Sarcasm!

Ah, I do love it!

How to rank various crimes in Africa by their gravity

By KWAMCHETSI MAKOKHA Posted Friday, October 23 2009 at 16:38

Charles Ngengi and Daniel Gichia, the two Kenyan men who announced their private intentions by wedding last week, did well to stage their public displays of affection in London, where police are half-asleep and the lawmakers lazy.

Were they to attempt a sudden homecoming to the continent of law and order, they would find that their crime outranks violent murder, rape, looting, drug dealing, child exploitation, corruption and murder. They would probably be arrested, denied bail and hauled to court to face criminal charges faster than anyone suspected or known to be a criminal.

In the week of their nuptials, here in Africa, we were speaking up for the rule of law. Ugandan MP David Bahati was striking a blow for the family. He had just published a private member’s Bill seeking to reward homosexuality with death — all at the taxpayer’s expense.

Those defending or abetting “homosexual acts”, he suggests, are candidates for 10 years in the cooler and a tonne of trouble. Looking for the guilty is not necessarily an exercise in gathering evidence.

THE MP’S CHRISTIAN CHARITY DREW instant support from Uganda’s inimitable minister for Ethics and Integrity, Dr James Butoro, and later the Speaker of that country’s National Assembly.

At home in Kenya, a member of the Committee of Chickens ruled out the possibility of people like Ngengi and Gichia finding accommodation in the new constitution, currently in the works. This is because their sham union would corrupt the morals of an entire nation determined to turn its back on the evils of sin.

Why, their infectious sexual preferences are the kind of crime that deserves speedy legislation to contain the epidemic before every virile man on the continent is lured into the pink-wearing, card-carrying membership of the gay community. Then, procreation would cease — seeing that men have no ovaries. The continent, already groaning under the weight of debt, would be forced to beg for aid that would be squandered on buying seed and ovaries to populate its lands.

When the corruption that has characterised the leadership of so many African nations is held up against this crime, even the deaths and misery it has caused pale in comparison. Corruption is excusable, even defensible in Africa because it waits for people to be born and then lets them die of natural causes like disease, hunger and poverty. They cannot complain too much because at least they were allowed to be born and to live their lives — however short and miserable.

Homosexuality stops people from being born altogether. It is African to loot public resources and very indigenous to rob the poor so the rich can live in luxury. But it is not African to have doubts about the correct method to use when having sex, and with whom.

Having homosexual partners living in African communities is so unAfrican that it makes the high rates of statutory rape – evident in the number of schoolgirls who drop out of primary school — look like child’s play.

The child marriages practised all over the continent in the name of religion and culture are very African — not these strange sexual liaisons between consenting adults. It is much better to see a Nyanza 13-year-old lugging a pregnancy than to countenance two men living together in a union of any sort.

Homosexuality is so wrong, it is sicker than the desire to cut off someone’s head and stick it atop a pole for public display in the fashion of the Mungiki sect of Kenya. It is 10 times sicker than locking people in a church or a house and then setting them on fire. It is definitely sicker than genocide. These things are African, but homosexuality is alien to us.

Drug lords can parade around the capitals, flashing their false gold and driving their big cars. They can be ordered deported from a country and still stay around for two years occupying the front pages of the leading newspapers without risking arrest.

THEY CAN IMPORT THEIR WARES and sell them without causing a storm. But on this continent of law and order, where morality is a public virtue, sex must happen in the prescribed manner, at the appointed time and with people the society approves of. Anything short of that is an unconscionable crime.

Many crimes can be forgiven, but not this one that Moses the lawgiver and Hammurabi forgot to codify through some terrible oversight. It is the crime they would not dare include in the 10 Commandments. The biggest crime around homosexuality is that it is private and personal. It does not create opportunities for people to get a cut.

Those involved are not likely to go around asking for a licence. There ought to be a law about people being happy without contributing to communal bliss. It does not injure people who are not directly involved — as is the case with murder, rape, exploitation and corruption. It is just there ... and it does not have its origins on this continent.

Ngengi and Gichia should be grateful they are not Ugandan. At the passage of the Bahati Bill, they would have been hunted down at taxpayers’ expense and deported back to face trial for their crime — being homosexual abroad.

kwamchetsi@formandcontent.co.ke