘congenital dichotomy’ (Ayoade 1988, 107) between ‘the government’ and ‘the people’.
If this dichotomy between state and society has become a sign of the crisis of citizenship across postcolonial Africa, that is because, by and large, the postcolonial ruling elite did little either to encourage a frank discussion of the meaning of membership of the states inherited from the colonial masters; or did just about enough to make the people believe that, as Sina Odugbemi once said, citizenship of a postcolonial African state ‘is not worth very much’ in part because the state does not care about its citizens (Odugbemi 2001). Taiwo's pithy summary of the ensuing situation, though in specific relation to Nigeria, goes thus: ‘there are no citizens in Nigeria, only citizens of Nigeria’ (Taiwo 1996, quoted in Idowu 1999, 33). In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of the 1980s and the implementation of a regime of structural adjustment in African countries, this crisis of popular identification has intensified, to the extent of, at least in the judgement of some scholars, destabilising the ‘affective economy’ (Hyden 1996), which has always provided succour amid the uncertainties of modern social life. This economy is important because, apart from material salvation, it has also provided a means of identification where ‘impersonal and informal institutions’ (Hyden 2006, 77) have fallen short.
Nonetheless, to insist that the idea of citizenship has not been sufficiently engaged in the Nigerian context is not to suggest that there have been no assumptions about what it means to be a Nigerian citizen. In fact, as I have implied throughout, the embeddedness of such assumptions (assumptions concerning (hetero)sexuality, privacy, personhood et al.) is a primary reason why a proper debate has yet to take place. What current tensions over homosexuality have done therefore, apart from dragging sex into the public domain, is to muddy the water as far as those assumptions are concerned. In the rest of this section, I mention these assumptions, paying special attention to their implications for the understanding and definition of citizenship. I also look at some of the dilemmas that ensue in looking at citizenship through the prism of sexuality.
Mustafa Emirbayer and Mimi Sheller suggest in their landmark essay ‘Publics in History’ (1999) that ‘there is no civil discourse … that does not conceptualise the world into those who deserve inclusion and those who do not’ (171). This process of simultaneous admission and expulsion is always ongoing and, by definition, necessarily incomplete. Second, there has never been a consensus on who is worthy of inclusion or exclusion. Such is determined according to public definition of morality and the terms of membership in a particular cultural community, both of which are always in a state of flux. A third observation is that the struggle (to define those worthy of inclusion or exclusion) takes place on a number of critical sites, perhaps the most important of which is the media. It is important to bear all this in mind in analysing current tensions over homosexuality in Nigeria. More important, it should be realised that these tensions have unfolded against the backcloth of the country's specific crisis of political transition, economic throes, youth disaffection (Obadare 2007), the emergence of a new sexual economy and the general crisis of manhood under conditions of contemporary globalisation (Osha 2008).
Against this background, part of what the crisis over homosexuality has done therefore is to furnish the context for an extension of the country's vocabulary of citizenship. In the same way that the HIV/AIDS epidemic ‘publicised’ hitherto private sexual matters, the conservative attempt ‘to reduce expansive vocabularies of politics, social debate, and intimacy to a straightjacket of absolute oppositions: nature and abomination; truth and deception, good and evil’ (Comaroff 2007, 200) has forced a questioning of the contents and meaning of social citizenship and instigated a concern with the travails of personhood on the basis of sexual identity, preference and/or orientation. For instance, discursive pathologising has trumped denial in that, while previously it was common to claim that there were no homosexuals in Nigeria, the current pattern is to denounce it by attributing it either to demonic possession, or to ‘global peddlers of immorality’, or both, depending on the situation.
For their part, gays and gay rights groups have responded by mobilising a vocabulary of difference to propose a new imagination of social being and a new agenda for politics that recognises the rights of sexual minorities.7 Since 2004 when Bisi Alimi, a University of Lagos undergraduate, spoke openly about his sexuality on Funmi Iyanda's national television talk show, New Dawn, gays in Nigeria have taken considerable strides in making discussions about homosexuality part of the national discourse. A measure of their success can be seen in the appearance in March 2009 of gay spokesperson Rashidi Williams of the Queer Alliance-Nigeria, before a public hearing of the Nigerian national assembly to discuss a bill outlawing same-sex marriage. Williams's appearance, a first by any gay Nigerian, attracted a lot of (mostly condemnatory) media attention, and gave the gay movement a new kind of media visibility. Williams himself arguably became the ‘face’ of Nigeria's gay cause.8
Gay groups have also profited from individual members' association with other public-minded organisations, especially transnational organisations working in the area of public health. For example, through his work with the Nigerian National Action Committee on AIDS and the United Nations Population Fund respectively, Ifeanyi Orazulike of Alliance Rights has succeeded in making gay issues part of the national conversation.9
Lastly, Nigerian gays have used varied Internet and social networking sites to maximum effect. Against the background of enduring hostility in physical public spaces, gay activism has migrated to Internet websites such as Facebook and http://www.manjam.com. These have provided effective virtual alternate spaces for gay sociability, gay expression and, most important, gay socio-political networking, especially at the transnational level; though class privilege still segments LGBT activists and constituents as not all have the same access to social media or the expertise to use them efficiently (Currier 2012).
