This Country Wants To Kill Me
This country declared war on me in 2014. I was 15, and President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan had just signed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) into law. That singular act, driven by a cowardly desire to appeal to the masses and hold power, drew back the curtain and forced us - the LGBT community into the glaring light.
If my memory were better I’d be able to count the number of times I’d heard anyone say something homophobic, or talk about “the gays” before then. Goodluck lost his bid for re-election, but the damage had been done. The entire country discussed whether “the gays” deserved to marry, and by extension, be included in society. I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’d ever asked for marriage. I don’t think we’d gotten to that conversation yet.
That the SSMPA is a deliberate attempt to exclude the LGBT community from society and we all know. That it led to a marked increase in homophobia, lesbophobia, transphobia, as well as hate crimes, is also something we know. After all, when the state puts a target on your back, the people pick up their weapons,
I hate this country. I’ve known, since I was 15, that this could never be my home. Like many Nigerians, I long to live anywhere other than Nigeria. This isn’t even because of the SSMPA, it’s everything else, or rather, the absence of everything else. Nigeria has the audacity to declare war on its citizens and not even provide that basic necessities. Maybe I’d be okay with living with a death sentence over my head if there was 24 hour electricity, but there isn’t, so I’m not. When I was younger I thought I would go to the US, or the UK, because I could be free there, and safe and happy. I still might, but I no longer believe I could be any of those things.
The problem, with being Black and queer, specifically Nigerian and queer, is that nowhere is safe for us. African countries are known for being homophobic, and literally everywhere else is racist. European countries, which are fairly liberal and accepting of the LGBT community (the irony) are deeply antiblack, with racial discrimination, the normalization of blackface (the Zwarten Pieten of Netherlands) and regular racism. America and the UK are both messes - homophobic, antiblack, with conservative governments led by sociopathic toads with bad hair. Canada might be a good option, but if I had to live in a white supremacist settler colony, I’d prefer one that doesn’t pretend it’s not a white supremacist settler colony.
Being Nigeria means hating my country, while feeling a strange patriotism towards it and its people. I want to leave, but as time passes, and sociopolitical situations in other countries worsen, I have begun to imagine a future for myself here. I never thought I would fight for this country, that I would want things to be better, and advocate for this, but then I found myself participating in a revolution. The #ENDSARS protests were a whirlwind of emotion; experiencing both unity and collective trauma, revolutionary anger and deep weariness for the way things are, and most of all, hope, actual hope. However this didn’t last long. My hope died on Black Tuesday, when the government murdered protesters in Lagos. It was the kind of horrific action that you read about in history textbooks, something my parents talk about military dictators doing. The Lekki Toll Massacre was meticulously planned; the curfew, the CCTV cameras being removed, the billboards and street lights being turned off, network service providers in the area were down, even emergency lines stopped working that night. Through social media I saw at least four dead bodies and watched people try to remove a bullet from a man’s leg with a pair of tweezers. I will never forget what happened.
As bad as that night was, somehow the next few days were worse. I watched as the government began to lie to us. It started with Governor Babajide Sanwo-olu (I call him Jide) stating that there were no recorded casualties, and then going on a hospital tour to take pictures with the wounded, and it culminated with President Muhammadu Buhari giving a speech on the 24th, where he simply skipped over the fact that the military had murdered people, and Lagos had descended into chaos as a result. It shook me to my core, I felt any hope, any revolutionary anger, die inside me. That night we took to Twitter to joke about leaving the country, but while others might have been joking, I don’t think I was.
I laid in bed that night, terrified, listening for the sound of gunshots and I knew that I could not do it anymore. I have to believe in something to fight for it, and I don’t believe in Nigeria anymore.