Chinua Achebe on Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-W.B Yeats ‘ The Second Coming’

In this century, in the west, we have beheld same sex lovers, gender and transgender deviants, sexual outlaws emerge in the public sphere telling us and our children that they have a right to be who they are. It is getting gorier than ever.  The disaster and the aftermath of the disaster are spreading rhapsodically through the West. This is one of those leitmotifs Yeats captured in ‘The Second Coming’. The first stanza of Yeat’s most sacred poem capture plangently the monocratic descent of the West on African culture, splashing the sagging breast of our existence into an improved commotion. Achebe was forbidden to write a protest novel such as Things Fall Apart, a title from Yeats poetry. The extenuating circumstances that maximised the opportunities for Achebe were so undeniable that Heinemann had to take the work onto the global literary scene in 1958. Note, The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the brutal aftermath of the first world war, in the same line of thought, Things Fall Apart was written after the catastrophic descent of colonialism on our culture, ravaging it beyond recognition. Both works follow a period of anarchy and gloom in a culturo-political epoch.

It is praiseworthy to observe that without western government, western schools, western technology, western science, western imperialism and western religion, we would never have anything like homosexualism, paedophilia and incest in our midst. Africa has taboos. Achebe’s core thesis is the need to leave Africans with their Africanness.  Here in Africa, live and let live is crucial, however, it does not mean one should allow another to live while he or she is committing abomination with their blood brothers. One man’s atrocity can destroy the whole community. What lays deep within the African heart is the fear not of capricious gods, but the fear of committing sacrilege, the fear of weakness, and the fear of desecrating the land. Did Okonkwo marry a man; did Okonkwo marry his sister? Woe betide any who claims to be breast-fed, yet welcomes  his own brother to marry his own sister, or rather, allows his own brother to marry another brother. The African man in Okonkwo was a hater of western life and culture. This is not to say that Okonkwo’s masculinity was not over deterministically described and over bearing, however, it points out the fact that Achebe knew that our men were that way, so he tried so well to describe the character as mannish enough. Real men cannot bend to be slept on by other men. Okonkwo can never do that. He even refused to be killed by the White man. The Zulu men cannot submit to their fellow men. African men do not do that.

Sigmund Freud viewed every human as bisexual. Yet, he used the medical term ‘inversion’ to describe homosexuality, a term predicated upon a somewhat pathological digression. However, Freud’s response to a woman who in 1935 had sent her son to him for a treatment of his homosexuality reads: “May I question you why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.” What do you mean by a certain arrest of sexual development? Were you denoting an abnormality? Name it appropriately. For Achebe this kind of response does not hold water in African traditional milieu. If it is of no advantage, and if our fathers never permitted such, we shall not allow it.  The complexity of Freudian discourse on sexuality and sex upholds supplementary deliberation. Freud concluded via his therapies that every woman is merely a mutilated male who resolves her castration anxiety by wishing for the male sex organ. This meant that women do not and are not supposed to want the vagina of another woman.  Now he tends to dissolve the later argument when compared to the case of the homosexual boy given his response to the mother of the boy. The West had outlawed homosexuality in the past, but now they are preaching its acceptability like they preached Christ to us. There is a possibility they will withdraw from it in the future given the way they have withdrawn from Christ a long time ago. Like Freud, the West is so uncertain in issues such as this.

Chinua Achebe who played a germinal role in the development of African literature and traditions will see Goodluck Jonathan’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act as a blessing on African tradition. As in Thing Fall Apart, Igbo culture breaks apart, so many things have spoilt in Africa today. The centre is so shattered thus allowing same sex marriages will cause more break in our communal development and culturo-political sustainability. Marriage between a man and a woman is what holds us together, we shall not allow them to break it. If they break it, our community is gone: “The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart,” says Achebe, the Father of African Literature.