A related issue is the ethicisation of the very idea of citizenship, in which citizenship equals heterosexuality, equals ‘moral uprightness’. The chief means of achieving this desired ‘bodily regulation’ have been (1) the law, which emerges as an instrument of prejudice, used to define and categorise ‘non-citizenship’ and ‘sub-humanity’;10 and (2) coercion, both actual and symbolic, whose ultimate goal is political homogenisation, and which, its apparently specific properties notwithstanding, is ultimately intelligible in a broader context in which coercion has become the dominant form of exchange in an increasingly volatile socio-political arena.
To the extent that the irruption of homosexuality into the public sphere can be said to have enriched the grammar of citizenship, this has been accomplished by resurrecting some of the dilemmas that have animated scholarship on plurality over the years. For example: What are the best ways for multi-ethnic, multi-religious and, shall we say, multi-sexual societies come to terms with their diversity? For a (notionally) secular state like Nigeria, what are the implications (practical and epistemic) of religious groups, as examples of exclusive communities, determining the basis for admission into, restriction of access to or outright expulsion from, the public sphere? Furthermore, what will have to change to effectuate a ‘hermeneutical conversation’ (Gadamer, cited in Smith 2001a, 2001b) between forces rooted in an essentialist episteme, and minorities – sexual, cultural or political – constructed as existing outside, to the point of threatening it?
Conclusion
In Africa, previously repressed forms of sexuality such as homosexuality and lesbianism have gradually forced their way into the collective unconscious, if not the public domain (Mbembe 2006). Although this is arguably part of a global trend in which ‘sex, gender and sexualities can no longer be presumed to be non-political, pre-political or even marginal, because electoral politics, public policy, local government and international … relations are all arenas in which the politics of sexuality arises’ (Carver and Mottier 1998, 1), some of the reasons behind this seem particular to the continent. First, the unparalleled spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has provoked frank debates about sex and sexuality in cultures still largely famous for their secretiveness in such matters. Second, homosexuality appears to have become a straw man for ruling elites facing socio-economic pressure at both the local and global levels (Herdt 2009). Third, particular leaders have used the purported threat to morals and social cohesion as a launch pad for popular mobilisation, thus validating Ferguson's (2006) supposition regarding the connection between a project of national-cultural reinvention and the spectre of homosexuality (143).
In locating developments in Nigeria within a continental canvas, I have worked with two assumptions, as follows: (a) that struggles over sexuality of the type currently seen in Nigeria are nearly always a foil for other forms of contestations; and (b) that sexuality is a medium though which contending ethico-ideological aims are refracted, and a site for the definition and negotiation of the character of the nation. In Nigeria, this struggle has involved a number of actors: the state, religious actors, particularly the conservative wing of the Islamic and Christian faiths, the print media, gays and gay rights groups. With respect to the role of religion and religious authorities, the focus in the paper has been on the Islamic religion, primarily because of its implication in the public discourse of homosexuality and political power.
Nonetheless, to the extent that Islam is integral to the social calculus that has led to the ‘outing’ of homosexuality, this has also had a few unintended consequences. One, it has rescued homosexuality from its former position in the ‘deep stratification of the sexual unconscious of African societies’ and brought it into the centre of the public sphere (Mbembe 2006, 167). Second, the extrusion of homosexuals from the deep recesses of the African imaginary has exposed some unproblematised assumptions about, inter alia, the moral composition of African societies, heteronormativity, the structure of the family, gender roles and, ultimately, what it means to be a citizen of an African state. Throughout the paper, I have suggested that while, by and large, the meaning and ramifications of citizenship have not been critically engaged for a variety of reasons, these assumptions have nevertheless been there, and have been salient to the extent of obviating the need for critical engagement.
Ultimately, I claim, the interplay of forces over homosexuality has been generally positive for the debate on citizenship in Nigeria. On the one hand, it has exposed conservative forces whose rhetoric has harped on the continued production of the nation along traditional hetero-patriarchal lines. On the other hand, however, it has resulted in the emergence of a new liberal politics in which perceived inequities have been challenged, based on the development of a new grammar of rights and entitlements. In short, homosexuality has re-energised a citizenship debate that, until now, was in a state of virtual slumber. Whether this will eventually translate into a new ‘intimate citizenship’ (Plummer 2003) in which people are at liberty to choose ‘what to do with their lives, their bodies, identities, feelings, relationships, representations, and so on’ (Olesky 2009, 3) is an open question.