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eazirel · 3 years

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Since it’s pride month, I wrote something about my life as an effeminate man in Nigeria.

One thing Africa, to narrow the milieu, Nigeria is good at is upholding customs even though they clearly are backwards, distasteful, not toeing in line with good conscience, nor an aid to the development of its state. One moment it is discerning morality from its laws and the next using it as bases to its laws and still at that, giving mawkish backups as to what they feel morality is. And every passing day, I wonder how it quests to develop when its laws are backdated and the minds of its people thickly benighted.

Some time ago, I read a story of a very young boy who was tortured to death for being effeminate; He was killed for his love for cosmetics and make up. Amongst other things, his story entails the inhumanity of people who are fanatical and undampened towards their belief of things they do not understand.

Growing up, I was taught to be ashamed of being effeminate or associating with effeminate men, to make conscious efforts in being more manly, that being effeminate emasculates a man and it is not acceptable in the African society, as a matter of fact, that it is ungodlike and morally villainous.

People made it a responsibility to call me by the way I walk, ’boy girl, see as he dey waka like woman, you be man so? Which was not a bother in my early childhood, but not until my teenage years when people with unsolicited opinions not only identified me with being effeminate, but also asked my parents why it was so. My mother always had one particular defense, I don’t know how it came about but whenever she said it, it got them speechless and the most of them wrecking with superficial and ungenuine laughter on their faces .

‘He grew up amongst women, he never had much memory with men.’ This is something I heard year in and out. In fact, it became a defense my siblings used too when confronted about me at school and gradually, I began to see my effeminacy as a malnormal.

I made conscious efforts at altering my truest form. I began to walk as though I was to follow two imaginary parallel lines, I made sure I used less of my hands in talking, and I always tried to never get my legs too close to themselves. I dreaded glossing my lips for it might seem to appear too much to those who cared. Basically, I tried to adjust the things people were concerned about the most.

Although it was always a great relief when boys said I was gradually beginning to act like one, this in its totality was a problem. I spent the most of my time thinking and rehearsing how to be more masculine and appealing to people, which was worth far more than good grades to me. In a quest to be more manly, I prayed, fasted and waited on God for yet ungiven reasons.

The first thing I noticed in a man was how manly he was, and how I could trade all I had to at the very least to just walk as he does without having to rehearse how to. Certainly because, it was so depressing how my pairs counted me as female and all everybody did was laugh at it. I felt like a joke, nobody ever saw the problem with that, it never appeared to be derogatory or abusive. It was rather amusing, something that triggered laughter.

While at high school, about a year before my final year, the press club had a task of running school news at the school assembly every Wednesday morning. School news told students of their obligations, and keeps track on the goings on at the school. It also publicized and extoled students who did exceptional things. I had never made the school news so when I got an opportunity to, I worked very hard to getting in for the best. There was an inter class debate which held at the school and I was the first speak of my class. I read wide and made sure I came up with good arguments. I tested my speed, made sure I was articulate enough, and that my grammar was in check. My class emerged winner and I, the best speaker. I was so happy because had won and the principles comment about it was, ‘you have a mind of a reader’, which meant a whole lot, and because I was going to make it to the school news. On the Wednesday morning, the club’s correspondent who read out the school news spoke about the interclass debate which held and mentioned me as a sharer, and as though his audience needed further description of me, he added, “also known as the best male cat walker in the school”. I am an early bird who was always at the fore of the assembly ground and as soon as he said what he said, it became a parade of laughter, and from where I was standing, it was easy to point me out to anybody who never knew me before then. This kept on for weeks until the whole school had its fill.

This worked negatively on my esteem. It felt like the only place I was truly valued was in mind. Just because I was effeminate. I began to question my goals and tried hard to change what truly I wanted to be. I wanted to be a lawyer and a writer-it’s a good thing that I am both now- but for the fear of public opinion, I began to consider a profession that would have me relate with people less. And no sooner than necessary, my effeminacy was associated with weakness and the conventional impairing gender roles ascribed to women. For instance, a girl can come top of her class overly, and by test of I.Q, be much more probable to become successful in life, but not until she controverts the code, the Nigerian civilization will stand by its view on gender inequality. And this is almost so for effeminate men. In Nigerian thinking, effeminate men can only love girly things, “they can’t love football, they are natural born domestics, they are as good as women in colors, they make good event planners and make-up artist, they don’t seem to make good lawyers nor engineers, they aren’t sound enough to be politicians” and it goes on and on.

