"NTA Shut Down My Show For Interviewing A Gay Man"—Funmi Iyanda.

Exceptionally brilliant TV talk show host Funmi
Iyanda has finally opened up about how
Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) shut down
her live shows after she interviewed openly
gay Nigerian man, Bisi Alimi, on her popular
breakfast show, New Dawn, in 2004,
I remember this story pretty well.

After Bisi
Alimi appeared on that show his life changed
forever. He couldn’t even return to UNILAG
where he was a student at the time. He was
forced to go into hiding and eventually
relocated abroad.

Read Funmi’s story after the
cut…
It’s a good thing my meddling mum took
Musibau off his alcoholic dad just before that
wretch of a father was sent to jail for
Molesting a minor.

My mother went missing a
year later so I never saw Musibau again but
that’s another story.
He was 15 but he looked 12, l was seven but l
looked 10.

People generally looked weird in
my neighbourhood, but nobody thought
anyone one weird – odd maybe but life was
odd wasn’t it?
Musibau was the first to run into Miss John
who spoke Queen’s English and walked like a
girl.

Everybody called him Miss John, I have
no idea why.

But we were interested in him
because we needed to walk through his garden
to climb into Baba Olugbo’s compound for the
agbalumo tree.

Nobody dared walked through Baba Olugbo’s
compound to get to that tree. He was a
wealthy molue bus entrepreneur with seven
wives, a distended, shirtless stomach,
marijuana thickened growl and a fast
horsewhip for clueless kids.
I had four older sisters and two younger
brothers but I felt closest to Musibau perhaps
because we had a shared tendency to get into
trouble and a common dislike of Nureni.

Nureni was crippled by childhood polio and
so dragged himself around on his muscular
torso except when he went to school wearing
his leg braces and crutches, which made him
vulnerable.
We did not like Nureni; he had a caustic
tongue, a reptilian ability to wrestle you down
then strangle you and was genius at maths.He
was faster moving dragging himself than he
was on his crutches.

He hated those crutches
but he really liked Mulika.
Mulika was one of the two daughters of Alhaji
Abara whose two wives wore hijabs so you
couldn’t tell one from the other.I of course
could; Mulika’s mother was the one with the
two Pelé on her cheeks, right above her
haughty cheekbones. A stunning woman.

I knew because I saw them in the women’s
quarters every time I went to play with
Mulika, who had inherited her mother’s looks.
We all loved Alhaji Abara because he had the
best spread for breaking fasts at Ramadan.

It
didn’t matter whether you were Christian,
Animist or Muslim. You could come break the
fast on divine akara, even if you didn’t fast.
He used to say only Allah sees the good heart.
We all attended Koran classes because it was
fun and then went to church on Sunday
because of the music and dancing.

My mother didn’t mind us going to church
and Koran classes, in fact she supplemented
all that with occasional visits to seers and
herbalists who read our signs and cleansed
our aura.

Everyone did that, even that nasty
priggish Catholic Mama Uche who acted like
she was the pope’s first cousin.

Miss John always pretended not to see us
sneaking through his garden and jumping over
Baba Olugbo’s fence to pluck some agbalumo.

A few times, Baba Olugbo would see us and
come running belly first, whip flaying but we
always out ran him, Nureni in front and
Mulika, scarf flapping, at the back.
We never got caught until the day Nureni
came on those damn crutches that made him
slow.

Baba Olugbo caught Mulika by her scarf
and I tripped over Nureni’s crutches.
We knew we were in hot soup because once
Baba Olugbo finished whipping us, he’d hand
us over to our respective parents each of
whom would apply equal supplementary
punishment. That meant my tough mother’s
hour-long frog jumps, Alhaji’s half day Koran
writing and Nureni’s aunty’s numbing,
monotonous curses.

We didn’t mind the whipping so much, a few
lashes, a couple of pain killers and we’d be
back trying to get more agbalumo’s off that
tree. Once you’ve been whipped, you don’t get
whipped again on the same day for the same
offence – even the adults had some sense.

So it was I laid on my back staring at Baba
Olugbo’s protruding belly button, Nureni’s
fast breathing in my ear, dreading the
inevitable – when suddenly Miss John walked
up.
Perhaps it was his Queen’s English or our
lucky day but he gently took the whip off
Baba Olugbo’s clenched wrist and laughingly
told him he had asked us to get some of the
ripe agablumo for him seeing as it was
abundant.

Baba Olugbo did not want to look like a mingy
old fart; he was after all a rich man with
political ambition. He grudgingly let us go,
and I swore to Nureni and Musibau later that
I saw Miss John wink out of a kohl-lined eye.
I remembered this story recently when I was
asked why I, as a straight celebrity, a word I
dislike, I support Bisi Alimi and LGBT rights.

Nigeria of today seems completely
homophobic, xenophobic and religiously
polarized as though that is the way we always
were.
This would be an incomplete narrative.

The
way we are today is a result of the political
and economic breakdown of our country, a
topic for another day.

However the ensuing
widening income gaps, extreme poverty,
illiteracy and crime has encouraged distrust
and exclusion at every level.

My sense of justice, fairness and rationality
supersede any latent sense of social propriety.

Gay rights, civil rights, religious rights, gender
rights, child rights are human rights.

Justice,
equity and fairness are my idea of morality.

I was a little girl who grew up in the same
neighbourhood as gay Miss John, Muslim
cleric Alhaji Abara, disabled Nureni, Mulika in
her headscarves and pious Catholic Igbo
Mama Uche.
I saw differences in ethnicity; religion, gender,
class and sexuality but these differences did
not carry judgement.

We lived together mostly
harmoniously; any lack of harmony was on
account of individual bad behaviour not
genetic differences or lifestyle choices,
I miss that Nigeria.

I guess in a way l still live
in that Nigeria in my head.

And that was why in 2004 I risked my career
to put Bisi on my sofa and conduct Nigeria’s
first interview of an openly gay man on
national television.

Bisi and I did pay a hefty price for that
action, he more than myself.

Was it worth it? I’m afraid l have never had
the luxury of absolute self-congratulations or
flagellation.

What I do know is, at that
moment, it felt right. And every moment since
then, it has felt right.
I do what feels right by a conscience
conditioned by my justice-minded, meddling
mother, a childhood experiencing the beauty
of diversity and a belief in our common
humanity.

Perhaps the childhood I speak about was a
dream. If that is the case then that dream is
my vision of the future to come for Nigeria.

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