At an academic conference some years ago, two students walked up to me after learning I was a Nigerian. They had based their academic projects on popular cross-dresser Idris Okunenye (Bobrisky) and they wanted to know a few things about her. Bobrisky was still a straw weight then but was not ignorable. One of them asked how she survives a Nigeria virulently opposed to any display of nonconforming sexuality. I opined that Bobrisky’s survival partly owes to the internet, particularly its feature that allows virtually any sight to escalate into a spectacle made Bobrisky one we could view remotely from the display show glass of our phone screens. That distance also put her out of the physical reach and social orbit where she could be harmed.
Then the other factor was money. The Bobrisky character implicitly understood something about Nigeria: for all our claims about “African values and morals,” we worship money. A universal solvent, money dissolves even our strongest claims of virtue. With money, you can regulate the collective moral temperature. So, Bobrisky did not appear on the social scene as a stereotypical cross-dresser appealing to public conscience for acceptance. She spurned acceptance and made her own brash rules of public engagement. Elsewhere, people who transition their gender take up an activist cause to fight the power (or the establishment) on behalf of other marginalised people. Not Bobrisky. On the social scene, she was a glammed-up doll, a made-for-contemporary-feminism Barbie doll that rolls in wads of cash. Bobrisky also talked about a “bae,” another tactic. Knowing that you are not a figure of power in the Nigerian political culture if you cannot claim the backing of some shadowy forces, she had to claim a male sponsor. It does not matter if those shadow backers exist or not. What counts is how much Bobrisky understood Nigeria, and how she mirrored us back to ourselves. It was a tactic that worked for her until it did not.
One day in the future when Bobrisky’s history is written, someone might say her undoing began when she stepped forward to collect an award meant for biological women. But the precedent will be how her glamorous existence as a woman undermined the ultimate symbol of masculinity: the penis. Bobrisky was a man who, by transitioning into a woman, proved that manhood was not the ultimate prize that men have long been socialised into believing. By whittling down manhood and opting for feminity, she treated the penis as another gift of nature that you could accept or reject. For men whose entire identity revolves around the thing between their legs, Bobrisky was an abomination. How can nature give you this thing, and you dare not venerate it? It was even worse for them that Bobrisky did not only become feminised but she was also living as a woman who possesses something beyond biology that a man needs in order to be called a man: economic power. For men whose claims to masculinity are daily abridged by the emasculating Nigerian economy, Bobrisky’s gender fluidity and wealth must have been torture. She was not the regular woman against whom they could measure their masculinity. That is why Portable’s song about Bobrisky being a “disgrace to Brotherhood” resonated with them.
When men could not take the affront to their dear penis anymore, they came up with the most spurious charge against Bobrisky. It was not that hard. Nigeria has a collection of judicial enforcers—from the police to the Department of State Services, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, and even judges—who wield immense power but hardly match it up with either a sense of moral responsibility or an understanding of the spirit of democracy. For people who operate in bad faith, they have a lot of power. When Bobrisky stood in front of the judge and pled guilty, she must have expected a judge who would treat her like any other person and not the one who would see her as a personification of destabilised masculinity.
By saying she was a “male” when the judge asked, Bobrisky must have thought she could assuage the judge’s slighted sensibilities. Unfortunately, she never had a fighting chance in that court. Judging from the harshness of the sentence she was given, one could tell that the judge was fighting some other culture war. If a death sentence had been listed on the books, this judge would not have hesitated to hand it out. A judge who sentences someone to prison for a “sin” virtually every Nigerian routinely commits must lack the fear of God. Now, the EFCC tells us that public members are bombarding them with video recordings of abuse of the Naira by Nigerians from all walks of life. This will be the way witchcraft will operate in Nigeria now. Rather than people taking the names of those whose lives they have secretly envied to awon ìyá mi òsòròngà, they will report to the EFCC. Since the EFCC too needs the clown show to distract us from the government’s economic failures, we will be entertained all night.
Bobrisky’s case is an intriguing example of our society’s obsession with the penis. After she was arrested, people asked if her dress could be lifted for them to see what was under. Even after she was jailed, they still followed up to inquire what was between her legs. Prison warders who should have told off the journalist who formally inquired to mind their business gave details of Bobrisky’s genitals. The journalist publishes it, several media/blogs happily reproduce it, and you see them circulating the news to rejoice they have humiliated a defector. Sick voyeurs! If not madness, what is your business with someone’s genitals? Imagine calling Kirikiri when Senator Orji Kalu or Bode George was incarcerated and asking about their private parts. You look at the level of obsession with another person’s private parts and realise that, for all the self-glorying assertions about our allegedly superior African values, we are a people who severely lack the notion of human dignity.
The toughest part of the Bobrisky issue has been watching people who call themselves critics, social advocates, and moralists justify (and even celebrate) the judicial abuse that landed Bobrisky in jail. Some of them claim they are trying to protect women, but it is a lie. Let me say that every single time I have read someone say Bobrisky accepting an award meant for a woman was “a slap on the face of actual/biological women,” it has come from a man. Not women, men. I have never felt insulted by what Bobrisky does, but I get grossly irritated by the paternalism of men who arrogate to themselves the power to define what insults “every woman.” You would think those men care about women, but wait until the National Assembly says it is time to pass a bill defending women’s rights. They simply want him gone because his non-confirming gender identity unsettles them. I will not be quick to call them hypocrites, but I will at least say that they have not thought through either their own politics or ideologies.
When issues are about abstract political issue—corruption, certificateless president, election rigging, IPOB/Biafra, terrorism, banditry, tribalism, Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and so on—their moral clarity is almost unimpeachable. When it comes to the right to express the freedom of the human spirit as Bobrisky does, they suddenly become self-contradicting. They want human freedom, but their imagination cannot stretch beyond what is merely convenient. And that constriction of possibilities is exactly where the problem lies. Look, a society can survive the ignorance (and amorality) of its masses who want to see what is underneath the skirt of cross-dressers. But no society can stand when the ideological vision of humanity of its supposed band of thinkers, judicial enforcers, and moral advocates is too narrow to accommodate the diverse range of humanity.
