Nigerian Same Sex Marriage Ban Violates LGBTI Rights. . . So I guess a round of “kumbaya” is clearly out of the question.

‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people around the world face discrimination, persecution and violence simply for expressing who they are and choose to love. ‘

“Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types—for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris, or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia. Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY.

A bill passed by the Nigerian House of Representatives on May 30, to ban same-sex marriage and prohibit organizations from advocating for same-sex rights, violates the rights of LGBTI people and should be vetoed by President Goodluck Jonathan. Freedom House urges the international community to condemn the bill and pressure the Nigerian government to abandon the measure and repeal the country’s existing sodomy law and other restrictive measures that undermine the human dignity of LGBTI persons.

The anti-same sex marriage bill includes punishments of up to 14 years imprisonment for violators and up to 10 years imprisonment for anyone who witnesses or supports a same-sex wedding. The draconian bill’s reach extends beyond same-sex marriage by outlawing all organizations supporting the rights of LGBTI persons and imposing jail sentences of up to 10 years for “direct or indirect” public displays of affection for same-sex couples.

The bill had already been passed by the Senate in November 2011. A June 3 statement by Nigerian human rights activists condemned the proposed law, stating that it “…will deprive Nigerians of their fundamental human rights as guaranteed in Chapter IV of the 1999 Constitution.” Moreover, it directly contravenes international human rights standards and norms,   <<<more

 I didn’t post this video in support of gay rights, it just shows a little clearer view of how they feel about gay rights in Nigeria.

What does “kumbaya” mean?

September 11, 1998

Dear Cecil:

This has probably been answered somewhere before, but I was getting my teeth drilled that day. Just what does kumbaya mean?

— F. Pierson, via the Internet

Cecil replies:

Oh Lord, kumbaya. Also spelled kum ba yah, cumbayah, kumbayah, and probably a few other ways. If you look in a good songbook you’ll find the word helpfully translated as “come by here,” with the note that the song is “from Angola, Africa.” The “come by here” part I’ll buy. But Angola? Someone’s doubtin’, Lord, for the obvious reason that kumbaya is way too close to English to have a strictly African origin. More likely, I told my assistant Jane, it comes from some African-English pidgin or creole — that is, a combination of languages. (A pidgin is a linguistic makeshift that enables two cultures to communicate for purposes of trade, etc.; a creole is a pidgin that has become a culture’s primary language.) Sure enough, when we look into the matter, we find this conjecture is on the money. Someone’s grinnin’, Lord, kumbaya.

Kumbaya apparently originated with the Gullah, an African-American people living on the Sea Islands and adjacent coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. (The best known Sea Island is Hilton Head, the resort area.) Having lived in isolation for hundreds of years, the Gullah speak a dialect that most native speakers of English find unintelligible on first hearing but that turns out to be heavily accented English with other stuff mixed in. The dialect appears in Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” stories, to give you an idea what it sounds like. In the 1940s the pioneering linguist Lorenzo Turner showed that the Gullah language was actually a creole consisting of English plus a lot of words and constructions from the languages of west Africa, the Gullahs’ homeland. Although long scorned as an ignorant caricature of English, Gullah is actually a language of considerable charm, with expressions like (forgive my poor attempt at expressing these phonetically) deh clin, dawn (literally “day clean”); troot mout, truthful person (“truth mouth”), and tebble tappuh,preacher (“table tapper”).

And of course there’s kumbayah. According to ethnomusicologist Thomas Miller, the song we know began as a Gullah spiritual. Some recordings of it were made in the 1920s, but no doubt it goes back earlier. Published versions began appearing in the 1930s. It’s believed an American missionary couple taught the song to the locals in Angola, where its origins were forgotten. The song was then rediscovered in Angola and brought back here in time for the folksinging revival of the 50s and 60s.

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