Scapegoats and camouflage

If you were to go by the recent news stories, you would think that the greatest threat Kenya faces today is from the Alphabet Mafia. The Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transexuals and Queers, better know as the LGBTQ, are at the heart of a conversation that has roused ministers of religion and ministers of government, and all manner of characters in-between, to fulminate and froth at the mouth. The anti-LGBTQ tinder was lit by a spark set by the Supreme Court when it said that the freedom of association protected in Article 36 of the Constitution permitted the registration of a non-governmental body that seeks to address the discrimination that the members of the LGBTQ community face. That the Supreme Court very carefully added that it was not repealing section 162, 163 and 165 of the Penal Code seems to have passed the fulminators and mouth-frothers by.

The effect of the news-media attention on the "implications of the Supreme Court judgment" very neatly deflected from a much more present and on-going scourge: the sexual exploitation of women, girls and children at the hands of labour recruiters working in Kenya's tea farms. I don't know if you noticed how swiftly the BBC expose of the sexual exploitation of women, girls and children in tea farms fell off the front pages of the news tabloids and how the socialites masquerading as TV journalists stopped telling the story or asking the hard questions.

These things are not even a well-kept secret. If you have worked in or worked with or worked for a tea company in Kenya, then you know that exploitation is at the core of its operations and no exploitation is as devastating as sexual exploitation of the vulnerable. The managers knew. The brokers knew. The "international" buyers knew. We knew. But everyone, other than the victims, chose to pretend that unless it was said out loud, then it didn't exist, it hadn't happened, no one had suffered. But what added to the shards of glass piercing my wounded heart is the knowledge that every single minister of religion that had ever plied his or her trade in or around the tea farms knew this to be true and did nothing except to participate in the anti-LGBTQ pantomime being enacted as camouflage for that abominable scourge. God, my friend, hates the LGBTQ far more than he hates rapists.

Two things can be true at the same time: the Supreme Court did not legalise carnal acts against the order of nature, and women, girls and children are being systematically raped by powerful men in tea farms. But it is the latter that is, or should be, consequential. It is the latter that should arouse our outrage, rage, and violent anger.

Not even the ministers of religion have bothered to sit with the awful, terrible, terrifying reality of the devastation that sexual exploitation brings to an individual, a family, a community. The utter humiliation. The utter shame. The physical and psychological subjugation. The violence against bodies, spirits and psyches. None of this has pricked the conscience of God's messengers. But paint a rainbow anywhere in Kenya today and watch as a mob, hopped up on religious fervour, descends upon you with the intent of killing you, physically and stochastically, because you have dared to ignore God's abhorrence of the Alphabet Mafia.

The men, and it almost certainly all men, who perpetrated and oversaw the perpetration of gross violence will get away with their terrible crimes. They will retire to opulent wealth. They will harden their hearts and deafen their ears because they know that even God's messengers don't think they did anything wrong. God's messengers only care for one thing today: how much lucre is given by the devout to the ministry. Gold is God. Suffering is no longer of concern to God.