Yahya Jammeh, the virulently anti-gay dictator who has ruled the Gambia for the last decade made some of his most hateful comments on the country’s LGBT community last week.
“If you do it [in the Gambia] I will slit your throat,” he said according to a translation obtained by VICE News. “[I]f you are a man and want to marry another man in this country and we catch you, no one will ever set eyes on you again, and no white person can do anything about it.”
Jammeh gave the speech in Wolof before a crowd in the town of Farafeni while on a national agricultural tour.
This is not the first time the country’s enigmatic leader has expressed homophobic vitriol. In October, he railed against homosexuality as “satanic behavior.” That same month, Jammeh approved a law that allows for “aggravated homosexuality” to be punished with anywhere from 15 years to life in prison.
The law is seen by rights’ groups as vague and open-ended. Human Rights Watch said that it’s “sparked a witch-hunt” against LGBT people. Some of those taken into custody for being gay were told that they did not “confess” a device would be inserted into their anuses or vaginas to “test” their sexual orientation.
The law is largely based on the Anti-Homosexuality Act that was struck down in Uganda in August. A new version of the bill was introduced into the Ugandan legislature in November.
The two bills are part of a spate of anti-gay legislation has been taken up across Africa in recent months.
In January, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan signed into law a new measure that mandates long prison sentences for those who enter same-sex unions or facilitate LGBT organizations. The Nigerian law led to a wave of arrests, some of which led to corporal punishment like whipping. The law create pretexts for LGBT people to be arrested — and has led to dozens of arrests since it passed.
It’s illegal to be gay in 38 of 54 African countries. The “crime” of homosexuality is punishable by death in several African countries including Nigeria, Sudan, and Somolia. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, people in African countries are some of the least accepting of homosexuality.
Nearly 100 percent of those polled in Ghana and 85 percent of Nigerian respondents, for instance, said that they believed homosexuality to be morally unacceptable.
Many activists there and in other African countries see a recent crackdown on the LGBT community as a way to divert attention from the sort of social and political issues that affect people on a day to day basis.
“The homosexuals in Nigeria are sacrificial lambs for bad governance, for corruption, for all of that,” Kehinde Bademosi an LGBT rights activist and entrepreneur said at a panel discussion on the future of Africa’s gay community during the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City last week. “[These laws make it seem like] we are the ones who are the problem, not the terrorists. We are the ones who are the problem, not the ones who are [robbing] the country blind. We are the ones who are the problem because we are homosexuals.”
A similar situation is at play in the Gambia, according to Jeffrey Smith, an advocacy officer with the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. He told VICE News that the president’s jarring comments about homosexuality are likely his way of distracting from the issues the country faces ahead of upcoming elections in 2016.
“There is definitely a sinister motive behind President Jammeh’s repugnant rhetoric,” Smith said. “While he has undoubtedly proven to be a virulently homophobic individual, his comments are also meant to divert attention from Gambia’s struggling economy, rising inequality, and the country’s decreasing levels of foreign investment.”