From inside a Cameroon jail, gay youth say police exploit homophobia to seek bribes

DOUALA — Pierre wakes up every morning atop a makeshift wooden table, in an open-air courtyard at the New Bell central prison in Douala, the most populous city in Cameroon.

He cleans toilets, shoes and laundry to afford the privilege of sleeping under the sky. He is exposed to rain and mosquitoes there, but it provides some distance from the bed bugs that crawl onto the tarps on the ground where other men sleep.

Pierre, who requested that his real name not be published due to safety concerns, is serving time for being gay.

“God will decide when I get out,” he said. “When I leave, I’ll restart my life at zero.”

Pierre and his friend, Jean, whose real name cannot be published because he was 17 at the time of his arrest, both say they’re victims of a society where homophobia runs deep. It leaves LGBTQ+ people to be exploited by crooked police. Cameroon is among 30 African countries that jail people for homosexual acts.

The Canadian Press travelled to Cameroon as part of an investigative series looking into a global backslide in LGBTQ+ rights and the consequences for Canada, including the impact of laws banning same-sex activity.

Cameroon’s penal code criminalizes “sexual relations with a person of the same sex,” with a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $450 fine.

Pierre, 25, and Jean, who is now 18, spoke to The Canadian Press in June in the prison’s visitation room, a former communal shower furnished with makeshift wooden stools, where shower curtains provide only scant privacy.

The two were arrested with two other male youths in June 2023, following a raid on Pierre’s home. A girl was also taken into custody, but released without charge.

All four males have since been convicted of homosexuality. Pierre was also convicted of “immoral earnings,” a term for pimping, while Jean was also convicted for prostitution.

The third youth contracted tuberculosis in prison and could not do an interview. He along with Pierre and Jean are scheduled to be released next summer. The fourth youth paid a fine and has left the prison.

Police arrested them after saying they were searching for a stolen phone.

Instead they found and dumped out a bag of condoms and lube Pierre was going to distribute to sex workers, as part of his job with an HIV-prevention organization. Pierre said the police used a homophobic slur to describe the contents.

After their arrest, Jean and Pierre say they faced homophobic insults in the remand centre and again at the prosecutor’s office. One official demanded Pierre pay a bribe of about $1,150. He said that when he couldn’t pay it, he was accused of arranging the rape of a child.

“They beat us, to the point of leaving me with a scar,” Jean said, pointing to a mark on his forearm, which he says was from trying to block a machete.

“They tortured me until I couldn’t bear it and I started recounting things that I didn’t do.”

Alice Nkom, a Cameroonian lawyer who has spent decades pushing to end the criminalization of homosexuality, says the case fits a pattern of underpaid police targeting minorities for bribes, using the pressure of criminal charges that stigmatize LGBTQ+ people.

She said jail time is often contingent on whether someone has the ability to raise the equivalent of $700 Canadian in local francs.

“What do the police do? If you need 300,000 bucks for the weekend to go to your village that you can’t find — that the state doesn’t pay you — well then you arrest some nice homosexual on Friday,” she said.

The longer someone is incarcerated, the more they often have to pay to get a bail hearing, or to cancel the case, with judges, prosecutors, police, prison wardens and even other prisoners wanting a cut.

“Everything is bought and paid for,” Nkom said, partly due to a societal belief that people engage in homosexuality to further their links to power, in addition to notions about the occult.

Alcondoms Cameroun, a prominent HIV-prevention group and clinic, said it often dips into its coffers to help people post bail, or even to pay police bribes to avoid incarceration.

The group’s head, Patrick Fotso, said it’s a major accounting challenge, as virtually all western governments bar their donations from being used to pay off cops.

“If you don’t have money, it’s going to be complicated,” he said. “Sadly that’s the reality that we experience on a daily basis.”

In this April’s annual human-rights report on Cameroon, the U.S. State Department said police “often detained LGBTQ+ individuals based solely on their perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, including individuals who had sought police assistance after being the victims of violent crimes.”

