I
Forced pregnancyresponsible for what happened if they
gave me 50 lashings with a stick. However,
when the commissioner left, they locked
me up for a month. I understood that in
this country there is no law, no respect
for authority or anything. The subordi-
nates complained that the commissioner,
a man trained in Spain, had lost respect
for the customs of Africa. Look at me, see
the African skin I have; I am black but
someone had decided that I am not from
here, from this continent.
My mother, before going home and
leaving me locked up, ordered that I not
be allowed to eat, drink, or relieve myself.
I was alone until one guard began to flirt
with me, refuting his colleagues’ claims.
He said that I was very pretty, educated,
formal and feminine, that I couldn’t be a
lesbian. Thanks to him I ate, drank water,
and slept on a mattress.
When I got out of jail, I returned to my
mother’s house. I picked up my small-
est child to take him away with me. The
family showed up as a group to take him
away from me; the fracas took place on
the sidewalk with the entire neighbour-
hood watching. Today I know they knew
I’d come back home and their strategy
was to keep hold of my child. That child
who I wanted to take with me out of pity, I
left with them. I went off with my partner.
The truth is, I wouldn’t do anything
for those kids that cost me my life. I
didn’t want to be a mother. I remember
my recovery after the first time I gave
birth, by caesarean section. They brought
me the baby and called it ‘beautiful’.
I wanted to die. How could they call some-
thing so ugly ‘beautiful’? I asked them to
take it out of my sight. I didn’t want to see
it. I almost died on the operating table for
a baby I didn’t love. I didn’t want to touch
it or suckle it. I saw it as a stranger.
The second baby, my God! I had it after
I fainted. The man who was my husband
and the father of the next three children
came to the house and asked me for sex.
I don’t know, I just don’t like penises.
After yet another pregnancy (how badly
that boy sat with me!) came the labour.
My mother told him to have patience,
because the hormones of the pregnancy
confused me. It wasn’t hormones, it was
loathing.
They brought me to the hospital. I
spent two weeks in the intensive care unit.
After recovering, the doctors forgot the
gauze in my belly and, I think they said,
some scissors. So, a third operation: they
needed to remove what the doctors had
forgotten. It was a surgery without anaes-
thesia: there was no anaesthesia left in the
city of Bata. The doctors told me that, if
I wanted to live, I must not squeeze the
skin of my belly.
I didn’t care if I lived or died. I didn’t
want to live; in fact, I squeezed my belly. I
don’t know why I didn’t die on the operat-
ing table.
Look at my belly. Today I can’t stand
my life, it hurts me all the time. The
births, my births, I don’t want them; they
almost cost me my life.
My mother got tired of me, of telling
me to get back together with my husbandand to stop being with a woman. Her next
strategy was to sue my partner before
the provincial office of Social Affairs and
Gender Equality. The decision of those
women was a disaster.
The women who were the directors
of Social Affairs... Ignorant, all of them.
None of them spoke coherent Spanish. I
might be a street walker, you know? But
I know the street. My clients have been
men with class who take you to important
places. You learn manners from them. I
learned.
In Social Affairs were the most foolish
women of this country, I assure you. You
bring a case to them and they don’t know
where to grab hold of it. My girlfriend
was accused of abduction of a minor – I
was over 18 at that time. And, without any
administrative document, any certificate,
they decided that my mother should take
my children because they ran two risks if
they remained at my side: conversion to
homosexuality, and bad education. They
decided that because I was a homosexual,
I wasn’t capable of educating my children.
The custody of my children was taken
away from me by the Ministry of Social
Services, through the provincial delega-
tion of Bata, alleging that I would con-
taminate them with my bad lesbian spirit,
my witchcraft and my un-African ways.
All without writing on any piece of paper.
The important men I sleep with like to
say that ‘the Administration is paper, it’s
not verbal’.
Before Social Affairs, we’d gone
through the courts. The judge had told
my mother that it wasn’t a crime to be a
lesbian, but neither was it something that
was admitted. That’s why she grabbed
me by the braids and dragged me to
Social Affairs, the ministry of foolishness
that doesn’t respect the laws and obeys
tradition.
She, the woman who birthed me,
called my partner ‘husband of my daugh-
ter’. She also accused her of adultery,
because I was married. I don’t want to
be a mother again. But should I decide
to be one, my partner, who says she acts
as the man in our relationship, would
not become pregnant. She says that men
don’t get pregnant.
Here, in Equatorial Guinea, homosex-
ual couples are made up of two figures:NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 67
And she went on: ‘A woman
without children is not a woman.
A woman without children is a bad
woman. We are not like the white
women who die without giving
birth, disobeying God’