Sorious Samura reflects upon his experiences making Africa's Last Taboo and the prevailing attitude towards sexuality in Africa.
According to an old African proverb, or should I say according to conventional wisdom, 'a child doesn't just get up and walk, it will first of all learn to crawl' – and the same goes for every race on earth.
There's a lot of talk in the Western media and even classrooms today about sexual attitudes but in Africa we still find the word 'sex' extremely difficult to mention, let alone discuss. Even now as a full grown man with my own children, I cannot talk about sex, or menstruation or even childbirth with my old man because to him all these are taboos, and he gets really angry whenever I try to.
There are a lot of things my dad and his mates would not entertain, but the one thing that makes them go mad even today is when somebody tries to talk to them about gay and lesbians. 'They are devils, evil bastards or nasty animals not fit to be amongst human beings'. These are just some of the words my father and his friends would use to describe gay people and this was exactly how my friends and I, and millions more across Africa, were brought up to view homosexuals.
Somehow we used to be a bit tolerant towards girls, because it was always rumoured that girls in boarding homes tend to have sex with each other, but we always concluded that this was something they would outgrow.
I was one of those who would tease and provoke you until you broke if we suspected you had gay tendencies. We would perhaps set you up to fight with girls we believed could beat you up – and once you lost that fight we would then start giving you all sorts of female names – but that was as far as it would go. We just had no way to talk about it to our parents, even when found two boys having sex, or dressing or behaving like girls. We would simply refer to them as dirty.
But we never even knew the word 'homosexual' existed. For me and for most of my friends, the word 'gay' or 'homosexual' only made it into our vocabularies when we were in our mid or late teens.
So it was a real challenge for me personally to make this film. It was really tough to confront some of the men who were now standing up against gay men in my continent because I knew exactly where they were coming from and what they would think about me – and it wasn't long before respectable men like Bishop Oyet in Uganda started questioning my sexuality. I spent a lot more time off camera answering questions about my sexuality than I spent interviewing some of the characters in the film.
We found out in some of these countries we filmed that, on top of coping with the rejection by their communities, it was pressure from religious leaders that has made it more difficult for gay and lesbians to come out about their sexuality in Africa – and not only African religious leaders either. We found American Christian preachers who had come over to help their African brethren in their fight against homosexuality. We also found out that not only has this homophobia led to a lack of sexual education but it also plays a significant role in the increasing prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
There is no doubt that this topic is clearly one of the last few taboos that still remains in Africa. As the Western world was some 30 years ago, the people of Africa are still on a journey of understanding, learning to crawl before they can walk.
