A Zimbabwean man arrested for gay sex after urinating at a bar
A 24-year-old Zimbabwean man is facing homosexuality charges after police accused him of being gay.
File photo of the hands of a man under arrest.
Police made the arrest after finding him and a second man chatting while relieving themselves in the back of a bar in the city of Bulawayo in southwest Zimbabwe.
The defendant, Anerudo [name changed], discussed the incident with NoStringsNG in an online chat.
Anerudo said he was arrested by police while urinating at the corner of the bar with a friend. The police claimed that he allowed another man to kiss, touch and insert his penis in-between his thighs, an allegation which he said was false.
“There is no affair, just two men urinating and the police came and said that we are having sex. It was at night, at a dark corner and we were just talking, just making conversation,” he said.
Bulawayo is located in southwest Zimbabwe. (Map courtesy of Gameo)
At the police station in Bulawayo, Anerudo said, he was beaten, verbally abused and detained for two days by the police in Bulawayo. Then he was taken to court and charged with sodomy.
Anerudo was released on bail after spending several days in prison. He is afraid of what might happen at the end of the trial, especially if he is found guilty, he said. He is looking into the possibility of seeking asylum in South Africa, he said.
This blog is seeking information about what happened to the second man at the bar.
Under Zimbabwean law, same-sex intimacy between men, including “any act involving physical contact other than anal sexual intercourse that would be regarded by a reasonable person to be an indecent act,” is punishable by up to a year in prison.
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This will keep the attention of the police well away from other “less important” crimes, such as murder, sedition, rape and burglary, while they deal with all important matter of intimate affection between people of the same gender.
This nonsense is entirely the result of lack of education, confusion between Church and State, and lack of reasoned dialogue at the political level. For now, this needs to be conducted quietly, behind closed doors, so it doesn’t heat up too much and allow bigots, who are currently in the majority, to seize the microphone.
It is usually possible to agree on anti-discrimination measures, and deal with the criminalisation of same-sex affection further down the track. At the very least, even churches should agree it isn’t right to deny basic rights of food, housing and employment and freedom from being the victims of crime to anyone, merely because of the way they were born. Otherwise, they are in effect saying it’s okay to perpetrate a genocide against gays, if we’re not entitled to eat, have a job and live in a house.
If they DO want a genocide, that too is never going to succeed, because the parents of gays are heterosexuals. The only 100% certain way to rid Africa of all gays, is to eliminate all heterosexuals, so they don’t give birth to any more LGBT people.
The other idea that gays are really just straight people who sin is also utter nonsense, Heterosexuals by their very definition are not interested in having sex with the same sex and so it is no effort for them to avoid such intimacy. It is absurd for the state to think you can make a gay man love a woman by bashing him and locking him up in jail. Is that what straight men have to do, in order to be able to love a woman?
Derek went off!!!!
So, now it has come to the point that two men talking in a private place are accused of having sex! How more stupid can it become? What kind of polcie is that? They are in that bar, what are they doing there? Why are they there? To entrap or solicit crimes? were they there to have sex with men, those police officers? Why were they pinpointing the two in the corner who were relieving themselves? Were the bigots interested in what was outside the pants? Seriously, these kind of practices must stop! Police offciers have no business with people taking a leak, police officers are hired to catch criminals, who rape, murder and torture people, not a couple of guys pissing!
Nigeria is a strange country. In some ways it’s making huge progress, if you go to the cities there are skyscrapers everywhere. But in other more social aspects its years behind the west.
Take care
Jamie
This was Zim tho