Homosexuality, the evil above evils

Perhaps the only bad thing about Islamic extremist is their application of violence, underlined by dogmatism, otherwise, even Christians should realise that certain western values are alien to us Africans. One of these is homosexuality.

To the Africans, who believes so deeply in abomination, homosexuality has unfortunately crossed the borders of acceptable human conduct, shameful enough for a normal human being to feel proud of.

Today homosexuality seems to represent a kind of glorification of human nature, so much that it has become institutionalised in the form of gay marriages, accommodated even by the church.

The first time I ever heard of homosexuality was in the late fifties. As a child in primary school in Tiko, my parents used to take me on holidays to Douala, where most members of my family lived. At that time, leaving this part of Cameroon, then known as the British Cameroons, to the other Cameroon under the French administration, was like one going to a different country altogether.

By standard, Douala was so well developed that, anyone from this part of the country could easily believe he was in one of those far off “Whiteman’s countries”. And of course the population of whites was virtually overwhelming and French culture became sumptuously consumed.

As I grew up later to understand that, French colonial policy was based on the principle of Assimilation and so the military officers who formed the administrative corps of their colonies were not French, but mostly of Polish nationality, who were posted to the interior of their colonies, and who introduced repressive systems of rule in those colonies.

Most of these officers were not married. Indeed they became a clan of their own, because there was no way they could mix up with the local population. Bonanjo in Douala therefore remains today a symbol of an exclusive residential area for whites only in those days.

This is how homosexuality entered Cameroon. It later developed into a kind of club for those who mattered.

Later when Africans joined the administrative corps, they were initiated into it, and it became a status symbol. When the local population became aware of it, it was given the name “Pede”. The vocal Eboa Lottin picked up the issue with a satire in one of his musical composition in which he mocked married women that their husbands have became their mates.

It was a terrible trend that had developed in society and it was even rumoured that the former regime had turned homosexuality into a yard stake for measuring who to put in government.

And so a few years ago, when a certain newspaper published a long list of alleged homosexuals in Cameroon, most of them senior members of government, it raised a storm. A certain journalist even made matters worse, when he declared that he had video cassettes depicting some of those named, caught in the act, and even promised to present them in court.

But whether it was an empty threat or the bare truth, the matter died, just in the same way that it was born, but leaving some scares which took quite some time to disappear. Fortunately, we as Cameroonians have a way of burying hatchets over one “man’ and a few sticks of soya.

No one seems to remember that society was at the verge of ostracising some of its children in high places because as an evil that the Bible reveals, was one of God’s unpardonable sin which prompted him to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. No one could tell the story better than Lot. He lost his wife, who was warned never to look behind as God had spared the lives of Lot, his wife and two daughters as they fled.

Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt and at the end, Lot found himself having children with his two daughters. So what lesson do we learn, from this when even the church of Christ is accommodating gay marriages involving even priests?