Author: Kechi Nomu

Does Caitlyn Jenner’s story mean anything for Nigeria’s Yan Daudu?

Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender Olympic champion formerly known as Bruce, unveiled her new name and look in a sexy Vanity Fair cover shoot in June. (Pic: AFP)
Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender Olympic champion formerly known as Bruce, unveiled her new name and look in a sexy Vanity Fair cover shoot in June. (Pic: AFP)

To understand the tasteless comedy that was the larger Nigerian reaction to Caitlyn Jenner, the woman Bruce Jenner introduced to the public on that iconic Vanity Fair cover, post-transition, you first have to understand the place of comedy in the country.

There is a lot that comedy placates in Nigeria. That we can laugh at our problems, that you can gather a broad class of Nigerians in a room and get them to laugh at class difference – the thieving politician sitting in the VIP section of that room is perhaps our most undervalued nationalistic tool.

A little more than a year ago, when the sexuality debate was sweeping through Africa, Nigerians felt it important to drawn clear boundaries. Yet for some reason, on this equally important humanity-defining issue, people largely chose the bliss of ignorance and comedy. For them, Caitlyn Jenner’s story was an America-is-crazy kind of thing. A problem with the world, but chiefly, other people’s problem.

And yet, the fact is in Nigeria, there are at least two public figures that disrupt the rigid boundaries of gender performance. Charles ‘Charly Boy’ Oputa is one of them; the entertainer who goes by the name His Royal Punkness regularly presents himself to the public as a person who exists in a gender flux; he wears make-up, a mostly punkish rock star kind. The other is Denrele Edun, a famous television presenter, who is even less subtle. He wears his shimmery gowns and long, gorgeous, sometimes outlandish hairpieces on the red carpet.

Nigerians, most of whom daily and with dedication watch Philipino love dramas where at least one character exists in a gender flux, are scandalised by these two local men who fearlessly dress across gender lines in a country where conforming to social expectations is almost non-negotiable. It is always interesting to read the classic Nigerian response to a Charly Boy photo shoot.

The common thread amongst people who live in this state of denial is God/Allah.

A majority of Nigerians construct their identities rigidly around religion. The world known to most Nigerians was created by God, filled by God with men, women and things for the men (to a large extent) and women to dominate. That world as it is known to most Nigerians is under threat from science in general and more specifically, people who think they are smarter than God. Anything that demands that their world be seen differently confirms the end of the world.

Asking that Nigerian to think of gender in the terms that Bruce’s transition demands is a threat. To find fun in it is the sane end of the stick, what lies beyond it can get scary. There is at least one reported case of the Nigerian public unleashing its wrath on an individual for not being ‘normal’. For being a man with woman breasts and, in essence, a witch.

There is a list of permitted ambiguities in the world as it is known to most Nigerians, and gender is not one of them.

From this convenient position, religion (and by religion, I mean Christianity and Islam) is the only accepted portal of history, and the past can be collectively rewritten. The very idea that people do not exist in straight categories of male and female becomes a dangerous foreign construct. Unfortunately, the idea of gender fluidity is not a new paradigm the free world cooked up.

The Yan Daudu exist. They are certainly not Nigeria’s only trangender people, not by a long shot, but they are the best evidence of a trans community in Nigeria. They have been part of the cultural fabric of pocket regions in Northern Nigeria for at least a century. They are pre-religion and have continued to exist post-religion. They cross dress, they take on complete female identities.

What Caitlyn should represent for them, is an audacity to claim the space of their individual realities. To make it anything more than a dying fringe culture.

And herein lies the question. Is what we have witnessed in the publicised transitioning of Bruce to Caitlyn a victory for the ‘global trans community’ in any real way? Does it mean anything for the Yan Daudu in Nigeria, or the Hijras in India?

“I am for people living in their truths” are words that have been increasingly used these past few weeks. I agree with the words. The only valid way to live in any case is in ways that are as truthful as one can muster. But as the world’s progressives cheer for Caitlyn, and we read the positive comments, can we also chip in a discussion on what this means to those small communities of people driven underground already by a witch hunt in places not the America? Is this too a victory for them? Are they, too, the earth?

Kechi Nomu writes from Warri, Nigeria. Her poems have appeared in Saraba Magazine and Brittle Paper. 

Sex education: What Nollywood and sermons don’t teach

(Pic: Flickr / Nollywood Artist)
(Pic: Flickr / Nollywood Artist)

Positive parenting had began to gain popularity among parents and teachers in the small Nigerian town of Sapele where I grew up, and my school was not going to be left behind.

