My friend, Chriton Atuhwera was killed in Kenya’s Kakuma camp for being gay. Don’t “humanize” him

There was no way my friend, Chriton Atuhwera could have known when he walked into the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya in January 2020 that a little over a year later, he would be a victim of a homophobic arson attack. 

There was no way he would have known that this attack would claim his life and that the very place he had come for refuge would in the end kill him instead. 

Yet this is exactly what happened. On March 15, 2021, my friend, Chriton, with whom I lived with for a year, was in Kakuma’s Block 13, which is a section of the camp housing mostly LGBTQ+ persons, when it was attacked by homophobes. 

Unknown individuals threw a petrol firebomb into the shelter, injuring Chriton, and another gay man, Jordan Ayesigye, both of whom suffered second-degree burns. 

I too live in Block 13. I have called the open-air  compound in the semi-desert place  home for the past  one year and I was there that night when the mob came.

Chriton, who was commonly known as “Trinidad Jerry”, died on April 13, nearly a month after the attack . He was just 22 years old.  

I think of Chriton a lot. I feel connected to him. 

Beyond living with him, like Chriton, I am also a Ugandan who had to flee home because of my sexuality. 

There are an estimated 300 LGBTQ+ refugees – from countries like Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo – living in Kakuma, which is home to more than 160,000 people.

I have equally had to reconcile with the knowledge that Kakuma was not the safety I craved and that it would not shelter me in the way that I needed it to. 

The fire that claimed Chriton’s life was not the only attack the camp had seen. Since the beginning of the year, there have been more than five attacks on LGBTQ+ residents at the camp from other refugees and host communities. 

It is also not the first time LGBTQ+ residents have decried how unsafe the camp is for them but every time, these complaints have been ignored. 

In 2015, some LGBTQ+ people who had fled Uganda and were living in Kenya were taken by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to a safe house in Nairobi, after they were attacked on a night out. Even the UNHCR – the very agency tasked with protecting us – has admitted its staff is  hostile.

In an interview with the BBC in 2015, Catherine Hamon, the deputy head of protection for UNHCR, revealed that staff has said that as Christians they could not work with, or talk to, a gay man.

 “It’s difficult for people to go beyond all the prejudices they have. And this is what we faced with our own colleagues,” she said. 

In 2020, some LGBTQ refugees in Kakuma shared a video with a VOA reporter where a crowd of people surrounded them and were thrashing them with stones and sticks.

In January of the same year, an NBC News article quoted gay refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma camp reporting repeated attacks from locals. 

Following the attack and Chriton’s death, the UN said it would boost security for LGBTQ+ refugees in Kakuma but Chriton didn’t have to die for this to happen and this kind of reactionary behaviour causes harm. 

The reason we’ve been ignored is simply because the world considers queer lives dispensable, more so when you are a queer African, and even more so when you’re a queer African refugee.

Having to constantly navigate these intersections makes me who I am and I recognize that. But these meeting points also expose me to danger, and they exposed Chriton to danger as well. 

Yet what is happening in Kenya is not an isolated case. In South Africa, over the last few weeks, gay people have lost their lives in a spate of homophobic attacks including Andile “Lulu” Ntuthela, who was murdered by homophobes and even buried in a shallow grave. 

Like Lulu’s death, the many attacks LGBTQ+ refugees have experienced in Kenya, spearheaded by refugees and other locals, is a clear definition of when the oppressed become the oppressors. 

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There’s a tendency among marginalized people to think that the fact that we are part of an oppressed group exonerates us of the ability to oppress others yet this is not true. 

It’s also a pointer. How many queer lives have to be lost for our lives to matter? What is the cost of the life of a queer African refugee? Is the cost your unlooking? Is your allyship reserved only for the queer folks you believe to be elite, deserving, and perhaps not Black?   

That Chriton’s death has largely gone without coverage from mainstream media makes me ponder even more how this is true. It could have been me, it could have been anyone in Block 13. 

Chriton was an activist in every sense of the word. We would sit down and strategize about the best ways to approach campaigns and what needed to be done for people to realize that we were queer and that we refused to remain hidden. 

He approached activism as though he wasn’t mindful of his rights and freedom, and I knew in a way that worried me that he would risk anything, even his life, to see that we are happy. 

But why do I have to write this? Why do I have to defend Chriton’s life paragraph upon paragraph as if he had to be an activist to matter? Why is any of this necessary? Do you only realize the humanity of a person when you are confronted with it or do you, as it should be, just realize it anyway? 

Why is the disregard of a person’s human right always greeted with a call to humanize that person? As if it is ever possible to bestow humanity on an individual and as though queer people are not already human enough merely be being, breathing, living, and thriving.

The world’s attempt to humanize queer people does nothing but dehumanize them because queer people are human, irrespective of the window or purview we think we have into their personal lives. 

Chriton Atuhwera was my friend. He loved life and enjoyed music, especially Mariam Makeba’s “A luta Continua”. 

But you didn’t have to know any of this for his life to matter.