The nation and its undesirable subjects: Homosexuality, citizenship and the gay ‘other’ in Cameroon

Abstract

This chapter is based primarily on empirical research conducted in the gay milieu between 2008 and 2010 and in different state courts in Cameroon where I followed trials for homosexual offences. By analysing how sexuality was culturally constructed by the regime of Cameroon’s first president Ahmadou Ahidjo (1960-1982) and that of his successor Paul Biya, the paper sheds light on the continuities and discontinuities in the government’s forging of sexual nationalism and citizenship as well as its management of the so-called ‘peril of homosexuality’. The paper argues that since the enactment of laws criminalizing same-sex relations in 1972, the Cameroon government has been determined to lock the sexuality of the masses into entrenched forms of localism and autochthony, accompanied by concerted efforts to draw boundaries between insiders and outsiders, citizens and strangers, authentic and deracinated Africans, good and bad citizens, and loyal and disloyal subjects, and so on.