Cameroon did not respond to the report, which also decried poor conditions in the country’s prisons, with food shortages, overcrowding and unsanitary living arrangements.

The country’s high commission in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication.

Jean and Pierre get two meals a day, but Pierre said that the corn and rice mixture they are fed is often full of pebbles.

“If you’re not careful, you’ll break your teeth,” he said.

Those who can afford it can pay for better food, or better living space, like Pierre does to sleep outside. Some pay for a cell with air conditioning.

Outside the visitation room, a vendor circulated the prison courtyard with a pot of Ndolé stew, made up of bitterleaf and nuts. A man nearby wailed, stomping back and forward on a dirt hallway covered by a centimetre of that morning’s rain.

Pierre’s mother comes by twice a month with a few coins to buy beans or cooked onions. Officials in the youth wing occasionally pay Jean in powdered milk for helping teach other teenagers how to write.

Jean said being charged with homosexuality probably confirmed what his family already knew. Only his mother has been to visit him in prison, and she has no money to share.

Jean finds it ironic that police have accused him of prostitution, only to send him to a place where he’s resorted to having sex for food.

“They sodomize you and then they give you a little meal. That’s how life is here,” he said.

Youth worker Gaëlle Alima says the conditions the pair described are commonplace in Cameroon’s jails, particularly for those from stigmatized groups.

Her organization advocates for incarcerated youth, and she says violence toward those from marginalized groups has only increased over the past decade.

Nkom launched the Association for the Defence of Homosexual Rights in 2003 because she was “tired of seeing young people lose their dignity in front of the courts,” where she says judges weaponize stigma to undercut civil rights.

Nkom points out that Cameroon’s penal code is subject to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the African Union’s human-rights body, which has called for an end to persecuting people on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation since 2014.

“These values ​​transcend regions and skin colour. They are universal.”

It’s an argument she’d like to bring to the country’s highest court, but few LGBTQ+ people manage to appeal their sentences.

Cases drag on for years, and people who are freed on bail tend to leave the country as soon as possible. Shakiro, a transgender model, was arrested in 2021 for “attempted homosexuality” in a case that garnered widespread media coverage. She ended up gaining asylum in Belgium.

Many have died from acts of violence or self-harm. The wall outside Nkom’s office has portraits of seven people who died despite help from her association.

Nkom says judges have become harsher over the years, going from suspended sentences for homosexuality to the maximum five years. She chalks that up to a wider “period of decline” where civil society is continually repressed by 91-year-old president Paul Biya, who has ruled for more than four decades.

This past September, police in Douala arrested 13 people during a raid of the offices of Alternatives-Cameroun, an organization advocating for LGBTQ+ people since 2006 that has official registration as an HIV clinic.

Nkom wants Canada to publicly push Cameroon to remove homosexuality from its penal code, though Ottawa fears that would be seen as imposing outside values.

Lorraine Anderson, Canada’s high commissioner in Cameroon, said Ottawa supports locals doing advocacy, research and education to help advance democratic campaigns for human rights — instead of calling out the country in public.

“I don’t see that that coming from a diplomatic space is going to be useful,” Anderson said.

“Sometimes a way of moving something forward is maybe not saying it right now, and then waiting for the time when it’s right. But at the same time, preparing the ground, to make sure that people are supported and people are protected,” she said.

Canada and peer countries occasionally raise specific incidents with the Cameroonian government in private, Anderson said, especially LGBTQ+ prisoners held in particularly egregious circumstances.

She expects it will take years for the situation for LGBTQ+ people to improve.

“Once we’ve reached a stage where people are not being violated and attacked and arrested arbitrarily, then we can start talking about the policy issues,” she said.

For Pierre, survival rests on not thinking too much.

“I’ve stopped reflecting on things,” he said. “If you think too much, you’ll go mad,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 30, 2024.

This is the second story of an eight-part series investigating a backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in Africa and the consequences for Canada as a country with a feminist foreign policy, which prioritizes gender equality and human dignity. The reporting in Ghana, Cameroon and Kenya was written with financial support from the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press