Alice Nkom explains why she advocates for gay rights

A 30-year-old gay Cameroonian man, Jean-Claude, met someone he was interested in. The feeling was apparently reciprocated leading to an exchange of telephone numbers. Thereafter, they both agreed to exchange text messages at a later date to arrange for a meeting. The message, unfortunately, ended up being read by the police.

Unknown to Jean - Claude, the man he had planned to meet had apparently arranged with the police to be present at the time his text message was received. They waited for him to arrive at the house and had him arrested.

At the police station, he was stripped naked and given an anal examination. The officers concluded that he was gay because "his anus was too open," says human rights lawyer Alice Nkom. Her face shook as she recalls the abuse her client suffered in the judicial system". This incident happened in 2011.

"Nkom fought for Jean-Claude's release on the basis that there was no proof of intercourse, "If you are a good judge how can you condemn someone and convict them for homosexual acts on the basis of a text message?"

Jean-Claude went to jail for three years. Nkom eventually was able to secured him a bail. Following his release, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and returned home to his family, but, because he was gay, the strict Catholic community shunned his medical needs leading to his death soon after.

"Cameroon is one of the 38 African countries criminalising homosexuality," Nkom said. "You can be jailed for five years. The country records one of the highest arrests for homosexuality, but nobody knows that. Everybody is focused on Kenya and Uganda because they have introduced recent bills increasing penalties."

I met Nkom in a central London hotel where she was on one of her frequent visits to Europe to meet other human rights activists, raising awareness and funding for her work.

Alice was the first black woman to be called to the bar in Cameroon in 1969. She spent the next several decades creating a formidable reputation for herself as a respected voice in its legal system. All that changed in 2003.

A chance meeting with some young gay Cameroonian men who had been living in Paris opened her eyes to the human rights abuse the LGBT community was suffering in her native country.

"I wanted them to know that, what they used to do easily and freely in Paris, they cannot do back home in Cameroon," she explains. "When they came out of the meeting they were sad, I could see it on their faces. I thought, 'What did I do?' Is it just enough for me to tell people, 'Please never show that you are happy, or you are in love?'"

She wanted to do more than just warn these men. "What about our kids when they travel to the USA, Paris or Belgium to study, where homosexuality is not criminalised, and then they want to go home to Cameroon and show what they have learned? What should we then do? Do we ask them to go back because the only places we have kept for them are prisons?"

Her words are compelling. Not only because she's dedicated herself to a repressed community that she's not directly a part of and does not need to fight a battle for.

"I used to tell people on the TV, 'I am gay'. But they cannot arrest me just because I say that I am gay," she says. Nkom has children and grandchildren and is heterosexual, but she says this to highlight the fact that the constitution in Cameroon is ratified with a human rights treaty, which inclusively protects all its citizens – including LGBTs.

Technically, being homosexual is not a crime, however, a "provision" was added into the law in 1972 making homosexual acts illegal. Nkom uses this awareness of the more superior law – the original constitution – to get people out of jail.

"If you followed the law to the letter, none of these people should be in jail. It's only same-sex sexual conduct that is criminalised, not being gay. People are going to jail for sending a text message. As such, the laws are being used illegally."

The police and judges in Cameroon rely on their victim's lack of education to prosecute them. "Ignorance is very bad, because [the victims] don't know their rights. This is why they don't arrest people in Douala, where I live. The police don't want to face me. They know that if they arrest someone, they call me and I go and we have a serious discussion."

After their experiences in prison, and following a long court battle where often the victims don't have the funds to pay for legal representation, people are entitled to compensation. "They never follow it up," says Nkom. "When they are freed, they just want to get away and be forgotten." Because Nkom finances her clients' trials, she can't "run after them and say we can continue," because she has "other cases to handle."

"This is my own money and the money of my family," she advises. "But with what I have, I do what I can." She founded ADEFHO (Association for the Defence of Homosexuality) in 2003 as a non-profit international organisation that applies for funding.

As she cannot fund the foundation from within Cameroon, she looks outside her home country for help. Past supporters have included the European Union, from which she received a €300,000 grant. She was later threatened with arrest by a representative of Cameroon's Ministry of Communication for accepting it. "I don't want to stop what I have decided to do. I want to show [the Cameroon government] that if one is determined to do something because it is right, or good, they cannot stop it."

Despite its homophobic laws, Nkom tells me her homeland is "a very beautiful country."

"It is the heart of central Africa," she says warmly of her homeland that has been colonised twice before, by France and Great Britain. "We have deserts in the north, forests in the south, and seas. We have everything to be happy. We have enough oil, we produce cocoa. We are a very diverse country, and very united."

The main problem she cites with Cameroon is how its controversial president, Paul Biya, has retained control since 1982. "He's been in power for 33 years. This is not good because we have a problem in setting up a democracy with the possibility for people to change, because everything is blocked."

