One evening when I was in my 200 Levels, Mr D found a way to convince me to follow him to his house off campus. I can’t recall what he must have said but there was nothing to suggest that this guy had crazy ideas and wanted to hang out with me the way a normal guy would like to hang out with a lady.
The first was when I was an undergraduate engineering student at the Federal University of Technology, Minna. I will never disclose the identities of these guys. So nobody (including my very close friends) should bother to ask me about that.
I was never interested in engineering and this fact is becoming clearer in retrospect. I was always a writer at heart — just waiting to be discovered and unleashed.
How can an engineering student be so committed to reading James Hardley Chase novels he nearly flunked his exams?
Indeed, I nearly did not get into the FUT Minna degree programme. Although I had secured 8 credits in my WAEC exams, I had a P7 in Mathematics. And the FUT Minna would not allow anyone into the faculty of engineering without a straight credit in Mathematics, apart from Chemistry and Physics. The only option was to do the one-session remedial programme and try to remedy that deficiency. As usual, each session in the university was made up of two semesters. But I was so disinterested in what I was learning during my remedial programme I spent more time reading novels instead of studying my handouts. Of course I was an intelligent guy. But lack of interest meant I did not have the motivation to study. And I performed poorly in my first semester exams.
After seeing my first semester results, I became scared and had a drastic change of heart. I dropped all my James Hardley Chase novels and sat down to study. The reason was because I did not want to disappoint my elder brother and my dad; it definitely wasn’t because I wanted to be an engineer and was scared of losing the opportunity. I knew I could make good grades in my second semester if I studied hard and my plan was to make sure I got such good grades they would compensate for my poor first semester grades. And I was right. I passed my second semester exams so well my aggregates were enough to get me admitted into the graduate programme of the department of Electrical and Electronics/Computer Engineering.
But habits die hard.
Once the pressure was off and I was safely an undergraduate, I carried my novels again and began to read. I was staying on campus at the time and I had the distinct habit of carrying a novel in my hand wherever I went. Interestingly, it was one of my roommates called Ige (as in Bola Ige) that observed that there were others like me on campus who walked around with novels in their hands.
Why not form a club?
One thing led to another and I established Lynx Exclusive Readers’ Club. It has proven very strategic in my life because two of my most important friends today were members of that club. What I’m saying in essence is that, except for Lynx, I may either not have met these two friends or may not have been that close to them. And we have been friends now for almost 25 years. Lynx was a social club for readers of novels and an avenue to facilitate access to all the novels we could pull together as a group. We even had a lecturer from the Department of Estate Management as a member. It was fun while it lasted. I remember we were able to buy every edition of Time Magazine, which was something only affordable to a few those days.
Unfortunately, there was a member of Lynx Exclusive Readers’ Club who was a homosexual. Of course I had no idea. He seemed normal — like the rest of us. Since his name starts with a “D”, I will refer to him as Mr D. However, because most people who know me know I’m friends with Daniel Donald Onjeh, I hasten to clarify that I’m not referring to Dan. Besides, Dan was never a member of Lynx.
This Mr D was not an engineering student and I will not explain his personality further for fear that Lynx members reading this may add two and two together and know who I’m talking about.
One evening when I was in my 200 Levels, Mr D found a way to convince me to follow him to his house off campus. I can’t recall what he must have said but there was nothing to suggest that this guy had crazy ideas and wanted to hang out with me the way a normal guy would like to hang out with a lady.
I feel like vomiting but I have to continue.
There is no need to explain what Mr D tried to do but, at the end, it was clear that he was a homosexual and had picked on me for copulation. I did not react violently, though, or tried to disgrace him by calling people out to come and see this aberration. This was Africa before the internet and rapid westernization: he could have been beaten to stupor or even beaten to death by other guys who were heterosexual and who naturally couldn’t stand the thought of other men being homosexual. Somehow, I extricated myself from the sordid situation without raising dust, thoroughly embarrassed that a fellow man could look at me and think of copulation.
Again, I feel like vomiting. But I will continue.
The second case was in 2006. I won’t offer any further information on this guy. What I can say is that this second attempt made me remember the case of Mr D and I begun to realize that, indeed, there were men out there who had sexual attraction for other men. I later read from the Bible (Romans 1) that it is a terrible state of being and may indicate that an individual has crossed from grace to perdition — like Judas Iscariot after the betrayal of Jesus Christ. By the way, this second guy is Mr O (because his name starts with an O) and I understand that he has been making tremendous progress in life. Sometimes I wonder if it has anything to do with his queer sexual orientation. But that is a topic for another day.
What’s my point in sharing these heartbreaking true life stories?
It’s because homosexuality and the practice of homosexuality is an indicator of the nearness of the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ.
How so?
While giving His disciples the signs of the end times (things that will happen when the Second Coming was near) Jesus Christ said the condition of the world will be similar to how things were during the days of Lot, with a clear reference to the evil perpetrated by the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Luke 17:28-30.
What did He mean by that statement?
What happened in the days of Lot?
In the days of Lot, homosexuality was endorsed by the society.
And there is a difference between practicing the abomination of homosexuality at the individual level and having it endorsed by society at large. As the Bible says, there is nothing new under the sun. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were not the first humans to practice homosexuality. But there is something significant when a given society endorses an abomination — such as homosexuality. And that was what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. Even in our life time, people used to be ashamed of the practice of homosexuality. That was the situation of things when Mr D made his attempt in 1998. Remember that 1998 is 25 years ago. But things soon began to change — beginning with so-called developed nations. To the extent that homosexuality has now been endorsed by the major nations of the world. It was this societal endorsement of homosexuality (and not just the private practice of it) that commanded the attention of heaven during the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
And it is its endorsement in our society today that will equally command the attention of heaven.
The homosexuality of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah had become nationally accepted sins. People were not ashamed of their homosexuality in the days of Lot. It had become the in-thing to the extent that you were excluded if you didn’t have some homosexual tendencies or absolute sympathy for its practice. According to the Bible, it was everybody in Sodom and Gomorrah that wanted to rape the two angels that came to give Lot the last warning from God for him to depart from the city.
Genesis 19:4-5
How did our generation descend to the level of the generation of Lot and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah?
It took the converging factors of legal backing, religious approval, political support, and cultural conditioning.
Legal Backing