Tag: cameroon gay rights

Sacked, shunned and suicidal: the Cameroon sports stars battling anti-gay laws

  Yaounde (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Cameroonian athlete Thierry Essamba still trains every day, even though he has little hope of reviving a career cut off when he was ousted from the national squad in a scandal over homosexuality. The 38-year-old hurdling champion was training for the 2014 Commonwealth Games when a senior sports official… Read more »

Cameroon: Crowd kills ‘man of God’ caught in the act

A pious shopkeeper in northern Cameroon was caught having sex with his 17-year-old male lover. Outraged, his neighbors killed him in the town’s central marketplace, local activists report. Diallo (a pseudonym), a human rights activist in Maroua, reports: A homosexual couple was surprised in the midst of love-making one morning last October in a shop… Read more »

Cameroon police arrest and torture 25 men for being gay

Police in Cameroon have arrested 25 men on suspicion of being gay. Homosexuality is illegal in Cameroon, with those convicted of homosexuality facing up to five years in prison. The arrests were made in the early hours of Saturday morning, as police raided institutions in the capital city of Yaoundé which are known to be… Read more »

Cameroon’s sex workers brush off beatings to send clients for HIV tests

Yaounde (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – During six years of selling sex on the streets and in brothels across Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, Rose has been abused, attacked and forced to have unprotected sex by her clients. “There are some ferocious beasts amongst them,” said the sex worker, a tall woman in her late thirties, wearing a… Read more »

Cameroon lawyer wins award for defending gay rights

A lawyer in Cameroon has been recognised for her work to promote gay rights in Africa with an award from Amnesty International. Alice Nkom has spent a decade defending people accused of practising homosexuality. Homosexual acts are illegal in Cameroon and carry a five-year prison term. Ms Nkom described the award, which she received from… Read more »

Cameroon: LGBT victim could become a businesswoman

Carine, a 26-year-old Cameroonian lesbian, was released in September 2016 after four years in jail because of her sexual orientation. Now she wants to resume a productive and happy life. By PSF In November, recently released from prison, Carine (a pseudonym) visited the Douala offices of PEP Sans Frontière (Peer Educators and Promoters Without Borders,… Read more »

Cameroon: Thugs attack 2 friends; widespread trauma

A gang of homophobic thugs assaulted and robbed two young men in Cameroon, claiming that they were homosexuals who needed to be scared straight. It’s an all-too-familiar story in Cameroon, where such attacks lead to depression and passivity in the LGBTI community: P. and T. are friends. Just friends. On the night of Dec. 29,… Read more »

Non, merci: English-speaking Cameroon rises up, wants Republic of Ambazonia

A middle-aged man stands in front of a freshly covered grave, a flag tied around his neck. The flag has blue and white stripes and a white dove in its top left quadrant, but these are not the colours of any country recognised by the United Nations. That is something this man and thousands like… Read more »

Born This Way

About The Film Synopsis There are more arrests for homosexuality in Cameroon than any other country in the world. With intimate access to the lives of four young gay Cameroonians, Born This Way steps outside the genre of activist filmmaking and offers a vivid and poetic portrait of day-to-day life in modern Africa. Lyrical imagery,… Read more »

Cameroon: Accuser relents, but police won’t free alleged gay man

The author of this article is an activist for LGBT rights in Cameroon who writes under a pseudonym. A 22-year-old Cameroonian man, identified here as A.H., was held in police custody from Nov. 17 to Nov. 20 after a Facebook correspondent entrapped him and denounced him to police as a homosexual. The accuser, Serge, turned… Read more »

Lonely track star, victim of Cameroon’s homophobia

Thierry Essamba, an internationally competitive runner in the 110-meter hurdles, was suspended from the Cameroonian track squad on May 24 because of rumors about his alleged homosexuality. When the story of his punishment first appeared, LGBT activists abroad offered him words of support. But none of those words led to any concrete assistance, either in… Read more »

Cameroon: Prison sentence ends for man denounced as gay

A Cameroon man, age 29, has been released from prison, putting an end to incarceration that began when a friend reportedly claimed the man was a homosexual, attorney Michel Togué reports. The man (called Myan in this blog to protect him from homophobic attacks) was one of 10 prisoners who had all been arrested for… Read more »

New Film Explores Homophobia and Hatred Towards LGBTI Community in Cameroon

The silhouettes of two women are concealed amongst the gradients of quivering candlelight. The interviewer asks, “Can you kiss each other in public?”, one women responds “We hug each other in public. Even the hugs are discreet. But kiss on the mouth? No.” The other adds: “People would yell at us ‘Ooh lesbians. You can’t… Read more »