Another worry for Nkom is the war with extremism that she sees looming, spreading slowly into Cameroon from Nigeria. "We are very afraid whether our president can face a war because we have always lived in a very peaceful place. Managing peace is not the same thing as managing a war. And when you have war, it's never a good place for human rights."

Nigeria is very rich in terms of oil, and Nkom says Cameroon's people are facing the same danger of Boko Haram "and we don't know how to deal with it." Nigeria also passed a bill to criminalise homosexuality just a year or so ago, she says, "but they also have a lot of states where they have established Sharia law, so this can spread and give a very bad example to Cameroon where, up to now, we were living in peace with muslims, christians, and catholics everywhere in a very harmonious way."

Among the many cases Nkom is working on is the defence of a lesbian who has been jailed for five years. "She was alone, there was no other woman arrested. I'm trying to get her out, but it's a very long process to gain her freedom."

Such individual cases are upsetting, but Nkom does not believe homophobia to be widespread among the Cameroonian people. "Homophobic people used to say that the majority of Cameroon is against homosexuals, which I don't agree with.

The problem is the people who disagree with homosexuality speak louder." Her use of terminology in reference to LGBT people is interesting. What about life as lesbian or trans in Cameroon? "We have only one word for this – 'homosexuality'. You can be jailed if you are trans or lesbian as well. The trans community has to hide. They cannot live their life freely and openly as they do here."

The concept of individual LGBT identity is a luxury of Western culture; life in Cameroon for the non-heterosexual community, however people identify, is devoid of celebration. On top of this, the sexual health and HIV needs of the gay community in Cameroon are ignored because doctors cannot be trusted to deliver treatment as the medical profession sees it as giving aid to men who are involved in criminal acts.

Nkom shakes her head again as she speaks. "The doctors say to me that they are being asked to treat sexual behaviour that is prohibited by the law. I say to them, 'You are a doctor. What did you swear on? That if I am a criminal I don't deserve treatment?' Cameroon receives a lot of money from the global fund to eradicate HIV, but it doesn't go to the needs of gay men."

"As sexual minorities defenders, we are accused of being agents of the West to exterminate African people so you can come and steal our natural resources. We are [accused of] receiving a lot of money from you to do this 'dirty' job because homosexuality is not African. Which is not true, homosexuality is human" – Alice Nkom

Nkom explains how religious factors also played their role in riling the anger of an uninformed population against homosexuality.

"In 2006 the Archbishop of Yaoundé decided to point his finger at the gay community as the people responsible for issues like unemployment, which is when homophobia became aggressive." She identifies the Archbishop's comments as the turning point that saw national newspapers take it upon themselves to start publishing the names of gay people, which fuelled homophobic hysteria.

"Before that the population were living comfortably with gay people," Nkom recalls. It's this warped injustice, coupled with a love for a country that was built on the basis of independence from colonialism and on the foundations of a recognised human rights charter, that spurs Nkom to continue her work.

I cite the words of fellow Cameroonian human rights activist Joël Gustave Nana Ngongang who said, "As Africans, we feel the vestiges of the long European colonial presence in our continent. We feel them when other – Western, European, 'international' – LGBT organisations speak on our behalf and we are left unheard. Only Africans can speak for Africans."

Nkom disapproves of this position. "I don't agree with him at all," she says, sighing heavily at his suggestion that the continent's former colonialist rulers should not interfere in the internal struggles of Africa. "We had independence in 1960.

We had no criminalisation of homosexuality then, we had no mass media, no television, nothing, and they never put homosexuality as a behaviour that can be the cause of prejudice and barbarity to others." She reiterates how colonial laws were rejected for a greater, more accepting human rights charter.

"As sexual minorities defenders, we are accused of being agents of the West to exterminate African people so you can come and steal our natural resources. We are [accused of] receiving a lot of money from you to do this 'dirty' job because homosexuality is not African. Which is not true, homosexuality is human."

It's easy to view countries like Cameroon and their confused laws with sadness and fear. But people like Nkom prove that there is hope – even if its glimmer is faint. There's hope that, even as the homophobes and fear-mongers shout, there are brave people like her who are allies to the LGBT cause because they believe in justice for all. The question remains: when she could be comfortably retired as she approaches her 70th birthday, why does she continue this seemingly unending, lonely battle? "I knew I would be alone for a while.

You cannot ask people to get into such risky work," she says. "They have all to lose. I face a lot of discrimination myself – many doors are locked behind me. This is a full time job I do today and I cannot work like a normal lawyer who has a paying client. I don't have time for that. This work is huge and I want results before I leave this earth. I'm 70 and I want to reach the stage when I have a definitive decision in the Supreme Court."

Due to the situation of non-democracy, the parliament in Nkom's country cannot remove the anti-gay "provision" in the law held in place by President Biya's majority party. So she follows the "judiciary road to fight in the Supreme Court" to challenge the situation.

"Somebody has to do this work. I am black, I am a woman and I am a lawyer, and I speak loud. I am a result of the battle of former generations that engaged to free me today, and it's a very heavy debt I owe to new generations."