I wasn’t taken as a complete man, neither was I as a woman, it was as though I had a different category, ‘a man, but not a real one.’ And for this aggravated may quest to lock myself out to avoid defamatory confrontations from people.

People are fast at pinpointing flaws or what they think is, for the same reasons they see your worst side as the real you. There is always a comparison of whose sin is greater; looking down on other people, seeking to feel better about themselves, and at its peak, for the thought that their opinions matter in every circumstance, down to other people’s personal decisions.

Effeminate people suffer a great deal in Nigeria; ranging from Social and emotional violence, to abuse by security officers. i.e. the defunct anti-robbery squad (SARS). Before October 20th, 2020, an unforgettable day of the massacre of innocent and promising people of Nigeria at Lekki toll gate Lagos, Nigeria, just because they wanted to be heard, BBC Nigeria reported stories from effeminate Nigerian men who were detained and battered for being human. There was also another account of a man who lost his brother to the same governmental agency for being effeminate, and nobody notices this inhumanity.

A single paper cannot do justice to all the inhumanity effeminate men endure in Nigeria and I may not know enough about being effeminate, and probably never will. But one certain thing is, effeminacy is not a decision. It is not something one wakes up to make every morning. I mean, at this stage of my life, I love myself but for the sole fact that we are social beings, I would have changed every morning and maybe have my real self as an alter ego. And neither does effeminacy come from un-association with men or over-relationship with women. men are born men; masculine or effeminate. Effeminate men have the exact capabilities as other humans with same tendencies to succeed. Effeminate men are all shades of beauty, you just need a little bit of soul to see it.

©Johnson Israel2021.

#lgbtq #lgbtqiia+#lgbt discourse #lgbt rights #effeminate #effeminacy

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wionews · 7 years

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Grassroots democracy is Kashmir's only hope against militancy

By Niloy Sengupta & Rumela Sen*

Jammu & Kashmir witnessed a dastardly attack on a group of Hindu pilgrims, resulting in several casualties, mostly women. This attack is significant and has to be seen in the context of the ongoing conflict in the region and the overall Hindu-Muslim relations in India. In politics, as FDR had once said, nothing happens by accident. If that’s true, the attack on Hindu pilgrims was planned and wasn't just a case of innocent civilians being caught in the cross-fire between the security forces and the militants.

Madhumita Saha, in her poignant piece in WION, wonders if militants acted out of desperation and if militancy would take a new turn in the area. We would like to argue, on the contrary, this follows a familiar playbook of escalation of violence, and militants are provoking New Delhi to push the conflict towards more militarisation. We wonder why is New Delhi happily obliging?

The movement that started as an aspiration of people for their own national identity, “Kashmiriyat," has steadily metamorphosed towards Jihad.

That an increased militarisation will be able to finish off the conflict is a mere pipe-dream. J&K is already one of the most militarised regions of the world with around 7 lakh security forces personnel already posted there. A generation of Kashmiris has now seen only jackboots and AK-47s in their land. Still, the conflict goes on unabated, through peaks and troughs of violence, crippling the economy of the region and the well-being of the citizens. The movement that started as an aspiration of people for their own national identity, “Kashmiriyat," has steadily metamorphosed towards Jihad. And the two sides that have benefited from this strategic stalemate have been the Islamic fundamentalists of the region, with a lot of the leadership staying in the relative security of Pakistan.

The incentive for militants to kill pilgrims is pretty evident. As the voices for more powers to the army grows shriller in New Delhi and elsewhere, there will be more human rights violations in Kashmir, which, in turn, will provide more oxygen and local support to the radical Islamic fighters. The militancy that started as a moral outrage of local Kashmiris taking up arms under the JKLF banner is now largely under control of Pakistan-based terror groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizbul Mujahideen. The Kashmiri jihadi groups are acting as conduits to draw in the global Jihadi elements like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the region, who already have significantly increased their presence in neighbouring Afghanistan and are just waiting to escalate the conflict to a whole new label.

Given the strategic location of J&K, a military conflict is not about to end anytime soon. In fact, the recent rhetoric of the Hindu chauvinists in India, that the army can finish off the job in the next two years has not gone unnoticed in the rest of the world. Iran, who has been sitting on the sidelines regarding Kashmir and had been a good ally of India, has now called for support to the Kashmiri cause.

