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Gay Liberia Reports 2008

Also see:
Behind the Mask LGBT African website

Republic of Liberia
-capital: Monrovia
-head of state: President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
-state: multi party
-population: 3,042,004 (July 2006 est.)
-independence: from Britain in 1847
-languages: English 20% (official), some 20 ethnic group languages
-religion: indigenous beliefs 40%, Christian 40%, Muslim 20%
-currency: Liberian dollar (LRD)A

Status of homosexuality: illegal
-age of consent: 16
-laws covering homosexual activity: Section 14.74, ‘Voluntary Sodomy’ of the Penal Law provides that a person who engages in deviate sexual intercourse under circumstances not stated in Section 14.72 or 14.73 has committed a first degree misdemeanour.
-Accordingly, Gays (homosexuals/lesbians) are individuals (males/females) who engage in deviate sexual intercourse with their sex mates or members of the opposite sex. Gay, being synonymous or close to Sodomy, is defined by the Penal Law of Liberia, as a deviate sexual activity and is therefore considered an offence under Liberian laws. (source: The Status of Gays in The Republic of Liberia/ILGA)
-background information and government attitudes: "From our study, the Liberian society frowns on or rejects such acts for the mere fact that such acts are immoral, unchristian, uncultural and unhealthy.
While it is true that there are Gays in Liberia, such people operate underground. They are believed to be residing in concession areas and cities. Members of the Gay society carry on their activities under the thick curtain of darkness, in secret, for fear that if it becomes public knowledge, they could be arrested, prosecuted, ostracized, ex-communicated and ridiculed by their non-gay friends, families and society at large." (source: The Status of Gays in The Republic of Liberia/ILGA)

1 Homoglobia: Out in Africa 6/09

2 Tecumseh Roberts Was Killed Because He Was Gay...Prince Johnson At TRC 8/08

From: http://www.dailyqueernews.com/news/843/

June 26, 2008

1
Homoglobia: Out in Africa-
If you thought you had it tough growing up, try being young and gay or lesbian in Liberia

By Jess Langley
If you thought you had it tough growing up, try being young and gay or lesbian in Liberia.

" I’m more nervous than a go-go dancer at a Madonna audition,” quips Samuel down the line in a mellow West African accent. “The dancing queens are fired up and we’re ready to go!”

It’s karaoke night in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, and I’m bumping down Tubman Boulevard in a rattly Land Cruiser. Dressed 1980s punk style, I’ve applied safety pins to my clothes, written ‘love’ on my knuckles, and wound a studded belt around my neck.

A Nigerian peacekeeper cocks his head at the next checkpoint. I lift my dark glasses to give him a smile, and he nods and waves me through, one finger on the trigger of his assault rifle.

“ You see, it works,” proclaims Emma, dressed in skater pants, her hair in tight braids. She flexes a wiry bicep covered in a blue biro tattoo of a Chinese dragon, painstakingly copied from a pirated DVD. “When you grow up, the bad men start to come behind you. And so it’s better to be a boy. They leave you be.”

Emma is 16 years old, or so the evidence suggests. She tells strangers she’s 13, and her small frame doesn’t betray her.
“ You do that,” I tell her. “You keep telling people you’re 13. It will stop people wanting to marry you.”

She gives a knowing nod and a smile. In a recent government survey, 92 per cent of Liberian women reported experiencing some form of sexual violence. Emma’s ambiguous gender is a force field.

I’ve spent a year in Monrovia, and we’ve formed a motley crew. In the driveway of my heavily fortified compound we laugh and break coconuts as brown-uniformed guards watch on. The coconuts bounce off the concrete driveway in unexpected directions like errant footballs. When one cracks, Samuel’s dark muscles ripple as he drives his fingers into the wedge to prise the green husk from the precious nut inside.

Samuel and Emma enter my compound on a daily basis. Emma lives with her grandma in a tarpaulin-roofed shack outside my gate. We do homework together. I’m a terrible educationalist and Emma seems dyslexic, but it’s a good excuse to feed her a hot meal.

The neighbours see Samuel come and go with Hans, my neighbour. As he walks the laneway of corrugated-iron dwellings to visit his older German lover, Samuel runs the gauntlet of sideways glances. Samuel tells Emma to be careful too, coming and going to my house. He doesn’t want her to attract the same whispering suspicions.

