World

NAIROBI, Kenya — WHEN the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina published his acclaimed memoir three years ago, he concealed an important part of his life from the public eye. Last Saturday, he unveiled “a lost chapter” of the book on the Internet titled, “I am a homosexual, mum.”

The chapter, about missing the opportunity to tell his mother before she died, is intensely personal. The response has been extremely public, a “ gay bombshell ” in the words of the newspaper The Daily Nation.

That is because, as a successful author, publisher, journalist and commentator, Mr. Wainaina, 43, has become one of the most prominent Africans ever to come out publicly. He did so at a moment when the issue is being fiercely debated here in sub-Saharan Africa.

Even as gay rights have gained ground in the United States and other Western nations, Africa has in some cases moved backward, with several countries increasing penalties against gays. Nigeria’s president this month signed into law a tough ban on same-sex relationships that threatens violators with 14-year prison terms, amid reports that gay men have been rounded up, arrested and even tortured.

“The law is extremely cynical,” Mr. Wainaina said. “Any kind of bill like that has such extreme consequences that an immediacy of reaction of every kind is necessary.”

Mr. Wainaina, voluble and expressive, with his hair shaved on the sides, dyed red on one side, blue on the other, and yellow sunglasses perched atop his head, labeled homophobia a Victorian export brought to Africa by British colonialists. He placed the debate over gay rights in the context of a young, rapidly growing continent.

“I’m extremely optimistic about rapid transformation and change of things in Africa in general,” Mr. Wainaina said. “It’s set off. It cannot stop. It’s going to be turbulent. There’ll be dark bits and there’ll be bright bits, but it’s a speed train.”

While Mr. Wainaina has spoken out against the new law in Nigeria, his decision to come out was equally about his own experiences in his native Kenya, in particular, the death of a young gay friend called Kalota whose parents were forced to leave their church afterward. Another friend died of AIDS last year, and the aftermath also left Mr. Wainaina pensive.

He was uncomfortable with “that whole feeling of a certain kind of surreptitiousness, why didn’t so-and-so come to the funeral, but they loved him and they’re very close.” It was hard for him to pin down why he went public, he said, because “it’s not so much the event as a singularity but how that singularity compounds on things that happen all the time,” he said.

SINCE his chapter went online, Mr. Wainaina (pronounced wye-NYE-na) said he had been getting messages of support, both public and private, from friends, relatives and even a retired Roman Catholic priest who was close to the family.

“Someone who was in high school with me who I haven’t seen or talked to in years, you know, sent me a private message saying, ‘I’m a cop now, so if you need any help, give me a call,’ ” Mr. Wainaina said.

It was generous, and in a way comforting, but also a sign of the severity of discrimination and public insults, blackmail and beatings gay people in Kenya still face, said Peter Njane, a member of the task force for the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya. “The kind of oppression we go through, it forces us to come out and say who we are.”

It is not just Kenya. On his visit to Africa last year, President Obama found himself trading barbs with President Macky Sall of Senegal. After Mr. Obama praised the United States Supreme Court decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, Mr. Sall retorted, “We are not ready to decriminalize homosexuality.” The news media and public in Senegal, where gay sex is illegal and gays are often persecuted, celebrated his defiance.

Mr. Njane said that while the coalition applauded Mr. Wainaina’s decision to come out, there had been “a lot of negativity on social media.” Some compared gays to pedophiles , while others made crass jokes or uncomfortable statements about gay sex, calling it “weird” and “unimaginable.”

“I blame the parents!” one Kenyan Twitter user said, for giving him an uncommon name like Binyavanga.

He was born Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina, and his family still calls him Ken. But “the exotic” of the name Binyavanga “gave me a thrill,” he said, and he began going by his middle name.

His mother ran a hair salon in the city of Nakuru, while his father was a successful executive. In the lost chapter, Mr. Wainaina said that he had known he was gay since he was 5 years old.

He described shaking a man’s hand at 7: “This feeling has made me suddenly ripped apart and lonely. The feeling is not sexual. It is certain. It is overwhelming.”

He studied in South Africa during the final years of apartheid, and had friends there who were gay.

His mother died in 2000, and he still had not faced up to the thoughts he had been having since he was a child. He did not act on it until five years later with “a man who will give me a massage and some brief, paid-for love” in London, as he described it in the chapter. “I cannot say the word gay until I am 39, four years after that brief massage encounter.”

IN the meantime he had become an important voice in African literature. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002 and was a founder of the literary journal “ Kwani? ” His critical essay, “ How to Write About Africa ,” in the British literary journal Granta in 2005, took foreign journalists and authors to task for their clichéd approach to covering the continent.

