Tecumsay Roberts, pop star, martyr?

The LGBT news out of Africa is typically bad. Homophobes, hate crimes, terrible laws. How bad it really is there is hard to gauge from outside. Africa is a big place. There are a lot of people in it, a lot of very different cultures/languages/ethnic groups in quite a range of environments. One can’t really say something about “Africa” and be right. European colonialism left many legacies, anti-gay laws, especially in former British territories, being one of the bad. 

In his book on three African countries, Liberia, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire), Robbie Corey-Boulet tries to give his readers some perspective. These countries are on the continent’s western coast. Liberia and Ivory Coast share a border, Cameroon roughly a two day drive from Ivory Coast. Not that far, considering African distances — and roads. 

Tecumsay Roberts was a Liberian pop star. His “hits would be familiar to anyone who so much as set foot in a nightclub in Monrovia [Liberia’s capital] in the 1980s,” says Corey-Boulet. The author compares Roberts to Michael Jackson. “The cover photo for his single ‘Comin’ Home’ is a mirror image of Jackson’s iconic ‘Thriller’ album cover. It shows Roberts in a white blazer, lying diagonally across the frame, staring into the camera, his face less severe than Jackson’s but similarly captivating.”

Roberts “was trailed by whisperings that he was gay.” So was Jackson, of course. But the rumors derailed neither career. 

Sadly, Liberia was plunged into civil war in 1989. Queer people are often scapegoats in times of trouble. One of the rebel armies “arrested Roberts … in 1990. [Roberts and his brother] had gone out looking for food when they were stopped … After complimenting Tecumsay on his music, [the rebel military leader] told him to get in the car and go with the convoy to a rebel base to sing for his fighters.”

Testimony to the post-war truth and reconciliation commission revealed that Tecumsay Roberts was suspected of being gay by this leader, so was murdered. His body was never recovered. 

Anti-gay rhetoric has continued to this day. Robbie Corey-Boulet doesn’t quite call Tecumsay Roberts a martyr to the LGBT cause, but that’s not hard to figure. 

Liberia was founded as an African American African colony, and the people there still look across the Atlantic as to a motherland, Corey-Boulet says. The changes in the status of gay people in the US has not gone unnoticed. Just as here, change has been difficult. Many in the gay community have not welcomed public discussion — and exposure, even when (as with human rights groups and, at times, the US State Department) the attention has been benevolent. When no one really notices you’re there, no one attacks you. At least, not as a group. But change has come, some of it good. In Liberia, as in most of Africa, the laws remain hostile, but Corey-Boulet sees signs of hope. Explicitly anti-gay political campaigns seem to sputter out. Although gay sex remains illegal, proposed additional penalties have failed to be enacted. 

source:

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

by Robbie Corey-Boulet

2019. Zed Books, London UK