Looking at extremist movements elsewhere, it is pretty evident that few have been vanquished militarily. Two exceptions in South Asia were the total trouncing of Tamil Tigers and Khalistan militancy. Neither is comparable to Kashmir as they did not fit into global geo-politics. It would have been difficult for Sri Lanka to succeed militarily against the LTTE unless India took a "hands-off" policy following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the terrible setback for the IPKF. Nobody should expect that Pakistan and the global Jihad industry will sit back and relax on the matter of Kashmir.

The Kashmiri jihadi groups are acting as conduits to draw in the global Jihadi elements like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the region

On the other hand, there is already a model for de-escalation of violence and transition to democracy as shown by the Nepal Maoists and the FARC in Colombia. These models are important, as were bi-partite efforts and did not require interlocutors, as any otherwise would be unpalatable to New Delhi. That leaves us with important lessons and templates for resolving the Kashmir conflict.

It is important to note that political settlement of the Kashmir question is critical but not a necessary pre-condition to initiate the de-escalation process. In fact, as peace settles in, and people experience its benefits, there will be pressure from below to force the hardliners to change stance and stick to the negotiations rather taking up the gun again.

That brings us to the central argument for grassroots peacebuilding in Kashmir. It might sound like a cliché beaten to death by overuse, but grassroots democracy is the only solution to an intractable ethnic conflict. The mechanism is quite intuitive: as long as the two communities routinely interact with each other on ordinary, dull, day-to-day issues, the breadth of civic engagement checks violence. Everything, from street corner gup-shup, theatre, art, films to various professional and trade associations and labor unions, count.

There is a wealth of empirical evidence to show that villages constitute a remarkably small portion of ethnic rioting compared to cities, where inter-ethnic communication is relatively sparse. Ashutosh Varshney has meticulously documented that between 1950-1995, rural India accounted for only 3.6 per cent of death in communal violence whereas eight cities representing merely 5 per cent of India’s population, accounted for 46 per cent of such deaths. He concludes that routine inter-ethnic engagement among Hindus and the Muslims kills rumours, banish radical elements to the sidelines and makes neighbourhood level peace possible. These local peace committees can act as bulwarks against rebel recruitment and polarising rhetoric and actions that precipitate violence.

Only when the two communities communicate, their respective leaderships and other stakeholders will experience a bottom-up demand to negotiate a political settlement. Of course, there are time-tested measures of counter-insurgency that needs to be integrated with this framework of grassroots peacebuilding. But spiteful bravado of rightwing fundamentalists, cheering violent repression by the Indian state, and baying for the blood of all Kashmiri Muslims as terrorists, is bound to polarise the two communities further into their belligerent clamshells. This will obliterate any possibility of neighbourhood intimacy and choke the limited democratic space that can be the site of inter-ethnic dialogue and peacebuilding.

Instead of using surrendered militants against the current militants, the state needs to integrate former rebels into grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, both formal and informal.

A thriving associational life will also create opportunities for rebels to retire and reintegrate back into the mainstream. We need the boys and girls to return to democracy. The vitriolic rhetoric of hate trickling down to towns and neighborhoods makes the prospect of return impossible and unattractive to rebels ready to quit extremist groups. As part of the counterinsurgency strategy, the Indian state needs to start to engage the local population, who are pro-democracy but sensitive to the rebels' cause, to build both neighborhood peace committees. Instead of using surrendered militants against the current militants, the state needs to integrate former rebels into grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, both formal and informal. In other words, potent counterinsurgency strategy in Kashmir is building a thriving network of inter-ethnic grassroots associations, which will contribute to increasing the lure of democracy in the region.

Of course, there are many spoilers in the Kashmir conflict who have vested interests in aggravating communal relations and continuing the bloodbath. But by eroding the very secular and democratic fabric that holds the country together, by advocating extreme repression and taking every communal outbreak as an excuse for attacking the entire Muslim community in Kashmir, we are playing into the very hands of these spoilers and militants. None of this is unknown to those in power in New Delhi and Srinagar. The question is simple: do we want a long-term peaceful solution in Kashmir or not?

In spite of provocations such as the Amarnath incident, rich associational life, replete with inter-ethnic civic engagement, both formal and informal, building a bottom-up democracy is our only hope against extremism. It is often referred to as "iron fist, velvet gloves" in counterinsurgency terms. We simply suggest what we already know: guns don’t keep the peace. Rabindranath Tagore said it so well. "Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where walls don’t break the world into fragments, where we keep the clear stream of reason unhindered by baggage, can peace and freedom prevail".

* Rumela Sen is Post Doctoral Fellow in Political Science at Columbia University. She is researching political violence in South Asia. Twitter: @rsen02

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