For photos, he advised, “an AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these.”

“If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress,” he wrote. Acceptable characters include “The Starving African,” but “she must look utterly helpless.” The biting piece became a minor sensation.

In 2011 he published a memoir, “One Day I Will Write About This Place,” which was a critical success at home and abroad. Women, especially, Mr. Wainaina said, noticed the absence of a love life. “I’m not ready to go there,” he recalled thinking at the time.

He had come out to confidants but had not taken the step publicly. He said that he and a few friends had been “brainstorming what to do for a while,” in half a dozen conversations in bars over the last eight months.

When he finally made the decision, it became a multimedia coming out, the initial online chapter followed by a cyclone of Twitter messages and a six-part video where he talks about education, creativity and his own experience, posted online as “We Must Free Our Imaginations.”

On Twitter Mr. Wainaina declared that he would travel to Nigeria, but when asked about it in an interview he said, “Such ideas really have to generate from Nigerians.”

“I’m not even sure I want to use the term ‘coming out,’ ” he said, offering “being gay in public” instead. Mr. Wainaina seemed like a man at ease with the momentous decision he had made, but also still getting used to how the way he related to the world around him had changed.

“What is my urinal policy? Do you chat casually with the person next to you as would be the case before?” he asked, with his deep, knowing chuckle. “These are all the sorts of questions in my head.”

But he said he had no doubt that he had made the right decision. “There’s no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can’t think freely and imagine freely,” Mr. Wainaina said. “There just really is no point.”

DAKAR, Senegal — In Senegal, never mind about same-sex marriage: gay men and lesbians are abused by the police, beaten and sometimes tortured, with impunity. They are threatened by mobs, mocked on the front pages of newspapers and subject to criminal prosecution for being gay. And the persecution is even more severe elsewhere in West Africa.

So it was hardly surprising that a day after President Obama, in front of hundreds of reporters, traded barbs with President Macky Sall of Senegal on the topic, people on the street, the press and the radio in Mr. Sall’s country lined up firmly on the same side.

During the opening leg of his visit to sub-Saharan Africa, Mr. Obama on Thursday called the Supreme Court’s decision the day before to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act a “victory for American democracy” and urged African nations that treat homosexuality as a crime, like Senegal, to make sure that the government does not discriminate against gays.

The comment prompted a retort from Mr. Sall that his country was not “homophobic.” Still, he added, “we are not ready to decriminalize homosexuality,” making a quick jab about the death penalty in the United States and earning plaudits from Senegal’s voluminous and voluble press.

“Firm … and subtle,” crowed Sud Quotidien on its front page, praising Mr. Sall for his response.

“No, We Can’t,” trumpeted Liberation.

“Macky says no to Obama,” said Walfadjri on its front page.

“Obama makes a plea for the homos, Macky says no!” said Le Pop.

“President Sall has closed the debate on homosexuality,” read a headline in L’Observateur.

On the streets of Dakar, support for Mr. Sall’s stance was widespread, though some wished he had been even firmer. “He should have said, ‘This can never exist in Senegal; this can never happen here,’ ” Tidiane Gueye, a security guard, hanging out in Dakar’s Ouakam neighborhood, said of gay marriage.

“Senegal is 95 percent Muslim,” Mr. Gueye said. “As a Muslim country, we will not permit laws that allow gays to marry.”

A retired army major, Bouramon Ndour, contemplating the late-afternoon bustle from a bench on the Tally Américain, a road said to have been built by American soldiers, said sharply: “He did extremely well. Nobody here can accept that. We are categorical on this point.”

Mr. Ndour added: “No, we are absolutely staunch on it. Look, this is a Muslim country. Over our dead bodies!”

Mr. Ndour said proudly of Mr. Sall: “He’s courageous to have spoken like that, in front of the greatest power on earth. Even if they turn off the spigots, we won’t give in.”

Senegal is one of 38 African countries that criminalize “consensual same-sex conduct,” according to a recent report by Amnesty International, and it is not the worst in its persecution of gay men and lesbians. Arrests of gay men, and long and abusive imprisonments, are regularly reported in Cameroon, among other places in Africa.

But abuse is well documented here as well, despite Mr. Sall’s claim at Thursday’s news conference that “Senegal is a tolerant country that doesn’t discriminate.”

In 2010, Human Rights Watch reported on numerous cases here: a mob of “dozens of people” armed with slingshots and knives attacking a party; the bleeding victims were then taken to a police station, where they were beaten further; a young gay man repeatedly arrested and beaten by the police; others beaten with impunity by neighbors.

