The impact on Oguaghamba’s life was swift. He rejected emailed and text message requests to speak to police officers who participated in the raid. Lagos state police spokesman Bala Elkana declined to comment on the beating claim on the grounds that the raid predated him. Seconds later, he said, he realized he was being held by a policeman using a gun as a bludgeon. Before he could reach the hotel compound’s gates, however, he was pulled to the ground and struck repeatedly on his head. After a long journey driving three customers to the hotel in the Egbeda suburb, he said, he had decided to sleep in the car rather than risk a perilous journey home on potholed roads where he could encounter armed robbers.Īssuming the dozens of people who raced past him were fleeing danger, Oguaghamba said, he got out of the car and ran. Oguaghamba had been dozing in the car park of the Kelly Ann Hotel.
“I couldn’t understand what was happening,” said Onyeka Oguaghamba, a trade union officer who used a borrowed car as a taxi at weekends. Within seconds, the birthday party at a Lagos hotel turned into a stampede as people fled armed policemen who had burst into the compound. THE FAMILY MANĪround 2 on a Sunday morning, they streamed out of the building, running in every direction. These are the stories of lives broken by a birthday party late one night in Lagos – and by a culture that cast the men adrift. And the man who was celebrating his birthday avoided arrest but is now overwhelmed by guilt, seeing blame even in his friends’ eyes.
A third man lives in fear of the street toughs who have beaten him up three times after recognizing him from the viral videos of the perp walk. Another man slept in a church outhouse after his family threw him out, until he was finally cast out of that safe harbor, too. For a time, he went without electricity because he couldn’t pay the bills after being fired even in the darkness of his house, the strain between him and his wife was visible to a visiting Reuters journalist. One of the men is a married father of four who says he had driven people to the party to earn extra money. In this resolutely Christian and Muslim country, homosexuality is broadly rejected across society, as casual as a snub on the street and as serious as Sharia law that threatens death by stoning. In a landmark case that may reach its resolution this month, the men face 10 years in prison if found guilty under the 2014 law, which has never been used to secure a conviction.īut prison time or no, the men have already been punished.
Arrest warrants were issued for the 10 other men who failed to appear in court. Last November, after more than a year of court hearings, Brown was among 47 men who pleaded not guilty to a charge of public displays of affection by people of the same sex. Friends, colleagues and strangers all learned of the allegations from the videos that circulated online. Video footage of the August 2018 news conference has since been viewed more than half a million times. The phrase “they didn’t caught me” quickly went viral. They didn’t caught me,” shouted James Brown, a wiry young man who said he had been hired to dance at a birthday party and had done nothing wrong. “What is the definition of a gay? It is when you are caught having sex, intercourse, with a guy. Most of them remained quiet, but others answered journalists’ questions. The cameras panned over the faces of the men, capturing expressions of shame, fear and anger. “It is the duty of everybody, not only the police, to ensure that such antisocial behavior, such social vices, such crimes, are checked so that we can create communities that protect our children from such deviant behavior,” he said. That law, which drew international condemnation when it came into force in 2014, targets not only same-sex unions but homosexual relations in general with prison terms of up to 14 years. Standing behind a bank of microphones, the Lagos state police commissioner, Imohimi Edgal, told the gathered journalists that he personally had ordered the raid that swept up the men after the authorities received a tipoff that young men were being initiated into a “homosexual club.”Įdgal declared that homosexuality ran contrary to the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act.