There are an estimated 1.5 million people in Monrovia. The average life expectancy is less than 45 and 23 per cent of babies born will not reach their fifth birthday. Reminders of a brutal civil war stagger down potholed streets in the forms of blind beggars and amputees.

Gay liberation exists only on hotjocks.com and hi5, delivered via a heart-breakingly slow modem.
We take a break from Whitney, Elton and ‘My Sharona’ in the karaoke lounge, and celebrate a queer New Year’s Eve over a bottle of whiskey in a backyard by a swamp. In a city with no running water and no mains electricity, we’re lucky to have a single naked bulb for light and a Nokia phone for music.

“ We don’t want to attract attention,” says another friend, Jojo, as he leans against the chest of his partner of five years.
Over the course of a year we’ve come to love each other; we’re a family. Emma’s grandma has a boyfriend now; he eats the fried fish and rice that she puts on the table each day, and Emma comes to me thinner than before, despite the foil-wrapped food parcels I send home with her each night.

Samuel’s older lover seems to be getting gruffer and more down-beat as the stress of his job takes hold.
“14 years in Africa. I must be crazy,” Hans mutters in a thick Bavarian accent, shaking his head like a condemned man.
I try to be a good role model in the time we have together. I tell Emma she never needs to marry; she never even needs to kiss a boy. I don’t kiss boys. I have my best friend Sally and we live together and might have a family one day.
Emma nods, tucking her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. I show her photos on the internet of drag kings, and a shot of me with a fake moustache.

Emma brings a doe-eyed teenage girl to my farewell party, and reaches up and whispers in my ear: “This is Bindu, my girlfriend.”

Samuel has tears in his eyes as I drop him at home for the last time. He gives me a string of plastic beads, still warm from his chest, and says, “Until I met you I never thought I could be happy to be gay.”

Jess Langley is a Melbourne-based writer and humanitarian worker.

The Liberian Journal
http://www.theliberianjournal.com/index.php?st=news&sbst=details&rid=452&comesOfTheHome=1

August 26, 2008

2
Tecumseh Roberts Was Killed Because He Was Gay...Prince Johnson At TRC

by James Kpargoi, Jr.
Monrovia - Popular musician Tecumseh Roberts was executed by Samuel Varnii, the deputy leader of the defunct INPFL, the head of the former warring faction Prince Johnson said. Mr. Johnson said Varnii shot Roberts (now deceased) in his (Johnson) presence because, according to him, he was involved in homosexuality. Mr. Johnson, now senior senator of Nimba County, said Mr. Roberts was engaged in the distribution of rice in his control territories on Bushrod Island during the heydays of the civil conflict until he was discovered to be a “gay.” Johnson said when Roberts was arrested he was in the company of a Caucasian man who was later released.

He has been testifying in continuation of the ongoing Institutional and Thematic Inquiry Hearings of Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at the Centennial Memorial Pavilion in Monrovia where a mammoth crowd turned up Tuesday to witness the proceedings. Mr. Johnson said following the discovery of musician Roberts, a stream of blood flowed down his pants leading to the confirmation of suspicion by Gen. Varnii that the musician was a “homosexual.” “Gen. Varnii ordered Tecumseh Roberts to take off his trouser and when he (latter) took off his trouser, it was discovered that his butt [anal] was rotten. The man whole anus was rotten,” the senator told commissioners.

Following the discovery that he was a homosexual, Johnson said, Gen. Varnii shot and killed Mr. Roberts. Meanwhile, former People’s Redemption Council (PRC) junta member, Larry Borteh, then Youth and Sports Minister Fred Blay, and AFL officer Roosevelt Savice, were executed for conniving with beleaguered President Samuel K. Doe, Mr. Johnson told commissioners of the TRC. Johnson said both Blay and Savice were caught communicating with President Doe and executed. Borteh, he said was arrested for conniving with the embattled president, was tried by a rebel tribunal and executed.

Under the theme: “Understanding the Conflict Through its Principal Events and Actors,” the ongoing hearings will address the root causes of the conflict, including its military and political dimensions. The hearings are focused on events between 1979 and 2003 and the national and external actors that helped to shape those events. The TRC was agreed upon in the August 2003 peace agreement and created by the TRC Act of 2005. The TRC was established to “promote national peace, security, unity and reconciliation,” and at the same time make it possible to hold perpetrators accountable for gross human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law that occurred in Liberia between January 1979 and October 2003.