The newspapers here take great delight in publishing the names, photographs and salacious details of trysts that run afoul of anti-homosexuality laws. The Senegalese news media has “recommended violence against people perceived or known to be gay,” said the Human Rights Watch report, which also spoke of “unchecked violence” in the nation, “state inaction” and the “near-universal condemnation of homosexuality in the public sphere.”

Religious leaders also regularly issue inflammatory statements condemning gay men and lesbians, even recommending that they be killed, according to a person cited in the report.

Senegal, celebrated in the West for a democratic tradition that includes a coup-free record since independence in 1960, unlike its West African neighbors, remains very conservative on social issues.

So while Mr. Obama was generally welcomed here during his brief visit, his praise for the United States Supreme Court decision on gay couples was not. And Mr. Sall’s retort was seen as a rare moment when a small African nation stared down a giant, “a little like David and Goliath,” said a front-page editorial in Le Pop, “or like the La Fontaine fable, ‘The Oak Tree and the Reed.’ ”

“In front of the most powerful man in the world, fully armed with his mission to influence the decriminalization of homosexuality, Macky Sall was able to say, ‘No,’ ” the editorial continued. “And we are in a country of free men, who have built a strong state.”

Those sentiments were amply echoed in the Ouakam neighborhood here Friday afternoon.

“He responded very well, and we are all very happy with it,” Moustapha Thiam, the owner of a bustling open-air welders’ shop, said of Mr. Sall. “This is a Muslim country, and in our religion, we can’t accept that. Everyone agrees with him.”

A tough ban on same-sex relationships that threatens violators with 14-year prison terms has been quietly signed into law by the president of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, a step that rights advocates have long feared not only as a repression aimed at gays but as an affront to basic freedoms of speech and assembly.

The ban, known as the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, was passed by Parliament in May but was not signed by the president, Goodluck Jonathan, until Jan. 7, Nigerian news agencies reported Monday from Abuja, the capital.

It is considered the most significant setback to gay rights in Africa, where same-sex relationships are already widely prohibited. The law took effect as gay-rights advocacy is gaining traction elsewhere, led by the United States and other Western nations where the legality and acceptance of same-sex marriage and civil unions are expanding.

Under the Nigerian law, it is illegal not only to engage in an intimate relationship with a member of the same sex, but to attend or organize a meeting of gays, or patronize or operate any type of gay organization, including private clubs. Any same-sex marriages or partnerships accepted as legal in other countries would be void in Nigeria.

Language in an earlier proposal that would have made it a crime not to report a same-sex relationship — which could have forced parents to report gay children, for example — was absent from a final version of the law, according to The Associated Press, which said it had seen a copy signed by the president.

The signing was not publicized, apparently to avoid offense to other countries where such relationships are permitted, but word of it still provoked widespread condemnation. Secretary of State John Kerry, hearing the news while on a trip to Europe and the Middle East, said in a statement on Monday that he was “deeply concerned,” and asserted that the law violated basic human rights protections guaranteed by Nigeria’s own Constitution.

“Beyond even prohibiting same-sex marriage, the law dangerously restricts freedom of assembly, association and expression for all Nigerians,” Mr. Kerry said.

International advocates of gay rights also expressed alarm. Adotei Akwei, managing director of government relations at Amnesty International USA in Washington, said in an email that the group was “appalled at the new legislation, which we believe will put members of Nigeria’s L.G.B.T. community at risk and is a clear violation of Nigeria’s international and regional human right obligations.” Mr. Akwei said all governments “are tasked with protecting the rights of all of their citizens and individuals in their areas of jurisdiction, not just the ones they like.”

Nigerian gay-rights advocates said the law also elevated the risk to people living with H.I.V. and AIDS, because organizations that help them might also be deemed illegal. Davis Mac-Iyalla, a gay-rights activist, said in an interview with SaharaReporters.com, a Nigerian news website , that the law’s effects “may well translate into more young people becoming homeless, and social and state violence.”

An even more severe antigay measure has been approved by the legislature in Uganda, but President Yoweri Museveni has not yet signed it.

With a population of more than 175 million, Nigeria is double the size of Africa’s next most populous nation, Ethiopia. As one of the world’s leading oil producers, Nigeria also carries enormous economic and political weight in Africa, and its message on gay rights is bound to resonate elsewhere on the continent.

Nigeria’s population, divided roughly in half between Christians and Muslims, is deeply conservative, with widespread hostility to homosexuality in both religious communities.

In a poll on homosexuality conducted in 39 countries and published last June by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project , 98 percent of Nigerians — more than any other population surveyed — answered “no” to the question “Should society accept homosexuality?”