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| Abimbola Adelakun |
By
Abimbola Adelakun
At an academic conference some years ago, two students walked up to me after learning I was a Nigerian. They had based their academic projects on popular cross-dresser Idris Okunenye (Bobrisky) and they wanted to know a few things about her. Bobrisky was still a straw weight then but was not ignorable. One of them asked how she survives a Nigeria virulently opposed to any display of nonconforming sexuality. I opined that Bobrisky’s survival partly owes to the internet, particularly its feature that allows virtually any sight to escalate into a spectacle made Bobrisky one we could view remotely from the display show glass of our phone screens. That distance also put her out of the physical reach and social orbit where she could be harmed.
Then the
other factor was money. The Bobrisky character implicitly understood something
about Nigeria: for all our claims about “African values and morals,” we worship
money. A universal solvent, money dissolves even our strongest claims of
virtue. With money, you can regulate the collective moral temperature. So,
Bobrisky did not appear on the social scene as a stereotypical cross-dresser
appealing to public conscience for acceptance. She spurned acceptance and made
her own brash rules of public engagement. Elsewhere, people who transition
their gender take up an activist cause to fight the power (or the
establishment) on behalf of other marginalised people. Not Bobrisky. On the
social scene, she was a glammed-up doll, a made-for-contemporary-feminism
Barbie doll that rolls in wads of cash. Bobrisky also talked about a “bae,”
another tactic. Knowing that you are not a figure of power in the Nigerian
political culture if you cannot claim the backing of some shadowy forces, she
had to claim a male sponsor. It does not matter if those shadow backers exist
or not. What counts is how much Bobrisky understood Nigeria, and how she
mirrored us back to ourselves. It was a tactic that worked for her until it did
not.
One day in
the future when Bobrisky’s history is written, someone might say her undoing
began when she stepped forward to collect an award meant for biological women.
But the precedent will be how her glamorous existence as a woman undermined the
ultimate symbol of masculinity: the penis. Bobrisky was a man who, by transitioning
into a woman, proved that manhood was not the ultimate prize that men have long
been socialised into believing. By whittling down manhood and opting for
feminity, she treated the penis as another gift of nature that you could accept
or reject. For men whose entire identity revolves around the thing between
their legs, Bobrisky was an abomination. How can nature give you this thing,
and you dare not venerate it? It was even worse for them that Bobrisky did not
only become feminised but she was also living as a woman who possesses
something beyond biology that a man needs in order to be called a man: economic
power. For men whose claims to masculinity are daily abridged by the
emasculating Nigerian economy, Bobrisky’s gender fluidity and wealth must have been
torture. She was not the regular woman against whom they could measure their
masculinity. That is why Portable’s song about Bobrisky being a “disgrace to
Brotherhood” resonated with them.
When men
could not take the affront to their dear penis anymore, they came up with the
most spurious charge against Bobrisky. It was not that hard. Nigeria has a
collection of judicial enforcers—from the police to the Department of State
Services, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, and even judges—who
wield immense power but hardly match it up with either a sense of moral
responsibility or an understanding of the spirit of democracy. For people who
operate in bad faith, they have a lot of power. When Bobrisky stood in front of
the judge and pled guilty, she must have expected a judge who would treat her
like any other person and not the one who would see her as a personification of
destabilized masculinity.
By
saying she was a “male” when the judge asked, Bobrisky must have thought she
could assuage the judge’s slighted sensibilities. Unfortunately, she never had
a fighting chance in that court. Judging from the harshness of the sentence she
was given, one could tell that the judge was fighting some other culture war.
If a death sentence had been listed on the books, this judge would not have
hesitated to hand it out. A judge who sentences someone to prison for a “sin”
virtually every Nigerian routinely commits must lack the fear of God. Now, the
EFCC tells us that public members are bombarding them with video recordings of
abuse of the Naira by Nigerians from all walks of life. This will be the way
witchcraft will operate in Nigeria now. Rather than people taking the names of
those whose lives they have secretly envied to awon ìyá mi òsòròngà, they will
report to the EFCC. Since the EFCC too needs the clown show to distract us from
the government’s economic failures, we will be entertained all night.
Bobrisky’s
case is an intriguing example of our society’s obsession with the penis. After
she was arrested, people asked if her dress could be lifted for them to see
what was under. Even after she was jailed, they still followed up to inquire
what was between her legs. Prison warders who should have told off the
journalist who formally inquired to mind their business gave details of
Bobrisky’s genitals. The journalist publishes it, several media/blogs happily
reproduce it, and you see them circulating the news to rejoice they have
humiliated a defector. Sick voyeurs! If not madness, what is your business with
someone’s genitals? Imagine calling Kirikiri when Senator Orji Kalu or Bode
George was incarcerated and asking about their private parts. You look at the
level of obsession with another person’s private parts and realise that, for
all the self-glorying assertions about our allegedly superior African values, we
are a people who severely lack the notion of human dignity.
The toughest
part of the Bobrisky issue has been watching people who call themselves
critics, social advocates, and moralists justify (and even celebrate) the
judicial abuse that landed Bobrisky in jail. Some of them claim they are trying
to protect women, but it is a lie. Let me say that every single time I have
read someone say Bobrisky accepting an award meant for a woman was “a slap on
the face of actual/biological women,” it has come from a man. Not women, men. I
have never felt insulted by what Bobrisky does, but I get grossly irritated by
the paternalism of men who arrogate to themselves the power to define what
insults “every woman.” You would think those men care about women, but wait until
the National Assembly says it is time to pass a bill defending women’s rights.
They simply want him gone because his non-confirming gender identity unsettles
them. I will not be quick to call them hypocrites, but I will at least say that
they have not thought through either their own politics or ideologies.
When issues
are about abstract political issue—corruption, certificateless president,
election rigging, IPOB/Biafra, terrorism, banditry, tribalism, Russia-Ukraine,
Israel-Palestine, and so on—their moral clarity is almost unimpeachable. When
it comes to the right to express the freedom of the human spirit as Bobrisky
does, they suddenly become self-contradicting. They want human freedom, but
their imagination cannot stretch beyond what is merely convenient. And that
constriction of possibilities is exactly where the problem lies. Look, a
society can survive the ignorance (and amorality) of its masses who want to see
what is underneath the skirt of cross-dressers. But no society can stand when
the ideological vision of humanity of its supposed band of thinkers, judicial
enforcers, and moral advocates is too narrow to accommodate the diverse range of
humanity.
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| Bobrisky being led by security agents |