So, every Valentine’s Day saw us assembled in our school hall to be treated to a film screening. Somehow, my teachers always managed to find the same kind of Nollywood story: good girls who kept themselves pure in the midst of the moral morass of youth and married handsome, wealthy men who loved them dearly for their virtue and would do anything to have them.  In the late 1990s, the whole film show business seemed like such a big deal. But did it occur to anybody to question the choice of Nollywood as a viable Sex Ed aid? I I don’t think so.

Before the film played, it was mandatory that we live through 30 minutes or so of reorientation. The big colour television, placed at the centre of our school hall, would be on, the blue screen waiting, while a teacher – preferably the most religious or the most willing/concerned – talked to us about our changing bodies. By an unspoken consensus, on days like this – on other days too, but especially on days like this –  everybody tried to avoid the use of certain words. And, standing in line, my breath held, my self-comportment overstretched, it was easy to understand why.

Those words, in their raw carnal forms, had terrible pitfalls. We had seen it happen many times; girls we knew, swallowed whole by the scotching intimacy of carnal words. Girls who knew about breasts and hips. Girls who we could tell, just by looking at them, that they were doing ‘it’. Girls who became pregnant. The general impression being that good girls just did not notice their bodies.

For the same reason that these words could just not be said, these films we saw were less about whatever narratives they managed to have and more about the overarching message. That narrative was: Good girls wait and are rewarded, bad girls end up with babies on their backs walking the streets looking lost. Good boys graduate, get great lives and have beautiful families, bad boys end up unfinished and angry at the world.

Then one year, our ‘exposed’ Home Economics teacher brought back a new movie Yellow Card (Zimbabwean) from one of her trips to Lagos. That film represents for me, to this day, a kind of epiphany.  At school that day, I saw a story that was by miles different, unnerving even, but possible. I saw young people who were preoccupied with sex but also preoccupied with education and careers. It showed them making mistakes but also it showed them trying to make better choices. And for showing this, that sex was not so much the problem as much as poor sexual choices were, for attempting to move the frame of conflicts to a flexible one, the whole positive parenting film show thing became suspect.  Our teachers feared we would become confused. And so, the whole film-screening campaign with its preemptive concern for possible life-altering choices was quietly shelved.

If campaigns to improve sexual and reproductive health education has done anything well in the last couple of decades, it is that it has increased the willingness of parents, schools and religious bodies to talk to about sexual and reproductive health. In communities like the one where I grew up, and perhaps communities like it mirrored all through Africa, this is how you mostly learn sex education: from well-meaning people in churches and schools who would designate whole programs to “talk to the young people about sex”, but deliberately neuter or thwart the message in the “best interests” of young people.

Recently, I attended a church program where the guest speaker, a woman from a religious NGO, insisted that “the computer age” was directly responsible for the proliferation of abortions in young girls. And as I sat there listening to her say these things in her confident, measured voice, I was not worried by the certainty of her illogic. It was the readiness, gratitude almost, with which the audience swallowed this rare information that worried me. The nature of information that was disseminated is problematic, perhaps enough to be counter-productive?

The statistics around abortion appear conflicting. Certain research shows that this conservative approach to sex education led to better sexual behaviour. Other research shows that it did not reduce the abortion rate. And that worse still, the numbers of unsafe abortions in countries like Nigeria are as high as ever. While this says nothing definitive about the challenges that apply to the methods of Sex Education currently practiced in Nigeria and other African countries, enough information exists that draws attention to the inadequacies of the approach.

From school lessons in the 1990s to school lessons now, SEX = SIN is the form of sex education that young people are getting, instead of the more pertinent ‘there are safe ways to have sex’. This is mostly because Nigeria, like much of Africa, is a highly religious space, where your Sunday School teacher most likely doubles as your concerned/willing school teacher, so there is the unavoidable problem of an overlap of the same kinds of sermonised sex education everywhere.

The dangers of going out to seek or buy protection can still seem as big and as real as the dangers of reckless, unsafe sex in certain communities. And this sermonised form of Sex Education which very often equates the emphasising of condom and contraceptive use as promoting irresponsibility, if anything, contributes to the entrenchment of conservative ideas in communities that are already too conservative.

Sex education is everywhere; on billboards, on TV, in churches, in schools, but it is still a long way from being about the simple and most basic thing: the right to protect yourself. It is yet to transcend religion or what I am willing to telling you. It is yet to be about life, about safety, about options.

Kechi Nomu writes from Warri, Nigeria. Her poems have appeared in Saraba Magazine and Brittle Paper.