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aunty ivy’s experience in banjul |
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Last Updated: May 12, 2006 |
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By Wendy Landau, Behind The Mask
May 12, 2006: Aunty Ivy is the “Queen of the Nile” from an organization called Ishtar in Nairobi, Kenya, which works with male sex workers in the area of health and substance abuse. Aunty Ivy attended a workshop on LGBTI advocacy and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Banjul from 5 to 13 May.
On Tuesday 9 May, Ivy decided to go for a swim at the beach with Angus Parkinson who works for Liverpool VCT, Care and Treatment in Nairobi and who was attending the same workshop. “When we left the hotel we met this man who looked at us and said something in a Gambian language. So we stopped and asked him what he was saying. He started shouting obviously abusive words at us and he asked us to stop behaving like women.”
They left him and continued on to the beach, assuming the incident was trivial. “We had a lovely time at the beach. Upon our way back there was another Gambian man following us. He said in English that I was a disgrace to black people. I told Angus this man was referring to me and so we stopped. He started calling us all sorts of names, like why I was agreeing to be the wife of a white man, why was I allowing a man to fuck me, and he said I had a small dick. He said that ‘we don’t allow homosexuality in Gambia’ and that he was going to call the police and other people to beat us up. We confronted him back and he started calling me his brother and I responded that I couldn’t be his brother or he wouldn’t say such things to me.”
He then followed them to the hotel as he said he wanted to see where they stayed so he could bring the police. He said that as long as Aunty Ivy is a black person he is his brother. He kept shouting “fuck you” at them after every sentence. When they reached the hotel people came to see what the fracas was about and they got safely into the hotel, but Aunty Ivy’s spirits were very low. The incident reminded him of the day he was kidnapped in Nairobi last year.
Behind The Mask has subsequently learnt that the President of the Gambia within the past year issued a standing order that homosexuality is to be regarded as totally unacceptable within the Gambia.
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Tambe Tiku Human Rights Advocate:
