People who are seen as “nonconforming,” Gateru said, are most often those publicly attacked. The Kenyan government claims that, between 20, nearly six hundred people were criminally investigated under the unnatural-offenses penal code. Since homosexuality remains illegal under the penal code, family members and neighbors sometimes report suspected homosexuals to the police. According to a Pew survey in 2013, ninety per cent of Kenyan respondents said that society should not accept homosexuality. Nobody was speaking about it at all-there weren’t even the words for it.”īy the late two-thousands, religious leaders across East Africa had begun publicly denouncing homosexuality-sometimes with the encouragement of American missionaries.
“There was also no name for a heterosexual. In the nineteen-nineties, when she was growing up in northeastern Kenya, “there was no name for a gay person,” she said. For decades, homosexuality wasn’t widely talked about, Gateru told me. Worldwide, at least seventy nations-more than a third of all countries-still outlaw homosexuality, and it remains illegal in more than thirty of the fifty-four African countries.Īfter Kenya’s independence, these codes appear to have gone largely unenforced. It also prescribes up to five years in prison for “gross indecency with another male person,” which is often interpreted as other, undefined sexual acts between men.
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Introduced by Britain during colonial rule and incorporated into Kenyan law after the country gained independence, in 1963, the penal code punishes acts “against the order of nature”-usually interpreted as sex between men-with up to fourteen years in prison. “The end, to us, means a space where we finally achieve equality for all people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.” “Whatever happens, we intend to fight this battle until the end,” Njeri Gateru, the director of the National Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, one of the gay-rights groups litigating the case, told me. The country’s High Court, however, unexpectedly postponed, until May 24th, its ruling on whether to strike down a nearly century-old law. On a recent Friday, gay and lesbian couples, dressed in matching outfits, posed for photos outside of a Nairobi courthouse, in anticipation of a decision that they hoped would decriminalize gay sex in Kenya.